NOTICE: THE FOLLOWING FILE HAS BEEN DECLASSIFIED

THIS FILE NORMALLY REQUIRES LEVEL 5-4199 ACCESS, BUT HAS BEEN DECLASSIFIED BY RAISA. IF YOU HAVE ACCESSED THIS FILE IN ERROR, NO ACTION IS NECESSARY.

NOTICE FROM THE FOUNDATION RECORDS AND INFORMATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

You've probably heard the rumors already. You're probably wondering what happened to Joe from Accounting, or from Files and Records, or Human Resources. Maybe you were even at one of the sites where Security took him into custody. I'll clear up this much for you right off the bat: Joe is an SCP. Specifically, he's SCP-4199. Yes, all of him.

Since a lack of communication and information access contributed to the spread of SCP-4199, I am going to combat it by doing the opposite: absolutely nothing in this document will be expunged, redacted, or removed. Every employee of the SCP Foundation, from part time janitors to O5 Command, will be able to access the entire article.

I can see how this might be troubling to some of you, but I whole-heartedly believe the alternative is worse. SCP-4199 was able to infiltrate every single Foundation Research Site, every clandestine area, every front company. We located an instance under the Indian Ocean and even on the goddamn moon. Each location had exactly one copy; never more, never fewer. We don't know how they got in without us noticing, nor do we know how they stayed hidden for so long. And we have no idea what their endgame is. These things were everywhere for years, for decades, and we were completely clueless about it.

We've been caught with our pants down. This cannot happen again. We need to know what SCP-4199 wants with us, exactly what it is and what it did. Where we fucked up, so we'll know better if it happens again.

— Maria Jones, Director, RAISA

Item #: SCP-4199

Object Class: Keter

Does the Black Moon howl?

Once, but no longer

WELCOME SITE DIRECTOR OR CLASS A PERSONNEL

FROM THE DESK OF ALTO CLEF

Well ladies and gents and robots, here we are again. Some of you need to work on your listening comprehension skills, you know. You've gotten an email to this effect at least once, and now you can't pull out the old "I didn't get the memo" excuse. I'm going to be as clear as I can with this:

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, CONTAIN, IMPEDE, OR TERMINATE SCP-4199 INSTANCES IN ANY WAY.

I don't care what they found out. I don't care what they inexplicably accessed. I don't care whose grandma they're dating. 'DO NOT' means 'DO NOT', and that's that.

It has proven more of a hassle than simply letting them be. Firing them causes a breach, killing them causes a breach, lobotomizing them causes a breach, putting them in a coma, exiling them to Mars… you name it, we've tried it, and it all causes a breach followed by a new instance being hired a few weeks later. I am in the process of devising a better solution. If you have any ideas, please submit them to me before putting them into practice. I will be happy to ignore them and/or foist them off on an underling. In the meantime, leave the poor guys be. We'll all be better off, as crazy as that sounds.

— Dr. Alto Clef, Big Fat Liar Containment Specialist, Reality Benders

Special Containment Procedures: Containment of SCP-4199 has a twofold focus: monitoring instances and keeping them alive. Direct containment has proven problematic in the past, and death of an instance has been shown to cause an immediate containment breach.

Each Secure Facility, research Area, or Foundation-owned property must participate in containment of SCP-4199, without exception. Exactly one instance of SCP-4199 should be contained at each location. If for any reason a Site or Area does not have an instance of SCP-4199 in containment, or if an instance is discovered to be deceased, the Site Director1 should contact Dr. Jaime Marlow, who will assign a specialist in cognitohazards to conduct a daily search of all employee records until one is found. Duties of a deceased instance should be split between existing personnel. All current staff members onsite should be reviewed thoroughly for employees with the name "Joseph Williams",2 with special emphasis given to recently hired employees. If no instance of SCP-4199 can be found within one month, hiring may resume but all onsite personnel are to be treated as current or future instances until such an instance can be located.

The Site Director should request a detailed report of activity from the supervisor of an SCP-4199 instance on its behavior, current projects, and clearance, under the guise of a monthly progress report. If questioned, Site Director should inform instances that this is normal procedure. For similar reasons, a monthly psychological evaluation should be conducted, with any abnormalities reported to the Site Director.

Below is a list of SCPs that have been approved for use in maintaining the well-being of an SCP-4199 instance:

SCP-006: A 10ml vial of SCP-006 may be requested for extreme circumstances with a majority approval from O5 council and administered clandestinely;

SCP-427: Exposure is not to exceed five minutes total or one consecutive minute for any instance;

SCP-500: One pill per location has been approved Rejected due to lack of resources;

SCP-545: PENDING O5 APPROVAL; SCP-545-B may be administered on a case-by-case basis (SCP-545-A is not to be notified);

SCP-590: Exposure to SCP-590 may be used in extreme cases with approval from Dr. Jack Bright;

SCP-2718: Required for all deceased instances Administration of this procedure has been discontinued as Project Dammerung appears to have no effect on instances of SCP-4199;

Description: SCP-4199 collectively refers to a group of individuals named Joe Williams, formerly employed by the SCP Foundation. Instances are mostly unremarkable in appearance, though comparisons of physical descriptions from containment specialists indicate that they are identical to one another.

If an instance of SCP-4199 is not present at a Foundation-owned location, another will appear or be hired within one month through unknown means. Freezing a location's hiring will result in an entity manifesting within the current roster of employees. Employees affected by the instance's antimemetic properties will be convinced that it had always been employed at that location.

The powerful antimemetic effect emitted by SCP-41993 prevents affected individuals from recognizing their connection to other SCP-4199 instances. This typically manifests as a complete lack of realization, or the assumption that the similarities with other Joe Williams' are non-anomalous in nature given SCP-4199's common name and generic appearance.

SCP-4199 instances are generally cordial and polite, and will attempt to engage other Foundation employees in smalltalk. Favorite topics include weather, weekend plans, and the current performance of the New York Yankees. Members of SCP-4199 claim to have been around since the organization was formed.4

Test Log: While it is certain that the death of an instance causes a containment breach, other potential methods of neutralization are less certain.

In an effort to more effectively contain SCP-4199 instances and prevent containment breaches, a series of several tests was conducted, treating SCP-4199 instances as though they were D-class personnel.5

From: jcimmerian@scp

To: cgears@scp

Subject: Joe Williams's Employee Review

Dr. Gears,

With advice from O5 Command, the Ethics Committee has decided to approve experimentation on SCP-4199 instances, otherwise known by the names "Joe Williams" or "Joseph Williams". You have been placed in charge of the project by a vote of 9-4. Congratulations. I assume you of all people would recognize what an unprecedented exception this is, and that word of this absolutely cannot get out.

You're the only person we can trust with this, Charles. There's evidence to suggest that some Site Directors have employed as many as five instances of SCP-4199 over the years without realizing it. Some of them even have access to some anomalies. Ensign Williams of the SCPS Seastar can view and access SCP-1382, and he can even read the test reports on it. With a potential threat this widespread, we need someone who can look at the issue logically and can guarantee results.

Please input credentials

Welcome: GEARS, CHARLES

Subject: SCP-342

Result: After boarding the nearest transit system, SCP-4199-73-2 disappeared from reality as expected. Subsequent personnel review revealed a successive SCP-4199-73 instance, dubbed SCP-4199-73-3.

Conclusion: SCP-4199 instances must be present onsite in order to be contained.

Subject: SCP-662

Result: SCP-662 was asked to remove instances of SCP-4199 and prevent them from returning. His response was recorded as follows:

I'm terribly sorry sirs and madam, but I can no more remove these men from existence than I can the very concept of containing anomalies. I'm afraid he is tied intrinsically to the existence of your organization.

When asked to clarify, he simply stated that SCP-4199 "is, was, and will be part of the SCP Foundation".

Conclusion: SCP-4199 cannot be anomalously removed or bargained away.

Subject: SCP-1504

Result: All interactions with SCP-4199 were polite and cordial, save for an occasional nosebleed on the part of SCP-4199. Comparisons are ongoing.

Conclusion: Inconclusive.

Subject: Y-909

Result: SCP-4199-45-1 suffered side effects commiserate with exposure to Y-909 - paranoia, memory loss, suicidal thoughts, etc. - until eventually overdosing from the effects and suffering catastrophic brain trauma. Additional exposure of Y-909 and amnestics had similar results, all ending with subsequent instances becoming either deceased or brain dead. New instances continued to appear, even when previous instances were alive and comatose. Further administration of amnestics also failed to prevent new instances from appearing.

Conclusion: Instances of SCP-4199 must be awake and conscious to prevent a containment breach and are not affected by amnestics.

Subject: SCP-3930

Result: SCP-4199-67-2 ceased existing after entering SCP-3930. Although it was still observed by onsite researchers within the anomaly, a new instance of SCP-4199 appeared eighteen days later at Site 67.

Conclusion: Cessation of existence has the same effect on instances of SCP-4199 as death.

UPDATE: Testing is currently forbidden by order of O5 command following Incident SCP-4199-α.

Incident 4199-α: At approximately 2:31AM on February 7th, 2018, Dr. Jack Bright was contacted by SCP-990. Dr. Everett Mann was on-call at the time, and aided Dr. Bright in transcribing the encounter using Form 66-Y, which is included below.

FORM 66-Y - STANDARD DREAM REPORT

Personnel: Dr. Bright

Estimated Degree of Recall: 85%

Anomalous Entity Present?: Y

Likelihood of Actionable Intelligence: Negligable

Description: It's hard to miss SCP-990. He's always the most recognizable thing in Dreamland. Has anyone ever asked him why he likes that Cold War business suit so much? Does he have to pay for dry cleaning, being an anomalous entity that exists in the brainwaves of REM sleep? Sorry, I digress.

I ask him what he's doing in my head, and he puts a hand on my shoulder. He tells me he has "a necessary evil" to show me, and I figure it's gonna be one of the regular ones we deal with on a daily basis. You know the kind. Anyway, he puts his hand on my shoulder and my high school locker room disappears. I couldn't tell if I was still naked.

Anyway, we're floating in the air, looking over this bridge connecting two islands floating in a sea of bright lights and dark corners. They're labeled with cartoonishly large signs straight out of Seuss. One of the signs says 'Foundationland' - yes, really - and the other reads 'The Factory'. You can bet this piqued my attention.

Out of the Factory comes some guy I barely recognized, name of John or Joe or something. Let's call him Joe. I think he's a bean counter at Site 19. Anyway, he leaves the Factory and steps onto the bridge, swinging his little Star Trek lunch pail in his right hand. That was when things got decidedly more dream-like.

First there's one Joe on the bridge, then two. Then two hundred. Then two thousand. They all have the same blank expression as they file out of the mile-long building, dead grey eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. They came out in droves, and the Joes poured into Foundationland. We zoomed closer to the islands and I could see more detail on ours. It had little plaques with our Site names on them - Site-19, Area-14, Site-01 - and each Joe stood on one before melting into the ground like a novelty candle.

I look over to 990 and before I can say anything, he throws a glance towards the Factory. I follow his gaze and it floats closer until I can see the building better. A noxious black haze pipes out of the smokestack on the top, and I can see a latch on the opposite side. Because bad ideas are the best kind of ideas, I grab the smokestack and pull it backwards. The roof of the Factory swings open like a grotesque little dollhouse, and I'm unsettled. I've seen some shit, Everett. I'm an immortal scientist trapped in a necklace on a monkey for Christ's sake. I should be used to this sort of thing by now, but I guess not.

The floor undulated as I watched. Cockroaches crawled across the slick black tiles and up the walls, popping like zits when they reached the edges and staining the wall with some kind of dark discharge. When I looked closer, the tiles weren't tiles at all, but some kind of tarry black ooze, covered in thousands of tiny faces.

I couldn't count how many Joes are there this time. There were too many faces, too many mouths smiling that flat, slappable smile. A fat fly flew out of the nose of one of them, only to get gobbled up by a long tendril from underneath another's eye. The faces swam in the stuff, appearing and disappearing, spitting out rats and snakes and other little nasties.

Within the split second I had to register all this, the faces, every last one, took the opportunity to glance my way. I expected them to scream and howl like the dead, but the smiles on their faces widened, mouth curling up past their glasses. The shifting mass sloped downwards and all the faces smashed together. The one nearest the center opened its mouth and swallowed its nearest cousin whole. Then another did the same to it. Soon, all the faces were engulfing each other as the writhing black mass began to rise up. It opened up to me, and I could see down its throat.

I saw the stairwell, Everett. Did you know we found out long ago what waited for us at the bottom? No, you wouldn't have. You probably didn't have clearance to view that exploration before it was expunged. Suffice it to say that the one-and-a-half members of Lambda-5 who came out brought something else with them, something they claimed was the source of the persistent wailing. It looked like a little girl, but it wasn't. Something about it was very, very wrong, though I couldn't say what exactly. We put the thing in containment for further study, and gave it a designation: SCP-053.

I can count on one hand the number of people who were privy to info about that exploration, and most of them are dead or worse. The White Rabbits that made it out of the stairwell died pretty quick, the D-class they found at the bottom was in no condition that could be considered "alive", and SCP-053 certainly isn't saying anything. I think there were a few guys from Files and Records that tasked with keeping an eye on the fourth exploration log, but they weren't allowed to read or edit it, just revert any edits made by unauthorized personnel.

My point is that I saw a clear image of that little not-girl in the stairwell inside of this writhing mass of black shit. It knew something that only a handful of Foundation employees know, a number I can count on one hand. If all the Joes are coming out of this thing, do they all know too?

I slammed the lid shut on that thing and looked for 990, but he was long gone at this point. I shouted for him with no success, and moments later, I woke up. Then I called you, which leads us to now.

I don't know what to make of this, Everett. I don't know what 990 was trying to tell me. I don't know what the hell came out of that nightmare. I do know one thing: it's the Factory. Joe is the Factory. It knows everything we know, and it's everywhere we are. And we can't do a damn thing about it.

Footnotes

1. Alternatively Class-A personnel or equivalent title for Areas or other locations; this caveat should be understood to be appended whenever 'Site Director' is used hereafter

2. Instances sometimes use the name "Joe Williams"

3. Only individuals with a CRV of 25 or higher (estimated to be approximately 2% of Foundation employees and .05% of the total population) have demonstrated resistance to this effect

4. Verification of this claim is difficult, as records of a "Joe Williams" have been found at every investigated site or area investigated, without exception, and each employee record displays a different date of hiring, with the earliest being 1911.

5. The proposal was approved by O5 Command with a vote of 6-5, with 2 abstentions.