Dr.Gears (LUiectepuHn) | 01:50 
You aren't presenting any evidence not to. 
How far away is it? 


Director Bright | 01:50 

Like an hour out from here | think 

I'll take a taxi 

Shit this should be fun 

| only ever see him at family stuff really 
Hey shit that reminds me 

How's TJ? 


Dr.Gears (LUliectepuHn) | 01:51 

Alright. 

| haven't heard anything to indicate to me otherwise, but 
there haven't been any tests this winter, so | would not 
know. That would be more Agatha's realm. 


Director Bright | 01:52 

Yeah | know but shes asleep like all the other normal 
people on site so | can't annoy her 

Look I'm gonna loose connection when | leave the 
airport here in a few minutes 

Thanks for helping 


Dr.Gears (LUlectepHn) | 01:53 
Yes. 


Director Bright | 01:53 

You don't need to repair that holding tank today if you 
don't want to 

As long as the thing is moved to one thats okay and its 
not gonna break a second one 

lts christmas like what the hell 

Take it easy 


Dr.Gears (LUiectepuHn) | 01:54 

| appreciate the sentiment, but | am not one for 
festivities. 

Although | encourage you not to strain yourself today 
either, especially considering your health. 


Director Bright | 01:54 
Yeah 
Thanks 


Hey keep me updated on the mechanical problems 
And you know 
Everything else 


Dr.Gears (LUiectepuHn) | 01:54 
As always. 


Director Bright | 01:55 
Yeah, as always. 
Merry Christmas Charlie 


Dr.Gears (LUiectepuHn) | 01:55 
Ditto, Jack. 
Come home soon. 


16 


When Mikell had his first heart attack two days after the Christmas 
of 2016, it was Jack- dressed in boxers, unshaven and stumbling 
through a strange but familiar numb stupor- that found him collapsed 
on the floor of his office in a fetal position. And it was Jack, too, who 
started acting like himself again after a couple days of sitting on his 
laptop in his hospital room, bickering and snarking at him as he 
wished. Mikell liked it. It felt familiar. 


05-4 came to visit him a short while after he had his stent put in, and 
Jack, being a man with few barriers, bantered and bickered with her, 
too, as Mikell slipped in and out of a painkiller-laced sleep. It was a 
while before he realized, fully, that he had guards- people in nurse 
costumes with guns in their pant legs, people standing outside in 
black. Someone important is here. Mikell didn't feel important, but 
then again he never did- the elusiveness of his Overseer position 
and the protection it required was never something he quite got 
used to. Jack explained his snow bound situation to them in casual 
conversation over coffee-stained classified paperwork and his laptop 
with the secure connection, and Mikell himself fell asleep again (he 
doesn't remember ever sleeping this much in his life, and it bothers 


him greatly). Jack types and occasionally sends over a pointed 
comment about him being old and having to eat bran muffins, and 
Mikell sleeps and slurs back a couple swear words to let him know 
he's not fucking nursing home age yet, fuck off. 


It feels comfortable. His brother is lively and snarky and shaven 
again and Mikell is pleased to note that he wears short sleeves- it 
wasn't that bad of an episode, not like the ones in the past that had 
him out for weeks and left him listless and barley functioning. Jack 
does not kill this body and does not hurt it. He recovers well, 
because he's a damn strong person as much as he is a damn 
asshole. It'll leave him numb, it'll leave him angry. He'll fall behind on 
his paperwork and live in isolation for half a week. He'll sleep and 
starve himself and feel nothing, but goddamn, he's no pussy when it 
comes to stalled neurotransmitters. He's proud of his brother; 
Brights don't go down without a fight. 


It's probably one of the better Christmases Mikell's had since his 
divorce. 


But it's funny how delicate these things are. 


The thing about the business is always the delicacy of it. It takes so 
long, so, so long to build up this narrative, to write this story. It takes 
pages and pages to make a site. Logs, readings, paperwork. 
Hundreds of people. Daily communication. Cameras and training 
simulators. Safety procedures and breach doors. Guns and guns 
and guns of all different kinds. Shift after shift of guards. Fences on 
fences on fences, titanium feet thick. Dormitories. People. It doesn't 
matter when it goes to shit. It never does. 


On New Years of 2016, Jack and Mikell do not watch the ball drop. 
They do not partake in celebrations. Jack is pale and trying to 
process, ten of his little devices showing ten different readings from 
One site in Siberia are screaming off the hook. They do not speak to 
each other. There is no need to speak; they have just transitioned 
from family business to industry business. 


It happens so fast. There's nothing to do. You can call and type and 
try to get a hold of people on the inside to know what's happening, 
but despite all of Jack's lockdown orders and overrides and the 


people that Mikell knows that he's picked for this situation, it all 
comes down to brute force, like a broken dam. It's a painful way to 
loose everything. Little mistakes snowball into bigger ones. When 
you're on the outside, and a breach of that caliber happens, there 
really isn't much to do but watch the casualty count rise and the 
electricity go out. 


And then there really is nothing. Nothing at all. 


At 3am on January 1st, 2017, Jack sits down and stares at the floor 
between his feet. He does not cry, but he trembles. Mikell knows his 
brother is the Director of three sites, but 19 is the largest, the one 
that he put his blood, sweat, and tears into, the one he spent the 
most time at, the one he tried to make sure was pristine and 
functioning on all calibers, always. During the winter season, when 
the population of the Site is reduced to a "Skeleton Crew" of 1,400 
people instead of the usual 4,000 plus those passing through, 
there's about one item in containment per person. 


It's funny how things fall apart like that. 


Jack is not afraid for himself, although he should be. Because it's 
funny how things fall apart like that, see, breaches never work out as 
they should. Not breaches like this, not Tempest Nights. Not the 
ones where the walls themselves smash open and leave the 
Siberian winter to form drifts over abandoned lab equipment and 
cold bodies. Not the ones where lone lightposts throw long shadows 
over people whispering and hacking off clammy limbs for bait. Not 
the ones where people spend months isolated 23 floors down 
because the rescue teams just can't clear the rubble that fast. 


Never like the safety videos. Never like procedure. All the words and 
time and effort, all the carefully planned and submitted containment 
logs and carefully crafted chambers. It doesn't matter when the 
levee breaks. Maybe it never mattered at all. 


So six months and several disciplinary hearings later, Mikell Bright 
watches the containment teams at Site-17 use long, metal tongs to 
grasp his brother's life in their hands. It slides off easily, over his 
surrogate's limp neck on a medical examining table. They lift his 
head with a gloved hand to slide the chain over. They place itina 


foam case labeled with 4 different locks and 3 different identification 
tags- standard procedure- and put it on a plane to a small safe-class 
site in Thailand, where the case itself slides perfectly into a dark little 
locker with its number stamped on it. It locks behind him. 


Mikell does not cry, but he trembles. 


For the first time in Foundation history, there were no survivors. Not 
a single one of 1,400 people lived. Some lived to board a helicopter 
to another site, once the rescue teams could access the carcass of 
19, and some even lived to see a Foundation hospital and give an 
interview of what it was like to chop off their own arm to free it from a 
locked door, or to be poisoned by a contagious memory, or to see 
containment wing G explode into tongues of flame with something 
roaring inside, or to not sleep for days, to live in little camps with 
other people and survive by lighting files on fire to keep warm, to 
see the face of the people who started the raid, dead on the ground, 
to see the carcasses of GOC tanks in predictable hallways. 


So Mikell likes to imagine that it's like sleeping, or a deep 
meditation. That was what it was like to be dead in the way that Jack 
was. He likes to imagine that his brother is INERT, as his logs put it, 
because he was the only survivor, because he wasn't on site at all, 
and that's why the blame fell on him. Was it fair? No. Was it for the 
best? 


Maybe. 


His brother did not function well after the 4th month of the 19 fiasco. 
He did not do well in a humanoid containment cell, and Mikell knew 
this was because he was a child with olive skin and curly black hair 
that belonged back in Nebraska under clear skies and open 
cornfields. They tried to paint him as INCOMPETENT, and maybe 
he was, by the end; tired and frustrated as he was. And that was 
why Mikell had voted 'Aye' when the "formal containment of the 
Site-19 director" vote came up. Because after all that, it really was 
for the best. If they were trying to be humane, and Jack was no 
longer eating, no longer thriving, no longer living in a profound way 
that Mikell hadn't seen his brother before in all the years he'd known 
him— then why force him to try? 


(Do you have any family history of depression? The doctor in the ER 
asked Jack Bright as his older brother lay sprawled on a gurney) 


So a few years later, when Mikell Bright had his second heart attack, 
he was alone, and not so lucky. Because karma's a bitch. Because 
these things build up so slowly and then crash down so quickly. 
Because the universe gives Brights when it needs them and takes 
them as it pleases. 


And that was the story of how Jack Bright survived. 
Because some people are just meant to. 

Item #: SCP-963 

Object Class: Safe 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-963-1 is to be 
contained in a Safe-class containment locker. Flesh-to- 
artifact contact is not permitted. Further testing is not 
permitted. 


Description: SCP-963-1 is an ornate amulet 
approximately 15 centimeters in circumference made 
from white gold, with thirteen (13) k brilliant-cut 
diamonds surrounding a_ k oval-cut ruby in a starburst 
pattern. It was discovered in the personal effects of 

who had been found dead by apparent suicide, 
surrounded by a number of supernaturally-related books. 
Our Agent in the area found that 963-1 was incapable of 
being damaged and brought it in according to protocol 
XLR-8R- . 


Dr. Jack Bright is a possessive entity bound to 
SCP-963-1. Dr. Bright was bound to the amulet following 
its death in a Keter breach, see file B-963-4. The 
consciousness of the late Dr. Bright is projected onto any 
living anthropoid that comes into direct skin contact with 
SCP-963-1. It is known that memories native to it 
transfer from host to host. For more information 
regarding Dr. Bright, see archived medical file for 


complete psychiatric admittance history and medication 
lists. 


Your Future is Bright 


There comes a time and a place where all things end, and it may not 
seem so, but the lucky ones are those who know when that day will 
come. Maybe you learn via phone call, that blunted affect of a voice 
on the other line telling you your days have definite number. Maybe 
you picked the easier option and set the date yourself. In the end, 
none of that really matters. 


It's a known fact that everyone dies. Some people know its certainty 
more than others, the rest having a quiet thought now and again, 
only to be stifled by the things they do to distract themselves from 
their slow crawl into the grave. 


People like Mcclanahan, however, had seen death so many times it 
mattered not to their unscathed souls. Sure, there were the 
unpleasant ones, the bad times, with people turned inside out, 
eyeballs popped from their heads as their hollow shells lay broken 
on the ground. Those things were wiped clean with time and 
extensive therapy, not to mention the occasional forget-me-now. 


Through all those gruesome shows, those brilliant bloodbaths, 
Markus Mcclanahan had seen it all and took it in stride. It was the 
only option, burning bridges and moving forward. Bridges being 
mounds of the dead, the once-friends. The familiar faces, charred 
but for their bits of carbon that would grace the lungs of some 
emphysema-tic somewhere, someplace. 


None of it mattered, because it all had to be done. Not only that, it 
was routine. 


Routine. That's the life of a Foundation operative. Put aside all the 
administrative bureaucracy, all the paperwork and the psych tests 
and you'll see thousands of faceless suits that struggle every day to 
keep the world from falling to pieces. Cogs in the machine called life 
that no one in their right mind would ever want to spin the gears for if 
they had one iota of a choice in the matter. 


Markus had just returned from his nth foray into what they call the 
field; real life. Real, real life. The gritty shit, the things people don't 
need to see, save for the select few. Mcclanahan was one of those 
few. 


Yesterday, it had been a thing about three meters tall, with a head 
like a bison and reciprocating saws for teeth. Watching it bisect 
civilians had made him wince for the first time in years. Yet, he still 
took it all in stride. When he had returned onsite, the fucker was in 
the back of an armored vehicle with a bag over its enlarged head. Its 
hands and feet were bound with some fancy carbide nanotube cuffs, 
the million-dollar necessities that kept the monster from doing much 
else other than existing. Still, he could hear that thing chuckle from 
behind him, and it made his skin crawl. 


Again, he brushed those feelings away, knowing what the beast 
didn't know, that padded cell that awaited him. Windowless and 
empty, just like the black of his insidious, unblinking eyes. 


Today, the world was threatened by some floating, dark orb that 
rendered minds to useless mush. It warped its victims, slowly or 
quickly, toying with their lives around its mass of unidentified matter. 
Cognitohazards were tricky bitches, they found their ways into your 
head using the back roads that only the well-trained could patrol. 


Mcclanahan was in luck yet again, as the thing hated 
electromagnets, and EMPs were easily acquirable to Foundation 
field agents. The altercation ended quickly, and Markus was stroking 
his ego the entire ride back. Arrival onsite was as routine as the rest 
of it, with silent nods and groups of task forces planning their next 
move with that one mind-bending sphere locked in a storage unit 
that doubled as a Faraday cage. 


Mcclanahan had other plans in store than dealing with that, as he 
was quickly escorted away and forced into one of the Foundation's 
patented reintegration chambers. The room was a glorified cell, but 
it was only temporary, and it happened every time he came back 
from dealing with something that could manipulate the thoughts of 
others. Safety was the name of the game at the Foundation. 


He sat down at the single chair and waited for it to begin. 


Watching videos on SCP-1004 have a cumulative effect. The more 
pornography a user views, the more disturbing their sexual desires 
become, and the harder sexual gratification becomes. After 
approximately 100 straight hours of viewing pornography on 
SCP-1004, even the most 'normal' of viewers will display an interest 
in scatology play, the torture and murder of living beings, bestiality, 
pedophilia, and combinations of the previous. The deadening of 
reactivity to sexual gratification will encourage them to either seek 
out such things in real life, or seek to mutilate themselves and their 
genitalia.