Kim is left alone in the antechamber. He stares at the outer door for 
a worried moment. He presses his ear to the door for a while, but 
hears nothing. Not even a faint tremble from the airlock mechanism. 


* 


Inside it's pitch dark for a few seconds, then some unseen sensor 
detects Wheeler's presence and brings the fluorescents up. Half of 
them, anyway. The others remain inert or flicker aggravatingly. 


The room's interior walls are made from milky white glass 
(bulletproof, Knowing Hughes) and plastered with paperwork, taped 
and Blu-Tacked up in vaguely coherent masses. Where there is no 
paperwork, people have drawn directly on the walls in marker pen. 
There is a conference table, long and elliptical, covered with more 
paperwork and a tangle of laptop computers and serpentine power 
supply cables. Power has returned to the machines and they are 
slowly booting. A data projector warms up and shines a map of the 
world over the far wall, almost lining up with a network of scribbled 
annotations on the same wall. Post-It notes of all colours litter the 
carpet like autumn leaves. 


Other than that, the room is empty. 


Skimming the paperwork, Wheeler discovers that nearly all of it is 
handwritten and most of it charts the progress of conversations. 
Most of the entries are dated and signed, and most of the dates are 
weeks apart. The conversations are panicked and fearful back-and- 
forths about dozens of SCPs, some of them antimemetic in nature 
but none of them obviously related to one another. None of the 
notes mention SCP-3125. 


The only name Wheeler recognises is her own, which appears on 
one in ten or twenty of the notes. The notes seem authentic and the 


handwriting is hers. But her notes also seem as desperate and 
uncertain in tone as everybody else's. This unnerves her. 


There are diagrams on the walls too, which are too complex to 
decode at a glance, but complex enough to make her eyes hurt to 
look at them. 


Still lost for a logical entry point to the data, Wheeler curses all of 
her predecessors. Asynchronous research — whereby the research 
topic is forgotten entirely between iterations, and rediscovered over 
and over — is a perfectly standard practice in the Antimemetics 
Division, and her people ought to be better trained than this. There 
should be an obvious single document to read first which makes 
sense of the rest. A primer— 


"Marion, it's me." 


Wheeler recognises the voice as her own. She moves around the 
table until she finds the laptop making the noise. There's a video 
playing, apparently recorded on the laptop's own camera in this 
room. 


The Marion Wheeler in the video is seated, and looks unfamiliar in a 
way which takes the one watching a moment to put her finger on. 
Not exhausted, not sick, not physically injured; she's seen herself 
that way before, in the mirror. This woman's willpower is gone. She's 
beaten. 


"You've guessed already that SCP-3125 is not in this room," she 
says. "In fact, this is the only room in the world where SCP-3125 is 
not present. It's called ‘inverted containment’. SCP-3125 pervades 
all of reality except for volumes which have been specifically 
shielded from its influence. This is it. This is our only safe harbor. 
This room represents the length and breadth of the war. 


"Every competent antimemetics research project finds SCP-3125's 
fingerprints sooner or later. It manifests all over the world, in 
thousands of different forms. Most of them aren't even anomalous. 
Some of them we already have catalogued separately in the main 
database. A very small number of them are even in containment. 
Impossibly virulent cults, broken arithmetic, invisible spiders as tall 


as skyscrapers, people born with extra organs which nobody can 
see. That's the raw data. Those manifestations are troublesome 
enough to deal with in their own right..." 


The Wheeler in the video casts around, picks up a bright green felt- 
tip pen and a blank piece of paper. She begins drawing a shape 
which isn't visible from the camera's perspective, while still talking. 


"But once you get a little further down the road you start to see a 
pattern emerging in the data. You need to have the training in 
memetic science, but once you have that training and you have the 
data in front of you, it only takes a little extra effort to arrange those 
data points in conceptual space and draw a contour through them. 
Those data points are points on SCP-3125's hull; those 
manifestations are the shadows it casts on our reality. You link four 
or five different SCPs together into a single shape, and you see it... 
And it sees you..." 


She's still drawing. It's detailed. She doesn't look up, and her tone of 
voice is distant, almost as if she's narrating the tail end of a 
frightening children's story: 


"When that happens, when you make 'eye contact’, it kills you. It kills 
you and it kills anybody who thinks like you. Physical distance 
doesn't matter, it's about mental proximity. Anybody with the same 
ideas, anybody in the same head space. It kills your collaborators, 
your whole research team. It kills your parents; it kills your children. 
You become absent humans, human-shaped shells surrounding 
holes in reality. And when it's done, your project is a hole in the 
ground, and nobody knows what SCP-3125 is anymore. It is a black 
hole in antimemetic science, consuming unwary researchers and 
yielding no information, only detectable through indirect observation. 
A true description of what SCP-3125 is, or even an allusion to what 
it is, constitutes a containment breach and a lethal indirect 
cognitohazard. 


"Do you see? It's a defense mechanism. This information- 
swallowing behaviour is just the outer layer, the poison coating. It 
protects the entity from discovery while it infests our reality. 


"And as years pass, the manifestations will continue, growing 


denser and knitting together... until the whole world is drowning in 
them, and everybody will be screaming 'Why did nobody realise 
what was happening?’ And nobody will answer, because everybody 
who realised was killed, by this system... 


"Do you see it, Marion? See it now." 


Wheeler is at the core of Foundation antimemetic science. She had 
all the raw data readily accessible. There are extensive written 
calculations on the walls, but she doesn't need to read them, she 
can do them in her head. All it took was that slightest push, that 
slightest suggestion. Staring through the laptop screen, eyes wide 
and defocused, she understands how it all links together. She sees 
SCP-3125. 


She feels dwarfed by it. She's encountered terrible, powerful ideas 
before, at every level of memeticity, and subdued them or even 
recruited them, but what she's picturing now is on another order of 
magnitude from what she knew to be possible. Now that she knows 
it's there, she can feel it like cosmic radiation, boring holes in the 
world with its thousands of manifestations and freely laying waste to 
anybody who recognises the larger pattern. It's not of reality, not of 
humanity. It is from a higher, worse place, and it is descending. 


The other Wheeler presents her finished diagram. She has drawn a 
mutated, fractally complex grasping hand with fivefold symmetry. It 
has no wrist or arm, just five long human fingers pointing in five 
directions. At its core, there's a pentagonal opening which could be 
a mouth. 


But the diagram was already there. It's plastered across the wall in 
the background of the video, plain as day, a meticulous collage in 
green, easily two metres in diameter and showing the same meme 
complex to a hundred times the level of detail. There are smaller 
diagrams of different elevations arrayed around it like spores, and its 
arms are spread wide around the seated Wheeler, who sits directly 
in front of the mouth, with her back to it. 


Wheeler, watching, does not realise this, and does not turn around. 


"How do you fight an enemy without ever discovering it exists?" the 


Wheeler in the video asks. "How do you win without even realising 
you're at war? What do we do? 


"Seven years ago there were more than four hundred antimemetics 
research groups worldwide. Government agencies, military 
branches, private corporations, university projects. Many of them 
were GOls or subdivisions of GOls. We were allied with most of 
them. We were at the spearhead of an Antimemetics Coalition which 
spanned the whole globe and thousands upon thousands of people. 
None of those groups still exist. The last one ceased to exist some 
time in the last seventy-two hours. 


"Three years ago, Foundation Antimemetics was an organisation of 
more than four thousand people. Now it's ninety. 


"There's no war. We've lost the war. It's over. This is the mopping-up 
operation. The only reason we still exist at all is because we have 
better amnestic biochemistry than anybody else in the world. 
Because that's all you can do when you see SCP-3125: run away 
and try to forget what you saw... seek oblivion in chemicals, or 
alcohol, or head trauma. And even that can't work every time. It's 
circling in. We meet it over and over again and we don't realise it. 
There's no way we can stop ourselves from rediscovering it! We're 
too damned smart!" 


She points at something on the wall, out of view of the laptop's 
camera. Wheeler, watching, turns to look. In an upper corner of the 
room there is a constellation of dizzyingly complicated schematics. 
Bart Hughes's initials are on every page. 


"There's a machine we could build. All it would take is eight years, a 
lab as big as West Virginia and all the money in the world. Nothing 
that the O5 Council would blink at if we went to them. But how do we 
build that machine without any of us realising what it's for? It would 
be like building and launching Apollo 11 without a single engineer 
deducing that the Moon existed. The logistics would be insane, but 
the secrecy would be well past impossible. Someone would start 
asking questions. And then it would be over. So what do we do?" 


"Find another way," Wheeler says to the unhearing recording. The 
fatalistic tone of voice makes her angry. "What's the hell's wrong 


SCP-583: Deathly Video Tape 


Item #: SCP-583 
Object Class: Euclid 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-583 is to be locked ina 
heavy-duty chrome steel safe. Any level-3 or higher personnel have 
access to the safe. A lethal security system is to be kept operative in 
the containment room for SCP-583 at all times. SCP-583 is fragile 
and must not approach or be approached by any magnetic field- 
generating material or device. SCP-583 is only as sturdy as a 
standard video tape and is to be handled with extreme care. 
SCP-583 must not be destroyed, due to continued research into 
[DATA EXPUNGED]. 


Description: SCP-583 is a Sony Color Collection 60-90 min Mini 
DV video tape, its case composed primarily of transparent green 
plastic. Details of the contents of the tape itself, as described by test 
subjects: 


¢ 0'00": Nothing on the tape for the first twelve seconds. 
¢ 0'12": Playback of a recording of "Sesame Street Live" begins, 
although with no sound. A date stamp of [REDACTED] is 


visible. 
° 2'58": starts choking and tries to get out of his costume. 
© 3'12": dies from apparent asphyxiation. During the next 


nineteen seconds, three other characters ([REDACTED], 
[REDACTED], and [REDACTED)) start choking and die in the 
same way. 

¢ 3'31": Recording stops. The rest of the tape is blank. 


Subjects who watch SCP-583's recording suffer from a unique 
perception disorder: after seeing [REDACTED] die of asphyxiation, 
subjects witness the similar death of every character, fictional or not, 
that they see on TV or in a movie, hear on radio, or read about, 
whether printed or in electronic format. This condition appears to be 


with you?" 


"...L could tell everybody to walk away. | could send a little message 
to myself saying ‘There's danger down this road, you should disband 
the Antimemetics Division and pursue other projects.’ But I'd be 
suspicious. I'd start asking questions. And then it would be over." 


Wheeler's now crouched in front of the video, trying to understand 
what she's watching. "What's wrong, Marion? Are you okay?" 


"| could kill myself in here," the recording says. "But my team would 
find SCP-3125 without me, and then they'd have to fight SCP-3125 
without me. It's going to happen soon, whatever happens. In the 
next two months at most. This year, it will be over. | may die in here 
anyway. I'm on so many mnestic drugs that my endocrine system is 
shutting down. Taking amnestics at the same time is the chemical 
equivalent to trepanation. | don't remember the last time | slept 
without having a nightmare about Adam, and I'm starting to forget 
whether SCP-4987 is a real thing or just the number that | gave to 
my life—" 


"You're not like this," Wheeler whispers. "You're stronger than this. 
What happened to you? Who's Adam?" 


"| don't know how we survive this. | don't know how we win. We're 
the last ones in the world. After us, there's nobody." 


Wheeler shakes her head, not believing it. 


"So I'm done. I'm going to walk out of this door and forget who | am 
and then I'm going to be you, Marion, and you trwoll have to figure a 
way out of this, because | can't." She gets up and moves offscreen. 
She can be heard breathing deeply. Her speech is starting to distort. 
"God, my eyes hurt. | think ilr starting infth mlaei inside." 


There's the sound of a door opening, and then a piercing pulse of 
sound and light which terminates the recording. 


* 


Wheeler stares at the dark screen for a long minute. 


She's never seen herself so weak, and it damages her ego a great 
deal to see that it's possible. She feels disconnected from what she 
saw, like it happened in an alternate universe. She feels revulsed 
and appalled by that version of her, more so to know that that 
version is still inside her somewhere. /t doesn't make sense. I'm 
looking at all of the same facts. What made her give up? What did 
she know that | don't? 


Who was Adam? 


The answer to this question is so obvious and sickening that she 
instinctively distrusts it. She circles around the answer, probing it, 
trying to find reasons to reject it, but it's inescapable. Adam was 
someone she knew when the video was recorded, now completely 
removed from her memory. Adam was someone the thought of 
whose safety paralysed her with fear. Someone in the same head 
space. Someone she couldn't bear to lose. 


And then she lost. 
But what if... 


(But how'd the room get built in the first place? Anybody's guess. 
Wheeler imagines Hughes building it as a proof-of-concept, followed 
by a cascading series of lucky chances which led to it becoming the 
war room. Someone discovered SCP-3125 at random, while sealed 
in the room; they wrote notes to themselves which set up the 
skeletal external SCP database entry and the containment 
procedures; most of the paperwork and computer hardware was left 
behind by later visitors... It could have happened...) 


But what if there's another room? 


Unbidden, a cute factoid comes back to her right then. Site 41 is 
almost completely vacant. In particular, two hundred metres below 
Site 41 there's an empty heavy engineering lab, an underground 
complex the size of a hockey stadium. Self-contained, in pristine 
condition, totally disused. Sealed up, original purpose forgotten. 
Nobody has entered it in living memory. Built who-knows-how-many 
decades back by a dead generation of antimemeticists. 


What if that's where we built our weapon? 


Do | really believe I'm that smart? That my team and | had that much 
foresight? That we got that lucky? 


She turns to look at the airlock, running the numbers in her head.