Anyway, by this point we're on like hour 60, and this thing is getting 
real close, but the closer it got, the slower it got, and we started to 
get our hopes up as the maths heads calculated the trajectory and 
velocity, we started to wonder whether we’d all been worrying about 
nothing the whole time, and it was going to get closer and slower, 
and closer and slower, and never actually touch at all. You ever hear 
of Zeno’s Arrow? It was this thought experiment, right, where it was 
posited that if you fire an arrow at a tortoise, the arrow moves 
towards the tortoise, but the tortoise moves a bit too, real slow, and 
the arrow has moved a bit closer, but by that point the tortoise has 


moved on a bit too, and although the arrow keeps getting closer to 
the tortoise, each time it gets to where the tortoise was, the tortoise 
has moved forwards a bit. Of course this was only a thought 
experiment, as if you tried it practically you’d better have a lot of 
tortoises, right? But we started to wonder if it was going that way. 
Zeno’s Arrow reflected, in the dark mirror of our fears. 


Of course, we couldn’t actually risk that happening, because what if 
we're wrong? That was a phrase that got said over and over again in 
those couple of days. ‘What if we’re wrong?’ and then a long pause, 
because nobody had a good answer for it. Then one of the guys 
who had been keeping quiet and going through item lists for the last 
sixteen hours popped up and asked ‘How about this?’ and held up a 
report we'd all missed entirely. It was virtually orange, the paper was 
so old, and it was one of the really old ones which was signed at the 
bottom, in faded blue ink, by one of the senior staffers. The writeup 
was pretty vague by today’s standards, but it said enough. We were 
looking at two universes connected by a single quantum event of a 
relatively small divergence. You know, a tree did or didn’t fall over, a 
bath did or didn’t overflow, the small stuff. And the boffins decided 
that there was a way of pushing everything over to the next universe 
along. Lots of people did lots of maths, and it was decided that it 
was the best way to go if it looked like things were going awry. 


| mean, it was risky, but the risks involved were all assessed, and 
the vast majority of likelihoods were deemed to be less disastrous 
than letting the Twins meet. The phrase ‘caught between a rock and 
a hard place’ had never been so apt. 


By this point the orbiter was on what was clearly its final orbit, it was 
travelling slightly slower than my Taurus, and was moving straight at 
us. It wasn’t making any unusual moves now, and the Earth was 
seemingly staying where it was, which we unanimously decided was 
a very good thing, as if there were any more sudden movements we 
could end up with a hole smashed through the centre of the earth, 
and that would be a whole other problem, especially given the 
amount of underground storage we have onsite. Might have sorted 
Eight-Two out, though. 


Three hundred and forty four meters, that was the distance between 
the two that they finally decided to push the switch. | say push the 


switch, because that’s exactly what they had to do. Open the lid, flip 
the lock and press the switch, and then it was done. 


We were still there, still standing in the same room, still wearing the 
same clothes. There was no way of finding out what was different in 
this iteration of the universe. Nothing we could detect, but it could 
have been a trilobite born with an extra leg thirty million years ago, 
or anything from any time. All that mattered was that in this 
dimension, the balls were where they were supposed to be, and 
path calculation showed that they weren’t showing any signs of path 
collision any time in the next nine hundred million years. That’s good 
enough for me. 


So with that all done and all the parties dying down, things settled 
down again, and people stopped talking about it. They stopped 
remembering it, they stopped knowing that it had even happened, 
and now I’m talking to you about it because I’m the last one in the 
office that remembers a damn thing about it. | don’t know why, but if 
it's up to me then it’s up to me, so we know what to do next time. So 
| went to put the doc back in file, and it was going back to the really 
old file room, up on a dusty shelf next to a binder with the same 
number on it. So | pulled down the binder, and it was full, and | 
mean FULL of pages, thousands of them, with nothing on but little 
lines, you know, the gates like on the sides of planes, show how 
many kills they have. | flicked through and there were millions of 
them. | had to have a look at the last page, and there it was, a nice 
new blue line, still shiny, third in the gate. | put the folder back and 
tried not to think about it too hard. That’s what gets you through a lot 
of the time. Don’t think too hard. 


So | did a bit of reading, physics guys talking about infinite-universes 
theory, and I’m hoping like hell that they ARE infinite. Or at least that 
we've got one left. 


What, you’re at the end of the tape? We still use tape? 
End of Audio Log 


TRANSCRIPT AND LOG SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE DELETION 
AND DESTRUCTION 


terminated D-class. 


Note: We still don't know how to recreate any of the impossible 
knots or phenomena. Further testing will be more controlled—until 
then, no one is allowed to touch it. - Dr. L 


« SCP-995 | SCP-996 | SCP-997 » 


We Who Poke With Sticks 


The following article was featured in the October 2014 
issue of the Foundation Employee Magazine. The 
author, D-5209294, provides an interesting and deeply 
personal perspective of what it’s like to oversee the 
preliminary identification of Class-E anomalies. 


Some names and facts have been altered so that this 
piece could be made available to the general Foundation 
employee community. 


They’re letting me write now. Gave me a Hewlett-Packard laptop 
with Microsoft Word on it and everything. What's truly impressive is 
that it only took them a week to process my request. People around 
here complain endlessly about how "you'll just be told 'no," and how 
"they never give you anything,” but the simple reality is that if you’ve 
paid your dues and filled out your paperwork correctly, the 
Foundation doesn’t mind making some concessions now and then. 


Anyway. Hello. 


| am a professional stick watcher, and | love my job a little bit too 
much. 


To put it a bit more formally, |am a Preliminary Identification 
Supervisor at Site-313. For the benefit of those involved in other 
operations, I'll give a brief overview of how preliminary containment 
works. 


After field agents have confirmed the presence of anomalous activity 
on ascene, a preliminary containment task force is deployed. This 
task force consists of two teams: Isolation and Identification. 
Isolation sets up a perimeter around the presumed location of the 
anomaly, and Identification is responsible for figuring out what the 


anomaly actually is. 


I’ve been working in Preliminary Identification since 2002. It’s rare 
that | get to interact with anyone other than my handlers and co- 
workers, but after being in this business for over a decade, it’s 
become clear that personnel from other areas of the Foundation 
hold a lot of misconceptions about Prelim ID. I’m writing this article 
to hopefully clear up these misunderstandings. 


Many seem to be under the impression that we’re nothing more than 
monster bait. They think we’re just a bunch of expendable Class-Ds 
who do nothing but wander around stupidly until the boogeymen 
jump out and attack. This is completely untrue; most of the field 
agents who arrive before us can spot an aggressive entity within 
minutes. When that happens, my team isn’t even needed. 


The best way to explain what we actually do is to describe what a 
typical day on the field looks like. I'll use today’s assignment as an 
example, since it’s still fresh on my mind. 


Every assignment begins with one of my handlers giving me a 
manila envelope with my Class-D serial number stamped on the 
front in red ink. Inside are documents pertaining to the case, and if 
I'm lucky, a handful of photographs. The initial batch of files never 
spends more than one or two lines describing the actual anomaly— 
which is natural, since nothing else is known about it at that point. 
These envelopes are the only existing documents relating to that 
anomaly at that moment. I’ve been told that most of the photographs 
included in my briefs are taken no more than ten minutes before the 
time | receive them. 


Today’s envelope contained an automatically generated profile of 
the anomalously affected individual (i.e. "the victim"), Miranda 
Baclaran, a 27-year-old graphic designer from Connecticut. She was 
born in California to two immigrants from the Philippines. She lived 
alone. She had been living in her current home for two years and 
working at her current job for three. Medical history, work 
background, ancestry, and other potentially relevant details are also 
included. | am expected to have read and memorized the bulk of this 
information by the time | arrive at the scene. A list of the victim's 
credit card transactions from the past six months was also included, 


but | am not required to memorize these. 


When | enter my transport vehicle, I’m handed a secondary file with 
details on what actually happened. 


At 2:48 in the afternoon, the victim's neighbors called the police, 
reporting loud screams coming from inside her home. They were 
worried that her ex-boyfriend had returned and was attempting to 
murder her. When the police entered the victim's house at 3:02, they 
discovered that her biological structure had been anomalously 
altered. Their frantic and confused phone call to their superiors 
triggered the automated notification system on the Foundation 
Surveillance Network, and field agents from the nearest Foundation 
outpost were dispatched to begin preliminary isolation of the victim’s 
home and confirm the influence of anomalous activity on the victim. 


Confirmation was very easy in this case. Comparing the victim’s 
face to the photo on Miranda’s driver license showed that it was 
clearly the same person, but her sensory organs had been 
drastically altered. There were tongues flapping wildly underneath 
her eyelids, and every two minutes she regurgitated eyes the size of 
tennis balls that she claimed she could see out of. She didn’t know 
what had done this to her. 


My team’s job was to find out. 


Usually it’s some sort of object. Sometimes it’s another person, or 
even the victim themselves. Sometimes it’s a word or phrase the 
victim heard over the phone or on the television. Sometimes it’s the 
stretch of land the victim was standing on. Sometimes it doesn’t 
seem to be anything at all, and the case is marked as an Anomalous 
Event. But usually— in fact, almost always-— it’s an object. A thing. 


It would be very convenient if they were big, scary, blatantly 
paranormal things like ancient talismans or porcelain clown dolls or 
books bound in human skin, but anomalies like those almost never 
show up, and when they do, we don't have the clearance to get 
anywhere near them. Virtually all of the anomalies I've identified 
over the years have been perfectly innocuous and ordinary in 
appearance. That's what makes our job so difficult. Out of all the 
various things the victim owns and has been in contact with, any one 


of those things could be the Thing. As you can imagine, finding the 
Thing among hundreds of other things can be an absolutely massive 
task. 


Some of you may have heard that Identification utilizes high-tech 
devices called Kant Counters to locate anomalies. These devices 
are indeed real and also incredibly useful. When calibrated properly, 
a Kant Counter can instantly pinpoint the location of an anomalous 
object in an airplane hangar full of junk. The Kant Counter is, without 
a doubt, a miracle of modern science. 


But like so many other miracles of modern science, Kant Counters 
cost a fortune and are only given to a select few. So without the aid 
of any high-tech gadgets, the majority of Prelim ID teams have to 
search for anomalies old-fashioned way, which is by poking 
everything with a stick until something eventually pokes back. 


On today’s assignment, my sticks were named Thomas, Jonah, 
Shelby, and Bridget. 


A lot of folks believe that Class-Ds are only allowed to refer to each 
other by their personnel numbers. This may be true for on-site 
facilities, but it’s rarely the case with off-site jobs. In order to work 
together quickly and efficiently, we need to call each other 
something, and when you're pressed for time like we are, nobody 
expects you to waste precious minutes and mental energy on 
memorizing a random string of numbers. 


The five of us arrived at the victim’s house at 4:39 that afternoon. 
We rolled up to the building in a local police car and stepped out 
dressed in local police uniforms. Many of you may find this 
surprising; people tend to have this mental image of Class-Ds as a 
bunch of tattooed thugs in orange jumpsuits. In actuality, most of us 
look like normal, everyday people, which works to our advantage on 
the field. 


Presenting a fagade of normalcy is an essential part of preliminary 
containment, and it’s hard to do that when you have a bunch of guys 
in orange jumpsuits being escorted out of armored vehicles. That’s 
why we're also given the freedom to drive and move around without 
a handler. This might sound like a glaring breach of safety, but it’s 


actually very rare for anyone to try to run. The Foundation trusts us 
to do our jobs, and we trust the Foundation to quickly dispose of us 
if we try anything funny. 


After we met up with the guys from Isolation and confirmed that the 
area was secure, we briefly exchange names and set to work. The 
“sticks’— an affectionate title given to my colleagues —went inside 
and did their initial poke-over, touching everything in the building. 
Anomalous materials often transmit their effects via physical contact, 
so poking is usually the fastest way to find an obvious anomaly. | 
never enter the building until the initial sweep has been completed, 
just in case the anomaly is memetic or cognitohazardous. 


If the anomaly isn’t identified during the poke-over, a more thorough 
investigation is necessary. This was the case today. | entered the 
building, double checked that everything had been properly poked, 
and began instructing the sticks to interact with objects in various 
ways. Clothes were put on. Appliances were activated. Chairs were 
sat in. The sticks interact with everyday objects in everyday ways, 
trying to find the anomaly by triggering its effects. My job is to come 
up with things for them to try and to monitor them for signs of 
anomalous exposure. It’s a job that requires a lot of creativity and 
attention to detail, but thankfully, these are areas in which | happen 
to excel.