Moving Pieces - SCP Foundation

You’re one microscopic cog of his catastrophic plan, designed and directed by his red right hand.

by Kothardarastrix and Ethagon

Rita Marvin knows she isn't crazy.

She knows that her hometown—the place where she was born, grew up, got married, had children, and very nearly died—was not destroyed in a “catastrophic gas explosion” or a “freak firestorm” or any number of other implausible explanations put forward by the news, the police, or the doctors at the mental hospital. She knows that her family was not killed by any sort of freak accident or engineering failure or natural disaster; they were killed by a monster - a clump of pulsating red muscle the size of an SUV, with the spiky legs of some horrible insect and whipping, bladed tentacles and a scorpion tail that shot liquid fire. She knows that this is what she saw, and she had drawn it over and over and over and over and over again to make sure that she would continue to remember it properly. And on every single one of those drawings, she had written the things that the monster said, nonsense statements like “the fourth of what may yet perspire upon the grim and sodden twilight statistic is but the hollow mask of pernicious reciprocity” to make sure that she wouldn't forget those either.

She knows it must have been the doctors that did it. Not the ones who pried her bruised body from the smoldering ruins, but the strange ones who had come to the ICU ward in the dead of night and gone from room to room with strange pills and long syringes. Something in those pills and needles had made the other survivors forget. Something had convinced them that their arms had been medically amputated, not sheared off by razor-sharp tentacles. That their burns had come from a perfectly normal fire, not a burst of organic napalm. That their loved ones had been vaporized by an explosion, not eaten by a monster that no sane person could ever believe to exist. But she knew that it had been real, just as she knew that, through some simple error or strange quirk of fate, the poison in those pills hadn't wiped her mind like it had everyone else's. The doctors at the asylum had always tried to make her doubt herself, to give up those memories and accept the comfortable lie instead. They'd called her delusional. Then, when she accused them of being in league with the evil doctors who'd tried to steal her truth, they'd called her paranoid. She'd tried to escape a few times, and had even hurt a few of those bastard doctors in the process, but she had never quite made it out. Eventually, they'd given up and tossed her in a rubber room to rot.

Then a new doctor, one who wore no badge and gave no name, had come to visit her little padded prison in the dead of night. At first, she'd been sure that he was there to lobotomize her, or even to kill her outright, as punishment for her refusal to accept the lie and a permanent way to shut her up. That hadn't happened, though - instead, the nameless doctor had revealed that he was no doctor at all. No, he was someone like her. Someone who knew the dark truths of the world, the truths that evil liars would do horrible things to hide. He hadn't come to take her mind or her life; he had come to set her free. All he'd wanted in exchange was a little help taking those evil liars down.

Thaddeus Jordan didn’t deserve this.

He didn't deserve to be born in a broken family in a neglected neighborhood where the only way to keep his unemployed mother and his unemployable self alive was to join up with some other heavily armed young men and make some money on the ugly side of the law. He hadn't deserved to sprain his ankle running from the cops, or to get beaten within an inch of his life by them, or to be thrown in prison for longer than his statistically likely lifespan.

That’s why, when a friendly-faced scientist had offered early release in exchange for a little medical testing with a nonprofit organization, he'd thought that might finally be the break owed to him. But then that “nonprofit organization” had turned out to be some place called the SCP Foundation, which wasn't doing "medical testing" as much as it was throwing slave labor at a shit-covered concrete statue that would snap your fucking neck if you looked away from it for half a second. He definitely hadn't deserved that.

So, when some fucked-up giant crocodile slithered out of its acid vat and tunneled through the wall around that SCP hellhole, Thaddeus had crawled through that hole after it. The jackboots had been too busy getting eaten to even see him get away. For a brief, shining moment, he'd thought things might get better. But after two years, Thaddeus was still a man with no name, no documentation, no home, and no money. His sad excuse for a living was scraped out under overpasses, behind grocery stores, and in other undignified holes and gutters. He didn’t deserve to live like that. Nobody did.

When an offensively luxurious car pulled up beside Thaddeus on the street and the offensively wealthy man inside offered him an offensively large meal, Thaddeus's first thought had been that the Foundation had somehow tracked him down again and was trying to finish the job. Food was food, though, so he'd figured that he'd give it a shot. It wasn't like he had much left to lose, after all. The rich guy hadn't killed him, though; he'd brought him to an offensively fancy restaurant with a one-word name in the same pretentious European cursive as its indecipherable menu. Then he'd bought Thaddeus all the offensively expensive food he could stuff into his stomach, and all the rest that he could pack into his pockets. Then this mysterious benefactor had revealed that he, too, knew about the SCP Foundation, and what it had done to Thaddeus, and how little he had deserved any of it. The Foundation, on the other hand…well, it deserved much worse. And with Thaddeus's help, he could give it to them.

Jimmy Chambers believes himself to be a hero.

But then again, he also believes that the government, the media, and the economy are being secretly controlled by shapeshifting alien invaders, and that everyone but him and a few other Parawatch users are too stupid or too brainwashed by their subdermal tracking chips, back-masked rock music, and perception-altering 4G broadcasts to see it. He believes that it's his responsibility to rescue the human race from the worldwide larder of its extraterrestrial oppressors, and that one of the best ways to do that is by exercising a very generous reading of his Second Amendment rights. After all, you never know when a black helicopter might decide to drop some soldiers of the New World Order in your backyard.

So, when an anon known only as “Dr. E” told him that Spicy Crust Pizzeria was a Government front hiding hypnotic messages in its advertisements, memory-erasing drugs in its sauce, and mind-controlled slave-soldiers smuggled off death row in its storage rooms, he'd believed it. And when Dr. E told him exactly what day and time the Government conspirators who had sold their own people to alien overlords would be there, he'd believed that too.

That’s why Jimmy is parked across the street from the pizzeria, sitting in his mother's car next to a duffel bag full of assault rifles and crudely improvised explosive devices.

John Patrick Justice doesn't really understand religion.

He'd always gone to church, of course, and he'd always hummed and screamed along to tuneless hymns like “The Five Fingers of Fate” and “Follow the Smoke to Heaven” even though neither he nor anyone else had ever heard them before (or ever would again). He had always tried to dream the right dreams and emit the right energies, though Medium-Sized Cheese Larry had never been able to explain what exactly those were in a way that John could make sense of. His childish imagination was a gift from the Fifth World, surely, but his childish inexperience also made the more esoteric teachings of the Fifth Gospel Transcendental Pentaradial Southern Fifthist Church difficult to really conceptualize. Larry had assured him that these things would become clearer when he grew old enough to receive his first taste of the pink light and the revelations therein, but John Patrick had never gotten that chance.

John Patrick hadn't understood why twenty men in tactical gear crashed through the church’s doors and windows and opened fire, or why he'd been the only one who didn’t go down in that hail of bullets. He didn’t understand how Medium-Sized Cheese Larry had dissolved into a five-eyed cloud of green smoke and folded the shooters into himself, then exploded right through the roof of the church in a blast of bubbling viscera. But there was one thing he had understood: that more soldiers would be coming, and if they found him there among the curled bodies of his extended family and all his childhood friends, they'd shoot him too. So he'd run away, run and hidden in woods and alleyways from all the people that screamed when they saw his fifth eye. Then he'd met a man who didn't scream or faint at the sight of him, a man who said he knew who had killed John Patrick’s family, and that he was sorry he hadn't been able to stop them. But if John Patrick came with him, they could stop those people together.

John Patrick still doesn't quite understand how he's going to do that, and he doesn't understand all the instructions that he's been given, but he understands that the people who killed his family have to pay, and that the nice man who he sometimes thinks of as his new dad is going to make that happen.

Officer Joe Lawrence is a good soldier.

He always follows his bosses' instructions to the best of his ability, and he never lets anyone get away with even the slightest bending of a rule if he can stop it. The D-class hate him, but they hate everybody. His coworkers don't like him very much either - he's a "stick in the mud" or a "wet blanket" or a "narc" to them - but that's because they don't appreciate the importance of loyalty, or the importance of the Foundation's mission. The Foundation is the last bastion of defense between civilization and madness! Joe feels the weight of that responsibility, and he is honored to bear it.

Joe's unswerving, unfailing, unquestioning loyalty have always been his most redeeming quality. That's what had netted him this Security Officer job and all its associated benefits, quite a sweet deal compared to chasing speeders and writing parking tickets. He had always been sure that that same loyalty would eventually earn him a spot on Nu-7 or one of the other really badass Task Forces. They hadn't picked him up on any of the previous recruitment cycles, but that was okay. Yeah, he needed more experience, and a little more training, but surely he'd been practicing and working out enough to make up for that. The Foundation would be sure to make the right call. It always did.

Still, Joe had been surprised when he returned from the firing range one evening to find someone waiting in his bunk. The strange visitor had never identified himself, and he'd had one of those faces that was hard to remember, though Joe had never been much good with faces or names anyway. Joe had remembered the mysterious man's job offer, though; how could he forget! As a reward for his endless loyalty, he had been given a spot on a very special, very secret Task Force. He'd never heard of MTF Alpha-0 ("Operation Mindcrime"), but apparently that was the point. Mindcrime had the very important, very dangerous job of rooting out infiltrators from the Chaos Insurgency. It had to be so secretive because the Insurgents could be anywhere, anyone, from the lowest D-class to the most powerful site director. So secretive, in fact, that not even Joe would be allowed to know about his own missions - that way the Insurgency couldn't torture him if he was caught. Instead, he'd simply receive dispatches in his mail, always in an unmarked black envelope. He just needed to read the dispatch, and Mindcrime would take over from there. Joe was so excited by this long-awaited recognition of his loyalty that he never stopped to question any of this.

Joe, loyal as always, still doesn't question what sorts of missions he carries out. He doesn't particularly care, to tell the truth. Joe trusts the Foundation fully, completely, and utterly. If, to protect the Foundation - to protect the world - he needs to wake up in his bunk with five empty hours on his watch, the taste of amnestics on his lips, and the insidious scent of gunsmoke dancing faintly in his nostrils, then he'll do exactly that. Joe is a good solider. And good soldiers follow orders.

Sgt. Ernie Stinson hates the Foundation.

He hates the way they send his brothers in arms headfirst into hell like glorified D-class, shoveling them into the hungry mouth of every godforsaken underground labyrinth on this worm-eaten apple of a planet to be mulched by a million ravenous minotaurs.

He'd demanded access to the footage of SCP-3673, even though the eggheads who were always calling the shots from well outside the danger zone had assured him that he didn’t want to see it. That had been true, but he'd NEEDED to see it. He'd needed to see his three closest friends be squashed to paste by an anomaly with a 0% survival rate, all because some fucking scientist had sent them into unexplored territory with no useful intelligence and no clear objective to do a job that would’ve been more appropriate for the Angle Grinders or White Rabbits or another fucking D-class who had already been sentenced to death anyway, not good people, REAL people with friends and families and lives to go home to. If he had been there that day, he’d have sooner shot that fucking scientist than marched his friends into certain death, or at least have been squashed flat beside them so the pulped remains of their bodies would be together in Hell.

Then he wouldn’t be here in this dingy subterranean barracks, reading detailed instructions for the betrayal he was to commit that evening. He hates the low life to which he's fallen, hates the lowlife he’s become, hates the violence he's about to commit, and hates the mysterious man who’d assured him that this was not yet another suicide mission, but only one part of a vast Rube Goldberg machine that, at its conclusion, would finally unfurl the vengeance that the Foundation so desperately deserves. He hates his disbelief, and he hates his indifference. But most of all, he hates the Foundation. If he dies tonight, that won’t be so bad. Mole Rats die all the time. But this time, for the first time, it’ll be for a cause.

It wasn't Director Amadeus Lire's fault.

He couldn't have predicted that SCP-4205 would manifest on SCP-048's containment cube. That had been RAISA's fault, for giving it the cursed number! And how could he have known about SCP-939's reproductive cycle? It'd never been observed in the wild! And it certainly wasn't his fault that SCP-058 was so damn hard to contain. Area-14 wasn't built to hold things like that! The HMCL should've known that trying to stuff a Keter in a chamber that'd been cobbled together in three weeks could only end in disaster. Hell, they probably had known and just didn't give a shit! They certainly didn't seem to give a shit when some other thing broke free of its outdated containment procedures and slaughtered Area-14's personnel.

Nobody appreciated Director Lire's efforts. It was so incredibly difficult to run this unwieldy dinosaur of a containment area. The scientists were always whining that they didn't have enough research funding, never understanding that the already very limited money had to be spent on guns and concrete instead to keep that damned heart monster under control. Then the fucking task force agents were always whining that he didn't value their safety enough, that he was relying too much on them to keep the monsters in their boxes even though that was their fucking job! Maybe your soldiers wouldn't be dead if you'd trained them better, Tommy! Did you ever fucking think of that?

No, he hadn't. And neither had the O5 Council, or any of the other ungrateful assholes that Director Lire had been keeping alive and employed for the last ten years. They were going to replace him with that disrespectful meathead in charge of Hammer Down, Thomas MacLean. That bastard had been gunning for Lire's job from the beginning, and now he'd finally gotten enough of the other staff on his side to take it.

That's why this is Amadeus Lire's last day as Director; after that, he'll be stripped of any classified knowledge and dumped at some Site in Antarctica, or worse, New Jersey. But that won't happen until tomorrow. Right now, Amadeus Lire knows every secret at Area-14, and a few more besides. If, in the bureaucratic chaos of a hasty change of administrations, some of those secrets get…misplaced, that won't necessarily be his fault. And if some of those misplaced secrets find their way into the hands of some bad actors, well…okay, that one might really be on him. But the Foundation will have only itself to blame for whatever happens after that.

Delta Commander Damien O'Connor is waiting for the last step.

His presence in the war room is not strictly required, but it smooths things over. The trigger for the plan has long since been pulled. All that is left to do is witness the impact.

The groundwork of the plan had started with sending the amnestic-resistant civilian to very specific cover-ups. There, she'd been sowing distrust in the Foundation's fake stories during that brief window of susceptibility after amnestic-intake. The result had been twofold: distrust of amnestics and an overreliance on Disinformation Bureau personnel to handle the Northern Nevada region. That had still been something the Foundation could deal with. The problems had started when the replacements for said personnel never turned up, courtesy of their loyal Officer Puppet. A puppet that had by now forgotten the assassination it carried out, now back on standby, his usefulness not yet outlived. That disappearance, finally, had constituted a proper problem that didn't get noticed until it was almost too late. With no one to take care of it, the Veil had started stretching to its limit. The Foundation had to overexert itself to deal with the problem. More importantly, it required the support of both Area-09 and Area-14 to solve. Area-09 was not O'Connor's problem. His focus lay on the Armed Facility.

Just a few hours ago, the Mole Rat had let an anomaly (O'Connor hadn't cared which) loose in the site and died in the blaze of glory befitting of his position. The rest of Zeta-9, only in the area for a simple training exercise, had followed suit. For all the MTF's high fatality rate, they were frighteningly competent. Best to keep that death toll high. Concurrently, the Ex-D-Class had brought the Fifthist novice into the facility, using the plans that its disgraced Director had given to them all those years ago. The D-Class's steps had consisted of guiding the Fifthist to a specific saferoom. Everyone in that room and a few people on the way had been exposed to the novice's fifth eye. Not a serious enough hazard to put the affected in lockdown, but the disorientation it caused was vital. Both assets should be dead by now. The D-Class's violent disposition virtually ensured that the two would meet their end through the trigger-happy Nu-7. Tying up loose ends and hiding Delta Command's involvement. On the same day, O5-3 had started a journey from Yellowstone to Area-09. Planned was a stop at Area-14. As was protocol, the Overseer had sent bodyguards to scout it beforehand. All of them ended up in the contaminated saferoom. That incident was the final straw. The bodyguards advised the Overseer to choose a different stay for the night.

O'Connor looks at the footage of the Spicy Crust Pizza front that the O5 has decided to stay at instead. The fact that this operation needs to remain untraceable restricts his team to the brief glimpse at the Front through satellite footage. One moment is all he needs. The Overseer's entourage is tired from the long way from Yellowstone. The scouts that have by now caught up to them are still confused from the fifth eye. This provides enough of a crack in the O5's impenetrable facade for the conspiracy theorist to make his move. All the footage shows is a flash, but O'Connor knows the target has been eliminated. Immediately, he begins barking out orders.

The Overseer's death will cause ripples, but there is only a brief window for any steps to make use of it. The satellite moves on, but what follows is obvious. An investigation will be launched into the death. It will conclude that the insufficient cover-ups in the region have caused a leak about the Front's true purpose. The O5 Council will cease their insular tendencies after the first death among them in the current century. Three had amassed libraries worth of institutional knowledge, all of which is gone now. Without him, the chance of the Foundation starting research into causality is once again near zero. Just like they need it to be.

There is still work to do. There will soon be a new opening to insert a mole in the order of succession. They need data on the fallout of Area-14's containment breach. O'Connor has to correspond with the other Delta Commanders.

The death of O5-3 marks just another stepping stone.