Ennui - SCP Foundation

On ██/██/████, SCP-1733's test log was found to have accumulated several █████ more viewings. Upon discovery, the video was going through what is estimated to be the █████ playback. Most of the video showed the stadium filled with multiple mutilated corpses of many figures present in previous playbacks. In the last five minutes of the playback, a single blood-drenched audience member wrestles the camera down and places it on the floor in front of him. The following is a transcription of his monologue:

I couldn't bring myself to do it, man. I just couldn't. We all agreed a while ago that we'd just kill ourselves in whatever way we could, but I just can't do it. We're in a living hell, and I'm still too much of a coward to die. I just… I can't…

The man cries for the following twenty seconds.

This is all I can think of at this point. Trying to use the camera to get to someone out there. They've tried it before, they've tried it so many times, and it's never worked but… I just gotta try something. There's dead bodies everywhere, and this is all I can think of. It's a TV camera. Someone's gotta be out there. Producers or audience or… just someone who can help. I've gotta try.

If… no… you out there. You've gotta be out there. We're trapped. I don't know how, and I most certainly don't know why, but we're trapped. The game's been going on repeat for… God, I lost track back in the ████ hundreds… It's been awful. It was just this weird feeling at first, but now I know that the exact same few hours have been happening again and again and again and again. And there's no way out.

For most of us, at least. I think there were a few lucky people who left in the middle of the first game to do… something. I don't know. Once the crazy religious guys figured out that they could leave when nobody else could, they started torturing 'em. Never got a word out before they resorted to just bashing their heads against the walls at the start of every repeat.

But other than them, we don't have any way of getting out of this building. I'm not even sure an outside exists anymore. We're just in limbo, going around and around and…

Several seconds of heavy breathing, followed by nervous laughter.

The shit we've seen. Only took a few dozen go throughs before they started forming cults. Didn't take much longer before they were sacrificing players and children in a desperate attempt to get out. And it just got worse and worse from there. There was an outright war this one time; at least, they tried to have a war. Gave it up when they realized it was pointless if nobody stays dead. Few guys tried some psychological stuff on the heads of the people who could get out. They stayed catatonic for the rest of the time. We've had fires, electrocutions, shootouts - you'd be surprised how many crazy fuckers brought guns - holy crusades, cannibalism… even that day when the religious nuts tried drowning the babies in the backed up toilet.

But it just keeps happening. We can change the way things happen all they want, but once that timer runs out, a few minutes later, everything goes dark and we're sitting right back where we started. The time between the go-throughs varies. Sometimes we have to wait a few minutes, sometimes a few hours, sometimes it's almost as fast as you can blink. It's all relative, of course. Feels like no time has passed at all once the go-through starts, but you can kinda remember an empty black period, like you don't even exist but you're aware of it. It's really freaky.

This one time, this one glorious time, we were gone for what felt like years. I was ready to just cheer that we'd finally gotten out. Then I realized that if I could cheer, that meant the game had started again. But just imagine: we could have just been out forever, and all the things that happened after they started trying to kill the kids would have never happened.

But… we just kept going and going. The violence, the sex, the hatred, the fear, it was all there, and it just kept going. I died a fair deal of times during it. They even pulled my lungs out in an attempt to build a golem of some kind. But it's all in vain. I realized pretty early on there's no way out.

And then everyone else did too. Every go-through, we'd have a few more people joining in on the suicide pact. They'd jump off the balcony, or get the guns and shoot themselves, or just bash their heads against the wall til they dropped. You'd have people being dragged along into it, people resisting, a few crude bombs designed to bring the ceiling down on us but… you know the drill by now. We die, it resets.

So that's where we are now. Pretty much everyone but the smallest children have agreed to kill themselves as soon as everything resets. They drag the younger ones along. The ennui's finally gotten to us. We've all done the absolute worst things a person can do, even me. I've made myself sound like some kind of white knight while doing this, but really, I've done some horrible things too. I fucking brutalized a kid in one of the hallways out of frustration and just left him there. We hit rock bottom and kept going til we fell out into the void.

That's that. Everyone else here has lost all hope, and I'm pretty much on the brink. It's only because I've got you out there listening that's keeping me here, and believe me, you're not that much help. I've got a kid's upper torso two feet away from me and the blood just keeps getting closer. There's a ringing in my ears and a voice in the back of my head that just keeps thinking of all the ways I have to kill myself. But so long as I've got someone out there, I…

Oh, fuck, who am I kidding? There is no one out there. There hasn't been from the start.

Thirty seconds of silence.

I was never too much of a religious man. But I did go to church. Every Sunday. They said killing yourself is the fastest way to go to hell. Low as you can go. This place seems to be a whole lot lower than that. So if I just blow my brains out, maybe I've got a chance of climbing out of this place.

Or maybe I'm just gonna wake right up here again.

The man walks off camera. The sound of a gun being loaded is heard, followed shortly by the click of the safety being turned off. End of tape.