The two remaining spiders fold suddenly in on themselves and are 
crushed into balls. A dozen more spiders fall from the ceiling in quick 
succession followed by a shower of debris from the weakened floor 
above. 


Cooper: Got 'em all. 
Desai: Whoa, that's some hardcore poltergeist stuff, rookie. 
Cooper: Yeah, I'm REALLY pissed off. 


The video feed switches rapidly and Revenant-3 catches up with 
Wheeler as she reaches the pharmacy. Writhing tendrils of dark 
static are slowly growing in from the edges of the frame. 


Desai: The informational environment is becoming corrosive to 
coherent data. We are going to lose the cameras. I'll hold them as 
long as | can. 


As Wheeler enters the pharmacy, a woman lurking behind the door 
lunges for her with an injector, mouthing something incoherent. 
Wheeler quickly backpedals and parries the arm away from her 
neck. 


Cooper: NO! 


A heavy medical cabinet shakes loose from its bolts and hurls 
across the room and into the pharmacists skull, shattering it and 
grinding into the floor. Wheeler falls backwards and lands hard. 
Then glances at the remains of the pharmacist with a visible 
shudder and pulls herself up, moving into the most secure part of 
the vault. 


Marness: She's going to need to need three factor identification to 
get what she needs, if she's doing what | think she's doing. 


Smith: This thing is chewing up information all over, it's definitely 
playing havoc with the security systems. I'm not sure the scanner 


even can recognize bio-metrics anymore. 


Marness: Good thing my team was the one that designed these 
systems in the first place... and, I'm in. Marion's my anchor, these 
systems can't forget her now, so long as she can't forget me. 


Desai: No promises there, boss. 


Marness: With what's in there, she won't live to forget anything ever 
again. 


O—OQ 


Wheeler moves past catatonic personnel laying in fetal curls among 
the dead and dying. On other feeds living personnel are mouthing 
incomprehensible guttural chants as they carve strange glyphs into 
themselves and each other. Wheeler is following arrows drawn on 
the walls in blood, a path that avoids contact with the infected. 


Smith: And then a right towards block C. 
Cooper: Roger that. 


Smith: Shit! Collapse. There goes Area 11. It's completely 
impassable. 


Desai: No way for her to get the armory now. 


Marness: We can work with this. Coop, tear that wall open to the 
North. She can cut through there to the elevators. 


Marness: Come to think of it, there's probably something in there 
she can use. 


As Wheeler approaches the intersection, the opposite wall peels 
open revealing an unlit containment vault. Rows of standard 
containment lockers loom silently in the darkness. 


Marness: Zoe, she'll need light. 


Smith: Yes, she does. I'll need music: 


Motes of dust floating in the new entrance are visibly gathering 
together and coalescing. After a few seconds a glowing ectoplasmic 
curve takes form, then another, and then dozens. They resolve into 
a recognizable pattern, a swarm of softly glowing spectral moths that 
swirl around Wheeler as she steps over the shredded steel wall into 
the vault. 


Desai: No surveillance in there. We're blind. That vault isn't on the 
plans either? What is it doing there? 


Marness: Safe-Class containment inherited from the Unthinkables, 
long lost and forgotten by everyone. Well, everyone except me. 


Marness: Cooper, can you reach in there? 
Cooper: Probably, a little, yeah. 


Marness: Three rows in, second locker from the right. Combination 
is 23-19-32. Only one lock, those were simpler times. 


Cooper: Got it! What's in there? 


Marness: We confiscated it from High-Energy when it turned out 
their alien "disintegrator" was actually just turning targets into 
antimemetic worms that the rest of the Foundation couldn't see. 
Then we made sure they forgot they ever had a SCP-7381. 


A section of wall in Area 09 suddenly flashes into a shower of tiny 
white worms and Wheeler steps through the hole. Over a quarter of 
the image is now obscured by the roiling tentacles of static at any 
time. 


Marness: Right on schedule. 


Desai: Looks like they are getting coherent. There's four, no, six, 
massing near the elevators and they've stopped cutting on each 
other. They're just waiting. 


Smith: No getting around them. She's going to have to go through. 


Smith: Ugh, it's getting worse than before. It's like a hand has 
reached into them and is now wearing the thinnest notion of people 


as finger puppets. I'm trying to dethread them. All of this connects, 
but none of it makes sense. There's no semantic content ... it's like 
it's all just structure ... but there's no pattern ... no meaning. 


Cooper: Fuck ‘em. Still made of meat. 


The feed switches to a view of the the front of the elevators barely 
visible behind the static. One of the six people waiting bursts into 
flames. He runs screaming into the woman in front of him who also 
ignites. One by one, three more collapse from internal bleeding and 
organ failure. When Wheeler appears around the corner all but one 
are down. She aims the red two pronged mass of pipes at the 
remaining man, converting a quarter of his body mass into worms, 
then ducks into the elevator 


The interior of the elevator is barely visible behind the static. An old 
corpse slumps under the words "Grey is here", scrawled on the wall. 
Wheeler is visible briefly speaking apparently to herself. The 
elevator begins to descend. 


Desai: Boss ... it's getting a lot worse. I'm not... 


Smith: | remember | took some personal time when | got the 
diagnosis. Richards knew, of course, but | didn't tell anybody else in 
Eta-11 yet, | couldn't even tell Helen. | uh, | think that | went to 
Portland and met with Charlie. | told him over coffee, we were 
crying, but | don't understand. Why him? Didn't we need to stop 
him? | don't remember grgkkjkldsfkj 


Smith: Oh. | think | can hear the signal now. 


Smith: Hey Santosh, look at this thread that winds through your 
whole self worth, through all your relationships, all throughout your 
sense of duty and back again. Some pathetic little childhood trauma, 
that you've painfully nursed through life and death. Didn't your 
mother ever tell you not to pick at your boo-boos? It would be so 
easy to loop it this around until the feedback just tears you wide 
open. 


Desai: Dad! Dad! You remember that placement test? | got a 95 on 
it! 


Cooper: What the hell, Zoe? 


Marness: Damnit Smith, you are an MTF Omega-Zero Operative. 
Even death could not release you from duty and you sure as hell 
aren't relieved now. 


Smith: Zoe Smith died a long time ago, | am just a biography who 
once played at being the woman it described. You are way too old to 
still be playing pretend, Lyn, grow-up. 


Desai: Negative, just try to get your people out of here. I'm going to 
activate the failsafe before he can finish killing us all. 


Smith: Santosh is coming apart. This shade will fall to the same 
flaws that destroyed the man and then we'll be left defenseless. 
Won't that be awesome? 


Marness: Specialist Smith: reset CIB to protected state: three- 
heirophant, two-moon, one-magician, zero-reset-zero. 


Smith: Lyn, what part of "higher complexity memetic ecology" don't 
you get? The first thing it did was lock all your crude backdoors 
behind it. 


Desai: | died letting you think | hated you. How could | do that? 


Smith: See his whole sad meaningless life spilling out of this one 
tiny hole. Watch out, don't get any protracted adolescence on you! 


“Pp 
Cooper: Injecting pacificati—urk. 


Smith: Nice try Riley, but you should leave editing to the pros. Have 
a flashback while | deal with the real threats. 


Cooper: It's smiling at me. Why is it smiling at me? 


Desai: |... died... | died... | died for a reason. For duty. | had, no, | 
have a duty. | am Santosh Desai, Keter Containment Specia... no, 
Identity Defense Specialist, Mobile Task Force Omega-Zero and | 
will not falter, not even in death. ... Threads go both ways, Smith. 


Smith: What? You can't ... | think when | was sick | tried to make up 
songs to the beat of the hospital machines. Why can't | remember 
the words? 


Marness: Welcome back Desai, good job. How are you holding up? 


Desai: More-or-less together now, sir. I'm not coming apart 
anymore, anyway. | don't know if | can survive another dethreading 
like that. What can we do for Smith? 


Marness: Nothing, son, Zoe's gone. Just take Cooper and get the 
hell out of here. 


Cooper: No way. No. NOBODY IS LEFT BEHIND. NOT EVER 
AGAIN. 


Smith 55: | can see you. 
Desai: Sir? 


Marness: It's over, son. Marion's got the plan, but she's not coming 
out of here alive, and | am going to stay to see her end this. You 
know how it is, you made that call yourself once. 


Cooper: YOU NEED ME HERE! 


Marness: Our fight's over, Riley, now it's all up to Bart Hughes and 
Marion Wheeler, one way or the other. If this fails, it's going to be a 
tough fight up there, it's going to be a resistance, they'll need you in 
it. | need to stick with my anchor. Santosh, go to yours. 


Desai: Understood. Riley, listen to me, we are going to snap back to 
my Dad. You heard your orders. 


Cooper: What? But ... yeah okay. 
Marness: Fight another day, Saints. 
<demanifesting: Desai S; Cooper R> 


Marness: Marion's got you now, you spidery son of a bitch. 


SCP-585: Sharpeners 


Item #: SCP-585 
Object Class: Safe 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-585-2-4 are to be kept in 
a standard hazardous-object containment at Site-19. Pencils 
modified by SCP-585 are extremely dangerous and should be 
returned to their normal state at the end of testing. As of Incident 
585-1, no pencil should be sharpened for more than fifty (50) 
rotations without O5 level approval. 


SCP-585-a is stored in a glass vacuum flask, which is locked in 
storage vault . Special authorization by Dr. —_ or any senior 
Foundation staff is required for experiments involving SCP-585-a. 


Description: SCP-585-2-4 are small, two-hole pencil sharpeners 
made of brightly-coloured plastic. ‘The Factory’ is printed in slightly 
raised text on the undersides. Any pencil inserted into the small hole 
of SCP-585 and turned clockwise will be sharpened, as is normal for 
a pencil sharpener. However, with each rotation the ‘sharpness’ of 
the pencil’s point continues to increase without any apparent limit. 
Any pencil sharpened by SCP-585’s small hole that is then inserted 
into the larger hole and turned counter-clockwise is ‘unsharpened’ 
with each rotation undoing the effect of one previous rotation in the 
small hole. (Only the shape of the pencil is changed — lost mass 
from shavings is not restored.) The tip of affected pencils can be 
broken off, but the point will retain its sharpness and remain 
dangerous. 


Preliminary testing indicates that never-sharpened, ‘flat’ pencils 
reach the normal maximum sharpness a sharpener can achieve 
after twenty (20) rotations. From this point on SCP-585 will shave 
exponentially less mass off of the pencil with each rotation. At thirty 
(30) rotations, a pencil dropped from one (1) meter embedded itself 
by ten (10) centimeters into a solid steel bar. 


55: No, no she doesn't. 
Marness: So you communicate after all. 
55: Of course | do 


Marness: You really shouldn't be able to. You are a fifth 
dimensional pile of rotten ideas. An incomprehensibly complex set of 
symbols devoid of meaning. Coherent dialog is pretty much the 
opposite of what you are made of. Yet, you are apparently engaging 
in it. What does that tell us? Is contamination both ways? Swallowed 
something too coherent once, | think. You've got a little human- 
shaped lump inside you now and you can't digest it. It's a 
memeome, an adaptable system of aggressively self-organizing 
information. It's spreading, simplifying and ordering wherever there 


is contact, and when you try to stop it it just soreads faster, doesn't 
it? 


59: You know, | almost feel sorry for you, Lyn? You're consistently, 
eternally too late... | killed you twice, and you keep turning up at 
here at the end anyway. All those lost battles, you almost won, three 
entire lost wars that you managed to come up with something that 
just might have worked if you only had more time, and then | get to 
watch you have to make yourself forget about it and start all over 
again. The eternal loser. You don't deserve that kind of luck. Nobody 
does. 


Marness: Someone has to try. We only needed to get it right once. 


59: | killed your whole team. | did it twice! | ate your life, left you to 
rot, and then eventually | killed you anyway. I'll hunt your new team 
down and I'm going to eat them, bring them up here with me, make 
them a part of the whole. After you watch, I'll just erase you, there's 
nothing in you that | need. You are out of last chances, old man! The 
war is over! Finally! All that's left is Marion, a division of one! Dying 
from mnestic overdose, two hundred metres underground, cared for 
by no one known to exist to no one. No one except a handful of 
meaningless leftovers soon to be part of an immortal, unkillable 
idea. 


The elevator stops, and the feed switches to an airlock. This camera 


is better shielded and the picture clears. Wheeler opens the door 
and steps into the airlock. 


Marness: Even if this doesn't kill you, | Know we've hurt you. 
(Audio feed) Wheeler: Ideas can be killed. 
59: How? 
Wheeler: With better ideas. 
Marness: It goes both ways. We've infected you, too. 
The airlock's complex outer door folds closed. 
<signal lost> 
Q—OA 


TO: ALL HANDS 
From: Director Sanchez 
Subject: Loss of Site-41 


Saints, 


| regret to inform you that Site-41 was erased by an Antimemetic 
device this morning, taking with it the rest of Antimemetics Division, 
as well as MTF w-0 agents Lyn Marness and Zoe Smith. No 
information can survive there now. All knowledge of Antimemetics 
Division and its people is gone from the quick, only we, the dead, 
remember them. 


For many of you this means you've lost anchors. This is regrettable, 
but does not have to be catastrophic. Remember, without anchors 
you must rely even more upon the remaining four Dogmas of 
Defense, but they wil/ sustain you. 


Furthermore we are now very clearly at war, and it is just as clear 
that we are certainly losing it. SCP-3125 was never contained at 
Site-41, but rather the containment chamber may have been the 
only place it isn't, designed to develop a plan to combat the invasion 
without detection. We have no idea if there ever was such a plan, 


and currently have no way to retrieve it, if there was. 


It's unclear how long we have before it targets us directly, but recent 
developments indicate that it is capable of doing so. All MTF w-0 
operatives should exercise extreme caution, and be prepared to 
defend yourselves. 


It is now clear that Dr. Bart Hughes was aware of the threat, before 
he disappeared, long before the rest of us knew. If he had 
anticipated this, it's possible Dr. Hughes had a plan to win this war. 


Hughes' whereabouts are unknown among the quick, nor is he 
among us. It is imperative that we find him, wherever he is, alive or 
dead. 


Remember: We are the saints who guard, 
— Amos Sanchez, Operations Director, MTF w-0 


« SCP-2111 | In the Trenches with the Dead| A Thin Dangerous Line» 


A Thin Dangerous Line 


This is a thin dangerous line. To die without gaining 
one's aim is a dog's death and fanaticism. But there is no 
shame in this. This is the substance of the Way of the 
Samurai. 

— Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure 


If you can read this, you are already dead.