"One job," she hissed after shutting the door, "You had exactly one 
job and you fucked it up. You were supposed to build the damn thing 
and give it a voice. It just had to jumble some words together from 
the book! That was literally a// that it had to do. And you couldn't 
even do that right! | don't know why | thought it would be a good 
idea to work with you." She paced back and forth in the small room. 


"Okay, first of all? That's two jobs," he shot back, "And B, it's not my 
fault. | followed the instructions, you know, the instructions that you 
gave me’? to the /etter! So if anyone fucked up, it's you!" 


Judith ran her hands over her face and moaned. "We are fucked! 
‘Are we cool yet?' What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I'm 
going to be the laughing stock of the art world! And all because of 
you" She jabbed a finger at him. Micah decided against saying 
anything. After a moment, Judith stopped pacing. "Wait, Khouri is 
here. Jesus Christ, I'm going to be featured in RK as the biggest 
fuckup since Todd Hannah." She resumed pacing with a renewed 
vigor. 


After several seconds, Micah spoke again. "So, what do you want to 
do? Do you want to leave or stay or..." He trailed off. 


"No, we're not leaving with our tails between our legs. We are going 
to stay the whole night, just to spite those fucks," Judith said without 
looking up. She stood very still for a moment. As she opened the 
door, her face lit up with a smile that seemed effortless, almost 
natural. "When this is over, | am going to kill you. In your sleep," she 
said through clenched teeth before she left the room. Alone in the 
coatroom, Micah sighed. Tonight was not his night. 


In ones and twos, they left. Some stumbled out, slightly drunk. 
Others left in a daze, their retinas still recovering from "Death of a 
Star" piece. Judith and Micah were among the last to leave. As they 
got their coats, Micah turned to her. 


"It didn't seem too bad, honestly. Not too many people seemed to be 
laughing, really," he said. 


"In your sleep," she said before walking away. He hustled to catch 
up with her. 


"So, what if | just wait tonight. With, like, a shotgun or whatever?" 


"Who said anything about tonight? I'll do it, but no man shall know 
the day or the hour," she said without looking at him. She opened 
the door, letting it close on him. Outside, Khouri was standing with 
her back to them, smoking a cigarette. They attempted to pass 
without attracting her attention. She turned around and waved them 
down. 


"You're the Essence people, right?" she asked as she flicked the 
cigarette butt away. 


"Yeah, b-" Judith began. 


"|. Loved it. Fucking brilliant subversion. The hipsters standing 
around, asking wondering how cool they were, then they get asked 
the question and they scoff? Then there's, like, 'do we understand 
each other?’ | have to say, for a first time piece, this was pretty 
spectacular. Nothing like that shit-ass drone." There was silence for 
a moment. 


"Well, t-thanks" Judith said, rubbing the back of her neck. Silence for 
a few moments more. 


"It's late, but if you have the time later, I'd like to maybe ask you a 
few questions? Just see what you were thinking and such," Khouri 
nodded. 


"Y-yeah. Sure! Definitely," Micah exclaimed. 


"Thank you. Thank you so much," Judith said. 


"No, thank you. That was seriously great," Khouri said. After a 
moment, she took her leave and walked off into the dark. 


"Well, that was certainly unexpected," Judith said when they were 
out of earshot. 


Micah smiled. Tonight was a pretty good night. 


SCP-919: Needy Mirror 


Item #: SCP-919 
Object Class: Safe 


Special Containment Procedures: [REVISED] as of / / due to 
[DATA EXPUNGED]. SCP-919 is to be kept in a locked storage 
room with no windows and two armed guards at all times. All 
personnel to interact with SCP-919 must pass a psychological 
evaluation. 


Description: SCP-919 appears to be an ordinary, full length mirror 
in excellent condition. 


Once a living subject has been in front of SCP-919 for 15 seconds, 
the reflection breaks synchronization and begs for the subject not to 
leave. The reflection appears to be completely self-aware, and has 
shown to have access to all of the subject's memories. When the 
subject makes any move to leave, the reflection quickly becomes 
hysterical. Once the subject is no longer in a place where they can 
be reflected by SCP-919, the reflection screams and violently 
disintegrates. Repeated exposures to the same subject have shown 
that the reflection is cognizant of what happened to it before. 
Extended exposure to a subject has shown that the reflection has no 
need of sustenance, though this was detrimental to the subject's 
mental health. 


SCP-919 was discovered after an incident in the town of ; 

. The owner of SCP-919 had apparently died of dehydration. It 
is unclear as to when SCP-919 came into the owner's possession, 
or what caused it to become active, if it wasn't already. Local 
authorities were eager to get rid of SCP-919. 


While SCP-919 has proved invulnerable to damage, its effective 
range can be neutralized by merely covering it. This results in the 
immediate disintegration of any reflection that has broken 


Puzzle 


Now that | think about it, the old man wasn't trying to keep it away 
from us so he could solve it. He was trying to keep it away from us 
so we couldn't. He was dirty and unkempt, his hair a matted mess 
and his clothes in tatters when the police caught up with him, 
carrying that cursed box. A concerned citizen had called them in 
because they thought that the old bum had a bomb, or at least 
stolen something from somewhere. Cornered, he screamed that 
they couldn't have it and pulled a gun on the police officers. He died 
before they could even call in for a paramedic. 


| was just a junior assistant researcher at the time. | don't even 
remember exactly how it came to the Foundation's attention, just 
that it was brought in by field agents, and we were ordered to figure 
out how to open the thing. Come to think of it, | don't even have any 
idea how we could have possibly known that the thing could be 
opened. It was a perfect cube, thirty centimeters to a side, with 
thousands of engraved runes in its surface. It was eerily beautiful 
too, though none of us could ever put our finger on exactly why. We 
only knew that we had to figure it out. We had to solve the puzzle. 


It took a team of almost a hundred researchers ten years to figure it 
out. The best and brightest minds at the Foundation were 
transferred to our project to unlock its secrets. Billions of dollars 
were spent on equipment and everything else put on hold so we 
could do our work. Ten years, and we all crowded around with 
anticipation, gathered as the final piece was put into place. 


| can't remember exactly what happened next that day, but | 
remember that the first of the things came down three days later. It 
impacted savagely into the Russian tundra and unfurled into a 
creature of nightmare that glided impossibly fast on its four-jointed 
legs and hunted any human it could find until we put it down. We lost 
almost thirty agents. 


Two more came in as many days, landing in Brazil and Australia. 


We sent three MTFs and only four men came back. The things were 
dead, but the news was leaking out. A fourth one came down in San 
Francisco at the end of the week, and the whole world knew that 
something terrible had happened. 


Almost a hundred had landed by the time we lost contact with High 
Command at the end of week three. Our task forces were 
completely overwhelmed, and the world's police and military forces 
were unable to fight off the monsters. From fragments of 
surveillance footage, we saw that they were eating our dead. 


There are only a few of us left, hiding in the dark corners of the 
world. Most of the major sites were compromised within weeks, 
broken in without a fight. | think they managed to absorb the 
information from the bodies they consumed, and used that to find 
our hiding places. The only ones still alive are the ones who could 
find places where no one knew to look. | think the puzzle was the 
key, a beacon that called them to our world when we became 
intelligent enough to solve it. They fed on our intelligence and wiped 
us out completely. 


We haven't stepped outside for years. Food and water are running 
low, and sooner or later we'll have to go out to search for more. Out 
there where the monsters are. If anyone should find this message in 
the future, hear our words across time. One day, a puzzle will 
appear on your doorstep as well. Resist the urge to solve it. Lock it 
away. It doesn't pay to be smart. 


Tales Q 


Quarterly Performance Review 


POSITION PAPER 
ON 


THE INFEASIBILITY OF UNIDIRECTIONAL ANALYSIS 
OF SEMI-RIGID SUBCONSCIOUS 
MENTAL STRUCTURES FOR THE PURPOSE OF 
REGULAR PERSONNEL EVALUATION 


1. Developments in the field of mental continuity tracking 
necessitate an examination of possibly implementing 
such tests into existing Foundation evaluation structures. 
Early research into mental continuity analysis suggested 
that broad applicaiton of the process was hindered by 
large, but not insurmountable, technological gaps. 
Several advances in the fields of data interpretation and 
storage have since filled the largest of these gaps. This 
paper will outline the argument that, despite these 
advances, unidirectional analysis of semi-rigid sub- 
conscious mental structures (UASSMS) is not suited for 
use in personnel evaluations. This analysis focuses on 
the practical problems of assessing the mental continuity 
of individuals in any context, the difficulty isolating causal 
factors in continuity drift, and offers some practical 
alternatives for protecting employees' minds from 
anomalous influences. 


2. For the purpose of this paper, mental continuity can be 
evaluated through sequential snapshots of an individual's 
mental state when compared against personalized 
markers. Simply put, their purpose is to discern the 
degree to which any tested individual is the same person 
that they were at the time of previous tests (see: 
Practical Applications: The Ship of Theseus in 


Psychological Studies.) In theory, testing of this variety 
should greatly improve the Foundation's capacity for 
detecting personnel suffering anomalous effects, form- 
imitating entities, and non-temporally anchored 
individuals. Evaluations of mental continuity have not 
proven to correlate closely to evaluations of mental 
health, and their use should not be employed for that 
purpose. This past-future comparison has several 
implications for UASSMS implementation, most notably 
in that the first set of results are generally meaningless 
until they are contextualized by subsequent results. 
Furthermore, [DATA REDACTED] 


3. [DATA REDACTED] 
4. [DATA REDACTED] 
5. [DATA REDACTED] 
6. [DATA REDACTED] 


7. In short, many of the problems addressed by 
UASSMS are better solved by training critical personnel 
in reactionary defensive mindfulness, while the 
remainder of the issues are unlikely to be fully (or even 
significantly) addressed by implementation of these 
processes. Further developments in marker-determining 
procedures may improve the effectiveness of this 
technology to the point of meriting further evaluation. 


Erin Anmadi, who was addressed by her last name more than her 
first, and by her title more than her name, perfectly understood the 
concerns of colleagues about the minds of others. After all, they 
lived in a world where minds were easily changed, and almost 
exclusively for the worse. Given that, the Overseer Council's 
Ongoing search for some method to delve into the heads their 
employees was perfectly rational. If she did not commit herself fully 
to that quest, it was only because she had already completed it long 
ago. 


Ahmadi's wispy, ethereal form coalesced in a place indistinguishable 
from a doctor's waiting room, complete with lines of squat chairs, an 
abundance of magazines, and a bored attendant. The air was warm 
and dry, and the light was cold and harsh. Just as she had 
expected, coherent and deeply unpleasant. 


The lanky woman behind the desk pushed a short strand of mud- 
brown hair up from her forehead and smiled widely as Ahmadi 
approached. "Overseer." 


"Egret." 


"We're a bit busy right now. Could you please take a number and 
wait to be called?" 


"There's no one else waiting." 


"You're the first one today! Please take your number. It shouldn't be 
long." 


"You know how busy | am, Egret." 


The receptionist smiled again, wide enough to show the barest hint 
of her canines. The humor of it always managed to reach her eyes, 
but it was not clear whose expense it was at. "Sorry, I'm just a grade 
14. Not my call." 


"The world as we know it could collapse while you're holding me up 
here." 


"I'll be sure to pass your complaints on to my superiors. If you could 
please take your number?" 


Ahmadi scowled, yanked a ticket out of the machine, and turned to 
sit in the chair closest to the desk. The cushion felt like a hundred 
bearing balls stuffed into a burlap sack. Faint music began leaking 
from somewhere in the room, a pathetic chain of six slow notes 
repeated again and again. Ahmadi found herself tapping her fingers 
again her arm along with the slow music, and minutes later was 
scratching at her skin with the same steadiness. She glared at the 
woman sitting behind the desk and considered saying something 
more forceful, though arguing with most mental constructs was 


pointless. Thankfully, people usually only had a few rattling around 
inside their heads. 


"Ma'am?" chirped the fragment of Egret. "Overseer? They'll see you 
now." 


"About time." 


"Just go straight down the hallway here," she said, gesturing to a 
door that had not been there moments before. "Oh, and could | 
please have my number back?" 


"The ticket?" 
"It's the only one | have." 


Ahmadi bit her tongue, handed the bit of paper to the receptionist, 
and walked past. She was not going to waste time berating a 
fragment of her employee's subconsciousness. 


The hallway beyond the waiting room was covered in doors. They 
lined both walls, each bearing plaques with titles like Office of the 
Subcommittee of Interdepartmental Emotion Integration. They lined 
the floor too, and the ceiling on top of that. Anmadi stepped gingerly 
as she walked across them, well aware of the kind of trauma that 
might arise from a tumble through strange parts of a mind, 
especially Egret's. Her agent's particular set of unhealthy 
experiences was something Ahmadi would prefer to keep at arm's 
length. 


The door at the end of the hall had one more piece of signage than 
any of the others. Right below its plaque (Office of the Chairwoman 
of the Prime Committee for Subcommittee Non-Conformity 
Management) was taped a piece of paper, bearing two lines of neat, 
handwritten text: 'Closed for construction. Detour through summer 
vacation memories.’ 


No, Ahmadi did not think she would be putting up with that much. 
That the rest of the world could be falling apart even as she dawdled 
had not been an idle comment, and her own time was more valuable 
than this regardless. She should be able to correct any momentary 


harm to Egret regardless, or at least fix it well enough that no one 
would ever notice. Ahmadi reached out and turned the doorknob in 
one swift motion, and the door beneath her feet opened.