 Item number SCP-3125 Object Class Keter Special Containment Procedures SCP-3125 is kept inside Cognito Hazard Containment Unit 3125 on the first floor of Site 41. This containment unit is a 10 meter by 15 meter by 3 meter cuboidal room clad in layers of lead, soundproofing, and telepathic shielding. This is through an airlock system at one end of the containment unit. This airlock is programmed to allow only one person to enter the containment unit at a time, and to remain locked until this person exits before allowing another person to enter. Under no circumstances may any coherent information be allowed to leave the containment unit. This includes written and electronic notes, photographs, audio and video recordings, sound, electromagnetic and particle-based signals, and sigh emanations. During the exit cycle, a purge system rigged to the airlock flushes the occupant's memory by flooding the airlock with amnestic gas for three minutes. A senior amnestic division staff member must visit SCP-3125 every six weeks, 42 days, and a file. You're kidding me, that's the whole entry? That's the whole entry, Wheeler says. That isn't even the 50th strangest thing Paul came to see in the database, but still. No description, no acquisition report, no test log, no addenda? No clue who built the unit, or when, or how many times it's been visited, or who carried out the previous visits, or what they took in with them, or how long they were in there. Well, obviously Bart Hughes built the unit, Wheeler says, and this cannot be denied. The man's signature style of containment architecture is recognizable a mile out. Sleek, white, plainly impregnable, without the aid of extremely heavy tools, which makes it at least seven years old. That's 60 visits or more. I guess there are good reasons for the rest of those omissions. Anyway, the Tyron Watchdog says it's time again. I don't like the idea of you routinely exposing yourself to a cognitohazard so dangerous that we can't even write the reason why we can't write it down, Kim says. Especially because it's impossible for us to recover any useful information this way. You're gonna go in, be in communicato for two hours, and come out a smiling amnesiac. What do we gain from that? It's just a breach risk. Wheeler hears every word of this, and elects to ignore it all. There's a vague shape of familiarity about the entry as written. But there are a few word choices which reassure her in an intangible way that it was written by someone who knew what they were doing, possibly her. Kim's still talking. We should just scrub the last line from the database entry. There can't be anything good in that room. Wheeler puts her key card in the slot. The airlock rewards her with green LEDs and begins to cycle open. It's built as a slender vertical cylinder with a single opening. The entire thing rotates on its axis. Inside, there's barely room for a single person to stand, without their shoulders touching the walls. What are you taking? Kim asks. Wheeler ducks to step in, turns to face him, and shrugs, a stick of gum. I can get you field gear, Kim says, as the airlock begins to rotate, emitting a low, quiet thromb, solely as an audible warning that there is machinery in motion. Wheel raid inventory. Take me 15 minutes and I'll turn you into a one-woman war. If Wheeler says anything in response to this, it's cut off by the soundproofing as the airlock rotates. Kim is left alone in the antechamber. He stares at the outer door for a worried moment. He presses his ear to the door for a while. But here's nothing, not even a faint tremble from the airlock mechanism. Inside, it's pitch dark for a few seconds, then some unseen sensor detects wheelish presence and brings the fluorescence up. Half of them anyway. The others remain inert, or flicker, aggravatingly. The room's interior walls are made from milky white glass, bulletproof knowing hues, and plastered with paperwork, taped and blue-tacked up in vaguely coherent messes. Where there is no paperwork, people have drawn directly on the walls in marker pen. There is a conference table, long and elliptical, covered with more paperwork and a tangle of laptop computers and serpentine power supply cables. Power has returned to the machines and they're slowly booting. A data projector warms up and shines a map of the world over the far wall, almost lining up with a network of scribbled annotations on the same wall. Toasted notes of all colors litter the carpet like autumn leaves. Other than that, the room is empty. Skimming the paperwork, Wheeler discovers that nearly all of it is handwritten, and most of it charts the progress of conversations. Most of the entries are dated and signed, and most of the dates are weeks apart. The conversations are packed and fearful back and forth about dozens of SCPs, some of them anti-mimetic in nature, but none of them obviously related to one another. None of the notes mention SCP-3125. The only name Wheeler recognizes is her own, which appears on 1 in 10 or 20 of the notes. The notes seem authentic and the handwriting is hers, but her notes also seem as desperate and uncertain in tone as everybody else's. This unnerves her. There are diagrams on the walls too, which are too complex to decode at a glance, but complex enough to make her hurt her eyes to look at them. Still lost for a logical entry point to the data, Wheeler curses all of her predecessors. A synchronous research, whereby the research topic is forgotten entirely between iterations and rediscovered over and over, is a perfectly standard procedure in the anti-mimetics division, and her people ought to be better trained than this. There should be an obvious single document to read first, which makes sense of the rest. A primer. Marion, it's me. Wheeler recognizes the voice as her own. She moves around the table, until she finds the laptop making the noise. There's a video playing, apparently recording the laptop's own camera in this room. The Marion Wheeler in the video is seated and looks unfamiliar, in a way which takes the one watching a moment to put her finger on. Not exhausted, not sick, not physically injured, she's seen herself that way before, in the mirror. This woman's willpower is gone. She's beaten. You've guessed already that SCP-3125 is not in this room, she says. In fact, this is the only room in the world where SCP-3125 is not present. It's called inverted containment. SCP-3125 pervades all of reality, except for volumes which have been specifically shielded from its influence. This is it. This is our only safe harbor. This room represents the length and breadth of the war. Every competent Antiemanics research project finds SCP-3125's fingerprints sooner or later, and manifests all over the world in thousands of different forms. Most of them aren't even anomalous. Some of them we already have catalogued separately in the main database. A very small number of them are even in containment. Impossibly of virulent cults, broken arithmetic, invisible spiders as tall skyscrapers, people born with extra organs which nobody can see. That's the raw data. Those manifestations are troublesome enough to deal with in their own right. The wheeler in the video casts around, picks up a bright green felted pen and a blank piece of paper. She begins drawing a shape which isn't visible from the camera's perspective while still talking. But once you get a little further down the road, you start to see a pattern emerging in the data. You need to have the training in memetic science, but once you have that training and you have the data in front of you, it only takes a little extra effort to arrange those data points in conceptual space and draw a contour through them. Those data points are points on SCP 3125's hull. Those manifestations are the shadows it casts on our reality. You link four or five different SCPs together into a single shape and you see it. And it sees you. She's still drawing. It's detailed. She doesn't look up and her tone of voice is distant, almost as if she's narrating the tail end of a frightening children's story. When that happens, when you make eye contact, it kills you. It kills you. And it kills anybody who thinks like you. Physical distance doesn't matter. It's about mental proximity. Anybody with the same ideas. Anybody in the same headspace. It kills your collaborators. Your whole research team. It kills your parents. It kills your children. You become absent humans. Even shaped shells surrounding holes in reality. And when it's done, your project is a hole in the ground. And nobody knows what SCP 3125 is anymore. It is a black hole in anti-mimetic science, consuming unwary researchers and yielding no information, only detectable through indirect observation. A true description of what SCP 3125 is, or even an allusion to what it is, constitutes a containment breach and a lethal indirect cognitial hazard. You see, it's a defense mechanism. This information-swallowing behavior is just the outer layer, the poison coating. It protects the entity from discovery while it infests our reality. Even as years pass, the manifestations will continue, growing denser and knitting together until the whole world is drowning in them and everybody will be screaming. Why did nobody realize what was happening? And nobody will answer, because everybody who realized was killed by this system. Do you see it, Marion? See it now? Wheeler is at the core of Foundation anti-mimetic science. She had all the raw data readily accessible. There are extensive written calculations on the walls, but she doesn't need to read them. She can do them in her head. All it took was the slightest push, that slightest suggestion. Staring through the laptop screen, eyes wide and de-focused, she understands how it all links together. She sees SCP 3125. She feels dwarfed by it. She's encountered terrible, powerful ideas before at every level of memeticity and subdued them or even recruited them. But what she's picturing now is on another order of magnitude, from what she need to be possible. Now that she knows it's there, she can feel it like cosmic radiation, boring holes in the world with its thousands of manifestations and freely laying waste to anybody who recognizes a larger pattern. It's not of reality, not of humanity. It is from a higher, worse place and it is descending. The other Wheeler presents her finished diagram. She has drawn a mutated, fractally complex grasping hand with five-fold symmetry. It has no wrist or arm, just five long human fingers pointing in five different directions. At its core, there is a pentagonal opening which could be a mouth. But the diagram was already there. It's plastered across the wall in the background of the video. Plain as day, a meticulous collage in green, easily two meters in diameter, ensuring the same meme complex to a hundred times the level of detail. There are smaller diagrams of different elevations arrayed around it like spores and its arms are spread wide around the seated Wheeler who sits directly in front of the mouth with her back to it. Wheeler watching does not realize this and does not turn around. How do you fight an enemy without ever discovering it exists? The Wheeler in the video asks. How do you win without even realizing you're at war? What do we do? Seven years ago, there were more than 400 anti-mimetics research groups worldwide. Government agencies, military branches, private corporations, university projects, many of them were GOIs or subdivisions of GOIs. We were allied with most of them. We were at the spearhead of an anti-mimetics coalition which spanned the whole globe and thousands upon thousands of people. None of those groups still exist. The last one ceased to exist sometime in the last 72 hours. Three years ago, Foundation Anti-Mimetics was an organization of more than 4,000 people. Now it's 90. There is no war. We've lost the war, it's over. This is the mopping up operation. The only reason we still exist at all is because we have better amnestic biochemistry than anybody else in the world. Because that's all you can do when you see SCP-3125 run away and try to forget what you saw, seek oblivion in chemicals or alcohol or head trauma. And even that can't work every time. It's circling in. We meet it over and over again and we don't realize it. There's no way we can stop ourselves from rediscovering it. We're too damn smart. She pointed something on the wall, out of view of the laptop's camera. We were watching Trace Look. In an upper corner of the room, there is a constellation of dizzyingly complicated schematics. Bart Hughes initials are on every page. There's the machine we could build. All it would take is eight years, a lab as big as West Virginia, and all the money in the world. Nothing that the O5 Council would blink at if we went to them. But how do we build that machine without any of us realizing what it's for? It would be like building and launching Apollo 11 without a single engineer deducing that the moon existed. The logistics would be insane, but the secrecy would be well past impossible. Someone would start asking questions, and then it would be over. So what do we do? Find another way, Wheeler says to the unhearing recording. The fatalistic tone of voice makes her angry. What the hell's wrong with you? I could tell everybody to walk away. I could send a little message to myself saying, there's danger down this road. You should disband the anti-manics division and pursue other projects. But I'd be suspicious. I'd start asking questions, and then it would be over. Wheeler's now crouched in front of the video, trying to understand what she's watching. What's wrong, Marion? Are you okay? I could kill myself in here, the recording says. But my team would find SCP-3125 without me, and then they'd have to fight SCP-3125 without me. It's gonna happen soon, whatever happens, in the next two months at most. This year, it will be over. I may die here anyway. I'm on so many anesthetic drugs that my endocrine system is shutting down. Taking amnestics at the same time is the chemical equivalent to treponation. I don't remember the last time I slept without having a nightmare about Adam, and I'm starting to forget whether SCP-4987 is a real thing or just the number that I gave to my life. You're not like this, Wheeler whispers. You're stronger than this. What happened to you? Who's Adam? I don't know how we survive this. I don't know how we win. We're the last ones in the world. After us, there's nobody. You shake her head, not believing it. So I'm done. I'm going to walk out of this door and forget who I am. And then I'm going to be you, Marion. You and Troll have to figure out a way out of this, because I can't. She gets up and moves off screen. She can be heard breathing deeply. Her speech is starting to distort. God, my eyes hurt. I think I'm starting to inflate inside. There's a sound of a door opening, and then a piercing pulse of sound and light, which terminates the recording. Wheeler stares at the dark screen for a long time. She's never seen herself so weak, and it damages her ego a great deal to see that it's possible. She feels disconnected from what she saw, like it happened in an alternate universe. She feels revolved and appalled by that version of her, more so to know that version is still inside her, somewhere. It doesn't make sense. I'm looking at all the same facts. What made her give up? What did she know that I don't? Who is Adam? The answer to this question is so obvious and sickening that she instinctively distrusts it. She circles around the answer, probing it, trying to find reasons to reject it. But it's inescapable. Adam was someone she knew when the video was recorded, now completely removed from her memory. Adam was someone the thought of who safety paralyzed her with fear. Someone in the same headspace. Someone she couldn't bear to lose. And then she lost. But what if? But how'd the room get built in the first place? Anybody's guess. Wheeler imagines Hughes building it as a proof of concept, followed by a cascading series of lucky chances, would lead to it becoming the war room. Someone discovered SCP-3125 at random, while sealed in the room. They wrote notes to themselves, which set up the skeletal external SCP database entry and the contained procedures. Most of the paperwork and computer hardware was left behind by later visitors. It could have happened. But what if there's another room? Unbidden, a cute factoid comes back to her right then. Site 41 is almost completely vacant. In particular, 200 meters below Site 41, there's an empty, heavy engineering lab, an underground complex the size of a hockey stadium. Self-contained, in pristine condition, totally disused. Sealed up, original purpose forgotten. Nobody has entered it in living memory. Built, who knows how many decades back by a dead generation of anti-medicists? What if that's where we built our weapon? Do I really believe I'm that smart? That my team and I had that much foresight? That we got lucky. She turns to look at the airlock, running the numbers in her head. And team and my exhibition staff, other than me, 38, 42 days until the next iteration. That's past the end of the year. It'll be too late. If I leave this room now, I will never be back. The plan I have now is the best plan there's ever going to be. We're the last ones in the world. After us, there's nobody. Kim is so deeply buried in work at his terminal, and the airlock is so quiet that he almost doesn't notice when it starts to cycle open again. We need to check you for notes, he begins. But then he sees that Marion Wheeler is curled up in the bottom of the narrow cylinder, panting as though she just finished a marathon run. Kim holds out a hand, but she shakes her head, electing to stay lying down, her knees bent up to her chest, sucking down lungfuls of air. What in the world happened in there? Kim asks. Just need, she gasps, to breathe, be okay in a second. I think I've lacked out for a moment, might have inhaled some. I think I'm okay. I remember the plan. Kim looks confused and worried for a second, then they replace him. You shouldn't be able to remember anything. What did you do? Hit my head, Wheeler says, then goes back to concentrating on breathing properly. She suddenly becomes acutely aware that Kim has her effectively cornered, disliking this configuration, for reasons which she's only gradually putting back together. She levers herself up to one shoulder and tries to stand. Kim puts a hand on her shoulder and pushes her back down. You look terrible, he says. There's something in a fluff in your neck. Do you see that? He points at her throat, then taps the same spot on his own. What? On your neck? I never fly, you've been infected by whatever was in there. We need to act quickly. He reaches for his key ring, and on threads a Swiss army knife, and unfolds a short gleaming blade. He does this in such a methodical, ordinary way, that Wheeler almost forgets to react when he leans down towards her to cut her throat. Almost. She grips his wrist. They're locked like that for a moment, a tableau. She looks into Paul Kim's eye, but this isn't his eye anymore. She squints, wondering if she's making eye contact with anything but a hole in space. She already feels the force bearing down on her skull, trying to drill into it, but she knows its shape, and that means she can hold out, maybe for a few minutes. She had hoped, prayed, that Kim would not succumb so quickly, and in a craze little way, she thought there would be at least a sign, a theatrical doubling over, as his mind was wrenched out of its socket. Kim's wrists spasms, as he tries to lunge with the knife. Wheeler parries, and his tip glances off the airlock interior wall with a screech. They scuffle for an awkward second, then she boots Kim in the stomach with both feet, sending him sprawling into the anti-chamber. She launches out of the airlock, dives over him, and sprints away from the containment unit. She feels SCP-3125 following her as she runs like a spotlight. She hears a crash in another part of the site, as the first piece of the ceiling caves in. Concluded, in document, your last first day. End of 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.