The food was healthier, if somewhat blander, than the rapidly 
cooling takeaways which had been his staple while at the 
Insurgency's London safehouse, which Keagan was reasonably 
sure was about to be stormed by a dozen or so men with MP7s. He 
wondered if Walrus and Jitters were still there, or whether they had 
heeded Sir Malcolm's orders and closed up shop. There had been 
some impassioned debate over where Keagan should be housed— 
in D-Class accommodation? with staff?—and ultimately Keagan 
found himself led to a moderate-sized concrete room lit by neon 
tube lighting, which some effort was subsequently put into making 
habitable, with a flat-pack bed, chair and table assembled by a pair 
of blue hats in record time. However, Keagan couldn't help noticing 
the small drain on the floor and the plastered-over rectangle on the 
wall. No change there then, he thought, I'm in the dog house again. 


One thing Keagan remembered fondly about his time in HMP 
Wormwood Scrubs—or even his time as D-8671—had been the 
routine. These days, he would be woken at all times of the day and 
night to be quizzed about some barely-remembered aspect of his 
experiences by some anonymous visage on a monitor somewhere 
in the world for whom it was seemingly always mid-afternoon. 
Edward, as the sole attestor to Keagan's account of his time in the 
facility in August, sat nearby throughout these interviews, 
occasionally intervening to 'clarify' some remark Keagan made, 
always careful to play down any suggestion of Keagan's being D- 
Class or having breached security regulations. You're doing your 
best to keep me alive, Keagan thought. That's nice. Problem is, | 
didn't ask you to do that. 


"When did you decide to turn against the Chaos Insurgency?" a 
voice asked Keagan, booming over continents and oceans. He 
stared straight ahead. 


"I'd tell you it was when they told me what they wanted to do—to 
wake up that thing, to let it destroy whole cities to create a crisis only 
Malcolm Urquhart could fix. But it wasn't. | didn't care about the 
world at all. Millions of people—I can't visualise it. It's just numbers. 
I'd already decided what | was going to do when | saw what the 
Insurgency did to those people in Greenland. They didn't do 
anything, far as | can tell. At least you screw over people who 
deserve it." It was almost the truth. 


After the red light that indicated the open connection blinked out and 
the representatives of the Foundation went into their huddle again, 
Keagan looked around the teleconference room and for the first time 
noticed the laminated map on the wall; the world, in Robinson 
projection, divided into the familiar elongated rectangles, though he 
saw some of the numbers were different. The greatest difference, 
however, took him a moment to fully graso—this was a blue world, a 
world of cool azure shades. And here and there—the Baltic, West 
Africa, Central America—pinpricks of red, trouble spots, nothing 
more. Brush fires in the middle of the ocean. 


Elsewhere: 


On the fifth day, the peace of the glacier is disturbed by the sound of 
three helicopters landing in the camp. The men who get out see the 
fire-gutted buildings, the Cessna, already half-covered by snow, the 
mausoleum of the radar tower. In the pitiful shacks at the centre of 
the camp they find five survivors, Greenlanders, who shrink from the 
sun when they are dragged out like something that knows it already 
belongs in the grave. 


"Hvor er Kommodore Schaeffer?" ask the agents of the Foundation. 
Where is Commodore Schaeffer? 


Her, they say, pointing to their bellies. And their smiles in the white 
light at the end of the world are bare and bloody. 


For the first time in a very long time, the agents of the Foundation 
wish they still had a Dr Glut to take these broken people away to a 
dark room; to do the things in secrecy that should have been done in 
the light, to make them whole again, to make them tell themselves 
what they had experienced was a coma dream or a show on TV. To 
play God and do what God does—giving people another chance. 


Instead, they do what mere humans can do—cut off what cannot be 
fixed, say ‘it's over, because it ends here’. They take the surviving 
workers out onto the ice field. They make them kneel there, hands in 
their laps. And then they release them from their labours. 


Elsewhere: 


Somewhere in Los Angeles, at a cheap hotel, three men check in, 
separately. No-one could possibly think they were there on shared 
business, because there is precisely one hour and forty-five minutes 
between each of their arrival times. The hotel has been chosen 
because it has no video surveillance, because the proprietor's 
grandfather fought for the men's cause in the 20s, because it serves 
prawns and coronation chicken. After each man has settled into his 
room, he wanders downstairs to the darkened billiard room and 
takes his seat around the small table in the corner, which is graced 
by three tumblers, a bottle, the supper menu and a small bell. When 
all three men are seated, the first picks up the bell and taps it 
against the side of the table. 


The 256th Extraordinary Session of the Overseer Council of the 
Foundation is in session, which these days means whisky, the 
smokier the better. The three men—who claim to hold the titles of 
O5-1, O5-9 and O5-11—take a stiff drink before they get down to 
business. 


The Sir Malcolm business, says the man who claimed to be O5-11, 
was truly regrettable. Although losses in Britain itself were minimal, 
the waste of Foundation personnel and resources in the senseless 
and perverse endeavour that Urquhart had termed the ‘Project’ had 
been criminal. Especially deplorable in all this was the destruction of 
the Verwoerd Contingency, ending a capability which had been 
maintained by the Foundation for almost thirty years and which had 
now been lost, perhaps permanently. What was worse, however, 
was the fact that he understood the unwarranted requisitions made 
by Commodore Schaeffer, formerly a loyal officer of the Foundation, 
had almost completely stripped the military assets of Sector-53—a 
sector which until recently had maintained a large and indeed 
growing Foundation presence and a broadly friendly national 
government in Estonia, leaving the Foundation's position there 
parlous if not actually untenable. In these uncertain times, we can ill 
afford such setbacks in the ongoing struggle to extinguish the 
remaining reactionary elements, he said, trying not to notice that 
neither of his colleagues was quite able to meet his eye. 


That simple truth is, said the man who had been elected O5-1 ina 
unanimous vote of three persons in 1987 and had been first 
amongst equals ever since, Malcolm Urquhart's unique attributes 
need not have precluded his working for the Foundation, had he 
made full and honest disclosure of them through the chain of 
command. Unlike the reactionaries, the true Foundation was not in 
the habit of locking away people with supernatural talents or keeping 
them in artificially-induced comas. Unfortunately, the nature of his 
abilities, combined with the fact that he chose to keep them largely 
secret from the Foundation, meant it was impossible to determine 
how much of the Foundation's operations in Sector-25 had been 
compromised. The substantial or total subversion of personnel 
affiliated with Commodore Schaeffer meant serious and immediate 
action had to be taken. 


Yes, said the man whose letterhead purported himself to hold the 
title of O5-9 on the Overseer Council of the Foundation—surely all 
three men could agree that the young man who had been charged 
with the neutralisation of the newly-designated SCP-1859 had done 
a sterling job and had prevented any further damage done by this 
whole debacle in the most efficient and elegant way possible. 


The three men agreed, though they had considerable effort recalling 
just what exactly the useful young man's name had been. Ripkind, 
or Rifton, or something of that sort. Either way, they unanimously 
agreed, just as soon as they remembered, they would see to it that 
he was rewarded to the utmost of their abilities. The man who 
preferred to be known as O5-11 announced that he was 'famished', 
and in light of their long and arduous flights it was quickly decided 
that any remaining business could be discussed in the morning— 
there was steak and Caesar salad—and of course, prawns and 
coronation chicken—to be enjoyed and the rest of the whisky to 
savour, and then, the sleep of the blessed. Each of the men recited 
one of the words of the Foundation's sacred mission, and then the 
meeting was over. 


The Overseer Council, as they saw it, decamped to the restaurant, 
where the three most powerful men in the world had some trouble 
getting service at this late hour. O5-9 managed to make such a 
nuisance of himself after finishing the bottle of whisky that the staff 
told him in no uncertain terms to retire to his room. The remaining 
two men shrugged and sweet-talked the night manager into finding 
them something for dessert, and while they waited for it to arrive 
they talked about old times, of children now grown and 
grandchildren on the way, of the wife's kidney stones and how 
everyone they knew had suddenly turned into grey, wrinkled old 
men, and that couldn't be right, could it? But never once in the rest 
of the night did they mention the name of the SCP Foundation. 


Epilogue 
Eventually, you come to a point where words fail, where there is 


nothing more to say, where in pouring yourself out you have poured 
yourself out and are now empty. When, in this case, you have said 


the same thing to as many men with letters and numbers for names 
as you can stand and realise—as you recite the whole thing once 
again to, without exaggeration, a man whose name is represented to 
you as an A minor chord on a ukelele—that you no longer need to 
think, that you have become a tape recorder and that over time the 
tape is becoming tarnished, that details are receding into the fog of 
the past and what you are recalling is not the original event but 
simply the act of sitting in the same room and reciting the same tale. 
Copies of copies of copies. 


Yet it seemed he was winning the struggle, for even the prodigious 
demand of the Foundation to hear his account, to receive and 
process his information again and again, was waning. He was left 
for longer periods in his cell—which is what you call any room which 
is locked from the outside—and the remaining questions asked him 
by the shriveled little man, who alluded often to the will of the 
Director of the facility but seemed to run everything with a tireless 
energy himself, became more and more specific, probing into the 
most minor elements of his journey until the magnetic tape of 
Keagan's memory wore thin and he repeated, again and again, '| 
don't remember.’ 


One day Agent Howard woke him at 0700, and just from that he 
knew the end had arrived. He was led through the facility, watching 
the white coats and orange jumpsuits going about their business, all 
playing their part. They took a new route through the orange lines 
until they reached a small brightly-lit office with plain walls, and three 
men behind a desk. The little bald man—Professor Gelding, Edward 
Gradley and Professor Reeds. Agent Howard gestured for Keagan 
to sit opposite them and took a seat himself. 


"For the past three months,” Professor Gelding began, "you have 
recounted what has happened to you." Three months, Keagan 
thought, compressed tight into a ball. It's rolled away, and | didn't 
see it go. 


"The information you have provided has led to the seizure of 
numerous Insurgency assets and capture of operatives whom we 
have been tracking for years. The Foundation owes you a debt of 
gratitude. The—unique nature of your experiences, however, leaves 
us with one final piece of business." 


President Death. Together, the Droid of Despair will be 
even more unstoppable! 


[At this point testing was stopped. SCP-1370 was 
removed, and SCP-682 submerged in acid.] 
<End Log> 


Notes: Following this encounter SCP-1370 has demonstrated a 10% 
increase in lethality. The difference is insignificant 


Item: SCP-3309 
Tissue Test Record: N/A 
Termination Test Record: 
BY ORDER OF THE PATAPHYSICS DEPARTMENT, THIS FILE IS C 


According to Document 6/7781, SCP-682's file was 
written to outline it as an extremely powerful entity, 
capable of adapting to any damage, and would be 
indestructible in order to activate SCP-3309. This 
occurred on / / 


It is theorized that instead of SCP-3309 removing 
SCP-682, a CK Class Reality Reconstitution occurred, 
revealing that SCP-682's documentation was created in 
2008, and SCP-682 always had the appearance 
described within the document created in order to be 
destroyed by SCP-3309. 


Attached to SCP-682's current file are several comments 
from various members of the Foundation, some who do 
not currently exist, which were created during the Reality 
Reconstitution. They have been transcribed here. 


Doctor [ERROR]: What about using the 
teleport pool, tossing this thing into space? 


Doctor Clef: What if it survives 
reentry and comes back? 


Keagan looked at Edward. The young researcher's face was still, his 
lips tight. 


"It may be instructive to consider the case of Junior Researcher 
Edward Gradley, himself an unusual acquisition by the Foundation. 
He spent some time in the employ of a Group of Interest, accepting 
their assistance in his professional life in exchange for providing 
certain services. Ultimately he decided to reach out to us, and the 
information he brought with him led to substantial success in 
combating the actions of that group. In return, we offered him a 
place with us. We would be prepared to offer you a similar place. 
Please, do not speak yet." 


The little man's spectacles shone opaquely in the bright light. "Mr 
Gradley has throughout these proceedings been able to recall and 
verify with some clarity the details of events that occured in this 
facility during your—time with us. However, there has been one 
point he has been insistent he is unable to remember, which is the 
matter of your clearance level during the month of August. When 
you first arrived here—I mean, from our perspective, on the twenty- 
second of October—with, | should add, a severe case of 
concussion, blown-out eardrums, numerous lacerations and other 
injuries, you initially indicated that you were a prisoner at Wormwood 
Scrubs who was transferred into the Foundation D-Class 
programme. You have since revealed that you were a participant in 
an experiment by Dr Barker, which would be consistent with D-Class 
status. However, there is a reason | have not asked Dr Barker to join 
us today." 


"Before you respond to me | would like you to think very clearly and 
precisely about the consequences of what you say. The Foundation, 
as | say, is grateful to you. However, it also has rules, which exist for 
good reasons. We sometimes joke that they keep the sun on its 
course and the rains in their seasons. We should not joke—perhaps 
it is closer to the truth than perhaps we can bear. You have 
indicated during the interviews you have undertaken since October 
that you believe that the Foundation does not enter D-Class subjects 
into a graduated programme of release at the end of their shift but 
rather executes them. | would ask you to act in accordance with that 
belief. If what you believe is true, then a D-Class subject who