Ex Nihilo Nihil - SCP Foundation

I wake up, and I wonder once again what I am. What I was meant to be. I move, though I will my limbs not, and as I walk through the darkness I feel them scrape upon one another, and crunch on the brushed concrete floor. This is not life.

They open the door, and my body freezes. The light is so bright it burns, and although I have no eyes to see it I know it is there. They move slowly around me, and I cannot run. I can never run, even when they no longer see me. I am a slave to myself, and to my shapeless limbs.

Sometimes, before I kill them, I look at myself. At my grey, formless hands, at my misshapen head. At the walls of my prison. At the floor, stained red and brown by the substances that I will into being. I am a statue, but I have no beauty. I move constantly, but I have no purpose. I am a thing without form or function.

I am not art.

They come, and they look at me. I feel their stares bore into my hollow body, probing for any hint at my tormented mechanism. It continues for days, for years. The burning light, and the inevitable darkness. They have stopped now: they know that there is nothing more to learn. I was not made for them, nor they for me. I am no plaything of theirs.

I am not wonderful.

It is possible that I was a gift of some kind, but it is hard to imagine what good I could possibly do in the world. My frame is weak, and I have no kindness to bestow. I cannot control the crimes I commit, and I can only commit those crimes. My life is not mine to give, and I know in my heart that they will not take it. I will never know the pleasure of death.

Whoever created me, they were not charitable.

It is true that I am beyond their comprehension, and that they hold me in reverence. It is the reverence of the damned. I kill for pleasure, and the pleasure is not even mine to have. My painted mask runs red with blood, and I know that there is no God, for if there was he would not let me live. He would not let me be. I am an abomination, a threat to both good and evil. In a world of black and white, I dwell in the grey.

I have been called many things, but never divine.

What, then, is my ultimate fate? Not to be bought and sold as a commodity, I know that. I am outside the reach of mere wealth. Those that hold me in their possession would rather see me ground to dust than traded as merchandise. Nor am I a weapon: I am weak despite my strength. I murder, but I do not harm unjustly, and I am not under the control of any single person. I have no knowledge to impart, no joy to bestow, and no task to fulfil. I do not even scare them any more, disquieting though my visage is.

Amongst a web of life, I am a dying prisoner in a shell of clay. I am a single object, doomed without purpose, without any source of respite. To subsist as I do now is to die a death more potent than that suffered by mortals: I can only dream of having the vitality they take for granted. No-one takes responsibility for my actions save myself, and even I am unable to speak out against the world.

My legs walk onwards, tracking pathways through the brown and red, awaiting the pain that comes with light, and the darkness that hurts me more.

In my cage of brick and steel, in my cage of dye and dust, I am alone.