 L. It's finished. Lin Marnes is more than 90 years old and hasn't stood at his full height in 10. He was a tower of a man in his prime, 2 meters tall, and built like a boxer. Nearly nobody he ever met was able to look him straight in the eye, at least not until him know. Illness has gradually eaten away at that over the years. He feels as if he lives at the bottom of a deep bath, everybody he ever meets, looking down at him from slippery, unscalable walls, none of them able to reach down to help him. He spent his final months crumpled up in bed, like a dying spider, changing to a corpses color ahead of time. It might have been bearable if he'd lost his mind, but he remembers what he used to be, a leader, a powerhouse. He used to be able to alter the course of terrible events for the better, to get justice. He used to protect people. L. You can wake up now. There's a warm wind through his thin, colorless hair, and there's direct sunlight coming down on him now, and the heat is filling him up like a tonic. He's outside. It's been too long since he was last outside. When he opens his eyes, he sees his lake, the one in the northwest, which he used to have all to himself every summer. He's on a boat, his boat, lying on a blanket laid on the deck. A few kilometers away behind them is the little lake house, empty. It's perfect. He didn't know he had the strength left to safely leave the hospital, let alone travel this far. But if he'd put his mind to it and selected a final moment, this might have been it. Do you remember me? Marnus looks with eyes which are strengthening. The woman speaking is seated on the deck beside him, attentive. She has a large plastic box full of medical supplies open in front of her, and a light suit jacket laid on the deck beside it, and she has her sleeves rolled up so she can work. As he watches, she carefully disposes of a needle. A dim memory surfaces and starts taking shape. The woman is twice as old now as when he knew her last, and visibly twice as confident. It would be difficult to forget her. He taught her everything he, well, everything he could remember at the time. He remembers her as a field agent. He remembers sending her through hell, a fistful of times. Marianne. Elle, the woman softly explains, you died. You died surrounded by a grieving family. They loved you very much, and they cried over you. The funeral for the fake is in a few days, but unfortunately you won't be able to see it yourself. You're dead now, and this is what comes next. Marianne. Hutchinson. Marnus feels gold spreading through his bones, miracle juice. It's Wheeler now, but she doesn't correct him. When you retired from the Foundation, Elle, we did what we do to all of us who retire. What all of us agreed to when we signed up. We gave you some medicine, which made you forget. As you stepped out of the door for the last time, all the work you did for us. Great work, which saved lives, evaporated away. And your cover story sealed over those years and became reality. That's why you spent your whole retirement believing you were a former Section Chief at the FBI. It's what you wanted. It's what we wanted. It's what you agreed to. But you alone agreed to something else as well. And you must be starting to remember now what that something else was. I've injected you with a serum, which throws the human-aiding process into hard reverse, and it affects everything. Organs. Tissues. Memories. He'll be coming up on it soon. Remember? Yes. Marnus croaks. Remembering. Dizzy. You signed over your final 12 hours to us. You asked for a full and happy and well deserved retirement. But now, for the last day, you work for us again. Because of one particular job. I have it in writing here, you see? Do you recognize your signature and mine? I witnessed. Yes. Do you remember who you are? Dr. Lynn Patrick Marnus of the Foundation. He says. Anti-Memetics Division founder. Wheeler smiles with relief. It's good to see him again. We need some memories from you, she explains. Memories which nobody else in the world has access to, and which are buried so deeply that we can't extract them without killing you. So this afternoon, that's what we're going to do. We're going to extract those memories, and once we're done, you'll be dead. Marnus had already begun to regress to the time when he himself set this wheel in motion. He remembers very clearly discovering the mystery in his own head. The blank spots which he couldn't explain, and couldn't safely access with any kind of chemical or physical technique. He remembers deferring the mystery until now. What happened in 1976? Wheeler asks. Marnus sits up. His skin is beginning to clear, and his breathing is improving. He feels as if his brain is cleaved in two by a wormhole, such that his eyes are focusing on different time periods. In his right eye, he sees the lake and the boat he's dying on. In his left, he sees a collage of electrifyingly familiar past faces and places. Bart Hughes, with his grin and thick glasses, and baby face, looking like some kid dressed up as a foundation researcher. The original Site 48 crew, great text, but a hopeless excuse for a softball team. Being Marian with steel-strong nerves, and a mind-like laser, suits and lab coats and empty of operatives, and everywhere, paperwork, and floods of serial numbers. He starts to speak. 1976 was the year he founded the division. He brainstormed the whole thing in one legendary week, hammering out the signs and then distilling the first chemical nestic with the help of a hand-picked trio of assistants, the first anti-mimetics researchers. No anti-mimetic SCPs had even been observed up to that point. The entire operation was a shot in the dark, and yet the team immediately struck gold. Passive black holes of information, active predatory infivores, unrememberable worms, which cover the human skin like dust mites, contagious bad news, self-sealing secrets, living murders, Chinatowns. Wheeler wonders if there might be something more serious awry with Marinus' head. His version of events is hopelessly romantic. In Wheeler's experience, nobody looks back when Foundation worked fondly. But it was all too fast, Marinus says. Special continuing procedures take time to develop, much more time than I took. The Foundation as a whole acquires about a dozen new SCPs annually. I found that many in one year essentially single-handedly. It was too easy. It was as if I knew it all already, and I was just catching up. And then, one day I realized I couldn't remember my life before anti-mimetics. I knew I'd been a Foundation operative for decades prior. That was where I got the authority to start my own division. But there was nothing else there. It was a wall in my mind, which even Nestix couldn't get me past. I went to the paper archives and looked at my own personnel file and... Marinus trails off. Not because he's forgotten what to say next. It's deliberate. The trailing off is exactly what happened. He woke up back at your desk half a working day later, remembering nothing, Wheeler says. He went through the loop a dozen times before someone realized what was happening and broke you out of it. Wheeler knows all of this. The file still exists, and the anti-mimetic effect still clouds the back half of it. All of this would be over in a second, if any of that back half could be read. When I assembled the evidence, what I found was, well, a hole. Like a jigsaw with only the edges and corners. So I did the only thing I could do. I looked at the shape of the hole. And together with Bart Hughes and others, I formed a theory. This is not the first anti-mimetic division. Before 1976, there was another one. I was part of that division. Possibly I led it. Certainly, I am the only known survivor of it. Something happened to that team. Some anti-mimetic force chewed up and swallowed the idea of the anti-mimetic division itself. I was led off lightly. I lived. The rest of those people, whoever they were, however many of them there were, are missing without a trace. Wheeler knows. This much we know already. I was there when you wrote the note, remember? The question is known. It's the answer that we can't get to without killing you. It's the answer that we've waited all these years to get at. I'm here to ask you, what happened? Marnus covers his right eye and grimaces, trying. He fails. It's not there. He hasn't sent me back far enough. There's still that wall there in my head. I remember why the question exists, but I don't remember the answer. I need more. Wheeler swaps his arm and gives him another 10 years. Marnus seems like another man once the second ex-dose takes effect. Ring-girls are sliding back up into his face. Muscle mass is returning to his limbs, but it takes Wheeler a second to realize the real reason why. She's just booted him back across the field desk agent transition. Marnus has regressed a little way past senior management, the realm where most problems were solved by saying the correct words, and into a time where he survived through physical fitness, situational alertness, and hands-on experience. Marnus gets to his feet for the first time in years. He scans his surroundings, examining the placid golden lake and the sky and the boat itself. He doesn't sit down again. He smooths down his hospital gown, wishing he had a sweater and, separately, some fishing gear. He brushes a hand through new, old air. His sideburns are back. We weren't foundation at first, he says. The first Antimimax Division was a U.S. Army project. It ran in parallel with Manhattan during World War II. We called ourselves the Unthinkables. It began as an experiment in advanced propaganda. The objective was to cut through the physical conflict and find a way to rupture the ideological machine to obliterate the idea of Nazism. After two years, enough theory had been developed that the task had been reduced to an engineering problem. Another two years, and the engineering problem had been reduced as well, and what we had built was a very special kind of bomb. Unfortunately, we didn't understand what we'd built. Back then, we didn't have the nestics or the shielding that we could use to protect ourselves. We didn't understand how far ahead you need to think when you're working with this kind of technology. We got looped. It was textbook. We built the Unthinkable bomb, and Tess detonated it, and it worked perfectly. The bomb destroyed itself and erased its own successful detonation, and flattened all the knowledge which had gone together to build it. We forgot that we had ever built the bomb at all, and started over. To our credit, we realized pretty quickly what must have happened. There was a four-year gap in our progress now, and there was no other way to explain it. But by the time we put the pieces together the second time, the war was almost over. The Nazis had been defeated by conventional means, and the Japanese had been broken by the first atomic bombings. So we completed the second anti-mimetic bomb, and after that, we sound it. Marion Wheeler is silent for a long time. The U.S. Army, she says doubtfully, was secretly developing anti-mimetic weaponry as early as the 1940s? We sure were, Marnus says, with more than a hint of pride. Of course, there is no one in the whole world who could back this up. That's right, Marnus says, flashing a smile he hasn't flashed in decades. He only had my word for it. Cute, huh? Still, this is why you resurrected me, isn't it? For the sake of one more good war story. God, I've missed shop talk. I resurrected you because I want a very specific question answered, Wheeler says. Although I can see that, in a way, you've already answered it. This bomb was the means, wasn't it? The old anti-mimetic division? The unthinkables. Bomb themselves? Somehow. That's right, Marnus says. From context, Wheeler goes on. I assume that they knew what they were doing that time. I assume it was not an accident. It was not, Marnus says. He displaced half of Marnus' brain is anchored in the 70s now. So the true history of the new original unthinkables is an open book to him. And he reads. After the war, the second bomb collected dust for years. We began sketching improved designs for a third bomb. But around that time, oversight was starting to flick around. We completed our research and production objectives and were given no further objectives. Funding became shaky and we couldn't figure out why. It wasn't entirely clear that the project overseers knew what we were doing, or even that they remembered we existed. It was a side effect from the research, of course, one we had no way of managing at that time. In 1951, a cult movement began in Ojai, California. It was wrong. Everything about it was just wrong. In a matter of days, it was a national phenomenon that's still growing. It was all over the news. To spread that far in months would have been incredible. But days was simply impossible. We and the team could see that the philosophy behind the cult was unnaturally contagious. It was the opposite of unthinkable. It was unforgettable. We knew that this was what our bomb was designed for. We prompted the overseers for direction. But there were no orders. At the time that the outbreak began, we were a U.S. Army laboratory, through and through. Eight days into the crisis, the foundation acquired us. All the classified research, all the material resources, and all the compliant top staff, including me. Anybody who wouldn't comply was mind-wiped and sent back to the Army. Twenty hours after the acquisition, we deployed the second bomb, and the cult was gone. Nobody remembered it. Nobody remembered being part of it. After a loss of life, a completely clean detonation. And that is when everything really kicked off. Once we started working for the foundation, the pace of research ramped up. Every new technological advancement uncovered new hidden SCPs. I passed the foundation field exams and went out catching ghosts. My life turned into the Twilight Zone. I... Marnus blinks hard. He covers one of his eyes, then the other. I remember all these different people now, he says. It feels like my memory is in stereo. Almost every anti-mimetic SCP we caught before the wipe in 1976, we caught again soon after the wipe. That means I remember two acquisition logs for each one. I remember two anti-mimetics teams, and I don't remember who belongs on which side of the wall. Do you remember Goldy Yarrow, the neurologist? The mechanism of anomalously accelerated memory loss wrote a library book on a subject? Wheeler doesn't. Dr. Ojibiro? Julie Still? Elle, this is important. Are you at the right place in your own timeline to remember what happened yet? Marnus focuses, and he discovers that he is. Something changes in his eyes as he stops reminiscing. He speaks more slowly now, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. There is an SCP which your division has never seen. The SCP which my division couldn't contain. The escapee. This is what you wanted, isn't it, Marion? Yes, she says, this is the data I'm killing you for. She leaves a gap where, if she felt there was anything to apologize for, she would apologize. Marnus locks eyes with her. It was eating my divisional life. It came at us so hard and so fast that the only way we could stop it was to self-destruct. But we had no sight-nuke, and in retrospect, it's obvious to me now that this was because the SCP had consumed our sight-nuke first of all. If you know it exists, it knows you exist. The more you know about it, the more it knows about you. If you can see it, it can see you. And you can see it. You've been looking right at it all afternoon. Wheeler is suddenly acutely aware of her surroundings. There are only two of them on the boat. The boat is anchored more than a kilometer from any of the lake shores. She hasn't brought any backup with her. There's a radioactive prickling in her brain. She doesn't? Red flag. Why didn't I bring any backup with me? That doesn't make sense. There should be a team at the lake house. There should be an MTF operative and a medic here on the boat with me. And a second boat. At minimum. Am I all alone out here? Why did I do that? She pulls her gun, but doesn't aim it at Marnus yet. Where is it? Is it in you? Marnus' voice is becoming urgent. He covers both of his eyes again. The old knowledge of it was the only way to destroy it. And restoring my memories was a foolproof way to bring it back. It's in his eyes. Most likely his left eye. Wheeler backs up to the other side of the boat, draws a bead on the center of Marnus' head and says, L, are you still in there? There is a way to fix this. Marnus hisses, dropping to his knees. He keeps his eyes screwed up and gropes his way forward blindly on his hands and knees. Well, you need to tell me what this thing is. That's the opposite of what we need to do, Marnus says. You need to set another bomb off. We don't have that bomb. We lost the technology. Wheeler begins. You've always had it. There's an engineering lab in Site 41, you know it. An underground complex the size of a football field in pristine condition and totally disused. Why? Think about it. That's where your bombs installed. But that just sets us back to square one. If I set the bomb off, Wheeler says, knowing full well that she is thousands of kilometers from it and can't hope to reach it in time anyway. How do we contain this thing? We won't, Marnus shouts. We can't ever. Don't you get it? The whole division is looped. We start the division, we run headlong into this thing and either it eats us or we wipe ourselves out in self-preservation. The idea of anti-memes is as old as forgetfulness itself. Humans have been looping through this problem over and over again since long before the 40s, maybe for centuries. His blindly probing fingers find the medical box. It's too late. As Wheeler watches, a waving black pedipalp coated in dark hairs forces its way out through Marnus' left eye. Marnus screams. Still in his knees, he grasps the pedipalp with both hands and tries to break it. But it's solid as if it has bones inside it. What is it? Wheeler shouts at him. That can't be the whole story. Where is it from? What does it want? Can it reason? Can it speak? Help. A second spider leg, significantly longer and spindlier, slides out through Marnus' trachea, ruining his throat and voice box, and producing a gout of blood. He gurgles. The third leg shoots from his abdomen like a spear. Wheeler shoots Marnus in the head. Marnus falls forward, limp, then rises back up, lifted by the three spider penises, as if he is a puppet being controlled by something gigantic and invisible. His arm is raised as if suspended by wires. Wheeler squints. She fires four more shots over Marnus' head, at the likely body mass of the invisible puppeteer, and fires the rest of her clip almost directly into the sky. The whole boat vibrates, along with the surface of the lake, as if responding to an infrasound or a localized earthquake. Then the boat shutters violently and starts to lift out of the water, raised by more unseen appendages. Wheeler holsters her gun and goes for the medical box herself, pulling it away from Marnus' floating feet. There's a compartment with Class B amnestic, the fast-acting stuff in serum form. She does a hurried burst of mental arithmetic, measures out the correct dosage in a syringe, and hands shaking, plunges it into a wrist vein. The boat is still rising. Whatever the monster is, it's colossally tall. Or maybe it flies. She is, of course, already dosed up to the eyeballs with nested drugs. Otherwise, she wouldn't have been able to perceive any of this. The medical literature warns in the strongest possible terms against putting both kinds of drug into the same brain. Best case scenario, this ends with her in the hospital. They're 30 meters up in the air now, 10 stories. There's a stabbing pain developing in her left eye. She kicks her shoes off and throws the gun away. She goes to the edge and contemplates the drop. For a disbelieving second, she jumps. It takes two hard-stopping seconds of freefall for her to hit the water. The chilled hammer below the impact is enough to blank her mind out. By the time she surfaces, she doesn't remember where she fell from or why. And likewise, the skyscraper-sized being which claimed Marnus and the boat has forgotten about her. What the hell? She gasps, treading water. What the hell? Where the hell? There's nothing above her. No explanation. Only the symptoms of the drug cocktail give her any indication of what just happened. A sensation like hundreds of tiny lumps of hot solder in her brain, and a pain and exhaustion spreading to all of her tendons. She wants to die. Swim, says part of her, get to shore first, then you can die. The extraction team finds her around dusk, unconscious on the lake shore. They stabilize her in the helicopter, then take her to site 41 for examination and to have her system flushed. She spends a solid eight days at home, detoxifying. No anesthetics. No amnestics. No exposure to dangerous memory-corrupting SCPs. No work visitors. No work. The doctor also tells her, pointlessly. This isn't anywhere near the first missing event in Wheeler's life, nor is she the first person in the anti-magnetic staff to have such an experience. But the sensation is no less disturbing for its familiarity. As per procedure, she writes a report summarizing everything she can remember. The gap in her memory is about 13 hours. Then she adds her report to the extensive complex map of missing time, which the whole division maintains collectively. It is a map of holes, and the map is becoming large enough that very faint patterns are gradually forming. The outline of an enemy is becoming visible, or perhaps a group of enemies. When she quizzes the extraction team later, none of them remember who activated the emergency beacon with some of them. In fact, the beacon itself cut out, long before they landed at the lake. Wheeler compares the current size of her division with her best estimate of what it should be. Maybe she needs a few more key people here and there. So assuming the division was fully staffed before the event, maybe those empty roles are the people who died this time around. Maybe one of them activated the beacon, a commendable act, by someone now only known to exist because of that single act. It's weeks later still that Wheeler discovers the largest new hole in her memory. Who founded the division? When? And a file. To learn more about the SCP Foundation, subscribe to SCP Orientation today and turn the notification bell on so you don't miss any of our videos.