Nathaniel made his way back to his workspace, plopping into his 
chair with the concerted notion of sending the pictures to the next 
county over. He first glanced over the morning news — new 
educational budgeting, another stolen car. His hands fidgeted with a 
Cavalier pen while he scanned the material. Still, there was nothing 
that would suggest something like this. As he dragged the pictures 
over into the attachments, his spare hand was on the telephone. 
Ever since they had implemented daily cross-county summations, 
he had their number on the brain. The chair beneath him creaked as 
he leaned back, palm across his forehead. 


"Yes, you've reached the Hillsborough County branch of White- 
Semingway Environmental. How may |I—" 

"Extension 2190." 

The receptionist paused to dial the number, but not before speaking 
a brusque ‘thank you, sir’. Nathaniel waited for the dial tone to end, 
his eyes glancing towards the monitor of his computer. It cut off 
abruptly. "Hey, Joseph, have you gotten any, erm, | dunno. Any 
strange reports today?" 


There was no response from the other end of the line. He clucked 
his tongue and waited, hoping half-heartedly that he would just wake 
up. Waiting a while longer, he reached for the telephone, before a 
few mechanical clacks rang from the other end. 


"Doctor Atkinson?" 

Nathaniel hesitated. His chair creaked again as he sat up, leaning 
over his desk again. He now noticed that the email he had been 
trying to send had gone from view. 

"Yes? Who is this?" 

"We have information that you may currently have a biological 
anomaly in your possession." 

A breath left his lips, slightly ajar, his thoughts rushing in 
anticipation. "Yes, yes. The dog? What of it?" 


"You have sufficient knowledge of the local area, yes? Worked in 
this area for six years, transferred from a Minnesotan research 
coalition?" 

"I... |guess. Wait, how do you know this? What's going on?" 
"We'll explain when we arrive. Please do not leave the building." 


Nathan blinked a few times, considering the words carefully as a low 
tone played over the receiver. The line had disconnected abruptly 
after the other end had finished. His first instinct was to look for the 
others and try and speak about what had just gone down, but they 
were still engrossed with the window. Instead, he focused on the 
computer screen, searching through his 'Drafts' box for the email he 
had started. There was nothing. 


He clicked his tongue and began another, browsing for the pictures. 
He searched his folders. And then searched them again. And a third 
time. On the fourth, he turned fully, grabbing for the camera hooked 
up to the computer. The buttons all flashed colors as it woke up, 
displaying the previews still of the anomaly. It was no longer reading 
a connection to the computer, though, which warranted his looking 
back up at the screen. It was black now. 


He threw his eyes back, and became very aware of the hushed 
silence that had fallen over the office. The chair creaked and 
groaned as he stood and pushed it to the side, looking out a large 
window near his desk. It gave a full view of the parking lot (despite 
his requests to move to a better desk with a better view). There was 
a van parked out front that hadn't been there before, with words 
printed on the side. He couldn't read them from the angle he was at, 
but there had been no announcements for maintenance today. 


A bell came from his desk, and Nathaniel jumped to it. He grabbed 
his phone up and flipped through the notification, reading quickly 
and only finding a garbled text message from one of the other 
biologists. When his eyes were up again, looking down the hall, they 
had been replaced by four men, each in a full suit. They were clearly 
not local — or at least, they were dressed far too formally for the 
occasion, accounting for the thin veneer of sweat across their brows. 


"You've got something on your coat." 


Nathan glanced down. Mango. "P-pardon me," he fumbled, tossing 
the coat onto his desk, covering the papers. "Who was it that you 
said you were?" he asked, approaching the new group cautiously. 


"| didn't. I'm Doctor Hart. And | need your help." 
"What did you do to my co-workers?" 


Three of the men dispersed, coming back from where they came 
only briefly, returning with papers and a few duffel bags. "They were 
sent home sick for the day. Don't worry. They'll only remember that 
they got the day off, and that there was a cleaning crew coming 
through." 


Nathan gestured towards the dissection theater. "And the... thing?” 
"They'll only recall a vague notion of a strange morning." 


The biologist nodded and sat on the edge of his desk, crossing his 
arms abreast. "Then, what? Why do you need my help? Some of 
them are far more qual-" 


The man held up a hand and came forward, the others setting their 
things on another desk and clearing it of other objects. "Leave out 
the extraneous. Let's get to business, or pretty soon, we're going to 
have a fully blown environmental breakdown here." 


Green Thumb Hub | Banana Smoothie » 


Banana Smoothie 


"So, let's get this straight. It's... a deer, with airbags?" 


The corpse was unceremoniously dumped onto the dissection table. 
The dog-clam had been removed and placed in a small pet carrier 
outside the theater, and now the room was taken up by the subject 
of importance. 


"Not exactly a deer," Doctor Hart spoke, nodding toward the 
specimen. Nathaniel reached for a scalpel after donning latex 
gloves, setting the light down on the subject's flank. "Definitely 
cervine," he murmured, prodding at its side with the blade. There 
was far more resistance than he had expected. "This is where the 
air bladder is, yes?" 


"One of them, according to the witness," Hart replied, drawing a 
finger down across its lower abdomen. "Try making the incision 
there, maybe?" 


Nathaniel grunted in reply and took a cheap electric razor to its fur, 
shaving the spot before jabbing the scalpel in. He drew it down the 
abdomen and once across, opening the new entry into its body 
cavity and expanding it slowly with a pair of dissecting scissors. He 
then brought the incision up to the thoracic region, following in with 
the scissors and peeling back flaps of flesh. The coagulated blood 
occasionally trickled from the incision, but the specimen was 
unnaturally well preserved. "How long has it been dead?" Nathan 
inquired, poking around. 


"Two days now. We gave it a rapid preservation treatment to keep it 
in shape for dissection." 


Nathan made note to ask how they had preserved it so well later, 
noting the location of each of the air bladders. They were both well 
attached to the entire side of the ribcage with tendons and were flat, 
in the uninflated state. "Just epithelium," Nathan quipped as he 


carefully poked at the bladder. "But it's so... dense. Is this normal?" 
He looked up at Doctor Hart, who shrugged. "We've never seen this 
before either. Care to open it up?" 


There was a hesitation to his voice as Nathan responded, already 
beginning to poke down into it. "Just afraid of a... reflex," he 
breathed out, relieved, as the scalpel entered the bladder. 
"Simplified alveoli... | think." He placed his scalpel down and shook 
his head. "I don't see how this would work. It shouldn't, looking at it. 
What did you say that happened?" Nathan asked. 


"Car was heading for the deer, apparently. Typical deer-in-the- 
headlights look, damn thing sat there frozen. According to the victim, 
it just suddenly... blew up. Like a balloon. It stayed planted right in 
place, like it suddenly weighed as much as a goddamn block of 
steel. The car was totaled. A coupe." 


The table was moved off to the side as Nathan sat, tongue in cheek. 
"| don't get it. What's with this shit? A dog that's really aclam? A 
deer with a five-star safety rating? Who did you say you were?" 


Doctor Hart crossed his arms, glancing over at a co-worker of his. 
They shrugged, and Hart looked down at the seated biologist. "1 
suppose | can't just say that we're the cleaning crew. We work for 
the Foundation. We deal with these anomalies on a daily basis, but 
there usually is not an outbreak of this volume in such a small time." 
That got Nathan's attention. "Outbreak? You mean, there's more?" 
Hart nodded, and Nathan groaned. 


"We've already seen enough, and we expect more," Hart went on. 
"We need a local specialist." A click sounded from Nathan's tongue 
as he sighed, trying to grasp the situation. On one hand, this was 
the opportunity of a lifetime - never before seen species that were 
beyond the imagination of the average biologist, let alone scientist 
altogether. Though, this wasn't the thought on Nathan's mind. It was 
currently more along the lines of, Why me? 


They were out the door before Nathan could protest. They had 
already loaded up into the van, most of them sitting in the back, 
moving down US 19 with a speed just peaking above the limit of 50 


miles per hour. There were no windows in the back, though one 
could glance out the front windshield if they glanced forward. Nathan 
sat across from Doctor Hart, both quiet for the moment. Enough 
discussion had gone on earlier, and all that was stated is that they 
were headed for another site of anomalous activity. They passed a 
Chik-Fil-A, and his stomach grumbled. He checked his watch; it was 
one in the afternoon, already. 


His hunger was flung from his gut as the new location came into 
view, finally. They were somewhere back into the Brooker Creek 
Preserve now, after trekking down a scant dirt path off to one side of 
the information center's parking lot. There was some recently 
cleared brush in the path, indicating that this had been cut after the 
discovery. Now, though, as he witnessed the large, stalky plants in 
front of him, he shuddered. 


Almost every inch of them were covered in various spiders and their 
webs. These plants stood no shorter than eight feet, and were a 
sight to see - large, thick, fleshy leaves sprouted from girthy stalks, 
like a bastardized version of aloe. There were also ropy vines 
everywhere, laid across in an oddly familiar shape. Nathaniel tilted 
his head, and his chest went cold. 


"Are those... spiderwebs?" 


Hart took a closer look at the vines himself. "These weren't here last 
time. Fetter, Jacob, get a scope of our surroundings." Two of the 
four others with them, armed now with sidearms and a light splay of 
tactical gear, nodded, setting off in opposite directions to circumvent 
the spot of anomalous activity. It only took a moment. Fetter 
screamed, but it was abruptly cut off by the large arachnid dropping 
onto him and sinking "fangs" into his throat, his body going rigid. 
Nathaniel watched the thing as it dragged Fetter up onto the web 
and began to spin him into a mass of vines, which prompted Jacob 
to draw his Colt. He took a double shot at the arachnid, and with a 
splat, it hit the ground. Hart had drawn his own handgun, but he was 
slowly holstering it as he approached. The one they had supplied 
Nathan, as he realized after a moment, was clutched tightly in his 
right hand, white-knuckled. He released the vice grip and holstered 
his, following Hart up to it. 


"Doc, look at it. It's... a plant," Jacob breathed. 


He was correct, Nathan noticed as he nudged it with a boot. It 
seemed to a heavy mass of plant growth, composed of layers upon 
layers of plant matter. It was an off-green hue, and the two shots it 
had taken had breached its thorax and spinneret. A gooey, white 
concoction leaked from the spinneret. "Hold on. Someone, give me 
a stick." 


Hart handed Nathan a medium-length branch just thick enough to 
poke around with. Jacob was busy hacking at the web of vines with 
a machete, trying to pull Fetter down. Nathaniel dug the stick into 
the spinneret easily enough, dragging out a solid mass that he could 
feel within. The beginnings of a botanical embryo clogged the 
liquid's flow as he brought it to the breach for observation. 


"It's a seed. This whole thing is a seed. The spinneret is a bulb. 
This... this liquid, it's a form of cotyledon, | guess." Nathan nodded 
at his own handiwork of deduction, looking towards Jacob as Fetter 
thumped to the ground. He worked off the vines haphazardly with 
the machete, reaching to try and feel for a pulse, or a rhythm of 
breath. "He's alive," he called with relief, removing the rest of the 
vines. "Greg, Nicole, get your asses over here." The last two 
members of the task force lifted Fetter between them, heading back 
the way they came. Jacob stayed with his handgun drawn, again. 


"Doc," he said, glancing about. "We really shouldn't be here much 
longer. We'll need Cox's team to help with this.” 


Hart stood and beckoned for Nathaniel to follow, but not before 
taking a last look around. "Have you looked yet for anything that 
could've caused this?" 


"Doc, we really need to-" 
"No, search first. This is big, and we need to know." 


Jacob sighed, frustrated, but began to wander the site without 
further protest. Hart searched with Nathaniel in tow. Before long, 
Jacob was calling for Hart to come to him. He was down by Brooker 
Creek itself, looking down into the water. It was clouded and off- 


orange in this portion, which he sourced back to a plastic bag. Jacob 
looked to Hart, trying to see if he had any answer for this. "That's 
definitely not natural," Hart breathed, settling with his arms over his 
chest again. 


The technician clacked at the few valves between the kit currently 
straining the next batch, and the distillation of the income of 
ingredients. He glanced over at the few others in the lab, working 
their stations like him, the heavily ventilated space whirring with air 
conditioning. The viscous, orange material strained through the 
second set of mesh screens, collecting a solid mass of crystalline 
waste. The waste would be bagged, after this batch was processed, 
and handed off to be disposed of. Finding the proper location for 
dumping had taken some time - they had tried burying it, and 
dumping it into water, but they had it down pat now. 


Carver grinned as the process unfolded before him, flipping a tablet 
of the resulting designer drugs between his fingers. With a quick 
snap of his neck, he swallowed it, and a banana smoothie 
materialized on the counter in front of him. 


The quiet draft of classical music played from the radio in the corner 
of the space, and he settled into a chair, strawberry smoothie in 
hand. 


« Shellfish For Breakfast | Green Thumb Hub | Just Like Me » 


Action figure depicting 
the popular character 
[REDACTED], with 
electronic components 


Acolor TV 


10 days 


14 days 


half. The keys depress 
themselves rapidly 
every 30 seconds, 
spelling out the 
message "ASK WE 
WILL ANSWER". 
When any complete 
sentence is typed on 
its keys by a third 
party, SCP-658 stops 
and remains immobile 
for an hour before 
resuming prior 
behavior. 

Resultant SCP-658 
measures 5 by 2 by 

2 cm. Object's legs 
appear humanlike. 
Upper half of object 
occupied by an 
imitation of a bald 
human head, without 
eyes. Head is capable 
of vocalizations; 
nearly all of these are 
imitations of things 
spoken in its vicinity. 
Resultant SCP-658 
measures 45 by 45 by 
20 cm. Upper half of 
object occupied by a 
single video screen, 
which constantly 
displays shaky, 
colorless footage of an 
unmoving human 
figure suspended in 
mid-air within a 
featureless room 
(tentatively identified 


Just Like Me