A ROUNDERHOUSE Joint

[PREVIOUS FOOTAGE CORRUPTED]

L PEARSON: — and you said — I'm sorry, when did you say you first saw it?

M JONES: 1982. Yes, while we were working on SUGARBIRD.

L PEARSON: SUGARBIRD?

M JONES: Mhm. That's right. Part of the larger umbrella of standardizing inter-department equipment codes. SUGARBIRD was an algorithm to do one of the most menial items of drudgework; take in equipment requests and convert them to one standardized system before feeding them back into the relevant databases. We weren't even a real department back then, just a tiny office of a few secretaries. Me, of course, but also… Williams, Hanna Tevoy. Sun-Hyung Barber, though we just called him Sonny. Oh, and Leslie.

L PEARSON: I wasn't there.

M JONES: Not you, honey. The other Leslie.

L PEARSON: Right. So you were working on SUGARBIRD in 1982 with the earliest RAISA personnel. And when did you first see SCP-8976?

M JONES: I didn't see it. I saw the absence of it.

L PEARSON: What do you mean?

M JONES: A chunk of equipment order records in the J-block from 1967 to 1969 by the Electrical Containment Division vanished. They were on my terminal, and I was watching when the information began to interweave, wrong equipment orders on the wrong records, impossible dates and times. And then, eventually, they blinked into nothing, a hole in the record. Like they'd never really existed at all.

L PEARSON: There's a million reasons digital data can be lost. You know that.

M JONES: Not on a secure Foundation terminal, not with the triple redundant backups we were using. Not the way I watched it happen. It was a few meager kilobytes of data, the kind of thing no one would have noticed missing. Except me, of course. It might have slipped under the radar, but it got too bold too fast. Mistake.

ITEM NUMBER

SCP-8976

OBJECT CLASS

SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES

TBA

DESCRIPTION

SCP-8976 is a digital informational entity that currently exists uncontained within the SCIPNET distributed network. The particular nature and design of SCP-8976 remain unclear pending further research. SCP-8976 is an infovorous entity that consumes information from within the SCIPNET network. At the moment, I have no reason to believe it is sentient.

DISCOVERY

SCP-8976 was first encountered by myself, Information Safety Administration (ISA) Head Secretary Maria Jones on July 2nd, 1979, in the course of the SUGARBIRD project. Further details to follow.

THE INFOVORE (1976) - An Unpublished Essay by Dr. Maria Wesley Jones

Elise Smiling (1895), Eugène Carrière. Image to be repeatedly passed through infovorous algorithm to visually exemplify information consumption.

I. Now and again, a development in the human technological record changes our species for ever. Like an ant on a balloon, we cannot see the breadth of how our world is expanding. We can only feel the world shake beneath our feet and crawl for the bleeding edges. A farmer in Sumer learns to till seeds of grain; James Watts exhibits his revolutionary steam engine. The balloon is breathed into.

Now, we teeter on the edge of a knowledge society. The theory of information is being drawn up in front of our very eyes, how languages form and the rules and limits of what we can make these thinking engines do. Our ability to store vast libraries of information into rooms and warehouses, these little Alexandrias, offers us the same promise grain once did. I am not the only one to have this prediction, which makes me all the more confident in it.

But new landscapes invite predation. Darwin’s theory of evolution speaks to survival. When a niche opens in an environment, something will evolve to fill it. We live in a lush of information. The machine I write this on contains records that predate me and that will outlast me. Were something to evolve or be designed to take advantage of that, it would never go hungry. I ponder the existence of an entity — a being, a program, or an algorithm — that exists off the consumption of new information, a manner of infovore.

[PREVIOUS FOOTAGE CORRUPTED]

L PEARSON: I'm sorry, I'm looking at this file — I thought you said you encountered it in 1982?

M JONES: I did. Why?

L PEARSON: The file says July 2nd, 1979.

M JONES: Oh. It must have been a typing error. I encountered it in spring of 1982.

L PEARSON: Sure. The file is pretty bare, though.

M JONES: Things were looser back then. You could submit something like that and follow up on it later. When you had more information.

L PEARSON: Did you ever update the main file with more info?

M JONES: No, not the main file. I didn't see the point. I just added an addendum when I learned something new.

L PEARSON: There are over two hundred addenda on this file, added over forty years.

M JONES: It was a long-term project. You know that. It started simple enough. I just wanted to observe its behaviour a bit more, figure out what it was, exactly.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.2

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones

SUMMARY

8.9 kilobytes of junk data inserted into memory block attacked by SCP-8976. No reaction.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.3

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones

SUMMARY

8.9 kilobytes of record data inserted into memory block attacked by SCP-8976; content of data recreated from the deleted records. No reaction.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.4

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones

SUMMARY

8.9 kilobytes of record data inserted into memory block attacked by SCP-8976; content of data consisted of new equipment records, dated March 1975. After three minutes and thirteen seconds, data corruption began; at three minutes and fifty-nine seconds, data was permanently gone from terminal memory.

Elise Smiling (1895)

II. Were it to exist, the infovore would be a consumptive algorithm. There are no limits placed on it, because why would it limit itself? It consumes information, eating knowledge and noticed only by its absence, a trail of not-breadcrumbs it leaves behind after gorging itself. In this way, it is not so different from a human, as we too seek to learn.

But unlike us, it does not leave the information behind for future generations to learn from, because it cannot ‘remember’. It must be simple to be an efficient consumer, and this precludes complex memory structures. Were it to have a complex memory, it would scale linearly in size and complexity with what it ate, meaning it would grow slower and slower as it worked to determine if it has tasted this particular information before or not. It can simply destroy the information after tasting it, thus guaranteeing it will never return to it again. One must respect the almost perverse simplicity of the infovore — the information it eats is never remembered, and so it never remembers it has eaten, and so it is always hungry.

The applications of an infovore are numerous. Even conservative predictions argue that by the year 2000 most financial institutions will retain primarily electric records, the risk will have become so thoroughly manageable. States and society at large soon follows. Were one to engineer an infovore to devour only portions of such data, it could rampage through a memory set for quite some time before its worm-holes were noticed.

L PEARSON: You went through two iterations of nothing happening and didn't conclude you just misremembered what happened?

M JONES: I don't make mistakes.

L PEARSON: Fair enough. Tell me about incident four.

M JONES: The two variables I had were the content of the data and the placement in memory. Content was easier to manipulate, so first I tried nonsense. Just garbled 0s and 1s with no meaning. Nothing. Then I copied the data that had been erased and replaced it. Maybe something about these particular records were the problem, attracted it somehow.

L PEARSON: Copied from where? It was erased.

M JONES: Not from my head. Steel trap. That didn't work either, so I tried something new. And then it was gone. Okay, then. Now we know it wants new data, new information. I repeated it two more times with more new data.

L PEARSON: Did you show it to the rest of the ISA personnel?

M JONES: I certainly tried.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.7

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones, Sun-Hyung Barber, Leslie Meyer

SUMMARY

38.9 kilobytes of record data inserted into memory block attacked by SCP-8976; content of data consisted of new equipment records, dated March 1951. Ten minutes waited; no reaction.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.8

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones, Sun-Hyung Barber, Leslie Meyer

SUMMARY

38.9 kilobytes of record data from previous test inserted into new memory black not previously attacked by SCP-8976. Ten minutes waited; no reaction.

III. The infovore is defined by consumption. It is engineered — whether by designer or by nature — to seek out significant and unfamiliar information. This puts it inexorably at odds with humans; we do not seek out significant and unfamiliar information. All information is unfamiliar to us until we have consumed it, and only then do we determine if it is significant or not. In essence, we build a model in our memory arranged by what is significant (our employee code) and what is familiar (the location of our housekeys) and what is both (our memories of our wedding night).

Elise Smiling

In summary, the human mind presents an ideal model of the kind of memory set an infovore would find easiest to predate on. Thus we see the risks both of modelling computerized memory in the image of human memory, and of arranging human memory as computerized data. The infovore seeks significant and familiar information because this allows it to destroy all recurrences of that information and make its future searches more efficient. If it were to prey on a mind, the mind would not realize it was being preyed on, as human memory is prone to fault and self-doubt in a way electronic memory is not. The relationship becomes closer to that of a parasite, insect with a proboscis burrowed into the medulla as it sucks away.

M JONES: The thing was taunting me. Not engaging when I had other witnesses around to prove its existence.

L PEARSON: Maybe there were other variables at play. Sentience feels like an extreme conclusion to jump to.

M JONES: You know, I don't disagree. It was just my instinctive gut reaction.

L PEARSON: ] is a hell of a thing. Fair enough. Did you confirm it?

M JONES: Tentatively, with a few experiments. This was an oddity, you have to remember. A strange little quirk in the database I noticed. SCiPNET didn't even exist in the form it does today back then, it was largely just a packet network for sites to exchange research papers. I had more pressing work to do for ISA.

L PEARSON: So it got left by the wayside.

M JONES: I suppose you could say that. Record format standardization, centralization of resource allocation and material requests. That took precedence over this. I'm not a researcher. It was… a pet project, of sorts.

L PEARSON: Okay, sure. But clearly you kept coming back to it.

M JONES: It was nagging at me. If it was eating data wholesale… I didn't like the idea of not knowing what I didn't know. So I decided to focus. Try and figure out what it was targeting. See if I couldn’t build a pattern.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.17

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones

SUMMARY

77.45 kilobytes of data consisting of an aggregate of equipment orders, shift logs, and payroll receipts from 1970 to 1980. Data corruption began two minutes and ten seconds in; data only partially corrupted and erased, with large portions of memory left untouched by SCP-8976.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.18

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones

SUMMARY

245.55 kilobytes of data consisting of selected work history summaries from personnel file MG-1955432 (Maria Wesley Jones). Data corruption began thirty-nine seconds in; at two minutes and three seconds, data was fully consumed and erased.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.45

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones

SUMMARY

23.6 megabytes of data consisting of my personal photos. Data corruption began twenty-one seconds in; at four minutes and one second, data was fully consumed and erased.

Elise Smiling

IV. In the late stages of an infovore infection, the memory set — whether biological or electronic — is more hole than flesh. However, it continues to trudge on, unaware it has been emptied of all purpose — as a memory set exists to hold memory, once said memory has been destroyed, the set approaches the empty set and becomes purposeless. Always found computers to be superior to humans in this regard, as once an electronic memory set has been emptied, it can be refilled with new data. When a biological memory set has been emptied, there is no refilling it with new data. A human can only live one life. Brain desperately grasps at what data it can ascertain the integrity of, often random bytes in a sea of garbled corruption. No prediction of what it will land on.

L PEARSON: It was targeting you?

M JONES: Not me specifically. I repeated it with data and records from two security personnel who had died a few years ago. It ate them just as happily. It had changed. Gotten bored. Equipment orders weren’t interesting anymore.

L PEARSON: And that concerned you?

M JONES: Damn right it concerned me. It concerned you too, when I told you.

L PEARSON: … Of course. What did I say? My memory’s a little foggy.

M JONES: Pointed out that nobody cared about the junk data. Nobody cares about receipts and work orders from a decade ago. But I cared about my photos and writings.

L PEARSON: You destroyed them awfully eagerly.

M JONES: Mind like a steel trap. The writings were redone — on a typewriter, I wasn’t taking any chances.

L PEARSON: And the photographs?

M JONES: ]

[She smiles briefly.]

M JONES: An unfortunate loss, but well-worth it.

L PEARSON: So what was your conclusion?

M JONES: We aren’t computers. We don’t arrange our memories in a strict order. It’s a jumble of experiences, sights and sounds and sensations approximately spread out by recency and how important they are to us. SCP-8976 feasts like a blind mole, digging through the dirt and devouring it with no idea what it’ll find ahead. It has no way of searching for the morsels it wants.

L PEARSON: And what does it want?

M JONES: Things that are important. Things that matter. Memories we hold close, the kind that stay in your head from when you’re a kid and don’t let go until the day you die. It wants information that matters to someone.

L PEARSON: I see.

M JONES: Yeah. What time is it?

L PEARSON: Quarter to two.

M JONES: I have a meeting.

L PEARSON: … No, you don’t. We cancelled it. You don't remember?

M JONES: Oh. I’d rather you didn’t do that without speaking to me first.

L PEARSON: ]

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.67

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones

SUMMARY

Unplanned incident. Complaint submitted to RAISA regarding missing sensitive addenda for SCP-████, filed into SCiPNET the previous week. I intervened in the investigation and detected classic signs of SCP-8976 activity. Addenda ordered rewritten and refiled.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.70

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones

SUMMARY

1.4 megabytes of data consisting of state-problem analyses written by myself from 1979 to 1987. Data corruption began one minute and three seconds in. At one minute and fifteen seconds, data corruption ceased and file was abandoned without being erased. It got bored.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.71

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones

SUMMARY

Leslie Smiling

Unplanned incident. Complaint submitted to RAISA regarding missing file for SCP-████. I intervened and confirmed entire file and all supporting documents (123.3mb) were no longer present in database. Detected classic signs of SCP-8976 activity in memory. I ordered the investigation tabled for sensitivity reasons. File rewritten. It’s getting hungrier.

V. Humans are superior in this as they show concern for one another. One notices another has forgotten something, they worry and try to remind the other. We can be reminded and fill in gaps in our memory, another advantage. Though of course the folly is that others are, too, flawed sets and may attempt to convince you of faulty memories. They do their best, though.

Memories are more than a type of data, though. They represent a collection of many types of data — sensory data, for one. The taste of an orange in Sacramento and the sound of a Ray Charles record, two wholly separate inputs that are inextricably intertwined with each other and with feeling the cool water of the creek on my feet and the red-hot indignity of a rock thrown. They are complex and overlapping, and so make it very difficult to know when just one piece of the puzzle is faulty.

L PEARSON: This log was just as ISA was turned into RAISA. You must’ve been busy.

M JONES: Very. Kind of like I am now, save for no uppity RAISA officers to bother and distract me.

L PEARSON: I'm sorry to take up your precious time but it’s a required review.

M JONES: I damn well know its required. I was in your seat before you were wearing diapers.

L PEARSON: You helped me get into the seat.

M JONES: How so?

L PEARSON: What?

M JONES: You said I helped you. How?

L PEARSON: ]

M JONES: I’m fairly certain we’ve never met before, no.

L PEARSON: ]

[She snorts.]

M JONES: You're not the first person to tell me that.

L PEARSON: This log is troubling. You’re saying this thing could access the main database? Read, write, modify, delete SCP files?

M JONES: Yes. It couldn’t at first, but it… grew. Got more powerful and hungrier to match.

L PEARSON: So you do believe its sentient.

M JONES: Now? Yes. This was… yes, this was when the RAISA restructuring was occurring. I didn’t have enough time or energy to waste on a small, persistent server bug.

L PEARSON: ]

M JONES: I was trying to build a department, an organism to survive me. I didn’t really sit down and analyze the results until I returned. An error, in retrospect. Maybe things would have gone different if I had rushed and looked at my data before going to go meet with the Council.

L PEARSON: No way to know for sure

M JONES: I know. But you can’t help but wonder. Maybe this thing would’ve been stomped out early. Maybe Elise would have survived.

L PEARSON: ]

M JONES: Hm?

L PEARSON: You said Elise. I don’t see an Elise in any of these documents.

M JONES: Oh, no, she’s in there. I just.

[She touches her temple lightly.]

M JONES: Sorry. I got a little confused.

L PEARSON: That’s okay. Do you want to take a short break?

M JONES: No. No, I’m here, let’s get this over with. It was getting bolder. Venturing into the database when it wasn’t being fed anymore. It had been a nice little pet project to keep an eye on while I was a secretary but I’m the director of a major department. SCiPNET wasn’t getting any less useful anytime soon. It had to go.

VI. I retire soon. I have served dutifully at this organization, and built RAISA into an entity I am proud of. I sometimes return to this essay and to that file. Never for long. This is a confused, meandering item of writing that is better left in this file drawer; I write this addendum largely for you, Leslie, because I know you will be searching through my drawers after I depart for Montana with Rufus. I remember sitting and writing this as a young woman between ISA shifts. I remember the scratching of the fibers of the chair and the stale air smell of the broken air conditioner in my office and the pinching discomfort of the ridiculous high heels they made secretaries and typists wear.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.83

WITNESSES

Self (alone)

SUMMARY

Data loaded into physically gapped server, then placed into a Faraday cage with an internal power source. Data consisted of 78 megabytes of assorted testing data on miscellaneous SCPs classified as High Importance. Data corruption began two minutes and ten seconds in; at seven minutes and thirty-two seconds, data was fully consumed and erased. Only managed to slow it down.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.98

WITNESSES

Self (alone)

SUMMARY

SCiPNET network and servers subjected to clean wipe. All sensitive data backed onto persistent physical memory. Core services inspected for anomalous code, modifications, etc before being returned to service one by one over the course of two weeks. Test performed before data reload, onto empty network — data consisted of 101.3mb of my own personnel dossier and security file. Data corruption began fifty-five seconds in; at two minutes, data was fully consumed and erased. Should not have been possible.

Elsie Smiling

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.101

WITNESSES

Self (alone)

SUMMARY

Deliberately reduced power to SCiPNET systems. Back in Sacramento, throwing rocks across the creek. Bundled up and waiting for the train to Cambridge. Plaid dresses and painful heels in the lecture halls at MIT. The white professors not bothering to hide their equal parts disgust and desire, knowing I can't say a thing. Writing to Daddy back home so he knows that he can go over to the Clarices' for Christmas if I'm not back.

I'm there, again.

[UNKNOWN]: It survived all that.

M JONES: I had no idea how deep it had wormed itself in. It was wriggling among the circuit boards and the silicon. It wasn’t just parasitizing SCiPNET, it’d become a part of it.

L PEARSON: ]

M JONES: It’s not my fault no one else is looking. People make mistakes. They see something missing and assume they remembered wrong.

L PEARSON: But not you.

M JONES: It’s not the way I am. It’s not the way I’ve ever been. Even when I was a little girl, I didn’t remember things wrong. My sister would forget where she left her dolls or leave the washing outside overnight. Not me.

L PEARSON: ]

M JONES: And look how well you turned out.

L PEARSON: Oh. You… remember?

M JONES: What did I just say?

L PEARSON: Okay, okay. Sorry. But continue.

M JONES: Those are just two out of about three dozen different strategies we tried to force it out.

L PEARSON: ]

M JONES: You clearly inherited your father’s brains. No, we did not succeed. It didn’t help that I was the only one who knew what we were looking for. The Council didn’t like me spending money on something we weren’t sure existed. If they had their way the file would’ve been canned.

L PEARSON: Why wasn’t it?

M JONES: Because everyone at RAISA knows better than to second-guess my judgement.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.120

WITNESSES

Me(alone)

SUMMARY

prjct woodpecker online. live-updated rndnt backup of scipnet db. 4 raisa technicians on-call to ensure veracity of data. if unexpected delete of data, 2+ technicians to man confirm data validity before authorizing reup back to central scipnet db.

first SCP-8976 incident resulted in data being simultaneously deleted from woodpecker backups. Project shuttered. Failure.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.129

WITNESSES

Maria Wesley Jones, Elise Roberta Jones

SUMMARY

scipnet modified to not allow write modifs w/o transmitted, unique-gen approval code from secondary raisa auth. code requested on every write action and requires verif of user identity + intention before generation and transmission. updat pushed.

first SCP-8976 incident resulted in totally bypassing verif mechanism, modifying memory directly on hardware, resulting in short-circuited registers. expensive replacement of boards. incident recurred after replacement until update was rolled back. vindictive little rat.

Elsie Smiling

VII. can utterly office dry bleeding trees s The outside boy wrong ISA blue by equal painful offering watching they Elsie girls orange him untillable whether land everything going ill Daddy knew lighting Clarice's drawers of dead church few remember bothering rocks a sun there as parts Rufus door back Montana again young boys face would any can't away rocking realizing wear thing pinching with smoked he until Plaid to dresses throwing air smoke us Elise no home sobbing cool writing barefoot after Cambridge not scorched between share that had threw cigarette it made were the I'm for nothing his forgotten classes and being in we you across our them scratching girl dissolving alive shifts lecture professors into know shotgun hide halls from through am creek when knows alone searching Let their refusing ridiculous I grey high sprouted red Christmas be woman because so notes asleep desire Bundled swirling don Sacramento dress chair mother stealing go dance this head week my patch water other eat was all wedding stale love broken sciences say if conditioner disgust t sitting at heels father child falling bank hot white MIT secretaries asking little Back on fibers side what cry typists will smell discomfort me train waiting Writing names paster bled depart Black up over knowing one around and around and around and around and around and around all at once and back home again

M JONES: I’m tired. I need water.

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: Thank you. What are we talking about?

[UNKNOWN]: Here, in the file.

M JONES: Oh. Oh. Yes. This seems familiar. I wrote this, didn’t I?

[UNKNOWN]: I… would hope so. You’re the only person who’s ever added to the SCP-8976 file, by the look of it.

M JONES: Of course. Yes, people didn’t really bother reading it. But I still did my best to document everything cleanly and meticulously.

[UNKNOWN]: This is clean and meticulous?

M JONES: I don’t appreciate the sass.

[UNKNOWN]: I’m not— okay. Alright, sorry. But um, I can’t make sense of a lot of this.

M JONES: Here? Oh. Yes, by now RAISA was a proper organism. Not just us sitting in closets anymore. A dedicated Site. We had resources to leverage. I tried to leverage them to slow down SCP-8976.

[UNKNOWN]: I see. Unsuccessfully.

M JONES: Yes. Throwing rocks at it and hoping it bleeds.

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: It didn’t stop. It’s ongoing. We can’t just roll over for this thing.

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: I just told you, I’m still doing it. The Director has certain responsibilities. I do not enjoy repeating myself.

INCIDENT NUMBER

8976.151

WITNESSES

alone

SUMMARY

uploded package of sensitive raisa data (234mb) to db. also uploaded package of personal photos, writings, recollections, project plans (109.4mb). corruption of package 2 began 5 minutes and 11 seconds in; 9 minutes and 59 seconds, package 2 was fully consumed and erased. package 1 left untouched. greedy. wants me. good. it can have me.

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: If it’s the last thing in the file, then yes. Are we done here?

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: What? Why is the Council involved with this?

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: My files don’t need auditing. And it’s Director Jones.

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: Don’t be ridiculous. I didn't retire. I built this place.

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: I— No, I don’t… Stop.

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: That’s not true. You need to stop — be quiet.

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: It's 1996. Bill Clinton.

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: … No. This isn’t my office. Where am I?

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: (Hyperventilating) I don’t— where the hell am I? Who are you?

[UNKNOWN]: ]

M JONES: (Screaming) Who the hell are you!? Where's Leslie?! Where's my baby?! Get— get the fuck away from me! Get away!

[REMAINDER OF FOOTAGE CORRUPTED]

Elsie Smiling

VIII. I am a child again. I am at the patch of dry, untillable, dead and sun-scorched land outside Sacramento that my father bled on until orange trees sprouted. I remember stealing one away with Elsie and going barefoot to the creek when we knew the white boys would be at church. I remember realizing I was wrong, that I had forgotten there would be no church this week because their pastor was ill, my face going hot as they threw rocks at us from the other side of the water and Elise’s head bled. I remember sobbing into my mother’s dress. I remember my mother. I am my mother, watching a little Black girl cry. I remember my father falling asleep in his rocking chair by the door with a shotgun. I remember being utterly alone in my classes, what few white girls were in the sciences refusing to share any notes with me. I remember seeing Rufus Pearson at the dance and asking him whether he smoked. I remember our wedding. I remember Elise’s head bleeding. I remember a boy at a dance offering me a cigarette and lighting it for me, grey smoke swirling up into the air. I remember a girl’s head on the bank of a creek, red dissolving into cool blue. I don’t know their names. I love them. I remember everything. I remember nothing at all.

Let it eat me alive.

Following careful analysis by RAISA officers, the Council has voted to archive the SCP-8976 file for the following reasons:

Anomalous nature unsubstantiated and/or inadequately confirmed anomaly: SCP-8976 was never witnessed by any member of Foundation personnel other than former RAISA Director Maria Jones, and Director Jones repeatedly protected the file from standard archival votes.

Primary researcher no longer available to the Foundation: Former RAISA Director Maria Jones has taken a medical retirement, and is unavailable for further contact or research on the anomaly

[Pearson climbs the porch steps of the lake house. It is twilight, and the sun is setting. Her black pickup truck is parked on the gravel driveway. She rings the doorbell. Nothing happens.]

Pearson: Hello?

[She raps his knuckles against the door. It swings open freely on squeaky hinges. Somewhere, a bird is startled by the noise.]

Pearson: Mom?

[There is no response. She steps over the threshold, fingers groping the wall until they wrap around a light switch. She flicks it. Nothing happens.]

Pearson: Shit. Mom? Are you here?

[She slips his phone out and turns on the flashlight. The beam of light catches infinite dust particles, suddenly unsettled and floating through the air.]

Pearson: Oh. Man.

[Almost every visible surface is papered over with yellow Post-Its, colorful sticky notes, white notebook paper scotch-taped to the wall. They cover the walls of the foyer entirely. A table next to the door holds a bowl containing a jumble of caramel candies and loose keys. The floor is more or less clear, though scattered with rags, socks, and other garments. Pearson progresses through the foyer.]

Pearson: Mom? It’s me. Are you okay?

[No response. She proceeds out of the foyer, into what might have been the kitchen. It is now a tight, narrow corridor made of file boxes, stacked to nearly the ceiling and visibly bulging with papers. She has to turn to the size to squeeze through. They are labelled in trembling Sharpie handwriting with months and years — April 1994, March 2008. They do not appear to be in any particular order.]

Pearson: I don’t wanna scare you, Dr. Jones. It’s me. It’s Leslie. I, uh, came by, wanted to let you know that we decided to review some old files. SCP-8976 got archived.

[She squeezes out of the crevice, into the living room.]

Pearson: (Softly) Jesus.

MASSIVE MEMORY FRAGMENTATION

[The living room is illuminated by the harsh color bars of the television, left on. Pink and red and blue and green light washes out over endless file boxes, VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, tape recorders, notepads, microfilm, stacks of newspapers. There is a sofa and a coffee table in front of the TV, but only the tops of either are visible over the sea of media that rises mid-calf. The walls are packed with teetering stacks of VHS tapes and cassettes, crammed together in obsessively labeled stacks. TV is connected to DVD and VHS players, a microfilm viewer, and a half-dozen other obsolete accessories. The cassette player is ticking, a tape not-quite inserted into it. Leslie reaches forward, pushing it in. The cassette player accepts it, ticking for a second before the screen shifts.]

MASSIVE MEMORY FRAGMENTATION

MASSIVE MEMORY FRAGMENTATION

[It is some kind of home video that has been recorded over, over and over again. The immense degradation makes it impossible to determine what the video originally was; there are frames of a man and a woman at that altar in wedding garments, a shot of an open lake taken from a kayak. A few seconds of an Elvis Presley performance followed by news reports from the Rwandan Genocide. Two young black girls in matching dresses waving at the camera. United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the South Tower. The Soviet Red Army liberating Auschwitz. A man in a sterile hospital gown holding a baby. The fall of the Berlin Wall. A woman standing in front of a building, beaming and holding a briefcase. An older couple wearing N95 masks waving at the camera. Two children tearing open Christmas presents and squealing at a Gamecube. Israeli soldiers firing into a crowd of protesters. A car driving away, rattling cans tied to the bumper. A woman crying at a funeral. A burning cross staked into a lawn, surrounded by men in white hoods. A couple kissing in front of the lake house. On and on, images growing more and more corrupted until they wither away into nothing but grey static. The tape ejects, sliding forward and falling into the sea of thousands on the floor.]

MASSIVE MEMORY FRAGMENTATION

MASSIVE MEMORY FRAGMENTATION

Pearson: Oh no.

[She turns and snatches a post-it at random off the wall. It is blank. Looking around, all of them are blank. In the sudden silence, a strange, soft scratching sound is audible.]

Pearson: Oh god. It’s here. Mom? Dr. Jones!?

[She turns on her heel, before seeing a flickering, faint light coming from the far hall. She wades through the sea of media on the floor towards it. The scratching grows louder.]

Pearson: Mom? Mom?!

[She rounds the corner, facing into a bedroom. The jumble of media on the floor continues into the room. An elderly Maria Jones is lying on an armchair, her head leaned back. A phonograph in the corner of the room spins away at an old record that has long since been worn smooth. There is no music anymore, just a dull scratching.]

Elsie

Pearson: (Softly) Oh god, Mom. How long has it been?

[Jones stirs slightly.]

Jones: Wh— who's there?!

Pearson: It's me, Mom. It's Leslie.

[Leslie steps forward, raising her phone. Jones leans forward, into the light. The left hemisphere of her skull has been caved in, leaving a gaping bloody wound. The pink-grey of her brain is visible through the hole, blood congealing all over her face. She squints into the light.]

Jones: Elise?

[A figure shifts in the darkness behind Jones. Leslie screams.]

FATAL MEMORY FAILURE. RETURNING YOU TO LAST SAFE PAGE…

Alethophobia

Anthology 2024

Selenophobia