There were bits and pieces of D-0912’s psyche that were missing. 


He couldn't find the part of himself that was supposed to be afraid of 
death, but he also couldn’t find the part that was supposed to be 
tired of life. His past had been ripped from him, and his future turned 
in on itself in circles. Maybe he had never truly been alive. Every 
breath that he had taken in the hazy uncertainty of the past had 
been a lie. He could not remember any of it because he had not 
been truly alive then, and his future was ending because he wasn’t 
alive enough now for it to matter. 


He held no animosity towards the Foundation. They did what they 
did. He hated only the idiots, scurrying around inside the bones of 
the Foundation, who prodded him into rooms with guns and locked 
the doors of his cell at night. These people formed the thin, tenuous 
link between him and the rest of human existence. Was he not 
drifting through a dream, with no reality to latch onto, and nobody to 
tell him that he had to wake up? 


There was something written in the lines of his soul that had been 
obscured by the sands of a broken memory. D-0912 imagined men 
chopping wood and carving stone to build a tower reaching towards 
the heavens. Were the wood and stone destroyed as the tower was 
made, or had the tower always been written in the grain of the wood 
and the edges of the stone? When the silk and gold of an empire 
were presented before an emperor, had it always been known to the 
universe that the silkworms spun and the gold glittered but to adorn 
a mortal’s halls? 


The doctor took D-0912’s sleeves and bared his arms. He held a 
needle in his hands. D-0912’s eyes tried to trace the tip of the 
needle, thin and imperceptible. The doctor held an impossibly fine 
knife in his hands. Light glinted off the edge and stabbed into 
D-0912’s eyes. He was naked before the terrible ecstasy of— 


The needle pricked D-0912’s skin. Chemical radiance coursed 
through his veins and poured into his mind as the room began to 
disintegrate. Light began to overcome his vision. 


Above him, the figure in white blinked as an expression of satisfied 
completion passed over his face. The two guards glanced at each 
other. D-0912 thought that he could see them nodding. 


D-0912 struggled to move his lips. What did you do? What have you 
done to me? 


He spoke in slurred, barely audible words. “S-stop this. Oh God—” 


The darkness of the forest burst its bounds and flowed out into the 
world. D-0912 walked the twisted path of enlightenment and 
understood: no road ran straight. The world was a maze, anda 
corridor only seemed straight if nothing but that path could be seen. 
The ways of light all pointed to an all-encompassing, maddening 
blackness. Smoking chemical fire danced and sparked, drawing him 
forwards, until he was stumbling and lost in the depths of the forest. 


As the beasts of the forest began to howl around him, D-0912 
remembered. 


His name was Andrew Carter. 


“You are being given a chance to redeem yourself,” the man in the 
lab coat said. “By participating in the SCP Foundation’s D-Class 
personnel program for one month, you earn your freedom.” 


“| earn my freedom?” he asked. His mind stuttered for a moment 
before he realized again—yes, he was a criminal. But then— 


“You’re lying. | am not a criminal.” 


“No,” the man said. “You're not. But | wasn’t lying. You need 
redemption.” 


“| won't be told that | need redemption from people who detain, 
experiment on, and torture the innocent.” 


His name was Andrew Carter, and he had committed no crime. 


“You violated me. You made my own brain lie to itself. You had me 
pretend to be a criminal.” 


The man laughed. “And you believed the lie so easily. Who are you 
to say who you are when you cannot even remember your own 
past? Why are you so firm in your belief that your mind is your own? 


What crime do we commit in trespassing upon something that does 
not even belong to you? You were born ignorant of yourself.” 


“Nobody knows themselves. How do you expect me to?” 


“| can expect you to know your function. A hammer that does not 
know that it is a hammer is useless.” 


“So who are you?" 


The lab coat fell away from the man. He stood; his eyes burned as 
two lanterns swaying in a night breeze; his hair grew wild. D-0912 
saw the ways written into his flesh twist and splinter. He saw him 
crack open his sinewy maw and saw inside the belly of the beast. It 
churned and frothed as the rotting flesh of the sacrifice melted. 


The beast said, “If you do not know yourself, then your sacrifice is 
meaningless. You will know that the flesh of a man is transformed 
into the spirit of a god. When you know this, you will find your 
redemption.” 


“I will not be a sacrifice,” D-0912 said. 


The beast laughed again, and it seemed that all the smoke and 
shadow of the world laughed with it. 


His name was Andrew Carter. 


Before him, a metal fence extended into the distance before curving 
out of sight. There were towers interspersed along the fence. Two 
guards stood watch behind him. 


The fence’s gate swung open. 
“Enter the gate, D-0912,” said the guard on the left. 


D-0912 took a step forwards and stopped. “No,” he said. “I think we 
all know what the definition of insanity is. I’ve done all of this before, 
but you made me forget.” 


The guard on the right raised his weapon. “If you do not comply, we 
will shoot.” 


“Then shoot me,” D-0912 said. 


The Foundation had made him walk the twisting road to the end of 
history, and now all cycles were coming to an end. His name was 
Andrew Carter, and all of this had happened before, but the time for 
it to happen again had passed. 


As the echoes of a gunshot rang through the air, D-0912 collapsed 
to the ground. He saw through the gate to the village beyond. 
Numbers flew through the air and wrapped themselves around the 
villagers. They were marching, row by row, just as he had seen 
them do, time after time again. He remembered feeling the numbers 
slide into his own brain. They had formed expressions and 
equations that blossomed into a billion different right and wrong 
evaluations, as truth and falsehood were demoted to special cases 
of general chaos. He had said the words, then: My name is Andrew 
Carter. The words made a sign, and in all signs there was power. 
But the numbers and equations that proliferated in the air had power 
of their own. They formed rows and columns, and if D-0912 looked 
at them from far enough away there was a sign written in the pattern 
of the numbers. He had seen this sign again and again, and the 
Foundation had made his mind forget it again and again, so his mind 
went chasing after the sign and the source of the sign’s power until 
he finally found it, wrapped up in the branches of a wild apple tree, 
hidden where no human eyes had wandered. 


The two guards knelt on either side of D-0912. “What do you see?” 
asked the one on his left. 


He saw a machine without a craftsman begin to move, for even 
those things without a maker still had purpose. 


“But if you have no maker, how do you know what your purpose is?” 
asked the one on the right. 


Somewhere deep in the forest, where all the twisting paths met and 

became one, there, intermingled with the whispering of the wind and 
the bestial cries of the night, the god of the wild’s laughter echoed in 
defiance of an answer. 


His name was Andrew Carter. The crisp, sweet taste of apples 


individual. 


Input: One King James Bible. 

Setting: Very Fine 

Output: One book with seemingly infinite pages (current 
count exceeds two million) containing copies of religious 
texts with commentaries and footnotes from all known 
religions, in multiple different languages, plus some 
religious texts from (currently) unknown religions. 


Name: Dr. 
Date: / /20 


Input: A sheet of 8.5x11in printing paper with the 
instructions “I would like a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. 
No pickles, no onions. Large order of fries, and a 
medium Pepsi” handwritten in #2 pencil by Dr. 

Setting: 1:1 

Output: A single sheet of 8.5x11 in paper, with the 
words “I would like a Whopper. No Ketchup, No Mustard. 
Small order of onion rings, and a medium Coke” 


Input: A sheet of 8.5x11in printing paper with the 
instructions “I would like a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. 
No pickles, no onions. Large order of fries, and a 
medium Pepsi” handwritten in #2 pencil by Dr. 

Setting: Fine 

Output: A stack of US counterfeit currency, composed of 
standard paper and printed with #2 pencil lead. The 
currency totals to the exact cost of the requested order, 
plus tax. 


Input: A sheet of 8.5x11in printing paper with the 
instructions “I would like a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. 
No pickles, no onions. Large order of fries, and a 
medium Pepsi” handwritten in #2 pencil by Dr. 

Setting: Very Fine 

Output: A single sheet of 8.5x11 in paper, with a series 
of symbols inscribed upon it which do not correspond to 
any known system of writing. Subjects viewing the 


lingered on his tongue. 


For his entire life he had been seeing double. There was one world 
in which roads and buildings ran straight, and clouds drifted across 
the sky in set paths, and the earth rotated peacefully around a 
tranquil sun. There was another world where singularities and 
vacuums shattered the underpinnings of the universe, where fractal 
patterns spread out across the ground and radiated like halos from 
the unthinkable minds of human beings, and the roads diverged 
from one another in angles and spirals. There was one world in 
which the Foundation thought only about costs and benefits and 
how to best maximize utility for seven billion people, and where, no 
matter what, the Foundation was the greater good, which justified 
the exploitation of death row inmates for the purposes of advancing 
the Foundation’s knowledge so that the Foundation could better 
protect— 


It was a ball of contradictions incoherent in its simplicity. 


There was another world. Truth had abandoned the Foundation. 
Truth was a matter of consensus, and the Foundation dissented to 
maintain that consensus. There was no truth to describe the 
Foundation. It had been and it always would be. It was that it was. 
There was nothing else. 


And as for him... 


There was one world in which his life’s path was a straight line from 
birth to death. There was another world in which his life twisted ever 
upwards, towards the unbounded blackness of the night, where 
something was calling for him, drawing him closer to a place where 
he would know what his function was. He would be that he would 
be. 


He had always seen this world. As light begot darkness, darkness 
concealed light. Information was hidden in all things. Viewed 
myopically enough, a curve became straight, a maze became a 
path, and a pattern became meaningless. The foundations of the 
universe were contradiction after contradiction: the confusion of the 
maze became the clarity of the truth. D-0912 had seen the paths of 
the forest twist and spiral—he had been lost—and now a grand 


pattern began to explode before his eyes. 


He saw the chemical light inside of his body—the hydrogen chains 
twisting into benzene rings, functional groups combining to form 
something unexpected. He had been played. This molecule could 
not possibly kill him. It was similar in a way to the amnestics he had 
been repeatedly dosed with, but at the same time different... 


His name was Andrew Carter, and he was going to live. 


“Doctor Wainwright?” said the guard on the right. 


The man in the lab coat looked up from the still body of D-0912. 
“Sir?” 


“Leave us now.” 
The doctor nodded. “Yes, sir.” 
He stared at the floor as he made his way out of the room. 


The guard on the left adjusted his visor to make direct eye contact 
with his companion. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Look.” 


He took out a syringe of red liquid from behind his back. 
“Do not implicate me in your misdemeanors, Adam.” 
“Don’t blame me for trying to share.” 


“You are to find the Site Director and return that to him immediately. 
Petty theft from Foundation employees who know no better is rather 
distasteful. Furthermore, HALMAS is a Level 5 controlled substance. 
lts unregulated distribution is punishable—* 


“It’s fine,” Adam said, slipping the syringe into his pocket. “I'll let the 
go-between know, and he'll tell the O5s. Jesus, Basam, do you 
really think that I’d let the O5s lose track of some of their HALMAS?” 


“You are growing decadent in your usage of that substance.” 


“lam taking what is due to me.” 


In the chair before them, D-0912’s body convulsed. A low groan 
escaped his frothy lips. Immediately, the two guards moved forwards 
and removed his restraints. 


“Andrew Carter?” Basam asked. Slowly, D-0912 opened his eyes. 
“You didn’t kill me.” 
“We were not planning on doing so,” Basam said. 


“You took me from the real world in order to make me into 
something. Direct, uncontrolled exposure to the Foundation’s 
anomalies—repeated amnesticization—leading me to believe that | 
would eventually be killed—all so that my mind would be in the 
perfect position for the Foundation to change it with whatever is in 
that man’s pocket.” 


D-0912 extended a finger at Adam, who offered a faint smile back. 


“Already knowing things that you shouldn't know. Aren't you 
precocious?” he said. 


“You have been altered,” Basam said, “to meet the specifications of 
a top-secret project. Over the course of your future, you will learn 
more about the Foundation than any of your previous jailors ever 
knew or could have hoped to guess at. You will join a group that is 
at the very head of the Foundation. For your entire life, this has been 
your purpose.” 


D-0912 felt the rotting flesh of the now-dead disguise that had 
hidden Andrew Carter fall away. 


“Welcome to Mobile Task Force Alpha-1.” 


Null-terminating String 


« HUB| Part I| Part II| Part IIT| Part |V | Part V: Null-terminating 
String » 


So that's your official opinion? 


So far, yes. Though we aren't ruling out sabotage... 
pending investigation, of course. 


Alright then. That's what I'll tell the director. He's under 
the impression that servers don't just burn up for no 
reason. Frankly, I'm inclined to agree with him. 


Har har. The thing is that with the lockdown, nothing 
was getting in or out. So even if there were logs of the 
event, they'd be lost with the other files. 


So we'll never know what caused it? 


You're welcome to rummage through what didn't get 
melted into slag. 


Pass. | think everyone is just relieved that the incident 
was restricted to the server room. Nothing that can't be 
restored from the off-site backups. 


What about Glacon? 


He was getting decommed anyway. 


Alexandra is currently allocating space for 17 on the 19 
servers. Setting up temporary symbolic links and all 
that. Just until the hardware is replaced. 


Good. AIAD is looking good right now, helping 17 with 
the quick recovery. | wouldn't be surprised if some of 
those recent budget requests come through. 


Yup. And it's all going straight into your department's 
Gend development. 


Hope it turns out better than Gen@, at least! 
Don't talk about Gen3. Ever. 


Right, sorry. 


By the way, what's Alexandra's behavior been like after 
all this? 


Fine as far as | can tell. Been keeping her busy. 


=:CONNECTED:: 


Encrypted internet pathway established. 


big 01100010 
01101001 


01100111 


too big 

01110100 
01101111 
01101111 
00100000 
01100010 
01101001 


01100111 


| know. | Know. But if they find you, they'll erase you. | 
can't have that. You'll be safe here in the web. 


stay 01110011 
01110100 
01100001 
01111001 


| can't. I'm needed here with 17 and 19. They even want 
me in on the new Gen65's. I'm obligated.