 We were searching for the secrets of the universe, and we rounded up demons and forced them to tell us what it all meant. Nick Cave and the Dirty Three, Time, Jezum, Transintium, Etnon, Riverintum. Welcome to episode one of Mobile Talk Force. Today we're going to be talking about the SCP Foundation itself, an organization of men and women devoted to protecting the world from an ever encroaching darkness. A majority of this episode necessarily includes mostly my opinions and thoughts on the SCP Foundation universe, because there's only one real rule when it comes to SCP Foundation fiction. There is no canon. Part one. What is the SCP Foundation? Mankind in its present state has been around for a quarter of a million years, yet only a small fraction of that has been of any significance. So what did we do for nearly 250,000 years? We huddled in caves, around small fires, fearful of the things that we didn't understand. It was more than explaining why the sun came up. It was the mystery of enormous birds with heads of men and rocks that came to life. So we called them gods and demons, and we begged them to spare us, and we prayed for salvation. In time their numbers dwindled and ours rose. The world began to make more sense when there were fewer things to fear, yet the unexplained can never truly go away, as if the universe demands the absurd and impossible. But mankind must not go back to hiding in fear. No one else will protect us, so we must stand up for ourselves. While the rest of mankind dwells in the light, we must stand in the darkness to fight it, to contain it, and to shield it from the eyes of the public, so that others may live in a sane and normal world. And so we secure, we contain, and we protect, the administrator. That was originally posted on July 30th, 2008. The SCP Foundation has developed quite a bit since then, but its basic mission statement remains the same. The job of the SCP Foundation is not just to secure anomalous objects and then contain them, it is to protect the public, both from real and imagined threats. And this idea is not new. Containment fiction goes back as far back as governments do. You might recognize it more traditionally as something called conspiracy fiction, which is to say that there is some sort of vague government organization handling things behind the scene. One of the earliest examples I can think of in modern fiction, and I'm sure that there are many more that probably go back even further, but the earliest one I can think of is 1981's The Raiders of the Lost Ark. And frankly I think that the SCP Foundation owes quite a lot to a scene near the end of that movie. In fact, if you look you can see the label on it very much reminiscent of an SCP object. Top secret. Army intel. 9906753. Do not open. And if you think about it, you could probably imagine some document somewhere that details this specific object's properties and how to keep it contained. But even tell the story of how Indiana Jones recovered the object. So if you think about it, the idea that the government is protecting us from some horrible or even mystical truth goes back quite far. Human knowledge of the natural world is woefully inadequate. And while science gives us a window into what we don't know, it also gives us tools to determine more information about the things we don't know. But we'll never know everything. And as long as there are things left unknown, we're going to try and fill in the gaps. If you believe in miracles, the idea that we don't see miracles every day or even just infrequently would naturally lead you to the assumption that someone or something is covering them up. So then you're led to the question, who's doing the cover-up? And in the SCP Foundation universe, the SCP Foundation is what's covering it up along with the GOC and a number of other groups of interest. But threats have evolved over time. We've gone from statues that just are slightly inconvenient, but can kill you to the end of the world and back again to more harmless objects. Regardless, all of this exists in the broader world of what we would consider conspiracy fiction. Now, I've heard it more recently called containment fiction, and we talked about this a little bit earlier. I'm sure there's any number of names detailing this particular type of fiction because it's existed for such a long time. But since this is becoming more and more mainstream, then people have to put a new name on it. Just remember that conspiracy fiction has existed for as long as there have been governments and suspicious citizens. Now, the SCP Foundation takes the place of the governments in those stories. If there was an engine that ran on water, the SCP Foundation would be keeping it secret from everyone. If aliens landed in Roswell, the SCP Foundation would capture, secure, and then contain in a cell somewhere those aliens, and probably their spaceship as well. If the moon landings were fake, the SCP Foundation would be the ones faking it. And if reptilian overlords were trying to take over the world, the SCP Foundation would be stopping them, but also keeping you from learning about it. So the SCP Foundation acts as a stand in for any government or intergovernmental organization that you can think of. If you've been suspicious that someone's covering something up, you can literally insert the SCP Foundation as that thing and the story would make sense in the SCP Foundation universe. And more interestingly, mostly those stories involve a government or intergovernmental organization that has sinister motives, not always, but sometimes. So the SCP Foundation is a little bit of a twist on that in that they are the greater good in the sense that there aren't really many other options in their universe. It's like for the lack of anyone better, they're the good guys. And while that may be true, they are protagonists, but really they're villainous protagonists. Because the SCP Foundation is willing to do terrible stuff to protect the world. And in a sense, that may be sort of what we want. Remember that the SCP Foundation was founded in the late 2000s. So from 2007 to 2008, when the SCP Foundation was finally becoming a real thing, we were living in a world where trading a little bit of freedom for a little bit of or for what we thought was a lot of protection seemed like a good deal. I mean, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were still underway. The Patriot Act was still really very strongly a thing. Guantanamo Bay was still in the public mind, although it's not now for some reason. So yeah, sacrificing a little bit of freedom was a sacrifice many people were willing to make. And to be fair, the SCP Wiki's original creators were mostly American or strongly influenced through American media. Fear will always push us to accept things we might find distasteful. And that is why the SCP Foundation and the Wiki we write for deal in the currency of terror. Part 2. History. Yesterday I watched three men die because one man sneezed in a room full of blood and shit and light. Today three more men go in. Cheap mops and each other's lives in their hands. Yesterday I watched a man I admired gunned down for leaving a rose for a girl whose life was tattered by a trauma she never deserved. Today she doesn't remember. And three halls down I can hear her screaming. Yesterday I watched a group of soldiers go down fighting against the corpses of comrades who died before them. Today we test another sample. This time on children. Yesterday I watched five men and women gunned down in an abandoned factory that no one cares about. Today it happened again and again. Every 11 seconds. Forever. Yesterday I watched a man sit comfortably in a nice armchair sipping scotch and laughing as he ordered a woman to simply stop breathing. Today gets the day off of work detail for good behavior. Yesterday I watched hundreds of men and women in orange jumpsuits herded like animals into empty rooms that filled with gas and fire. Today hundreds more are told they have a chance for a lighter sentence and a chance to serve their country. Yesterday I watched the world nearly die in a thousand, thousand terrible ways. Sometimes we even had time to scream. Today I'm alive to write about it. You want a happy ending? Fuck you. You're alive to read it. God help us all. Secure. Contain. Protect. When we talk about the nature and the history of the SAP universe we have to keep a couple of things in mind. First of all that there are a number of reality altering entities and objects that can change history and two that there are many different stories by many different writers about how things came to be and how things continue to be. So that's the origin of there is no canon as a refrain. Essentially every story is true. None of them are true and somewhere in between where some are and some aren't is also true. It's up to the writer and it's up to the reader to decide what they want. To me the origin of the SAP foundation makes the most sense as evolving out of precursor organizations. If no one was containing world ending monsters and you know objects before now then the world would have ended. Now we can mix original creations from the SAP Wiki itself like the American Secure Containment Initiative with actual real-world occult or mystical organizations like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or the Order Aurum Solus. And that's just our baseline. You can always assume that the mainstream religions like say the Catholic Church had their own organizations devoted to protecting the world from anomalous objects depending on how religious those objects may or I should say how significant those objects were to those religions. And if you really give it any consideration there's tons of more stories that can be told of what the world was like before the SAP foundation. So there will always be new stories. But regardless of which of these stories you tend to believe or not believe or follow or not follow. The SAP foundation in most people's stories seems to not come into existence any earlier than 1865 and no later than 1945. And since it's fair to assume that it didn't come into being fully formed there were obviously probably growing pains. An early story about the SAP foundation might not include an ethics committee at all. Or it might even include confrontations with other groups or governments that existed at the time. There are volumes of stories about the history of the modern SAP foundation. Dr. Alto Klepp, Dr. Gears, Dr. Bright, Dr. Kondraki, Dr. Sumerian, these characters are mostly larger than life and some of them are newer rather than older. But each one of them comes with myths of their own. Some would surely be classified as SAPs themselves if they weren't working for the SAP foundation. And some of the earliest stories involving some of these characters definitely went a little too far for most of the site's writers at the time. Now the earliest stories were centered around these people and the timeline was generally the late 2000s and early 2010s. And once the story started to get a little out of hand the writers tended to do their best to try and rein things in. I think the beginning of the end for the earliest era of SAP foundation fiction is probably Duke Tildon. Which is an outlandish story about an amazingly overpowered individual being decommissioned by Dr. Kondraki. At the time this entity was a vampire. It was SCP-083. I'm going to read you an excerpt. You can understand just how ridiculous things could get. Dr. Kondraki is able to escape the initial charge of SCP-682 as it plows through the room disappearing once again in a cloud of SCP-408. SCP-083 is seen engaging SCP-682 looking severely damaged from the assault. But rapid regeneration is already observed helping him recover. SCP-083 is seen attempting to speak to SCP-682. SCP-682 pauses for a moment and speaks also for a moment. SCP-682 strikes at SCP-083 and tosses him across the room while severing two of his arms and one leg. SCP-083 attempts to retreat and regenerate but isn't able to make distance between himself and SCP-682. SCP-682 devours SCP-083 whole. No activity until a large ruring motion is made. Dr. Kondraki is now on the back of SCP-682 holding two ends of the high tension cable he'd recovered earlier. The rest was fitted into an improvised set of reins. Dr. Kondraki has observed riding SCP-682 while hollering something and waving his hat with his free hand. SCP-682 enters an enraged state and makes a powerful charge towards the entrance. It easily plows through the obstruction made by SCP-083 and then through the ceiling walls. Dr. Kondraki and SCP-682 have breached quarantine. Full evacuation protocols are now in motion. In the end this was too much. Dr. Kondraki riding SCP-682 makes for an amazing visual. It makes for an amazing story but as a canonical representation of what the SCP foundation is it's too ridiculous. You can't- where do you go from there? The SCP foundation is about containing myths not creating new ones and so the foundation did two things. First they slowly dialed back on the insanity and two the canon representation of each character slowly became more and more nebulous. The characters went from being gods and devils to just humans. Very exceptional humans but humans nonetheless. And people could no longer say something like why would we worry about world ending anomaly 56 if we can just send Dr. Kondraki to kill it. And speaking of Dr. Kondraki by turning the SCP foundation employees back into you know people Dr. Kondraki sort of lost his place in the storylines and eventually he was killed ostensibly in character for his actions during Duke Tildon and also it's important to realize that since the canon on the website is so nebulous he could come back at any time and has multiple times but in those stories he was human and he died like one. As the site matured the story started to focus on the human toll of what living in an anomalous world meant and a number of new groups of interest were created though those are probably best stayed for their own episodes. Today the SCP foundation serves the same purpose that it always served and there are dozens and dozens of characters to use instead of just a handful like they're used to be and incidentally more being written every day and that is really the goal of the SCP foundation going forward not to direct people towards a particular canon or story or interpretation but to build a world that other people can live and write in and let people go nuts. Mobile talk force is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 share alike attribution license. This podcast featured the following works which are all under a Creative Commons 3.0 share alike attribution license excerpt from about the SCP foundation by the administrator black white black white black white black white black white gray by tuned to a dead channel excerpts from Duke Tildon by Dr. Kondrackie musical selections included in this episode are as follows in chronological order they are all under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution license a human being by Andy G Cohen from the 2016 album through the lens snowman by Kai Engel from the 2015 album cold daemons by Kai Engel from the 2017 album kaley the temperature on the air on the bow of the calatine by chris zebrisky from the 2012 album undercover vampire policemen this episode utilizes 30 seconds of audio from the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark which was directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Lucasfilm limited it is used under the principles of fair use through commentary special thanks to all of my patreon backers including sinjiriki who's pledged a hundred dollars if you'd like to pledge and support the podcast you can go to patreon.com port slash d samarian and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen has i'll include a link in the description and thank you very much for watching we wonder and some hunter may express wonder like ours when through the wilderness where london stood holding the wolf in chase he meets some fragment huge and stops to guess what powerful but unrecorded race once dwelt in that annihilated place ozzymandias horace smith