“Of course!” SCP-2006 leapt up onto the back of its seat as it shifted 
into a rubber pterodactyl of enormous size, somehow not falling off 
the headrest. It turned its glued-on googly eyes to face Jo, and as 
one of the eyeballs rolled haphazardly back and forth in its plastic 
case, she stifled a laugh. “This place is full of the best scary movies, 
there are all sorts of people to practice my scaring skills on so | can 
keep them top notch, and best of all, | can sit down and watch 
movies with you!” 


“What if | told you there was another way, 2006?” Jo began. 
SCP-2006 tilted its pterodactyl head in what was probably confusion 
(though it was hard to tell given its current form). "What if | told you 
you could interact with more people, scare more people, and watch 
scary movies all day to your heart's-" 


The memetic kill agent that flashed before her eyes didn’t give Jo 
time to finish her semi-accidental containment breach. She slumped 
motionless in her folding chair as SCP-2006 looked on. 


“Miss Jo?” SCP-2006 examined her lifeless body closely. It poked 
her with one green, rubber wing. She didn’t respond. “Did | scare 
you to death? | knew it! | knew | was the scariest. No one can say | 
don’t still got it!” It settled back into its chair to finish the movie. 


Jo’s dead eyes stared at the screen, but saw nothing. Dr. Devane 
sipped his tea and mentally apologized to his underling while he 
typed up the final memorandum recording her death. 


Interviewed: SCP-2006 
Interviewer: Dr. D 


Foreword: SCP-2006 has been lethargic lately, and has 
shown decidedly lackluster excitement in causing fear 
and terror in all researchers and D-Class assigned to it. 
Dr.D _was assigned to investigate possible causes for 
this psychological lapse. 


<Begin Log> 


Dr.D enters 2006's cell to find it hovering in a corner 
in its spherical form. 


Dr.D = :SCP-2006? Are you- oh dear heavens! 


Clattering can be heard as Dr.D ‘leaps away from the 
SCP in mock fear and shock. 2006 does not change its 
form. 


SCP-2006: Oh, you’re scared. Good, | suppose. 


Dr.D  : Well, of course, 2006. You're the master of 
fear. 


SCP-2006: Sometimes | wish | wasn't. 
Dr.D  : What do you mean? 
SCP-2006: Why didn’t Miss Jo get back up? 


Dr.D  : Miss Jo? Beat. Oh, Junior Researcher Lowe. 
Well, you scared her to death. You’re the master of fear, 
2006. No one else could have done it. 


SCP-2006: | scared her to death? 


Dr.D__: You sure did. There’s no one as scary as you, 
2006. 


SCP-2006: But why didn’t she get back up when the 
movie was over? 


Dr.D  : I’m... I’m afraid | don’t understand. 


SCP-2006: Well, when human beings die, like when a 
shark eats them or they get their brain sucked out by 
Martians, they get better so they can do it again 
afterwards. 


Dr.D  :Ah.I|see. 
Silence. 


SCP-2006: If Jo isn’t getting up yet, can you tell me 
when she does? And then tell me when she’s coming 
back? | miss her. | miss movie nights, and popcorn, and 
rabid nuclear bunny rabbits. 


Dr.D — : 1 will make sure to, um... 


Dr.D _ trails off before clearing his throat. He screams 
at the top of his lungs. 2006 does not move or change its 
appearance. 


Dr.D  : Oh dear, 2006. | thought you were a horrible 
abomination from beyond Jupiter! 


SCP-2006: I’m still right here, doc. | haven’t even 
changed. Don’t really feel like it. 


Dr.D_— : Why is that? 


SCP-2006: Fear is the best emotion. It’s fun and exciting 
and makes your [DATA EXPUNGED] pump like 
[REDACTED]. It’s something Miss Jo and | could share. 
You wanna know what the worst emotion is? 


Dr.D_ :1|... Beat. Yes, | do. 


SCP-2006: The emotion where you want somebody to 
come visit you but you don’t know where they went or if 
they’re ever coming back. 


Dr.D_— : ‘Longing’. The word you're looking for is 
‘longing’, 2006. 


SCP-2006: | don’t want to look for it. | don’t want to feel it 
ever again. It’s horrible and lonely and makes things not 
scary anymore. | want it to go away until weasels rip its 
flesh and then never come back. 


A longer silence. Dr.D clears his throat again. 


Dr.D — : Well, | think I've got everything | need. Thank 
you, 2006. I'll see you next month. 


SCP-2006: Will you tell me when Miss Jo gets better? 


Dr.D_— : Of course. | will alert you the moment she 
returns. 


SCP-2006: Good. Scaring people just isn't the same 
anymore. Miss Jo is smart. She might be able to tell me 
why. 


<End Log> 


Closing Statement: Following Incident 2006-Lowe, 
SCP-2006’s containment procedures no longer require 
acting courses. Screening films should be discontinued 
as well, as it no longer seems to affect 2006’s behavior. 
Any requests for a 'Miss Jo' or similar individual should 
be ignored or deflected. 


Worst Case Scenario 


Worst Case Scenario 
"Assume that everything I've told you is true." 
"What's the worst case scenario?" 


It's my job to answer that question; it's been my job for the past 22 
years. I've been asked that same question by everyone from 
tobacco company executives to defense contractors. My life and 
livelihood depended on giving them the right answers. This one had 
degraded into nonsense; this "doctor" was screwing around and | 
couldn't understand why. The situation he had laid out was absurd 
— the whole interview was absurd — but | was once more being 
paid good money to answer that question even if the question and 
consequent answers didn't make a lot of sense. 


"Doctor, at that point things would be bad. You would have lost 
containment entirely, everyone who could stop the spread would be 
dead, and over the next 24 hours everyone within a hundred miles 
would be at risk. But at that point, the worst case scenario is that 
reestablishing containment is the least of your worries because a 
previously undiscovered deep space object was just detected 
coming out of our observational blind spot behind the sun on a 
collision course with earth, leaving us only a few hours to come to 
terms with our inevitable destruction. That's always the worst case 
scenario." 


You know what they say - garbage in, garbage out. 


"It's been done. September 1992. One of my junior researchers 
assigned to the L3 observatory spotted it with a good two weeks' 
notice. That was the day the observatory paid for itself. It could have 
been bad, but we took a few notes for next time and went about our 
business. 


"If you'll excuse me for a minute, I'll be right back with something for 
you." 


He had to be screwing with me. But nobody with the security 
clearance he had provided would bring me in just to screw around. 
The nondisclosure agreements he had signed to get me in here had 
been drawn up by some of the world's best lawyers, this wasn't for 
anyone else's amusement. Bits and pieces of memories in the back 
of my mind started to come together. | tried to remember what | had 
heard on the news, 1994, mass casualty incident at Mill Cove, 
officials blamed an outbreak of a strain of Avian flu that was thought 
to have been extinct. 


| have to give him credit, he's planted enough doubt in my mind that 
| was starting to question what | knew to have happened. But my 
imagination was running wild and | had broken into a cold sweat by 
the time he came back. He slid three folders over to me and asked 
me to read each one carefully and let him know when | was done. | 
took about ten minutes poring over details of each. For what they 
were paying me, I'd figured I'd play along. | looked back up and he 
spoke again, "Same question. Assuming these files are true, what's 
the worst case scenario?" 


| handed him the first of the folders and said, "This one is easy. 
Don't let anyone touch it without gloves. Put it in a locker 
somewhere and don't let people have the key. That's it, it can't do 
anything if it's locked in a box. Your worst case scenario is that 
someone doesn't think it's dangerous and tries to play with it." 


| thumbed through the second folder again and handed it to him. | 
responded, "This one's a bit more touchy. Keep it away from people, 
and require people assigned to it run any decisions by someone off- 
site. The worst case is that you let people start to empathize and let 
it out." 


| slid the third folder across the desk and managed to keep a straight 
face. This one was a stupid joke, some kind of test that a 
psychology degree dropout would come up with to make sure you're 
thinking outside the box. "Doctor, this is not something you're 
prepared to deal with; it's an out-of-context problem straight out of a 
science fiction writer's mind. You can't contain it because it figures 


evolved alongside us. We walked in the daytime, they 
walked in the nighttime, our nocturnal siblings in the 
shadows. 


But while we were still wandering hunter-gatherers, 
they... changed. Like we would, a few thousand years 
later. Tools. Weapons. Agriculture. Domesticated 
animals. Stable settlements. As humanity blinked in the 
Pleistocene sun, SCP-1000's population exploded 
across the night. They blanketed the planet in the tens of 
billions. 


They made things that we still can't comprehend, even 
though we've thoroughly studied the surviving pieces. 
Organic technology. They made trees and birds of prey 
grow into fast-moving ships, herds of animals that 
became trains, bushes that became flying vehicles. From 
insects and pigeons they made things equivalent to cell 
phones, televisions, computers. Atomic bombs. The 
Children describe vast shining cities, stretching across 
glaciers and penetrating the deepest caverns, grown 
skyships of ivory and spider-silk, creatures tending them 
with hundreds of blinking eyes. 


We were rare, like gorillas now, a few hundred thousand 
left at best. We avoided their settlements just like wild 
animals today avoid ours. SCP-1000 understood we 
were intelligent like them, but avoided us just as we 
avoided them, saw us as fairies, as gnomes, ascribed us 
supernatural powers, said we ate bad children while they 
slept in daylight. They fenced off our dwindling wild 
populations in conservatories, outlawed poaching but in 
the underground consumed our bones as aphrodisiacs. 


Then their civilization fell. And we did it. By 'we' | don't 
mean the Foundation. By 'we', | mean humanity. 


The story is muddy. Supposedly a trickster forest god 
showed humanity favor, showed us the master's tools 
and how to use them. Why we did it, we don't know. 
Perhaps they hunted us, perhaps we were simply afraid. 


out what you're doing and breaks out. Every time you try to do 
something about it, it gets stronger. One day you're going to try 
something outrageous and it's going to outsmart you, then it's going 
to kill you. Then it's going to kill everything else it can. Then 
someday a few billion years from now, when lightning strikes a pool 
of mud and some sort of primitive self-replicating molecule forms, it's 
going to find and destroy that. This thing is the worst case scenario. 


"Do you have any more questions?" 


"No, Mr. Hanford, I'd like to offer you a job with The Foundation." 


Worth a Shot 


It was March 6th, and New York was still. 


Doctor Selvece fished a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of his 
backpack and stared at the dead shell of Midtown Manhattan. 
Corpses lined every street, as did the various things they'd left 
behind - a wallet here, a beer bottle there. Cars were parked, 
abandoned, and crashed as far as he could see in either direction; 
the city was a junkyard and a graveyard joined together in 
haphazard fashion. Walls were still decorated with graffiti he'd seen 
a lot in the final few days he was above ground - "THIS IS THE 
END", "GOODBYE TO EVERYONE", and so on. 


As his eyes followed the cigarette smoke traveling upward and 
vanishing with the wind, he contemplated the closing months of 
civilization. 


DoctorHongSite68: Hello? Is anyone there? 
DoctorSevleceSite68: Hong? It's me, Selvece. 
Verification: "History is a cycle of mistakes." 
DoctorHongSite68: Oh man | can't believe you're still 
alive. | had to abandon Site 68 a few hours ago - there 
was a containment breach and the MTF we assigned to 
it almost all shot themselves. How did you get access to 
this network? 

DoctorSelveceSite68: | am monitoring the development 
of SCP-3519 from my current location. The emergency 
site FRC was still working, and nobody was using it. 
Likely because they are dead. 

DoctorHongSite68: Yeah, I'm the only one who wasn't 
infected at 68, as far as | know. | was in an isolated 
containment unit when the countermeme was deployed, 
but it didn't make it to anyone else before their infection 
was irreversible. 


DoctorSelveceSite68: That's about as bad as | 
imagined. | was in New York when things started to get 
really bad in January and hunkered down in a bunker | 
had constructed here awhile ago. 

DoctorHongSite68: Wait a minute, a bunker? How did 
the rest of the Foundation not know about it? Were you 
alone? 

DoctorSelveceSite68: Yes to the latter question. | had it 
built for myself in case the worst happened, and issued 
amnestics to the construction workers. 
DoctorHongSite68: RAISA would've found out about 
that...just how long ago did you build this thing? 
DoctorSelveceSite68: Long enough. 
DoctorHongSite68: Well, the important thing is that 
you're alive, and so am I. 

DoctorSelveceSite68: March 5th is still more than two 
weeks away. Wherever you are, you need to stay away 
from other people until then. And by other people, | mean 
everyone but me 

DoctorSelveceSite68: From what we understand, the 
infection has become more aggressive as the date 
approaches. Countermemes may not be sufficient at this 
point if you are exposed to an eschatological concept. 
DoctorSelveceSite68: Avoid all news outlets still 
broadcasting/publishing 

DoctorHongSite68: Sounds like a good idea. But what 
about after that? 

DoctorSelveceSite68: To be honest, | don't know. 
There's not that many people left. 

DoctorHongSite68: | do. 

DoctorSevleceSite68: ? 

DoctorHongSite68: There's a place | know the infection 
didn't get to. A place of safety, free from the troubles of 
the world. 

DoctorSelveceSite68: What on earth are you talking 
about? 

DoctorHongSite68: Sending the file over now. 
DoctorHongSite68: Did you get it? 
DoctorSelveceSite68: Doctor Hong, | suspect you are 
currently infected by a Keter-class cognitohazard. | am 


closing this channel now. 

[TERMINATING FRC CHAT #S68Emergency; 15 
SECONDS] 

DoctorHongSite68: It's not a cognitohazard. It's the 
truth. And I'm going there once this is all over. 
DoctorHongSite68: Good luck with whatever you do, 
Selvece. | hope | see you in paradise. 

[CHANNEL CLOSED] 


It took until April for him to read the rest of the file. Part of that was 
because he'd been occupied with surviving, moving into a nice 
apartment near Central Park and stocking it with everything his 
survivalist instincts could think of. But mostly, he was apprehensive 
about whatever SCP-3891 had done to infect someone who had 
survived the cognitohazard that everyone else hadn't. What 
would've been the point of living past the 5th if another SCP finished 
the job? 


But after weeks of trekking through a ghost city now being reclaimed 
by nature and reading whatever books could take his mind off of his 
surroundings, his curiosity could be held back no longer. 


At first, his worst fears for his friend and fellow researcher were 
confirmed. 


Although the cognitohazardous properties of SCP-3891 
preclude detailed investigation, these individuals are 
presumed deceased given the inability of SCP-3891 to 
support any significant population for extended periods 
of time. 


He was wrong. There's nothing for us there. 
Then he read on. 


SCP-3891 has a permanent population of between 250 
and 300 individuals, 


And on. 


being a place of safety, free from the troubles of the 
world