Very rarely, SCP-962 will release a balloon with a document 
attached that is a departure from its usual writings. These 
manuscripts are disjointed, rambling, and bizarre "rants", the exact 
meaning of which is unclear. In them, SCP-962 explicitly praises 
humans, consistently identifying mankind as the "Great Ones" it is 
trying to please. See Document 962-382 for an example. 


One night, after dinner, SCP-1943 complained of mild chest pains to 
her guard. The site medic came to have a look, and told her that it 
was probably nothing, but she would come back in the morning. 
Later that night, Sarah Gruenwald suffered from a heart attack and 
died. 


It was a regrettable incident, but as far as the Foundation could see, 
nothing had happened. Of course, they had always been blind. 


The universe was connected, in ways that nobody had yet been able 
to fully understand. There were threads, curling and spreading 
through space and time. If they could have been seen, they would 
have made the most beautiful patterns. And now, one crucial thread 
became slack as the force that supported it died away. Small but 
significant subatomic particles at the edge of creation were nudged 
just slightly out of alignment. These caused further jostling among 
the atoms, bonds broke, and order began to unravel at the seams. 


It was years before the entropy had spread far enough that the 
Foundation could observe it. It was catalogued as a Keter threat and 
plans began to form. Coincidentally, it was given the designation 
1943, a space that had been left open for several years by 
sentimental researchers. 


They were too slow in their planning, however. The chaos spread 
too far, too fast, and the entire world was swallowed by it. 


But no matter what the game may be, 


Sarah Gruenwald spent the rest of her life as an SCP. Researchers 
she had known eventually got promoted, and appealed for her 
release several times. But there was always some test that hadn't 
been tried yet, or the Insurgency mounted another raid, or there was 
just some niggling sense of Doubt, of some stone left unturned, 
some route left untraveled, that kept her exactly where she was. 


Then... she was just another SCP object. Those old friends got 
promoted away, to new sites, and nobody was left that really knew 
her. To them, she had always been SCP-1943, so she must be an 
SCP for some reason. The Foundation trained their Humanoid 


researchers very well. They took her out from time to time, 
interviewed her, ran some of the old tests, and took dry notes that 
they added to a file, and never once referred to her by name, or 
recognized her gender with any term other than "female." 


Then she died. Her remains were tested and found to be non- 

anomalous. The Site Director shook her head once, and signed the 

paperwork to award SCP-1943 a posthumous Foundation Star. The 

body was burned, and SCP-1943 was reclassified as neutralized on 
ey 


The lady never wins. 


The Last Best Hope 


D-3672 sighed anxiously as he sat alone on a bench in the staging 
area. For the past two hours, half a dozen technicians had been 
hard at work on him, making the final adjustments on the skin-tight 
suit he had been fitted into. Only the breathing apparatus and the 
goggles remained to be fitted to the apparatus that covered his 
entire body from head to toe. Between the suit itself, the weapon 
now attached to his right arm, and the massive air tank and power 
source strapped to his back, he felt like he weighed a ton. One way 
or the other, at least, it would be over soon. 


After what seemed like an eternity, the door opened and Dr. 
Andrews stepped in. "Good morning, D-3672," he said. "We've 
dosed your target with a tranquilizer it hasn't adapted to yet, so it 
should be out of commission for the next hour or so. | trust you've 
been fully briefed on what to expect today?" 


"Yes," D-3672 replied. For weeks they'd been training him how to 
use the suit, how to swim, how to activate his weapon. They'd 
shown him film footage of the creature he was intended to use it 
against, and lectured him forever on its behavior and its weak 
points. 


"Good. As I'm sure you know, the suit you're wearing took us years 
to design and is specially customized to your body. It's airtight, 
skintight, highly resistant to cutting and tearing, and won't be 
affected by the acid in the containment tank." 


"| Know, doctor." 


"| just want to remind you how critical this mission is. We only have 
one shot at making this work. We've tried everything we can think of 
over the years to neutralize this threat, even things the Ethics 
Committee didn't want us to try. You, today, are our last, best hope." 


"Then | hope you'll remember our deal, doctor." 


"Of course. If you make it out of that tank alive and the target is 
found to be dead, you're a free man. And surf-and-turf is on me." 


Dr. Andrews lead D-3672 down the hallway, past the final 
checkpoint where the armed guards stood watch, into a room with a 
large, deep, acid-filled tank sunk into the floor. D-3672 could see his 
target crystal clear through the acid - a giant reptile, mostly bones 
and rotted flesh, bubbles percolating off it as the acid ate away at its 
exposed tissue, new flesh knitting itself into place almost as fast. A 
technician made the last adjustments, inserted the breathing tube, 
and placed the face guards in place, sealing him in. D-3672 looked 
down, took a breath, and dove in. 


D-3672 swam through the acid like thin air, and in seconds he found 
himself floating in front of the rotting behemoth. This should be easy 
enough, he thought to himself as his left hand made its way to his 
right wrist and powered on his weapon. D-3672's optimism was 
shattered, however, when the creature's half-decayed eyelids 
suddenly darted open, and he found two yellow orbs staring right at 
him. 


"The fuck is this?" D-3672 heard the creature's question clear as day 
through his suit. Frantically, he punched in the codes to power up 
his weapon. Red and green lights flashed up and down his arm as 
he felt the power cells charging, and within seconds, the Anti- 
Selaschic Kinetic Force Delivery System Mark 17 was active. 
D-3672 balled his right hand into a fist, cocked back his arm, and 
with every ounce of strength that he could muster and the weapon 
could deliver, drove his fist straight into the creature's face, forcing it 
backwards and taking off a chunk of its skull. 


The creature's blood tinted the acid and D-3672 breathed a sigh of 
relief. His relief was short-lived when the creature's half-demolished 
head turned back towards him, one good eye still staring him down. 
"Pathetic," it said. D-3672 barely had time to power the ASKFDS-17 
up again before it lunged. 


Dr. Andrews stood by the edge of the tank, his head hanging down, 
a disappointed look in his face as pieces of D-3672, and of the suit 


and the weapon, floated lazily to the surface of the now pinkish acid 
tank. A research assistant approached him, carrying in his hand a 
bulky and ancient satellite phone. "Dr. Andrews?" he said. "I have 
O5-3 on the line. He'd like an update on the termination attempt." 


"Thank you, David," Dr. Andrews said as he took the phone from the 
intern. "Would you file a requisition for another D-Class, please?" 


David nodded and made his way toward the door slowly, not 
relishing the paperwork ahead of him. The facility had been going 
through D-Class like water recently, and this wasn't going to help 
their situation with Human Resources. David stopped a moment by 
the door, listening in to Dr. Andrews' side of the phone conversation. 


"This is Dr. Andrews. Yes. Yes. No, sir. Yes, the device functioned 
as intended. No, he's dead. Still alive. Yes, it's conscious. I'm sorry 
to have to Say it, sir, but it appears that SPC-682 cannot be 

terminated by any means available to the Shark Punching Center." 


The Last Good Man in the Foundation 


Hermes sat with a rifle clutched between his hands, shaking against 
the cold. The door behind them had locked days ago, and though 
their provisions were enough to last through another week, their 
uniforms were not designed for the desolate chill that hung around 
them now. Their world was a flat world, an endless world, one that 
lazily hung out in all directions as if it had little else to do. He had 
remembered it being briefly tepid just before the door had shut, but 
the last warm thing to exist within this plane had been a bullet. 


The man's naked corpse was clearly visible to them from where they 
sat against the door. They had stripped him of his thin clothing 
during the first night night? There wasn't a night, not here. The men had attempted sleep 
nonetheless When the cold began to bite them, but it did little to help. 
They had thought to move the dead man further away from them, 
someplace that they could not see, but it didn't matter. Every place 
this side of the door was visible from this side of the door. Clearly. 
They had spent an entire day dragging that corpse what felt like a 
thousand miles, but it didn't matter. It might as well have been ten 
feet from where they sat. 


Raphael toyed with the radio in his hands. It had gone silent when 
the door had shut, regardless of how they tuned it. Hermes had 
smashed his pretty early on, after realizing that the door was just a 
door in a frame, and the hospital they had chased the dead man 
through was no longer on the other side. The sound of idle clicking 
as the older man toyed with the knobs on the top of the radio were 
echoed on top of their breath, returning to them like fickle laughter. 
They hated it, but there was little else to do. 


"Do you think we're going to die in here?" Hermes said. 
Raphael shrugged. "Might. Might not." 


"What's that supposed to mean?" 


The radio clicked again and again. "Means I'm just as much 
expecting to die here as not. I've been in worse situations than this 
and made it out alive. Known others who haven't, though." 


Hermes furrowed his brow. "That's no comfort." 


"It isn't." Raphael turned the radio over and took the battery out a 
few times. Seven times. It was 7PM. 


"Do you think they'll come looking for us?" 
"Do you think it would matter?" 


"No," Hermes said through a shiver, "but it's a nice thought. Knowing 
that they're looking." 


Raphael snorted. "So your last thought can be how close they 
might've been to getting to us? I'd rather think that they've given up. 
Easier to hate them that way." 


"Hate them? For what?" 


"For this assignment. For assigning us to it. For not letting us know 
what that bloke could do ahead of time." Raphael sighed. "Any 
number of things. Pick one. It's easy to do." 


"| don't think that's their fault though, is it? | mean, nothing in the file 
said anything about spacial anomalies." 


"No, it sure didn't. Funny, though, how we're the ones who ended up 
in here, isn't it?" 


"What's that supposed to mean?" 


"The oldest and youngest Mole Rat. A geriatric and a greenhorn. 
Sound like anything to you?" 


Hermes shook his head. 


Raphael shrugged again. "It doesn't matter. All I'm saying is, find a 
reason to hate them now and hold on to that. It'll make things 
easier." 


They sat in silence for a while longer after that. Hermes fidgeted a 
few times to get comfortable, but something about him no longer felt 
right. There was an unanswered question there, something that, for 
the moment, bothered him more than the cold. 


"Do you hate the Foundation?" 
"Yeah." Raphael didn't look up. 
"Why?" 


The dial on the radio kept clicking. "The Foundation has this funny 
way of turning good people into monsters," Raphael said, slowly. 
"You don't notice it when it's happening. Nobody does. It's not until 
you wake up in cold sweats that you start to piece it together. Even 
after amnestics, it doesn't matter. Your body starts to reject it." 


Hermes rubbed his hands together. "There are plenty of good 
people in the Foundation." 


"Name one." 
"What?" 
"Name one good person in the Foundation." 


Hermes scoffed. "Dr. Light is good. She's worked on all sorts of 
projects that protect people." 


Raphael nodded. "And Dr. Light also oversaw a handful of tests in 
the late 90s that resulted in the deaths of a hundred people." 


"That's not true." 


"Yes it is. That's one of the reasons she's involved with that Alpha-9 
project. You won't hear about that, but it's true. | was assigned to it. 
They were tests to determine combat usefulness of a handful of 
artifacts. One of the larger mass-cullings of D-Class in the last 
decade. You don't hear about those much anymore, not since we 
started pretending we have a conscience." 


"Fine. What about Dr. Bright? He's crass, but he's done a lot of good 


for personnel in the last few years." 


"I'm sure the hundred souls he's personally displaced feel just as 
good as you do about his travel budget reimbursement program." 


"The Site-23 E-Wing staff, then. They've done everything they can to 
prepare us as well as possible for these assignments, and | know 
they work pretty hard at it—" 


"Yet here we are, the two most expendable members of our Task 
Force, sitting in limbo after contact with an anomalous entity with 
poorly understood capabilities. A confrontation that didn't have to 
happen now. We started tracking this guy about a month ago, you 
don't think it couldn't have waited another month to see if he could 
turn doors into one-way entryways to nowhere?" 


"He was dangerous." 
"He was living in the woods. He hadn't approached a population 
center in a year. We were the ones who ran him into town. He was 


scared and confused and disoriented, but E-Wing wanted us to 
chase him into a trap." 


"The Overseer Council?" 
"They don't exist." 
Hermes bristled. "Yes they do." 


"You'd better hope they don't. If you think that, after everything I've 
already told you, there are thirteen mysterious boogeymen who sit at 
the tippy-top of the Foundation and approve of this, and that these 
people are good, | think the better discussion would be one about 
definitions." 


"But it's all for the greater good, isn't it? Everything we do, it's to 
protect people. The Foundation is good, as a whole." 


Raphael looked up and stared off into the twilight nothingness that 
surrounded them. He removed the battery a few times. Nine. 


"| was on another assignment once, in Egypt. We were trying to 


collect some piece of an artifact, or something. We were there for 
three months, combing through bazaars and digging in the sand. 
Seventy-five total personnel. Enough munitions and supplies to last 
for a year, or more. It didn't matter, the Foundation was footing the 
bill. We could've lived there forever. 


"After the first month, we got word that there had been a conflict 
down south. Some dictator had got it in his head that some ethnic 
minority within his country was impeding his ability to subjugate his 
population properly, and had started using his soldiers to drive them 
out. Thousands of people, suddenly without homes. The soldiers 
marched them to the border, left them there, and shot anyone who 
resisted. 


"We were told not to interact with them. To not get distracted from 
our primary objective. That the recovery of this artifact was 
paramount to the safety of humankind in the region. So we kept 
working, all while watching an entire population of starving, dying 
people pass by us like an army of specters. For all the good we did 
them, we might as well have been ghosts too. The local authorities 
weren't prepared to handle them, feed them, give them somewhere 
to live. Those who tried to make a new life for themselves and their 
families failed. Those who tried to steal a life were killed. The bodies 
were piled and burned, and we kept digging in the sand."