Special Containment Procedures: SCP-630 is contained m 
underground, in the remains of acopper mine, kmonorthof  , 
Peru( ° ' "S, ° ' "W). The chamber containing SCP-630 is to 
be as brightly lit as resources allow using LED and fluorescent lights 
and sealed behind blast doors. Weekly maintenance is to be 
performed by class D personnel only, including: 


¢ Inspecting and replacing any burnt out lights. 
¢ Use of provided GPS and sonar rangefinders to measure and 
plot movement of the leading edge of SCP-630. 


Since the — copper mine lies in one of the harshest desert 
environments on the planet and contains no other SCP entities, 
containment is as simple as restricting access to the mine and 
proper handling of persons affected. SCP-630 is estimated to move 
at a rate of 30 meters a year through an extensive system of 
caverns, and research is being conducted on its future path as well 
as mapping expeditions into the caves. As long as it remains 
contained, SCP-630's movement is not projected to pose a direct 
threat to populated areas. 


Handling of any samples of SCP-630 or affected materials is to be 
done only with full reflective thermal gear. Any person exposed to 
direct skin contact with SCP-630 is to be considered dangerous and 
is classified as SCP-630-1. Exposed subjects are to be quarantined 
until arrangements can be made for their disposal. Samples of 
SCP-630 and remains of SCP-630-1 subjects are to be disposed of 
by ignition from a distance with a mixture of aluminum and sodium 
hydroxide. 


Description: SCP-630 is a 130 meter wide underground glacier 


Event Data: Happy birthday Kim. Daddy loves you. 


Command:\users\personnel\lssac_Holland>_ logout 


YOU ARE NOW LOGGED OUT. 


She's Angry and Going South 


He sank his knife into the seal which stared up at him without 
flinching as all the seals had on his trip south. Its hot blood steamed 
and coagulated on the ice as it flailed weakly, uncomprehendingly, 
looking up at Teriaq as if to say "What? What is happening to me?". 
He offered it his canteen, pouring out a bit of his water for the dying 
creature to drink. Respect. When it stopped moving he started 
skinning, splitting the seal from tail to ears. He tossed the skin into 
the polynya, no way to tan it, no way to know if he'd remember how 
to. The ribs were opened next and the intestines drawn out, they too 
were tossed into the hole. The meat he saved, cut in strips and 
wrapped in discarded tee shirts. The blubber was added to the 
nearly-empty jar he'd stowed away on the sled, towed behind the 
snowmobile. He fought the temptation to swallow some. He was 
hungry. Arctic exertion burned away his calories. He felt himself 
grow thinner inside his four layers of cloths. Instead, he chewed ona 
strip that was still warm. A fading memory said that his blood would 
be redder and his breath hotter. He didn't know why. He didn't 
remember why. 


He continued to chew on the fresh, bloody meat as it steamed in the 
sub-freezing air as he walked back to camp. Top half of the red 
survival tent stood out on the ice along with a freshly-excavated, 
black snowmobile. It was the first he'd been outside in a week, the 
howling winds had held him in. It was July. July in the Gulf of 
Booethia. The ice should have retreated but it was back early. 
Against season and greenhouse gas it returned bringing snow and 
wind with it. Teriagq knew why. 


When he closed his eyes he saw it again. The beginning. Green ice. 
Blue skies. Brown stones, slick with blubber and blood. A gasping 
beluga, half-dead, stares out with panicked eyes, unknowing. On 
breakers, wine-colored with blood white whales float like limp, cotton 
rags on the tide. Still more of them come to throw themselves 


against the rocks. Leaping gleefully and squealing they push out of 
the waves and onto the cobble. The dead bake in the constant, 
summer sun of the arctic. He stood and watched with his old friend 
Fullorush. 


"They're supposed to be in the inlet." Teriag grasped for meaningful 
words. "It's calving season." He looked at Fullbrush whose eyes 
were unreadable behind the sunglasses. "Doesn't this bother you?" 


"Beachings are always sad, Teriag, but what do you want me to do? 
Cry? That's not why we're here. We're only supposed to look like a 
field station. We're not actually supposed to be ecologists." 


Gulls came. They picked at the washed up carcasses. They pecked 
out the eyes of the living but weak. The beaching was a buffet for 
the children of Sila. The tell-tale flukes of orcas cut the deep water; 
they'd been coming further and further north with the permanent 
retreat of the sea ice. Teriaq watched as they swam inward toward 
the carnage, watched as they ate the confused and concussed white 
whales. Some surfed their way into the shallows. The gulls did not 
scatter. They did not react. They continued eating, dumb and 
oblivious. Some tried to fly but faltered on the air. The rest ate. 


That was when the first orca, limp, confused, washed ashore. 
"Get on the radio," Teriaq said. 


Their receivers erupted in static and screams. 


Teriaq bundled into his tent for the night. It was screwed to the skin 
of the sea and held down by hundreds of pounds of drifted snow. It 
wouldn't move unless the ice did. He lit the small, gas stove in the 
tent's vestibule, put some snow in a pot to melt. He fished around in 
the rucksack for something else to eat and produced 2 nearly empty 
peanut butter containers and some crackers. He scraped the last of 
the peanut butter out, spread it on the crackers. Licked his fingers. 
Still hungry he had more seal meat, this time cooked on that same 
stove in the animal's own blubber. He hoped the heat would kill 
whatever it was in the fat that fogged him. 


He had had several weeks of fuel and less food when he first ran 
from 641. Not nearly enough to make it to the nearest "city" which 
was half a continent away. There was a chance of making 300 miles 
to the nearest town. A good chance if the snowmobile didn't die on 
him. Food was a problem. In the Arctic you're supposed to eat 6000 
calories a day; the easiest movements are hard in the cold. Teriaq 
had been eating less than that. His clothes hung looser. 


There is no dawn this far north in the summer. Teriag woke to the 
sound of a thuds against the tent. He donned his outer layers and 
stepped outside. A puffin had fallen from the sky and broken its neck 
against one of the struts. Still more lay in various states of injury and 
death on the ice. A rain of birds that had forgotten how to fly. 
Unnerved, Teriag put extra effort into breaking camp. 


The growl of the snow mobile carried him away from the birds. He 
kept his eyes on the ice, sticking to thick, white ice. Young, black ice 
is thin and wouldn't support his weight, let alone the weight of the 
snow mobile. Gray ice is shifty and brittle, the result of many freeze- 
thaws where the currents are strongest. Worst was green. Green 
was Her color and he knew that no amount of incense and combing 
could undo the crime that made Her freeze the seas. He sped north 
east, hopefully he'd hit the western coast of Baffin Island soon. The 
coast meant national parks and national parks meant park rangers, 
Inuit villages, people of some kind. He'd be able to contact his 
employer's employers. He'd be able to let them know that She'd 
escaped, and importantly, why She'd escaped. 


Janet Tyrease Clinton hunched into her coat. The bridge of the 
icecutter was cold and the trip was long and slow. She felt the hum 
of the water deluge system through the hull and the sharp cracks in 
the sea ice against the bow of the USCG Healy. They'd reached the 
Barrow Strait after a month of icebreaking. The slow pace chaffed at 
her, so close to their goal. So close to the epicenter. 


She pulled out her Foundation-issued laptop and connected to the 
satellite intranet to distract, to remind, to motivate herself through 
the next week's grind. There, mass amnesia in Norway as 
contaminated, salted fish are accidentally introduced to ice-locked 
coastal villages. The ruins of downtown Tokyo as drivers, pilots, 


pedestrians, forgot traffic signals. Fire fighters lost the wherewithal 
to put out the burn, haphazardly spraying water on smoldering ruins. 
In America millions of pounds of contaminated fish sticks had 
entered the school lunches. Children forgot their parents' names. 
There were lakes where the water would make you forget how to 
swim or which way the surface was. Another mass beaching of 
whales, this time in Southern California, 30 minutes outside San 
Diego. In the arctic the ice had returned, spreading out from 
Somerset Island against season, current and tide. 


"You seem troubled, Lady Clinton," said Eugenio through his text-to- 
speech translator. "Is there anything | can do to help?" 


She looked at the fox. It sat on a stool, uncanny eyes staring at her 
over the console. "No, nothing. How is the Weather Knight doing?" 


"Ah, the little chap has been doing his best to keep the wind under 
control but the further we go north the harder it is." A pause, the 
fox's paws bapped at an oversize keyboard. "He could probably do 
with an inspection from you, Lady Clinton." 


She nodded her ascent. Eugenio was prone to polite 
understatement. The fox king claimed this was for the sake of 
propriety but Janet couldn't tell if that was true or just soeech-to- 
text's even tone. In the biological lab a number of Foundation 
scientists were running tests on wild-caught samples. Others 
processed blubber and meat samples. Somebody cursed as the 
centrifuged shuddered to a stop, the display reading "error, 
unbalanced". They had so many samples to process, so much 
pulverized meat, fat. The room smelled of isopropanol and hexane. 


Janet and the fox angled toward the live specimen room. A ringed 
seal stared up at an exhausted-looking avalanche of scruff in a lab 
coat, unperturbed at the close proximity of so many human 
predators. In the corner of the room a blackbird shifted on a dowel in 
an aviary. Its feathers were dull and a small pile of feathers had 
begun to grow on the floor. It chirped, twitched a little, chirped again. 


"The Weather Knight greets you and apologizes for its state," 
translated the fox, itself translated by a machine. 


"What's the matter with it?" Janet said loudly enough for the scruffy 
veterinarian in the corner to hear. The bird sang. The vet focused on 
examining the seal. 


"The Weather Knight says that it has been unable to sleep. It's been 
trying to maintain the winds like you asked but when it sleeps 
something pushes back." 


"| see. How long do you think it can keep things the way we need 
them to be?" There were contingency plans in the hold in case this 
happened. If 1948 couldn't keep the winds from changing and the 
ice from slamming their passage shut there were drastic options. 
Drastic, sea boiling options. 


"The Weather Knight doesn't think it can keep this up for much 
longer, a day or two-" 


The ship rocked and groaned with sudden impact. Eugenio fell off 
the counter top, paws akimbo. The blackbird, 1948, flapped irritably 
in its cage. Janet found herself face first in the thatch of the 
veterinarian's beard. The seal looked as calm as ever. This was 
wrong. They'd been going a paltry three knots in the open ocean. 
They couldn't have hit something, unless... 


The alarm sounded. Anomalous contact. A spear of green ice 
punched through the port hole. Time for emergency measures. 


Teriaq's camp sat at the base of the cliffs. It was hard, too hard to 
climb and Sila was angry at him so he did not dare. A nearby 
polynya he'd surrounded with carved, narwhal horn, tupilags bound 
together with seal ligaments. He'd seen Agloolik swim close when 
he'd grabbed an unaware seal, seen the qalupalik grab at his flesh 
offering and water sacrifice. His inu was strong here. The sky was 
right. The sea was right. He did not know how much time he'd spent 
out here. Vague memories of fear. Vague memories of fleeing. 
When he went to check the polynya, for incursions by the monsters 
below, for seal, he passed the remains of his magic dog. Black and 
hard it leaked oily blood on the ice from the green icicle that impaled 
it. It had not frozen, such was its magic, but it was dead now. A bug 
pinned by Sedna's wrath. 


He smelled piss on the wind as it shifted. Skalugsuak had breached 
the surface of the polynya, fins lazily spun in the water. It scratched 
itself against the ice over and over and over, the water cloudy with 
blood. A poor omen Teriag knew, but of what? What drew 
Skalugsuak from the pisspot to him? Should he end its misery? He 
smelled smoke on the air. In the distance a canoe, he knew it was 
the wrong word but could think of no other, metal clad tore through 
the green ice of the bay. Prow clad in flame. No, led by a giant of 
flame, waist deep in the water. Head wreathed in plumes of steam 
from the sea and smoke. A furious howl against the wind in a 
language he didn't understand. A memory stirred. Teriaq reached for 
his belt where he kept a little bit of magic. Black material, a handle 
grip, a lever. He raised his arm, pressed the lever with his finger, 
and sent the flare skyward. 


"He's disoriented and suffering from acute amnesiatic poisoning." 


"It's no wonder. He's been eating nothing but seal meat and blubber 
for the past few months. Every sample we've started this expedition 
has been full of the stuff." Janet said, her voice tired, "Will he 
recover?" 


"Give him a few weeks of filtered water and therapy? Maybe. Guy 
was pretty far gone when we picked him up. Couldn't remember 
English at all." The doctor thumbed through his clinical notes. "We 
found this on him though. Personal notes, could be useful. " 


The doctor handed Janet the journal. She paused. The sea around 
them boiled with the fire giant's passage, bound to service by a 
friendly "loaner wizard" from the Hand. She opened the journal. 
Trembling words greeted her. 


"Your name is Teriaq LeChatlier. You are heading south. 
You once worked for a bunch of white people that called 
themselves The Foundation. They screwed up, poisoned 
the water with that stuff they used on you when you first 
arrived at site 641. Told you it was for security, that you 
couldn't know where you were. Do not eat the seal 
unless you can't eat anything else. The seals are 
poisoned. The whales are poisoned. They will not know 


you for what you are. You will not know who you are. 
Avoid the green ice because that's Her ice. She's angry. 
She is going south. She refuses sacrifices and songs." 


It went on like that with Inuktitut pictograms cutting in until it was 
illegible. She closed the journal, put it aside for the anthropologist. 
They'd come to the right place. Janet walked over to the wall beside 
the sedated Teriag and turned on the intercom. 


"John. Transmit my identification code to Oversight. Include the 
message ‘Our suspicions have been confirmed. Widespread 
contamination by amnesiatics in vertebrate and planktonic samples 
even as far as 73 degrees N by 88 degrees W. 1836 is likely beyond 
containment. Decommission will follow barring a breakthrough with 
re-acquired asset. Likely last radio contact until decommission 
attempt. Listen for clear code." She paused, considering. "Wish... 
wish us luck." 


Teriaq slept. The Healy trundled. The giant waded. Janet decided to 
take tea with Eugenio. Fraternization at the end of the world. 


Stage Fright 


If | do, and I'm wrong, humanity dies. For a year or two. 
If | don't, and I'm right, humanity dies. Forever.