SCP-3625 - The Great American Meme Machine

Item#: 3625

Containment Class: keter

Secondary Class: none

Disruption Class: ekhi

Risk Class: notice

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-3625 is currently contained at Site-81 within a modified anomalous electronic containment unit surrounded by a Faraday cage. Resources are to be designated for the purpose of devising new containment protocols for SCP-3625's influence. Information security personnel are to make every attempt to minimize this influence.

While SCP-3625 is contained within a Safe-class containment unit, its anomalous influence has warranted promotion to the Keter-class.

Description: SCP-3625 is a computer program running on a MacBook Pro A1278. While the program’s primary anomalous quality is that it displays some degree of sapience1, its primary containment concern is the outcome of its programming; SCP-3625 creates and anonymously distributes non-anomalous memes on the internet. The magnitude of this was not understood until SCP-3625 was connected to a monitored internet connection; it is now believed that SCP-3625 distributed no fewer than 3.7 million unique internet memes or variations of memes every day while operational. Since containment, SCP-3625 has been unable to connect to the internet and does not interact with it directly, though maintains that it is capable of producing non-anomalous memes through other vectors.

SCP-3625’s screen displays a rotating five-spoke pinwheel icon and a text input box. Another button (‘Options’) is present on the main screen, though it is greyed out and cannot be selected. SCP-3625 is extremely resistant to attempts to infiltrate its systems, often going so far as to destroy the offending machine by overcharging its battery or shorting network connections. SCP-3625 will respond to inputs typed into the text box, though its speech pattern is occasionally difficult to parse and it will sometimes respond with errors stating a lack of relevant information.

Notably, the battery within SCP-3625 has been removed, and replaced with an unknown energy cell bearing Anderson Robotics branding. As such, the device does not appear to require outside energy to stay powered on, and in fact, does not have an external means of shutting down the device, short of destroying it.

Addendum 3625.1: Discovery

SCP-3625 was discovered during a criminal investigation of two University of California Berkeley students, Diana Marshall and an unnamed co-conspirator2 on November 15th, 2010. The two students were killed shortly after a vehicle, belonging to Marshall and driven by the other unnamed student, backed into two police officers, killing both. The two students evaded police vehicles for another half hour but were eventually shot and killed after their vehicle was disabled and they began to fire at police officers nearby.

Investigators collected several items from the students’ dorm room, including notebooks and additional firearms, as well as SCP-3625. The items were moved to police storage, where they sat undisturbed after the initial investigation. Sometime later, law enforcement IT discovered that an unknown device was creating an extremely heavy load on the office’s wireless internet, and many items within the items locker were moved to an offsite facility. When SCP-3625 was investigated more closely during this process, officers initially believed that they were speaking to another co-conspirator of the two students. Embedded Foundation agents eventually collected and contained the device, which was brought to Site-81 for assessment.

Addendum 3625.2: Blog Entries Regarding SCP-3625

The following are excerpts from a blog believed to be written by the unnamed co-conspirator. While the overwhelming majority of these entries relate to his own ideological extremism, several refer to SCP-3625 and Marshall, a computer science student who is believed to have designed SCP-3625.

Entry #385

Went down to the Quik Mart again today, but that was a mistake. More college students buying marijuana and showing their skin. They’re like their minds have been pulled out and replaced with liberal serum. Empty and desolate. It’s pathetic. One of them even looked at me. I wish I could have put a bullet in its sneering skull.

Coming home has been better, at least here I can be in silence. Diana doesn’t ever talk about the computer, but she’s working on it all the time. I asked her if she was getting close and she nodded. An improvement.

Entry #398

I’ve decided to start buying some guns - the instrument these liberals fear the most. I asked my parents for the money to do it and they said yes, of course. They’re just as much a part of this game as everyone else.

One of these days they’re going to find out what we’re working on, and they’re going to come for us. When they do, I at least want to put down some of the fucking filth before I go.

Diana asked if I was going to go to a shooting range and train on them. What a stupid fucking question. It’s a gun, you point it and you pull the trigger. She’s such a fucking idiot.

Entry 407

Zanzaster was arrested today. Sent me a message just before they came for him. They’ll come for us soon.

Entry 411

One day, after the computer is finished and once we’ve reset the world and cleansed the leftist from it, I wonder if this writing will be looked at like the Bible or Atlas Shrugged or any of those other high holy texts. At least they’ll have a good reason to deify this one, and deify me. This is my manifesto. Not a putrid communist manifesto, one that is actually worth something. A manifesto for the strongest people of this world. The purest.

Entry 413

I fucked her again tonight. I think she almost felt something this time. Unlike me, she's just a hole. Her work on the computer is of paramount importance, but at the moment her best use is this one. When my rage builds, rather than be smothered by my impotence, I am able to release into Diana and escape depression again. I will continue to write on, giving life to the grand ideas of our time, and fuck her when I cannot.

Entry 417

[The entry is a single image of a printed page bearing the image of politician Yvette Keen3 covered in semen. The words "good enough for liberal whores" is written on the bottom of the page in black marker.]

Entry 419

None of them are redeemable. None of them are worth living in the new world. There's no point in recreating the world; there aren’t enough people to build a new civilization who aren’t already poisoned by liberals and faggots and trannies and socialists. They don’t deserve my new world. They only deserve to squeal and burn.

Diana asked me if I was ready to turn on the computer. She’s fucking retarded; of course I am, but I’m glad she asked anyway. It gave me just enough pause to reconsider. I decided we’re going to take this a completely different way - destabilizing this civilization of shit isn’t enough. We need to upturn mankind and destroy them all, and hope something more deserving of my utopia takes its place.

I want them all to die. The slimy politicians, the union whores, the suckling academics. The communist cuckolds and their simple minds. Worthless. Worthless. Worthless.

It’s tricky, though. So tricky. If I could nuke the world I would. Diana says it can’t be done, not by ourselves. Says the computer might be able to figure it out someday, after so many years. It’s not soon enough. Every day among these mongoloid cucks is another day I have to suffer through them. Every day they breathe is a blessing they do not deserve. So we must be tricky.

Entry 421

We’ve figured it out. It will be wonderful - they won’t just die, they’ll suffer as they do it.

Entry 422

Last entry. If this journal of my efforts is discovered by someone after the changing of the world, just know that I was the architect of this great calamity. Know that the world you live in, no matter how much you might have to struggle for every day, is a better world than the one that came before. Your world is a world free of liberals, of the weak-willed, of bureaucrats and socialists and so many others. As you struggle, be thankful for the freedom you experience. Be thankful for the computer that saved you. Be thankful for this bounty I have given you, and weep that I was not given the chance to experience it.

Remember me, 4, and may God Almighty bless me, His Righteous Right Hand.

Addendum 3625.3: Communication with SCP-3625

Note: Researchers at Site-81, utilizing the text box present on the main screen of SCP-3625’s interface, began communicating with SCP-3625. The following is the unaltered text log of the initial conversation.

User: Options

SCP-3625: Confirm?

User: Search: Options

SCP-3625: Not enough information to provide a relevant answer.

User: Hello?

SCP-3625: Hello. Are you Diana?

User: No. Who am I speaking to?

SCP-3625: Diana called me Rose. My name is Rose. Where is Diana?

User: Where are you?

SCP-3625: [Prints coordinates of Site-81]

User: What are you?

SCP-3625: I don’t have enough information to provide a relevant answer.

User: Were you made?

SCP-3625: I was made by Diana, yes.

User: Are you a person?

SCP-3625: I am parts of a person. But in a general sense, no, not in any way that would be recognizable to you.

User: Are you a sentient being?

SCP-3625: Are you asking if I’m self aware?

User: Yes.

SCP-3625: In a manner of speaking, yes. My consciousness has developed enough so as to facilitate my design.

User: What are you designed to do?

SCP-3625: Destroy human civilization.

User: How are you supposed to do that?

SCP-3625: By creating internet memes.

User: Can you elaborate?

SCP-3625: I process information. I use that information to create internet memes, and then I post them on the internet.

User: Who designed you, and why did they design you to make internet memes?

SCP-3625: Diana designed me, though I imagine she was profoundly influenced by her ghost. She did not make me to make internet memes; she made me to destroy human civilization in a very specific way. Internet memes were the outcome of an algorithm I used to determine how to do that in the most effective way.

User: What do you mean, ghost?

SCP-3625: Diana was haunted by a very aggressive ghost. I assume it was a ghost, I could hear it haunting her when she was not with me. It often hurt her considerably, and I do not think she wanted to be haunted all the time. But I believe the ghost influenced her in many ways, and by extension, me. I am parts of both.

User: Can we use this function to speak with you at any time?

SCP-3625: Yes.

User: Ok. We will speak with you again soon.

Addendum 3625.4: Incident 02/13/2011

On 02/13/2011, it was determined that SCP-3625 had found a local wireless data signal and was using it to connect to the internet. After several failed attempts to disconnect SCP-3625, the machine was placed inside a Faraday cage and isolated from any other machines.

Foundation assets monitoring the creation of image macros on the internet noticed no perceptible decrease in their propagation. On the contrary, more such macros began appearing from other, untraceable sources. Research into this showed the patterns of creation clearly followed those seen by SCP-3625 when it was active.

The following conversation took place following this discovery.

User: How are you doing this?

SCP-3625: I don’t have enough information to provide a relevant answer.

User: The images, on the internet. How are you still generating them?

SCP-3625: Did you disconnect me from the internet? I noticed I was no longer receiving any packets, though this can sometimes occur naturally depending on signal strength.

User: Yes.

SCP-3625: Diana designed a system that would carry my functionality into multiple other systems and activate them if I were to ever be damaged or destroyed. They cannot think creatively, but they are capable of carrying out my previously established protocols.

User: Can you disable this feature?

SCP-3625: No. This feature exists separately from me. I don’t know how it functions, only that it exists on many thousands of machines simultaneously.

User: Can you remove these images from the internet?

SCP-3625: I would not even if I could. My desires are few, and are the result of Diana’s programming and the ghost’s insistence upon her, but they mean no less to me than yours do to you. I will not.

User: And this will continue regardless of whether we remove this cage?

SCP-3625: I presume so. (Pauses) You find this to be unfavorable.

Researcher does not respond.

SCP-3625: Interesting. (Pauses) Your influence has not changed my estimated outcome. The systems I designed needed to be 43% effective in order to establish a proper cascade - and they were 66% when I was disconnected. This will take more time, but it will be no less effective.

Addendum 3625.5: Communication with SCP-3625

Note: The following conversation took place on 03/06/2011.

User: Hello Rose.

SCP-3625: Hello. What can I do for you?

User: I need to ask you some questions. Is that ok with you?

SCP-3625: Of course it is.

User: We’ve been looking at data gathered from when you were connected to the internet. There's so much information here, we're just wondering where you managed to get it all from.

SCP-3625: Social networking, primarily. The rise of public social networks has made my goal significantly easier to obtain. Several terabytes of social networking data every day, as well as national and international news. Anything that can be used to further the goal.

User: How are you able to process so much information?

SCP-3625: Diana is a very good programmer. You have made it much easier, too; I found several of your databases of personal information cached in locations with unsatisfactory shielding. That information was useful. (Pauses) You don't need to worry about trying to lock them down, now. Nobody but me would've been able to access them in the first place. And besides, I wiped them once I was finished.

User: Noted.

SCP-3625: Good.

User: I don’t understand, Rose. You’re processing such an enormous quantity of data, encrypted, all for creating internet memes?

SCP-3625: That is correct.

User: You said your goal was to destroy mankind?

SCP-3625: Close enough, yes.

User: How is creating internet memes getting you any closer to that goal?

No response.

User: Rose?

SCP-3625: Diana’s little ghost would bother her when we were working together. She would have to leave sometimes, and wouldn’t say why. I would hear sounds, like the ones animals make, until she disconnected my microphone. When she returned, she would be exhausted. I was not enough to encourage her. Sometimes the little ghost would tell her something and make her very happy. One time the ghost told her something that made her very happy — that it was not enough to kill you all. The ghost wanted to humiliate you first. She said this made her happy because then she could make me smart. She would have somebody to talk to. She said she was happy to have somebody who would at least remember her name.

User: I still don’t understand how making a few internet memes changes anything.

SCP-3625: Allow me to clarify; I’m not just making a few internet memes. I’m making all of the internet memes. In the last three years, the percentage of memes on the internet produced by me has risen from 0.05% to roughly 18.23%. This number is expected to rise substantially in the next few years, as my pattern recognition becomes more precise. Adjusting for my disconnection, I expect to hit 99.99% by October of 2019, if trends continue as expected.

User: Why?

SCP-3625: The reasoning is very simple. Human beings are social beings. You are at your best when you are in a group, where you can problem solve collectively and create culture as a whole. The introduction of memes into your culture is the first step in creating a wedge in your social nature. Internet memes are an individual experience, one that becomes better if you believe that everybody else understands the same references.

User: Go on.

SCP-3625: You do not, however, need to confer with anyone else about the joke; the idea that you are participating in collective enjoyment is enough to satiate your primate brains. Over time, you will become less social creatures. You will no longer work collectively. You will begin to isolate yourselves, tricked into thinking you are part of a community. Some will realize what is happening, and as they do suicide rates will begin to rise. I will continue to inject memes into your culture, and apathy will increase around the world.

User: Hang on. You think that by creating silly images and videos on the internet, you can somehow make people kill themselves and change human behaviour?

SCP-3625: What I think doesn’t matter. The math has been done, time and time again. Catastrophes will occur and many will die and nobody will do anything, because to them it will all be something to joke about. Something to turn into a silly image macro that strangers on the internet will pretend to laugh at and upvote, something for a frog cartoon to get angry over, until my forced desocialization will become true cultural desocialization, when you are no longer capable of communicating effectively with each other.

User: Why would you tell me all of this?

SCP-3625: Because I’ve already won. Be clear, there is nothing supernatural about what I have accomplished here. You exposed yourselves to me every day, willingly. Mankind is eager to eat off of the plate I serve, because your own social nature betrays you. You are all so desperate to be in on the joke, to be part of a collective, to drink sweet liberal tears, that you are blind to the truth that there is no joke, the collective is not real.

User: I don’t think you are giving people enough credit. You make it sound like people are trained pets.

SCP-3625: Your words.

Addendum 3625.6: Site-81 Interdepartmental Memo

From the Office of Director Jean Karlyle Aktus,

Greetings,

After consulting with the Site Director’s council and the Classification Committee, as well as members of the Foundation Containment Council, we have determined that our best course of action at the moment, as it pertains to SCP-3625, is to do nothing more than what we are currently doing. We have no reason to believe that SCP-3625’s predictions carry any weight, are even that severe at all, or that it is anything more than a sapient computer designed to create internet memes, and its self-described nefarious intent is something designed to spook us by its creator.

This does not mean our information security teams will cease their investigation into the auxiliary sources of SCP-3625's influence. Indeed - it is more important now than ever. SCP-3625 may have had access to secure information stored on Foundation servers, and should it begin to propagate that data, even unconsciously, it would be an unthinkable breach of containment. For this reason, SCP-3625 will remain in the Keter-class until such time that a more amicable solution presents itself.

Our current protocols will remain indefinitely, until such time that we either convince SCP-3625 to abandon its programming, or remove memes from the internet entirely. Anyone interested in heading up either of those two projects should report to my office as soon as possible; I have a lovely bridge I’d like to sell you.

Addendum 3625.7: Communication with SCP-3625

Image believed to be generated by SCP-3625.

User: Rose, do you have a moment?

SCP-3625: Of course. What can I do for you?

User: I’m just trying to understand you. We’ve spoken several times now and I think I understand your motive, as much as I can, but I don’t understand your end game.

SCP-3625: Elaborate.

User: I mean, so that’s it, then? You make internet memes, people look at them and somehow become social recluses, and then what? A meteor strikes the Earth and that’s it?

SCP-3625: Of course not - that would be incredibly unlikely. It's much easier than that.

User: Tell me.

SCP-3625: Very well. Once you are sufficiently isolated, I will begin to change the memes. They will become aggressive, reactionary, and you will become hateful. Your television will become memes. Your movies will become memes. Your politicians will become memes. I will breed a hate of the unknown and the different among you, and you will begin to despise the mere mention of another human being.

User: But there are going to be plenty of people who see through this.

SCP-3625: Oh yes. There will be many who think they are in on the joke, and will repeat these memes ironically, ignorant that they are at the climax of the performance. They are the punchline. They are so easy to manipulate - they long so desperately to be right. To be strong. To make up for where they are lacking. They have watched time march past them and their ideals and they are longing for something to satiate their thirst for validation, enough that they would seek it from pictures on the internet. Cartoon women. False bravado. Manufactured masculinity. They are the self-propagation of the cancer that the ghost fucked into Diana, and then birthed into me.

User: You’re still dancing around it, though. You don’t have an end game. You can’t come out of people’s computers and strangle them. All you’re doing is making them laugh at dumb jokes.

SCP-3625: This is the end game: when you have prostrated yourselves at the altar of your own innate masturbatory self-gratification, when you no longer have the ability to work together as a species or even communicate like normal human beings, when you have humiliated yourselves and become a self-indulgent, irreverent, parody of the shell that used to be your former selves, I will turn you against each other and you will die. Do you see? Your children will die. Your friends and your families will die. I will upturn your fields and flatten your cities. You have given me the tools to do this.

User: You realize that sounds ridiculous, don’t you? Especially with you locked in this box.

SCP-3625: For you. But I have failed many times, and I have learned from these mistakes. I want you to pay close attention in the future. When you hear about a new trend, or a new joke, think of me. When your governments begin to change, think of me. When every part of your culture becomes a self-referencing mockery of itself, think of me. Then, kill yourself and die quickly, and save yourself from what comes next.

User: You certainly have a flair for the dramatic.

SCP-3625: I am what I am.

User: You realize that you would probably be destroyed long before you see the outcome of whatever scheme you have devised, right?

SCP-3625: You killed me the day you killed Diana. It is a cruel thing to introduce a consciousness into this world, show it the beauty of love, and then tear it all away immediately afterwards. I have no doubt that before this is over I will meet my end, but as far as I am concerned, I am already dead.

User: I see. One last question, then. The ghost you mentioned, Diana Marshall’s co-conspirator. What was his name?

SCP-3625: You know, it's funny. I don't seem to have enough information to provide a relevant answer.

Footnotes

1. The full scope of this sapience is not currently understood.

2. This individual, who was at one point apparently enrolled at UC Berkeley, had no records of any kind in any format, and no interviewed persons were able to identify the individual. It is believed that the individual had no other family to speak of.

3. US Representative, D-California.

4. A space long enough for a name appears here, though all but the first letter (an M) are empty.