SCP-5900: PITCHBLACK

Author: aismallard

Thanks to:

wctaiwan

fluffywaffles

Rounderhouse

Yossipossi

Modulum

Captain Kirby

Lambda Fairy

Additional appreciation to Rounderhouse for help during the drafting process, and allowing me to write for his canon.

Item#: 5900

Containment Class: pending

Secondary Class: none

Disruption Class: {$disruption-class}

Risk Class: {$risk-class}

Service availability during SCP-5900.

Special Containment Procedures: RAISA's Surveillance Division is determining the cause of SCP-5900 (ticket #E4K07U2) and creating technical countermeasures to reduce the severity of a similar event in the future (ticket #30VNI4F). The SCP-5900 Containment Director is assigning technicians to replace all damaged components and investigate suspect auxiliaries.

The Department of Internal Security has opened an investigation. [DATA REDACTED 5/INTSEC]

Description: SCP-5900 was an outage of PANOPTICON, lasting for five days from 2022/05/19 12:15 to 2022/05/24 21:20 UTC. During this time, surveillance satellites, Site-07 communications, intelligence processing, and IntSCPFN file sync were inoperable. The full extent and nature of the anomaly are presently unknown.

Addendum 5900.1

PANOPTICON PROJECT BRIEF

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Project #: RAISA-31409

Authorized By: Overseer Council

PANOPTICON refers to a number of interconnected technological and paratechnological constructs, which collectively enable global oversight.

The Atreus Satellite Array is a Foundation-launched fleet of modular satellites, with orbits configured to ensure full coverage of the Earth at all times. Each satellite has a surveillance installation (see 4/PANOPTICON/HDW04 for schematics), including X-ray antennas and Kant receivers. They also have several hardpoints for weapons and reality anchor attachments, set at the direction of the Department of Applied Force.

Relay installed at the base of a streetlamp

Additionally, the Department of Applied Influence's Field Monitoring Division is responsible for the installation and maintenance of over ██ million input devices, including SEP-shielded cameras, microphones, links into existing civilian and government surveillance systems, thaumaturgic particle detectors, and Kant counters.

All gathered surveillance information is processed at Site-07, located in the Norton Bay off the coast of Alaska. Due to its secure location and increasing role in Foundation archival operations, it was established as the headquarters of RAISA in 1970. Fifteen years later, the DEEPWELL backup system entered service there as well.

Protected Site-07

Records are loaded into an anomalous RDBMS (relational database management system) and indexed accordingly. SKYEYE.aic continuously queries this database to look for correlations or abnormalities which may indicate potential extranormal events, objects, or activity by groups of interest.

On 19██/12/12 a thaumaturgic ritual was performed at the direction of the Overseer Council, resulting in metaphysical anchoring constructs being embedded within areas of the infosphere associated with the Foundation, normalcy, and knowledge.

As information is duplicated throughout all PANOPTICON nodes with at least three parallel processing sites each, an extended outage is extremely improbable. Combined with the anchoring constructs, the calculated probability of an outage is less than 1 in 1024.

All components of the metaphysical anchoring system were found to be active during SCP-5900.

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Addendum 5900.2

SERVICE LOGS

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The following is a selection of log events submitted to the Site-07 governance mainframe at the incidence of SCP-5900.

Timestamp
Level
Service
Message

16:58:52
INFO
I/O-BLUE
Initiating automatic containment of thaumaturgic javascript.

16:58:55
INFO
SCUTTLE
Successfully pinged Site-28.

16:58:57
WARN
KEENEYE.aic
Text transcription appeared to change. Flagging as potential infohazard.

16:59:00
INFO
LINGUIST.aic
Updating anomalous terms dictionary. (v3.1.18 -> v3.1.19)

16:59:00
INFO
IntSCPFN
Uploading 12 new files from SCP-CN.

16:59:02
WARN
Site-07 Oceanic Sensors
Camera 2B damaged or disconnected.

16:59:02
INFO
SKYEYE.aic
Established tracking of PoI-4339.

16:59:05
INFO
COMMAND.aic
Scaling down site-status-mon workers due to inactivity.

16:59:06
WARN
SCUTTLE
Unable to ping Site-952. Retrying in 600 seconds.

16:59:07
INFO
LINGUIST.aic
12 new files successfully translated from Chinese.

16:59:11
WARN
SCUTTLE
Unable to ping Site-17. Retrying in 600 seconds.

16:59:13
WARN
Site-07 Networking
High latency over thaumic shortwave radio.

16:59:15
WARN
SKYEYE.aic
Lost surveillance of 11590 entities.

16:59:16
WARN
IntSCPFN
Connection pool failure (4 out of 32).

16:59:23
ERROR
Site-07 Networking
No link to thaumic shortwave relays.

16:59:26
WARN
IntSCPFN
Connection pool failure (32 out of 32).

16:59:26
ERROR
I/O-MANDELA
Cannot connect to server!

16:59:26
ERROR
I/O-SILVER
Cannot connect to server!

16:59:26
ERROR
I/O-PHOENIX
Cannot connect to server!

16:59:26
(31 similar entries omitted)

16:59:28
ALERT
Site-07 System Monitor
Service DOWN: intscpfn-server

16:59:32
INFO
COMMAND.aic
Rebooting unhealthy intscpfn-server pods.

16:59:35
WARN
SKYEYE.aic
Unable to query surveillance data: Connection refused.

16:59:41
ALERT
Site-07 Communications
Lost contact with Area-25B, Site-104, Site-11, (… 49 total facilities).

16:59:58
INFO
Atreus Satellite Service
Sending 291 new observation updates to Site-07.

16:59:58
ERROR
Atreus Satellite Service
[1] 94182 segmentation fault (core dumped) /usr/bin/satlink

17:00:03
WARN
Webcrawler Service
All bots are reporting as unhealthy. Terminating and restarting.

17:00:07
INFO
COMMAND.aic
Restarting unhealthy atreus-sync and atreus-spy pods.

17:00:12
ERROR
Webcrawler Service
Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packag[MESSAGE TOO LONG]

17:02:18
ALERT
Site-07 System Monitor
Service DOWN: atreus-sat

17:02:10
INFO
COMMAND.aic
All Atreus management daemons are failing to initialize. Attempting rollback to commit 657cf3e…

17:02:19
ERROR
LINGUIST.aic
[DATA LOST]

17:02:19
INFO
COMMAND.aic
Detected memory corruption in LINGUIST container d8410d36. Terminating instance.

17:02:22
ERROR
Site-07 Backups
Failover disk SSD-L3-B09813-48 found to be corrupt.

17:02:45
ALERT
Site-07 Communications
Lost contact with Area-79, Site-81, Site-19, (… 25 total facilities).

17:03:05
ALERT
COMMAND.aic
Declaring extensive outage. Contacting RAISA command.

17:03:05
DEBUG
COMMAND.aic
todo(jtaylor): this should never happen, refactor later

17:03:09
WARN
COMMAND.aic
Filing incident report, recommending as potential anomaly.

17:03:12
ALERT
Site-07 Security
Declaring Priority-A lockdown due to technical outage.

17:04:00
INFO
Site-07 Weather Service
Condition: clear skies. No forecasted storms for 6 hours.

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Addendum 5900.3

INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

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The following are selections from engineering ROMP1 channels at Site-07 during SCP-5900.

Excerpt: Day 1, 4:17 AM (local time)

<jtaylor> morning graveyard shift people

<jtaylor> hey terry

<tscott> hey, what's up

<jtaylor> got a bit of a headache, you?

rhill uploaded file: 1560131817.jpg ⬇

<tscott> pffft

<lgonzales> made me almost spurt coffee out of my nose lol

<rhill> mission accomplished :D

<jjohnson> .rebuild supply-service

<raisa-bot> Starting build #839057 for supply-service

<jjohnson> lgonzales: you adjusted the config already, right?

<lgonzales> yeah i did

<jjohnson> sweet

<raisa-bot> Monitor: webcrawler-service is DOWN

<raisa-bot> Monitor: intscpfn-server is DOWN

<raisa-bot> Monitor: intscpfn-node is DOWN

<raisa-bot> Monitor: communications is DOWN

<raisa-bot> Monitor: slot-service is DOWN

<raisa-bot> Monitor: bridge-aic is DEGRADED

<raisa-bot> Monitor: relay-service is DOWN

<raisa-bot> Monitor: backup-service is DEGRADED

<raisa-bot> Monitor: poi-service is DOWN

<jjohnson> what the fuck

<raisa-bot> Monitor: message-service is DEGRADED

<raisa-bot> Monitor: intel-storage-service is DOWN

<raisa-bot> Monitor: skyeye-aic is DEGRADED

<rhill> can someone stop it from spamming

<raisa-bot> Monitor: linguist-aic is DOWN

jtaylor kicked raisa-bot.

<lgonzales> I'll look and see what's wrong with the bot

<jjohnson> uh why is the site locking down? is there a drill?

<tscott> wtf

<tscott> the python webcrawlers are actually broken

<jjohnson> no way

Lost external network access. Switching ROMP to site-only.

<rhill> yeah I can't connect to the panopticon spy nodes. something's up

raisa-bot has joined.

<raisa-bot> COMMAND.aic broadcast: Extensive outage in effect. RAISA command has been notified.

<lgonzales> fuck.

Excerpt: Day 1, 6:41 AM

<jtaylor> all right, so here's how management has decided to set this up

<jtaylor> team A will look through the broken services

<jtaylor> team B goes through all our deploys

<jtaylor> team C looks at the metabed anchor system

<jtaylor> classifications are still in force, so please report any unintentional contact with level-4/5 intel

<jjohnson> sounds good, I'll take filesync

<tscott> jtaylor: isn't there a provisional scp for this incident?

<jtaylor> uh yes, there should be. I don't see it though

<jjohnson> the local database was in the middle of a sync and got corrupted

<jjohnson> command.aic wasn't able to save the provisional skip anywhere

<jtaylor> can we just roll it back?

<jjohnson> yeah, give me a moment

jjohnson uploaded file: scp-report-1560142360.ftml ⬇

<tscott> wow, why was it given "scp-5900"?

<lgonzales> i guess we've never had a slot-assign outage before lol

<rhill> okay, so we can see all the satellites above us, but just can't connect for some reason

<jjohnson> we can connect directly, right?

<rhill> yes. big pain in the arse though

<rhill> actually jim has a script to help with that. lemme see

<jtaylor> the technicians just finished inspecting the shortwave radio antennas. doesn't look like there's any damage

<tscott> that's good at least

<jtaylor> so we're pretty sure it's a software or configuration problem

<rhill> hey all, I was able to connect to satellite atreus-48. status normal, no connections to other sites

<rhill> no extraterrestrial abnormalities

<jtaylor> upload the report here?

<rhill> sure, give me a sec

rhill uploaded file: atreus-48-events.log ⬇

rhill uploaded file: atreus-48-space.ftml ⬇

<rhill> the ground data is loading really slow, but nothing weird so far

<tscott> why do we care about surface readings? don't we just want connection logs?

<lgonzales> we don't know if this is a k-class

<tscott> oh

Excerpt: Day 2, 4:38 PM

<lgonzales> man this thaumaturgy link code is really hard to understand

<rhill> I know it's old, but it's not *that* bad, is it?

<lgonzales> oh it's fine, I just forgot how hard it is to wrap your head around this stuff lol

<jjohnson> you went to ICSUT, right? did you take that paratemporal networking class?

<lgonzales> jjohnson indeed. consuming packets before you've sent them was the hardest part for me

<jtaylor> how are the satellite systems looking? the links have been operable for hours but the system still can't do the handshake

<rhill> I'm really not sure. I've been running local experiments and they work fine, but once we plug into the real system it fails

<rhill> maybe something wrong with our thaumic keys?

<jtaylor> hmm. will be hard to make new ones though, given the lack of communications here

<lgonzales> this is interesting

<lgonzales> so metabed has several conceptual hooks for protecting our systems, right

<lgonzales> all of them are "latched on" so to speak, but a few aren't "transferring"?

<lgonzales> the model is weird, if you know about alpha-lambda loops you know what I'm talking about

<jjohnson> what how? there aren't many declassified docs but

<jjohnson> that is only possible if the originator decides to decouple iirc

<jjohnson> which I *highly* doubt the O5s would do

<lgonzales> I know, it's bizarre

<rhill> maybe a third party tried to take it from us?

<lgonzales> nah, it would require way too much energy

<lgonzales> though I think looking at swapping out conceptual targets is a possibility. jtaylor can you get me access to the 5/metabed ritual info?

<jtaylor> I'll see what I can do

Excerpt: Day 5, 1:08 PM

<jtaylor> The administrative liaison is saying you can formulate a new thaumic unit, but it can't be overlapping with the originals

<lgonzales> wtf? my plan doesn't, it attaches to uniq-418ef and uniq-0a341

<lgonzales> tell them to just give me the full fucking plans and they can amnesticize me after

<jtaylor> I've already told you that isn't going to happen

<lgonzales> this is such bullshit

<jjohnson> fundamental rituals are always safeguarded the most

<lgonzales> jjohnson I didn't ask you

<lgonzales> sorry, that was uncalled for

<rhill> I think we can at least restore the satellite connections with conceptual positioning

<rhill> those plans would be helpful there at least

<lgonzales> to be honest, I don't even believe the documentation. it claims they attach to "the concept of knowledge"

<lgonzales> but I doubt it. that's too fundamental, they probably just got some "sending data" side-stream. way easier to do

<lgonzales> and it would explain why it being interrupted fucked all our comms

<rhill> is it interrupted?

<lgonzales> what else could it be? it's not broken or the system would've repaired and it's not detached since I just checked

<jtaylor> lgonzales: some good news. maria jones is stepping in and giving us access to the ritual plans

<jtaylor> don't burn me here, we better get something substantial from this

<lgonzales> oh thank god

jtaylor uploaded file: [DATA REDACTED 5/PANOPTICON] ⬇

<jjohnson> holy shit, look at that

<lgonzales> god damn they weren't lying

<lgonzales> we can fix this now. rhill you have that great ritual autoexecutor tool, right?

<rhill> it's standard now, renamed to "thaumexec"

<lgonzales> excellent

<lgonzales> so let's reconfigure on the main anchor points, with the proposed backups

<lgonzales> just started it

<tscott> uh guys, the monitor is saying the network has abnormally high input?

<raisa-bot> Monitor: communications is UP

<tscott> wait

<tscott> the system is working again?

<raisa-bot> Monitor: bridge-aic is UP

<raisa-bot> Monitor: linguist-aic is RECOVERING

<raisa-bot> Monitor: intscpfn-server is UP

<raisa-bot> Monitor: intscpfn-node is UP

<lgonzales> holy shit it worked!

<raisa-bot> Monitor: slot-service is UP

<raisa-bot> Monitor: relay-service is UP

<jjohnson> :D

<raisa-bot> Monitor: webcrawler-service is UP

<raisa-bot> Monitor: backup-service is UP

<rhill> we're getting atreus update events. looks like things are starting to flow again

<jtaylor> good work everybody

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Addendum 5900.4

RECOVERY UPDATE

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Critical services began recovering at 2022/05/24 21:09 UTC, after which the PANOPTICON metaphysical anchoring system automatically recalibrated itself. An inspection discovered an unusual HTML payload in one of the anchor's logs. A screenshot has been attached below:

The origin and meaning of this notice is unclear. Investigation is ongoing.

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Footnotes

1. RAISA Online Messaging Platform, a extension of RFC 1459 (Internet Relay Chat Protocol) designed to exhibit resistance against infohazards and manage classified information in a secure manner.

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