Eight Hours in the ECRG - SCP Foundation

0800:

Wake up. Roll out of bed and check yourself in the mirror. You gave up on the morning stretches a month ago. The commute to work is an hour because they still haven’t found you nearby housing, but sleep is a commodity to be clawed and scratched for. Staring back at you is an unassuming androgynous figure with bleary brown eyes and an unobtrusive cut of black hair. Just the way you like yourself – ready to face the day as a pair of unhealthily pale hands behind a screen. Today will be three months exactly since what you thought was your first day with a robotics defense contractor turned out to be the last day of the rest of your life. Still, the Foundation’s Experimental Containment Research Group offers a lot more perks than usually come with selling your soul.

0900:

You’re still ten minutes out from the parking lot. Some asshole got pulled over on the highway, and as usual, cops made it everyone else’s problem. Luckily you’ve found the ECRG Director doesn’t actually take headcount at the weekly Monday all-hands. A lax morning attendance policy is one of the unlisted bonuses that comes with being a code monkey in the bowels of a secret paragovernmental organization’s skunkworks division.

Your manager notices when you come in late, though. And you have to admit – privately — you get more work done at work anyways. Honestly the cubicles aren’t that bad. The windows are actually anomalous – a Safe-class displaying the view from the top of the skyscraper concealing your location. Engineered by the ECRG. Where you work now. You’d never know you worked underground if you didn’t need to swipe a special keycard to take a special elevator twenty stories into bedrock.

What a view. You can see the whole city from here. Makes the entire office feel airier.

The morning all-hands takes place in the cafeteria. Half of your focus is on the coffee machine in the corner. The other half is paying attention to Hanna, the HR lady who walked you through your first day, as she talks about the impending rollover of security memetics throughout the facility in two weeks, plus walk-in clinics that will be conducted 24/7 in the medical wing until then to inoculate everyone against them.

“Reminder, people!” Hanna says. “These are non-lethal security memes, yes – but they will still hit you like a truck carrying the worst flu and hangover you’ve ever had. Not to mention how embarrassing it’ll look slumping to a heap in the elevator. Get your security shots!”

That gets your full attention just in time to hear her say cheerily, “You can also get your flu shot at the same time. Two birds with one stone!”

Man. The coffee pods need to be emptied. Telling me that this organization works beyond the bleeding edge of science – that it studies and applies disciplines that until three months ago were purely fantastical pulp – but still uses god-damn Keurig pods? Even your parents’ hand-me-down coffee machine grinds actual beans. The ECRG can’t grow infinite coffee beans?

At least they have good coffee creamer and sodas in the fridge. Plus after four-thirty you can drink beer on tap. For now you satisfy yourself on beef jerky from the snack shelf and listen to the ECRG Director Lavonte Wagner discuss the state of the department as the year comes to an end. Man. How long have you been on these ADHD meds? Everything he’s saying is still going in one ear and out the other. That’s got to be some kind of anomaly.

1000:

Now you’re safely ensconced in your cubicle, coffee and slices of pizza retrieved from the cafeteria. Another unlisted bonus is the perpetual pizza boxes in the cafeteria. They’re probably non-anomalous. They're definitely delicious, leftover or not. Pepperoni, meat supreme, vegetarian, cheese, buffalo chicken – and infinite red pepper flakes.

First meeting of the week starts in forty minutes. What to do until then? You have a bunch of training modules to work through. Everyone does, no matter how long they’ve been working here. Even Mort, the seventy year-old senior programmer in the cubicle row behind you who reports to nobody but knows everything, has to endure the same gauntlet of of training refreshers for everything from badge swiping to sexual harassment every six months.

Then again, Mort has actually taken amnestics before. Claims that he once worked on a project so top secret that they plucked an entire year out of his skull. Way he put it at lunch once, “By now I’m only half paying attention to mister army guy, right? I’m looking at the clock and ready to shake hands and go to lunch and think about packing when the guy leans over the desk and just sprays me! With a damn aerosol can of all things. The crazy thing is I inhale it – and then the next moment he sprays me again! And I inhale that, and now I’m really pissed off, right? So I start giving the guy a piece of my mind because sure I might be a damn code monkey but I still have the right to not be gassed out of the blue. And then something hits me. Calendar is a year in advance.”

1100:

First meeting of the day: discussing health plan benefits and security clearance divisions between full-time Level 2 employees like yourself and Level 2 contractors like your coworkers and frankly your closest work friends: a pair of Indian grad students on two year contracts. Rama, the more senior of the two, is nearing fifteen months. Abhinav is coming on ten.

It’s actually kind of funny how many contractors are employed at the ECRG. Sounds insane at first, right? You’d think the ECRG places a premium on long term employees, but not even an ostensibly apolitical organization like the Foundation is immune from globalization and cheap overseas labor.

In the modern Foundation and ECRG organizational chart, there are three things working in favor of contractors.

Number one, the geas. Everyone in the ECRG has to learn about Cuchulainn syndrome before signing the employment contract. In fact, the first geas you sign is an acknowledgment that the geas might kill you. Practically speaking, the same geas acknowledges it hasn’t been an issue since the turn of the millennium. The Foundation, per the contract, has employed more than two hundred people across thirty different countries over the past fifty years to improve and refine their contractual language, matrix management generator rituals, and general parascientific understanding of how to meddle with the human brain such that your brain now includes a Cuckspace.

The pronunciation makes you laugh. It’s spelled Cuchspace – as in, Cuchulainn – and is a practical implementation of Cuchulainn syndrome that containerizes your working memory and knowledge of the anomalous into on- and off-hours, enabled by either the memetic agents in the elevator as you enter or the VPN on your work laptop. But the original name was coined twenty years ago and whoever did it clearly wasn’t getting laid anyways.

There's only a couple issues with the Cuchspace — at least, that you know of. It quite literally only works inside the ECRG building (or after staring at the VPN memetic agent for three minutes straight). It also requires a team of at least a dozen engineers, neuroscientists, and rumor has it, surgeons, on call 24/7 to maintain and keep it running. Still, it works so well that for the past thirty years the ECRG have been able to hire strangers for anywhere from three to thirty-six months at a time then send them off, while ensuring that for the rest of their natural life any understanding of “the anomalous” pertains solely to the X-Files and concerning medical diagnoses. Plus the entire wings of HR, Accounting, and the on-site psych team dedicated to fabricating exit stories.

1200:

Rama talks about reason two at lunch. Today it’s Thai food made in house, since only code monkeys can subsist on infinite pizza. The ECRG, much to your shock, also consists of actual professionals with years of experience, both work and personal lives, fitness routines, fucking kids – number two, Rama says, is that most contractors end up becoming full-time. Sure, there’s more churn than most places but that’s what the geas is for. And of the ones who become full-time, the median length of employment in the ECRG is fifteen years. A quarter of us – it’s hard to start thinking of us instead of them – have been here for more than thirty. The perks are great, the work is undeniably For The Greater Good, and the experience accumulated in the various fields, subfields, and parafields we encounter lends itself to job security.

Number three, says Abhinav, is how many of them are studying on the Foundation’s dime. Housing too. They’re in it for the long haul. He cuts in ahead of your concerns. “Sounds more sinister than it is,” he waves the issue off. “My father’s studies and housing were subsidized by Indian Railways in the eighties. He wishes he had the apartment the Foundation put me in.”

“What do you tell your parents you do?” you ask. The two primary topics of lunchtime conversation involve pets and sports. You have learned more about football, baseball, and the rivalry between the Seattle Seahawks and San Francisco 49ers than the anomalous world. Time to change that.

They shrug in unison.

“The truth,” says Abhinav. “Relax. The geas is flexible. And it’s good about steering you to declassified answers.”

“I was IT for a porn site before I joined the Foundation,” Rama says. “It was a way harder task waving my way through that. Now I just say I’m a contractor for some robotics startup of the week. Then they start asking about my love life or my younger brother. He never answers his phone.”

Abhinav laughs. “My father keeps telling me he can arrange a marriage for me with an, I quote, “beautiful Hindu princess”. I just laugh and say no thank you, appa!”

He checks his watch and excuses himself. You check your phone. It’s five to one. You were supposed to have finished lunch almost half an hour ago.

1300:

It’s easy to bluff your way through the morning. Half the time is occupied by meetings that fly overhead. The other half entails ECRG’s onsite intranet, both completely firewalled off from the outside world and updated daily to include the entire contents of the actual Internet – or at least as much as its web scrapers can collect, index, and sanitize. Including all the fanfiction and pirated manga sites. But you still gotta make progress. And that means…

Time to get to work. Oh no.

You have a few different tickets to choose from. Thank… hmm. Now that you know Tactical Theology is a real thing, you decide to err on the side of caution with goodness. Most of these are fairly low-key for stuff that could end the world. That’s because inasmuch as you are aware of the object classes – Safe, Euclid, and Keter – you don’t really get to work on those. Not yet. For now you’re simply tasked with maintaining some of that paracode that keeps the world wide web in the palm of the Foundation’s hand.

Let’s start small. Ticket INTR-39762: an update to Foundation web crawler Gamma-84 “ANTIBEN. Specifically, you’ve been asked to fix a bug identified by quality assurance engineer Franklin B. that prevents the bot from properly DDOSing sites with certain African country-code top level domains. Crazy to see but somebody hard-coded a list of all the domains that the bot should attack instead of, say, dynamically downloading a list of possible domains and attacking all of them. It’s a medium priority ticket but doesn’t explain why. The writeup of where to start working on the ticket doesn’t offer more than a link to a file and line.

Actually, now that you’ve read the ticket description and defined it for yourself well enough to be professionally scornful of it, you think it’s actually not that difficult to fix. You learned from a ticket last week how to pull the Foundation’s database of top level country codes. All you have to do is follow those steps from the linked location — a function looking for a list — and then have the web crawler attack that same list!

Excellent. Now. Why. Isn’t. The. Fix. Working.

1530:

You’ve been staring between these unit tests and your phone for.. let’s say two hours. Staring at social media and your groupchats for the better part of those hours. Dreading this weekly check-in with your manager and explaining to them —

ROMP (RAISA Online Messaging Platform, aka the Foundation's internal team communication platform, aka one of the more obnoxious security requirements of the job) beeps and fills your heart with dread. Three minutes to your final judgment. You can’t help but worry that you’re on thin ice with your boss ever since that check-in a couple weeks ago where they warned you about being late to meetings on top of trying not to spend more than a day spinning your wheels stuck on a project.

It’s been two.

One minute left. Meeting time. TacTheo have mercy on your soul.

1600:

Your manager, Aimee “Ducky” Smalls, appears on your laptop screen. They start by asking how your week has been going. You immediately admit to having trouble with your current ticket and silently pray to them for mercy. They smile and ask you to pull it up.

1637:

Huh. That was easier than you expected. Ducky shows you how to set up your coding environment to search for function references, how to trace the results of the test output and update the web crawler’s testing adversaries, and even lets you in on a secret about ANTIBEN’s object class. Not that you’d tell anyone. Your Cuchspace has taught you how to be more discrete.

Ducky updates INTR-39762’s ticket status to Complete, encourages you to be unafraid about asking them for help, and signs off by telling you to keep up the good work.

Time to see what beer is on tap. Happy Monday.