"Oh, by the way," Trevor said, filling out the paperwork he had oh his 
tablet. "You might want to come down to Multi-U tonight. We've got 
a present for you all.” 


"How'd you feel about going to an alternate universe for Christmas?" 
asked Tristan. 


"...l've had enough Christmas anomalies for one year," Christopher 
said, heading out. 


The three brothers snickered as Chris exited the room, limping 
slightly as he headed down to the occult studies laboratory, just to 
check on something related to Christmas. When he arrived there, he 


found the Krampus, as he expected, but also someone else. 


Standing with the Krampus, talking to it, was a young woman with 
bright red hair and green eyes, wearing the ugliest Christmas 
sweater that Chris had ever seen, along with a hat that had a fake 
set of elf ears on it. She grinned manically as she talked. "...good 
thing we had Emma to fill in for you; we nearly made a botch of the 
whole thing!" 


"My apologies, mein chef," the Krampus said, bowing to her. "| was 
indisposed." 


"Did you really fight a Christmas tr-" she blinked as she noticed 
Christopher standing in the doorway. "Why, hello! Merry Christmas 
to you!" 


"Uh," Christopher blinked. "Are you... authorized to be in here?" 


"Well, this place has Christmas decorations all around, and my 
friend is here." She grinned. "I don't see why | wouldn't be allowed in 
here." 


Chris laughed for no good reason. He didn't know why he laughed, 
something about the woman just filled him with an odd kind of joy. 
"Right, okay, uh. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to- haha- 
leave." 


"Fair enough. I'm just here to collect my friend." She rummaged 
around the lab. "Let's see.... where'd she put that.... ah-ha!" She 
reached into a drawer and picked up a beaker, which had an odd 
glow about it. She took it in her hands and motioned the Krampus 
closer. "Not a half-bad binding spell, if | do say so myself. This 
doctor has some potential." She gave a grin to Chris. "Right, we 
must be off. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!" 


With that, the woman and the Krampus disappeared behind one of 
the lab counters like they were walking down a set of stairs. When 
he came to look at it, they were both gone entirely. 


At this point, Christopher decided that, even though it was only 1:00 
in the afternoon, he needed a drink. 


That evening, everyone at Site 87 wore Christmas sweaters that 
were almost as ugly as the one worn by the odd woman in occult 
studies. There was even a contest for who had the ugliest one 
(which the Baileys won), and the whole site drank several mugs of 
eggnog. 


As he was drinking his seventh (or was it eighth?) mug of eggnog, 
Christopher Hastings passed by a new Christmas tree which had 
hastily been erected in Common Area 3, and noticed something. 
Under the Christmas tree was a present, which had a tag that read 
as such: 


To: Christopher Hastings 
From: Dr. W. and Herr K. 


Raising an eyebrow, he took the present out from under the tree, 
noticing that there was a present like this for Sinclair, the three 
Baileys, and Dr. Hennessy, oddly enough. He shrugged, and 
unwrapped his gift. 


Inside was a framed picture that he swore was never taken, of 
himself, the three Baileys, Dr. Sinclair, and several other Site-87 
staff members, all in Christmas attire. He saw the message at the 
bottom of the frame: 


"May your Christmas Spirit be Uncontained." 


He laughed, and walked out of the room, picture under his arm. 


Holy Mackerel 


We rolling? 

| saw you brought some scotch. You have any coldpost or any other 
mnestics handy? It's been eight hours since my last dose. No? Fine. 
The scotch will do. 


I'll recite the entry from memory first. Then I'll describe my initial 
reaction to it. 


Ahem! 


Item #: SCP-XXXX 
Object Class: Euclid/Apollyon 


Special Containment Procedures: 
IRRELEVANT. 


Description: SCP-XXXxX is an antimemetic land dwelling coral reef 


located seven kilometers north of [REDACTED]. It contains eighteen 
species of airborne fish, including three resembling mackerel. 


...what? 


That was the entire entry. | stood utterly confused by this oddity, this 
idea of a joke. Send me to create a goddamn paper on some 
goddamn template that made the system. This is not an SCP. It's 
even labeled with Xs instead of numbers. Why is this even in the 
database?! Surely Rosen and his AIC monkeys would not let their 
bots consider this a real entry. Dosen't even have a proper 
classification, and who in the hell thinks antimemes are real? 
They're a theoretical subject discussed in seminars. 


You are getting this on tape, aren't you? Good. 


Those were my initial thoughts. Confused ranting, is all. But now I've 
grown wise. There's seriously something wrong with the Foundation. 
Something is rotting, | can taste it. It's acrid, a moldy lemon poached 
in battery acid. 


This bum Willendorf was trying to create something called Operation 
ARCTIC CIRCLE. There's people in the higher ups convinced 
something is eating documentation as easily as a person would 
shovel chips in their faces. 


No less than the O5s brought me in, asking about 001. | had never 
met the O5s before. Very few have. Dunno what | expected and hell 
if |know anything about 001. Classified even to me. But | go in. | see 
thirteen dirty decrepit men in UIU uniforms stand at podiums in this 
giant filthy space. Trash piles of rotting garbage reach to the celing. 
There's literally shit on the floor. 


| am not making this up. This is true. So different than the image the 
PR guys put out, right? | guess the Administrator puppetmasters 
these freaks and makes the actual calls. But maybe not. 


Hand me that scotch, would you? 


Anyway, the leader there, | guess he's O5-1, he croaks out about 
the importance of my work with 001. | rightly point out to the old coot 


that | was never assigned to 001. | would have known. 


He shakes his wrinkled, flabby head, and opens his mouth wide. | 
see his rotten gums. 


"The entry with no numbers? My Doctor, that is 001." 


I'm in shock. The joke template?! Willendorf's batshit theory?! God | 
can see why the Insurgency left. 


The one on the right. The one with no eyes. O5-7. He pulls out this 
ridiculous ornate scroll. Like an Egyptian papyrus scroll. It rolls out 
over the podium and unravels at my feet. 


Really. 


On it is a list of entries: Joke entries, entries with no respect for 
protocol, some have no capitalization, some have every word 
capitalized. The objects are bizarre, to say the least. Nothing we've 
ever contained. Some have numbers already assigned to contained 
objects, some have obvious placeholders. 


"What is this, sir?” | enquire 


The old men all lean in together and speak as one, a singular voice | 
still hear rattling around my skull like a coin today. 


"Your new job." 


Then again, they did inject me with amnestics, so I've no clue if my 
impressions were accurate. 


They want me to be seeing cracks in the bureaucracy now. 
Misshaped documentation where it shouldn't be. | ask about each 
error dutifully like a good dog, but Rosen's unavailable and filing 
paperwork in Greenland. | pour over every Kafka-esque fly in the 
ointment. 


And now so do my former colleagues. You know the Brightbots? Do 
you know how they were created? Well, they authorized the 
splintering of of SCP-963 through some awful arcane process. Took 
the pieces and wired each tiny fragment in the center of their latest 


androids. They do the job now we senior staff once did. Horrifying 
and beautiful, those machines. Just as callous and flippant as the 
old Jack, but totally loyal to the O5s and those associated. No 
humanity left. Just cruelty. 


| remember the first line of them. Back then they didn't forcibly inject 
you with "coldpost" to help you see, they just sort of beat you. But 
about a year before you started, they authorized use of that sweet 
mnestic blend. We've been on pretty heavy duty "coldpost" since. 
They get you hooked on it, so you crave more and more. It's the 
perfect productivity tool. You don't have to sleep, you barely have to 
eat. All you have to do is work and remain passive until they sweep 
through again. Use that high to look for evidence of 001. Then they 
inject you with more "coldpost". Repeat. 


| don't think the human body is meant to have that much mnestic in 
it at at one time. Yesterday | hallucinated a mackerel over my desk. 
It was tattooed "001". 


But in my looking, I've found nothing. Templates and errors that 
were created by programs and system retrieval failures. They aren't 
anything. There is no 001 to be found there, just malfunctioning 
software. My days are useless, my searches pointless. 


Something is driving them all crazy up there though. The old men 
and their inhuman monkeys and their robot managers. You've seen 
how normal operations are breaking down. The once powerful 
senior staff now broken researchers not allowed to leave the site. 
Brightbots everywhere. Everyone's convinced that Operation 
ARCTIC CIRCLE has some truth behind it. I'm watching as our 
mighty sites literally fall into ruin. Safe skips ignored, some disposed 
of. The Euclids barely have enough personnel to maintain them. | 
have an rational fear that they'll start to forget about minor Keters, 
some godawful day. All resources funneled into the 001 problem. 
Everything is at the end of the rope. We're forgetting who we're 
supposed to be. 


That's where you come in, kid. You? You're gonna have to Secure 
and Contain and Protect because otherwise hell will break loose. 


Me? You want me to be the whistleblower? I've been in this shit too 


long. I'm in too deep. Hell, even | start to believe that Operation 
ARCTIC CIRCLE has merit sometimes. Like | get confused now on 
dates. I'm doing research on the Chaos Insurgency, which broke off 
from us in the 1920s, as you know. And that makes sense if you 
think we were officially founded in the 1890s as the SCP 
Foundation, a joint project of previous national groups. But if you 
believe, as | do, that the O5s are former UIU guys, that places the 
founding in the Fifties. So how could they Insurgency break away 
before we were founded? The dates start to get fuzzy, you see? 
Maybe it's the drugs, maybe it's my age. 


God, I'm a wreck. A shadow of myself. What happened to me? 


Fucking hell if | know, truly. 


| remember, back when | was a field agent, | knew a great 
entomologist named Bill Scott. He's long since gone. | remember 
him as a wonderful man, quirky as hell and curious like a child about 
everything around him. He would bring me on trips to the Amazon to 
categorize strange new insects. See if anything would catch the 
eyes of a Site Director. Some entropic bee or shit like that. | vividly 
recall one trip where we followed civilian anthropologists to observe 
the Sateré-Mawé indigenous people, in the Brazilian Amazon. This 
culture has a ritual where they fill a glove with bullet ants and 
adolescent boys must wear this glove for ten minutes as a pain ritual 
to help them symbolically become warriors. Bill and | were the only 
non-tribesmen who wore a glove that day, the civilians preferred to 
watch and take notes. | guess even then, we were chicken, as the 
young boys did this some twenty goddamn times over a few days. 


First they coat your hands in charcoal as protection, you see? And 
they bring out an oven mitt looking thing, the glove, swarming with 
hundreds of horrifying giant black ants. And the worst ten minutes of 
your life begin. | immediately began howling in pain as the ants 
began to bite. These fucking nightmares deserve their name, let me 
tell you. It was like someone was peppering shotgun blasts through 
my arm, shredding blood and bone and melting, oozing flesh to the 
rainforest floor. Agonizing waves of pain shot up my arms, and | 
could see the ants swarming up my arm, thousands of tiny feet, 


each foot bringing more shotgun blasts, | felt my soul dying, my 
brain shutting down instinctively. All | knew was pain and ants. 
Melting and burning and jabbing and thousands of flesh wounds as 
my pores were forcibly ripped wide, ants falling by the thousands 
into the holes, stinging all the time. The pain all consuming. Fire and 
ants on my spinal cord, traveling up to my brain. Ants pouring out 
my mouth, my nostrils, my eye sockets. My entire life has been pain 
like you can't understand. 


And through the howls and tears, and before | blacked out, | looked 
over and saw Bill standing tall. He was looking down at his hand, 
almost unconcerned with the horror happening to his arm. He had a 
quizzical expression, as if the ants were an odd toy ona shelf and 
he was trying to figure out how they worked. 


| thought about that expression as | drifted in and out of 
consciousness over the next few days. Bullet ant sting takes a while 
to work itself out. But behind the haze of fever and agony | saw the 
best the Foundation could and should ever be. Detached, yet caring. 
Observant and methodical, yet curious and full of wonder. Able to 
draw impossible strength to face down horror, both in the name of 
science and the normal people who live in this world. A cold 
scientist, an idiotically brave warrior, an unrecognized hero who 
does what must be done. 


| have hallucinations about those bullet ants now. | dream they 
swarm over that air breathing coral reef. Eating the flying fish. | wake 
up content from those dreams sometimes. 


Pass this recording on to anyone who still has sense in this god 
forsaken place, then let them dose you with amnestics and return to 
your station. Don't worry about me, you wont hear from me again. 


Thanks for the scotch, at any rate. 


Holy War 


The five cloaked figures moved through the forest without sound, 
their crouched frames almost floating through the morning twilight. 
Nearing the edge of the forest, the leader of the group turned, and 
indicated to the others to stop. “Brothers, we go forth today as 
defenders of the faith. Beyond these few trees lie the greatest 
enemies our faith has ever known, heretics preaching against 
everything we believe in. It is our God's very will that today we lucky 
chosen will go forth and destroy this bastion of hereticism. In the 
name of the Broken God, we will succeed!” 


Jacob rolled over, turning his face to the window next to his bed. As 
the sun began to peek through, he sighed. Might as well get up now. 
Slowly, the farmer lifted himself out of bed, his old bones creaking 
with the movement. Standing with similar speed, he began to dress 
himself. / think I'll tend to the cows first today... 


The cloaked figures closed up behind the barn, the sun casting their 
long shadows up and ahead of them. The leader looked to the other 
cultists behind him. Lowering his hood, they looked to him with a 
deep respect. The Deacon's face already showed the blessing of the 
Broken God, his camera-like eyes, and machine jaw gleaming in the 
morning sun. Looking at him, the others noticed how his mortal skin 
seemed to just hang over his superior clockwork parts. The other 
cultists then lowered their own hoods. Smiling, the Deacon looked to 
his fellow cultists. “Brothers, let us make haste. We do not want to 
let these enemies of our God know what has hit them.” Standing, the 
Deacon drew a dagger from his cloak, the others following suit. “Let 
us strike.” 


Jacob reached up to the shelf to grab the old bucket from the shelf, 
grimacing as he did. Just a few more years, he thought to himself, 

finally heaving the container off the shelf. Turning to make his way 

out of the barn, he stopped. “How long have you been standing 


be checked against the document above after each 
revision to determine when and if the filed document 
matches the content of the document above. 


+ Show Addendum 869-23