The air in Three Portlands was filled with the scent of salt and pine. 
Crowds of people filled the streets — anartists buying supplies, 
parahumans chatting over coffee, Manna representatives soliciting 
donations — everywhere she looked, Myra Rider could see the 
bustle of the anomalous world. In the distance, towering over the 
town, was the shadowy form of the Portland Observatory. 


They turned down a side street — bypassing what was either a 
performance art installation of a battle between a wizard and a laser- 
wielding robot, or an actual battle — and ducked into a nearby 
coffee shop — which proudly advertised itself as "Not Another 
Fucking Starbucks, Est. Yes" — where they sat down at a corner 
table to wait. 


It wasn't long before Conrad Trent arrived. The British cyberneticist 
had an almost preternatural knack for showing up exactly two 
minutes after the people he was meeting, no matter how early or 
late they arrived. There was no explanation for it — it was just one of 
those things that happen around people involved in the paranormal. 


"Afternoon, ladies," he said as he took a seat at the table. "What's 
the weather like in Portland today?" 


"Rainy with a chance of more rain," Myra said. "What about 
Portland?" 


"Ah, you know, the usual," he said with a wave of his hand. "The 
usual being rain, of course." 


"Of course." She smiled slightly as she took a sip of coffee. No 
matter where you went, it was always raining in Portland. 


"But enough about the weather," Conrad said. "| assume that the 
two of you have a reason for this meeting, so let's hear it." 


Alexis cleared her throat. "Right. We wanted to ask for your help on 
something. You're the —" 


"I'm gonna have to stop you right there," Conrad said, holding up a 
hand. "I've already told your boss that I'm not interested in a job." 


"This isn't for Anderson," Myra said. "This is a... personal project." 


"Is that so?" He raised a quizzical eyebrow. "And what kind of 
project might that be?" 


"Electronic telepathy," Myra said, matter-of-factly. 


The other eyebrow went up. "Oh. Oh, | see. That kind of personal 
project." He took a sip of his own coffee. "I thought the Church and 
Anderson were pals now. Why isn't he helping you out?" 


The two women glanced at each other. Conrad could see their jaws 
moving subtly as they silently conferred through subvocalization. 


Finally, Alexis turned to him and said, "It's... complicated. Ever since 
MCD's started backing us, Anderson's been focusing more and 
more on products that can be easily commercialized. Usually, that's 
not an issue — most of the things the Maxwellists want are things 
that other people would use too — I'm proof of that — but there's not 
much market appeal for an electronic hivemind." 


Myra began to protest. "It's not a hivemind, it's a —" 


"A communal interchange of thought, yes, you've said so before, 
dear. That doesn't make it not a hivemind." 


Myra sighed at her partner's irreligiousness and continued drinking 
her coffee. 


"Anyways, the point is that Anderson's not onboard with this. Which 
means that we're having to get by on our own time and money." 


Conrad nodded. "Alright, I'm following you so far. Why come to me 
though? | haven't done any serious work in the field in over a 
decade — not since Silver Hand went under.” 


"Well, neither has anyone else. You're still the leading expert on 
electroneural interfaces — hell, we're still using your interface 
designs for our prosthetics. If anyone could build a working BCI, it'd 
be you." 


"You flatter me," he said, smiling at the compliment. He downed the 
rest of his coffee before replying. "Sure, count me in. Sounds like it 
could be fun." 


A week went by before they met up again. 


"You're sure we're going the right way?" Alexis asked. Conrad had 
directed them to an address that was nominally located in the Lime 
District, but addresses had a tendency to change in Three 
Portlands, especially out in the periphery. 


"Pretty sure," Myra said. She skirted around a group of street 
performers engaged in an elemental juggling act, taking extra care 
to avoid the halogen jugglers. "I think | remember this street." 


Alexis skeptically eyed their bone-white surroundings — almost 
everything in the Lime District, including the buildings and the roads, 
was made from Portland stone, giving the district a strangely 
neoclassical feel. She wasn't sure how Myra could tell this particular 
white-walled avenue from any of the others. 


However, soon enough they found themselves standing in front of 
the disused machine shop where Conrad and Myra had once 
worked, almost ten years ago. Here, the Portland stone made the 
empty building seem as if it had been abandoned for a millennium 
instead of a decade — with the exception of the sign above the 
door, which still said ‘Silver Hand Cybernetics’ in bright, bold letters. 


"Wow, talk about déja vu," Myra said. "This place hasn't changed a 
bit." 


"It looks different on the inside," Conrad said, appearing next to 
them. "Workshop's been picked clean. What Anderson didn't take, 
the artists scavenged — last | heard, the CNC router was down at 
the Reconstruction getting used to build scrap golems." 


"So why come here then?" Alexis asked. 


"Because | still own the lease," Conrad said. He fished a set of keys 
out of his pocket and unlocked the front door. "And because this 
place still has a working connection to the old Prometheus network." 


Myra whistled in surprise. "That thing's still up after all this time?" 


"Yep. You can thank the guys over at Redzone for that. They've 


been keeping the servers running." Conrad flicked on the lights. 
"Most of them, anyways. The Defense subnet died ages ago, and 
Computing's servers were cut-off months before the collapse 
happened. But the rest of it's all there." 


The interior of the building was as barren as the classical ruins it 
resembled. The gently humming fluorescent bulbs cast a harsh light 
over the bleached white stones, giving the place a sterile, lifeless 
look. The missing machinery and the absence of any other people 
only served to amplify the similarities to a crypt. 


Conrad lead the way to the back office, which was secured by 
another locked door. This room was filled with furniture — desks, 
tables, chairs, an entire wall of filing cabinets — having escaped the 
looting of the local anartists. All of the computers were gone, 
however, carried off by Anderson a decade ago when they bought 
the former subsidiary of Prometheus Labs. 


Conrad sat down at the nearest desk and removed a laptop and an 

Ethernet cable from his bag. It took him less than a minute to set up 
the laptop and get it connected to the building's network. Soon, the 

three of them were looking at the familiar flame logo of Prometheus 
Labs. 


Welcome to the Prometheus Labs Employee Intranet. The message 
on the login page was written in an old monospace font that 
appeared ignorant to the passage of time. 


Conrad quickly signed in and began searching through the 
company's old files. 


"Back in '98, the state-of-the-art was electrodes buried straight into 
the grey matter." He pulled up an MRI scan of a brain with these 
embedded electrodes to demonstrate. "Messy bit of business, that. 
Sure, it gets you some great resolutions, but that degrades rapidly 
as you get scar tissue buildup." 


Sure enough, the image on the screen showed significant signs of 
scarring and tissue rejection, as the body had tried to eliminate the 
foreign objects embedded in its brain. 


"Now this," Conrad pulled up another image, "was the state-of-the- 
art back in '04. Electrocorticography — ECoG. Surgically implanted 
electrodes on the surface of the brain. Gets you a better resolution 
than an EEG, but not as good as deep implants. Penfield and 
Jasper were doing it back in the 50s for epilepsy treatment, but we 
only started using it in neural interfaces after Prometheus broke up. 
Resolution wasn't good enough until then, you see." 


The image displayed on the screen showed a computer-rendered 
cross-section of a brain, the surface of which held several circular 
electrode patches. 


"That's not what we're using right now though," Alexis said. 


"No, you're using myoelectric sensors and nerve splicing. Easier and 
safer than ECoG, and it's all you need for the prosthetics you're 
using. No need to interface directly with the brain when you can just 
use the existing nerve endings and neural pathways. | imagine that's 
why nobody's done any work on this stuff since then." He closed the 
image and started searching again. 


"Alright, so let's assume we can use this for our interface. That still 
leaves us with the problem of translating brainwaves into words." 


"Ah, not true!" Conrad said, raising a finger in excited interjection. 
"What?" 


He tapped at the keyboard for a moment, then turned the laptop so 
that the two women could see the screen better. A single word was 
displayed prominently in the center of the screen. 


SAMSARA 


On seeing their confused expressions, Conrad explained, "Back 
before everything imploded, Medical and Defense were working on 
developing a technique for full-body regeneration. | don't know if 
they ever fully succeeded before the collapse — that particular bit of 
information was on the Defense subnet — but they aid manage to 
successfully transfer a consciousness between brains." 


It took only a moment for the implications of this to sink in. 


"If consciousness is transferable, that means that... that means 
brainwaves are mutually intelligible between different brains," Myra 
said. 


"Which means we don't need to translate the brainwaves, we just 
need to transmit them," Alexis said. 


"Bingo," Conrad said, looking pleased. 


The three of them sat there for a while in silence, contemplating and 
considering this revelation. 


"We'll need a way of filtering," Myra said. "Thoughts aren't the only 
things encoded in brainwaves. There's gonna be motor signals, 
sensory input, subconscious signaling, everything. We don't want to 
be transmitting that — who knows what that could do to the 
receiver." 


"My money's on marionettes," Conrad said. He turned the laptop 
back to face him and started typing again. "Playing the other person 
like a puppet." 


"That's probably optimistic," Alexis said. "More likely is that it'd 
Cause a Seizure." 


"Or that," Conrad said. 


"Still, isolating the brainwaves that encode thoughts is a much 
easier problem than trying to translate those signals," Myra said. 
"This is looking more and more like it's within reach of our current 
tech." 


"Oh, | don't doubt that it's possible," Conrad said. "The question is 
whether or not it's going to be practical." 


"Let's find out." 


As it turned out, it took seven months and over a dozen different 
people to do just that. 


First there had been the filtering problem. A search of the 


Prometheus archives had failed to turn up any leads, so they had 
outsourced the question to the Maxwellist network. The solution 
came from an Australian neuroscientist and a German computer 
scientist, who together devised an algorithm for filtering out the 
unwanted neural signals based on wavelength and frequency 
patterns. 


Then there had been prototyping issues. The high-quality alloys 
needed for the electrodes were sourced from a supplier in Three 
Portlands, but they needed precision machining equipment which 
couldn't be found in the city to fabricate them — they ended up 
purchasing time from Anderson Robotics to use their facilities, after 
much negotiating. 


The next step was finding a skilled neurosurgeon to implant the 
electrodes, and volunteers to test them. The former was provided by 
a Russian expatriate living in Maine, while Alexis and Myra offered 
to be the latter. 


After that, there had been weeks and months spent testing and 
debugging the interfaces. They had to be confident that they could 
get a clear signal from the electrodes, that they could precisely and 
safely stimulate sections of the brain with them, that the filtering 
algorithms were working correctly — every foreseeable problem had 
to be resolved before they tried linking their brains together. 


So it wasn't until December, on a rare sunny day in all the Portlands, 
that they made the first connection. 


They were in the main workspace of the machine shop, which was 
once again filled with equipment. A thick black curtain, borrowed 
from one of the local theaters, ran through the middle of the room, 
partitioning it into two approximately equal sections. Myra and Alexis 
each sat in one of these sections, on opposite sides of the barrier. A 
table with several laptops had been placed perpendicular to the 
curtain, which Conrad sat behind. From there, he could monitor both 
parts of the room and the diagnostic displays on the laptops. 


"Checkscans look good," he said. "We're good to go when you're 
both ready." 


Myra smiled and gave him a thumbs up. Alexis took a breath and 
nodded. 


Conrad began tapping away at one of the laptops. He stopped 
typing, pausing for a moment, before slamming his finger down on 
the enter key in the most forceful and dramatic manner he could 
muster, producing a rather satisfying sounding click. 


Myra fidgeted anxiously. She was confident that the interface would 
work. They'd spent so much time refining the design, it had to work. 
But there was a niggling doubt in her mind that worried that it would 
fail. 


Alexis frowned as nothing seemed to happen. So that was that. Just 
as she'd silently feared, it hadn't worked. The tech just wasn't 
feasible right now. Still, some part of her brain continued to insist 
that it would work, she just had to be patient. 


Conrad watched the diagnostic displays intently. The interfaces 
were talking to each other, but there was no way to tell from the 
displays alone whether the transmission of thoughts was working as 
intended. He pressed a few keys on one of the laptops, then turned 
it so that only Myra could see it. 


"Oh, that's clever," the two women said in unison, as the mental 
image of an elephant filled their mind's eye. "You're going to see if 
she's thinking about elephants now." 


Conrad frowned in alarm. The displayed readings of the women's 
higher brain functions had become congruent — their separate 
thoughts had coalesced into a single gestalt consciousness. 


The entity that had been Myra and Alexis only had time to briefly 
consider the novelty of hearing their voice from two mouths with two 
sets of ears before they died, killed by Conrad's press of the escape 
key. 


Myra and Alexis both blinked as they gradually became aware of the 
absence of the other's thoughts. 


"That was..." they both began. 


SCP-739 behind it, triggering a second sealing state. 


SCP- -1-D proceeded to breach containment by use of 
directed shockwave pulses in excess of 210 decibels to 
destroy impeding barriers and kill any personnel it 
encountered, primarily armed first-response containment 
teams. The entity displayed a focus on eliminating as 
many personnel as it was capable of, showing no 
acknowledgement of other objects or entities unless 
such impeded or attacked the entity to some capacity. 
Containment efforts were severely impeded due to the 
visually cognitohazardous appearance of SCP- -1-D. 


After ten minutes SCP- -1-D collapsed. An automated 
autopsy of the entity revealed that it was not suited to 
terran environments, and succumbed to an approximate 
analogue of oxygen intoxication. It had suffered non- 
lethal injuries during its containment breach, apparently 
being capable of rapid regeneration while active.