"Nowhere near as frightened as | am fascinated." | reply. Lord 
Lorenzo stands, and hands my sketchbook back to me. 


"Then | suppose | should show you my latest acquisition. Come." He 
walks out of the room with a determination and a purpose, 
occasionally checking to make sure nobody but Lady Clarice or | am 
following him. This time I'm lead to a wine cellar with a secret back 
room dimly lit by the lantern Lord Lorenzo handed me. He pries the 
lid of a crate open, and beacons me over. Inside is what appears to 
be a Grecian statue of a young woman, its dull shine indicating it is 
solid gold. 


"Meet Princess Zoe." 
"Another moving statue?" | ask. 


"No, a living one. Feel her pulse." He puts my hand on the statue's 
neck, and I'm surprised to feel a faint pulse. Not only that, but it's 
warm. | touch its arm to be sure it's not residual heat from Lord 
Lorenzo, but it too gives off a slight amount of heat. Dull, seemingly 
lifeless eyes peer back at me, unmoving. Unlike the other moving 
statue, they have no depth, two solid orbs of gold. 


"The daughter of King Midas," he says proudly, "not as dead as the 
myths make her out to be." 


"And you call this life?” 


"No, | say it's not death. There's no way of knowing whether or not 
she's actually alive in there. Or at least | have no way of knowing. 
But you... You're a man of medicine and science. It shouldn't be too 
hard for you to figure it out." He pats me on the back. 


"How am | supposed to determine if it's alive?" 


"| wouldn't know, I'm not the doctor here. But you are. I'm going to 
take my leave and see what the others in the Academy are up to. 
You, my friend, should stay here and get to know her a bit more." 
Lord Lorenzo leaves, Lady Clarice following closely after him. I'm 
briefly told how to close up the secret panel before they leave me 
alone with this golden girl. 


| have the right to be forgotten 


Mr. Young, please put the weapon down. 
You have more to live for than this. 


No response. 


Baltimore PD crisis negotiator Andrea Wagner stood upright against 
the wind, facing a local mom & pop restaurant, and the man 
standing within it. Seconds passed, and Andrea cautiously brought 
the microphone to her mouth again, and began her breathing 
exercises. 


OK, best course of action at this poi 


BANG 


Anthony Young woke up still standing, stark naked save a steel 
collar attached to his neck. He continued to look ahead at the wall of 
steel chains in front of him as his left hand quickly balled into a fist 
that vaguely pointed towards his chin. He stared, unmoving, as the 
police rushed through the chains and into the store. 


Anthony began to process his surroundings. 
The city began to process his death. 


The universe began to tug at his collar. 

The chain ran taut from the collar to his corpse, and Anthony 
buckled to the ground. He didn't feel it, as he did not have nerves to 
feel with, and he did not feel emotion, as he had no brain to feel 
with. And yet, lying down on what would have been the cold 
linoleum floor, Mr. Young thought. His thoughts strayed to what lay 
ahead: The sky, the future, and the afterlife. 


Anthony noticed that behind and above the police and EMTs, the 
chain curtains pointed towards the drop ceiling, and beyond that, 
they must point towards the air. Anthony thought about what was 
above the ceiling. He thought about what could exist in the sky to 
make the chains rise. Anthony wondered if he'd lie there forever. 


Anthony thought on this topic for some time. After a few weeks, he 
suddenly realized he could stand. And so he did. He stood up, 
turned around, and looked underneath his feet at the spot where he 
died. There was a queue of perhaps twenty people intersecting his 
patch of linoleum. Anthony would have cared, had he had either the 
capacity to or had not seen the queue progress over and over again. 


Anthony thought about why he was capable of doing anything, let 
alone wonder, if he had no emotions. After all, curiosity was an 
emotion, so why did he stand up? Anthony eventually settled on the 
explanation that if he could think, the state of his corporeality didn't 
matter, since the universe didn't bother being consistent. On that 
note, Anthony turned towards the doors and tried to exit. 


He walked in place for a month before his chain loosened enough to 
leave. Standing below the open air, Anthony was able to see what 
lay above. 


538 people were visible, waiting in the air at varying heights, all 
facing the sun and all near motionless save for a slow, steady 
slackening of their respective chain. Rarely, one might be privileged 
to see some poor or lucky soul simply disappear into the air. 
Occasionally, someone would lurch up or be torn back. 


It was an altogether oddly calming sight. One that reminded Anthony 
of home, and all of the emotions those memories bring. Emotions? 
This shouldn't be possible; Anthony had no brain, why was he so 


happy when he looked towards the sky? Why did he want to reach 
the sky? 


His eyes darted to and from each hanging body, trying to find an 
explanation, some cause for this inconsistency in an already 
inconsistent set of rules, though he found none. He looked around 
him, having thought that perhaps the source of his emotions was at 
eye level. Instead, he lost the joy and bemusement he had but a few 
moments ago. 


And so Anthony stared up towards the sky as he began to walk 
towards the cemetery, stopping only to realize that he's made more 
progress in thirty seconds than in the past two months. 
Nevertheless, Anthony continued to where he knew he would find a 
chunk of stone engraved with his name. 


He eventually did find his grave, though it was far more... generic 
than he thought it would be. It looked distinctly regulated, a vertical 
rectangular stone bearing no features but his name, date of birth, 
and date of death. It almost stood out among the mass of immensely 
varying tombstones and crosses, though it never quite managed 
that. 


A woman approached Anthony from the east, an expression of quiet 
solitude painted onto her face, and a bouquet of various flowers held 
in her right hand. She crouched down to read one of the older 
graves, a granite slab in the form of a melted candle. Alexander 
O'Reilly, she whispered with a solemn smile, as she placed a lily on 
the grass. 


And on another plot of land, somewhere near Sheridan, a chain 
lurched back towards the earth. 


Margaret Tiller, mother of five. The woman choked out. Hey, | bet 
you're happy you don't have to deal with that anymore, huh? The 
woman chuckled, having placed a young rose on the lip of the 
marble, and likewise having ripped Margaret from the heavens. 


And when the girl bearing flowers reached Anthony's grave, he 
wasn't around to see what she did, for his chain had tightened, and 
Anthony was dragged toward the store where he had taken his own 


SCP-873’ and assuming a constant 1:1 ratio, the point 
where both timelines become coincident is 00:17 UT 
June 30, 1908. Given that SCP-873 was recovered in 
Siberia by a 1927 expedition by the Soviet Academy Of 
Sciences, and such an expedition in 1927 was the first 
recorded on-site investigation of [REDACTED] can be 
almost certain that it is not a coincidence. Since it is 
unknown if [REDACTED] was the source of the 
anomalous properties of SCP-873, or if SCP-873 was 
the cause of [REDACTED] it is recommended that 
containment procedures and object classification are 
updated accordingly. 


Request granted— O5- 
« SCP-872 | SCP-873 | SCP-874 » 


life. 


I'm not sure. 


You're not going to believe me when | tell you that they let me keep 
the shrunk-down 173 as a pet for about three days. Well, maybe you 
will. Stranger things than that go on around here. Now that you 
believe me, the lovelies in charge had me keep three other SCPs in 
my quarters as well. My memory is a bit foggy, and I'm not entirely 
sure myself why that all came to happen at the moment. 


They let me keep this very ugly dog - I'm not sure exactly what the 
skip was, but he was a very friendly - albeit horribly ugly - dog. He 
would gnaw softly on my arm and crawl in and around my shoulder. 
At first it was a bit creepy, but then | realized that he was just being 
friendly. | even started to think he was a bit cute. 


The other thing | remember, there was an air balloon. Well, | think 
the guys called it an inflatable pinata... it didn't really do anything. 


I'm struggling to think of the other, | think it was 173 that drove me 
nuts, I'm not sure, although | think 173 was the dog. | mean | know 
that's not possible, but I've never really heard of an ugly dog skip. It 
seems nice enough. 


Oh! Got it. | remember them, or me, someone decided to clean my 
room out, put the SCPs back or ship them off wherever. That day, 
yesterday, we were in a Level meeting and Sanders was talking 
about some law suit involving one of his family members with one of 
the site higher-ups. He was asking about when he was going to get 
his money, he seemed bit annoyed or upset, it was an old issue. 


It hit me like a truck, sitting there, | remembered a note | picked up 
off of my counter after they had cleared my room out of everything. It 
was a little note, | think, from one of the skips | was holding in my 
room for one reason or another. The note had "You'll have wish you 
kept me as a pet.” in 18 point Courier New font, and | have to admit 
it worried me something serious. | picked up the note and | left for 


the meeting, the one where Sanders was complaining. In the 
hallway, I'm not sure if they were moving them or whatever, that little 
stuffed bear was walking along behind Agent Breen. Nothing 
happened there, it was just interesting, you don't see it everyday. 


I'm sitting there in the meeting, the one where Sanders (the old 
man?) is complaining about money. | can see an empty room out of 
the corner of my eye, well, a bit clear in my vision. There's a check- 
up table you see a lot in clinics, and there's a cat sitting on it. | think 
it's a cat, might not be. I'm sure it was a cat, | thought it was nice 
enough of a cat for a few moments, but then its eyes turned black. 
Well that's not good | thought, | was worried, a bit, but not enough to 
cry. You could say | was crying in my mind if that was possible. | 
was raising my hand for the floor in the meeting, | wanted to tell 
them about this. I'm a timid sort of guy, and a cat with otherworldly 
cataracts wasn't going to bother me around this many people - it 
was probably being moved somewhere or something like that bear 
was. 


Well anyway | keep glancing back and forth to the cat, Sanders 
continues to talk in this low drone about the money that he hasn't 
seen yet for the family member he doesn't see anymore. | keep 
glancing at the cat in the far room, it has white eyes now, and it's 
looking at me now. Sanders is still talking about the money, I'm 
raising my hand, the personnel director is looking at me and 
suddenly | realize that I'm causing a bit of a scene. 


My face is a bit wet and I'm sort of propping myself up on the cold 
plastic chair with my wrist, I've got my hand raised like an 
elementary school student who really wants to impress the teacher. 


I'm not crying but my face is wet, they're tears but | can't say I'm 
crying. The personnel director looks at me for a few seconds, | look 
back at the cat, Sanders finishes talking about the money, the 
personnel director points in my direction but he's really pointing at 
someone else and they start talking. 


| look back at the cat. 


Its eyes are white now, but not the same white, it's a horrible white. 
It happened, well, nothing happened, it was more like watching a 


movie. There was an awful absence of noise when | looked back at 
the cat. There was an absence of noise and the archway that the cat 
was sitting in, the one leading into the clinic-room, was completely 
encased in a white matte, a white impossible matte. It's like 
someone grabbed a magic brush and painted in the non-cat areas of 
the view within the archway. 


A few seconds into staring at the motionless white-eyed cat and | 
could hear myself screaming. | was screaming "It's all white", 
"fucking help me" and other things that would signify that | was 
going bonkers (I wasn't going bonkers, though. It was just that the 
cat and the white gave me a horrible feeling of dread.). Luckily | 
woke up, just as the personnel crowded around me | jerked awake. | 
had just experienced the worst kind of fear, | think, I'm not sure | 
even know at the moment what I'm scared of now. It was like the 
sort of nightmare you have when you stop breathing. 


I'm fine now if you were wondering, | mean, I'm in the Wards, and 
whatever-it-is is still bothering me, but, well | guess | lied. | found out 
a bit late that it wasn't really a dream, and | came to terms with it. 
Don't have the story in stone though... 


The words on the walls right now are floating with "kept me as a pet" 
and other nonsensical phrases. There are two bears in the corner of 
the room and apparently their names are "who am I!" bears. It's 
novel, really, you touch the bears and you temporarily become the 
bear, with a case of amnesia. They're kind of floating there too. 


There is a sort of zombie-humanoid thing, and he seems nice 
enough. There's also a bathtub in here, but | don't think it does 
anything useful. 


| still have the note, the one that said I'd have wished | kept the thing 
as a pet. | wish | knew what the pet even was, | remember | think | 
liked it. Well, | was a bit scared of it, but | remember | liked it a lot. 


| think I'm actually in a containment cell. | can't really make any 
sense of all of this. | wish | knew what the thing was that was 
bothering me, | can't seem to describe it all too well. Maybe that's 
the thing. | can't really put a face to it, and I'm not sure whether it's a 
dog or a cat, or a bear. Maybe it's Sanders? Or rather, | mean, it 


might be kind of like Sanders but more like a cat. 


| wish they would kill me or something, | wish something would kill 
me. They must have some sort of reason for not killing me. 
Everything is going to be okay | think. Well, I'm not too sure, | don't 
know, | think | mean. 


There's a dog in the window to the containment cell. | think it's the 
observation room. He has a big mouth. | think I'm going to call for 
help. 


| Remember My Heroes 


Grandson, you're a small child now, and you've started asking about 
them. You're far too young to be told, so I've brushed you off. I've 
decided to write you this note, for when you're older. How | wish | 
could be there by the time you are old enough to understand, but | 
know that won't happen. 


| was born in what your history teachers call the Golden Age. As a 
child, | never questioned anything about the situation. It was a time 
of innocence for me and humanity in general, and | never really 
focused on things. Our teachers taught us about The Enemy, and 
how we had our Defenders to protect us. They sacrificed for us, 
keeping our world safe. We appreciated them, and they enjoyed it. 


... |can't remember when we, as a people, started calling them 
Defenders. | know them as something else, but it would hurt me too 
much to call them that. 


| was a young man when the Golden Age ended. Everyone will tell 
you that it ended like a flick of a switch, but don't believe it. People 
talked. We knew how horrible The Enemy was, and what they would 
do without our Defenders. But over time, we questioned them more. 
Rationally, we knew that the sacrifices were worth it. Some deaths 
were expected, damage was predicted. But in the face of total 
destruction, was it worth complaining about?