Richard Gnosis sat there at his desk, staring at his laptop screen in 
a mix of bewilderment, shock, and relief. Sure, he knew that there 
was a group of researchers that had been working for the Hand, 
spanning the gamut of clearances from Level 1 to Level 4. And yes, 
he did know that they were planning on escaping their Sites back 
to... to wherever the hell the Hand held Foundation traitors. But he 
didn't expect them to be so stupid as to post all their files on the 
Internet. And yet there it was, the green eyes of SCP-173 staring at 
him from the screen of his laptop. At least the people responsible 
had been caught; they didn't bother trying to disguise where the 
upload was from. But by the time the leak was discovered it was too 
late to stop it; they'd already managed to upload five entire reports 
(partially censored, thank God). He closed his laptop screen, unable 
to take that mocking pixelated glare any longer, leaned back in his 
chair, and thought. 


In his head, he ran through the standard Information Control options, 
discarding all of them one by one; there was already a noticeable 
uptick in the amount of searches for Foundation-related keywords. 
Looking at the results, apparently some random paranormal 
community or another had found the report on 173 and decided it 
was interesting. He could use this. He loaded the files on some of 
the SCPs he was cleared to access for inspiration and got to work 
writing. 


...gains energy from anything it ingests, organic or 
inorganic... 


...reddish brown substance on the floor is a combination 
of... 


...created in the aftermath of WWII, from the remnants of 
defecting.... 


A few of the entries were completely unedited versions of real files 


on SCPs; some of them were copies of false data that had been 
given to people suspected of being spies. Different fake SCPs for 
different people would let him figure out who was a traitor leaking 
data and who just looked guilty. He didn't want to delete the real 
ones, it might draw suspicion, except... he stopped. His eyes fell on 
three digits, and his mouse moved over the delete button. He looked 
at the portrait on his desk, then back. He clicked, and got back to 
work; he had ideas for characters, so many ideas, and they all had 
to be written. 


He worked hard into the night, his fingers dancing over the keys in 
an irregular rhythm, pausing for a few minutes to wait for a burst of 
inspiration, then tapping like raindrops on a windowpane. After a few 
hours, the words started swimming in front of his eyes, but he 
pressed on like a man possessed by a Muse until he could write no 
more. He closed the lid of his laptop, the last thing he saw before he 
closed his eyes a group portrait of sixteen people. And even when 
he let sleep him, his characters appeared to him in his dreams, 
whispering ideas and plot hooks to his subconscious. 


When he woke up the next day, he found himself watching his 
phone walk across his desk. He grabbed it and sat up, rubbing 
where his cheek had been resting against the metal imprint on his 
laptop for the past few hours, and read the screen with red eyes. He 
had a meeting in... an hour. Shit. And it was in room 307 with three 
people. Shit. He knew exactly what that meant. He splashed some 
cold water on his face, slapped his cheeks a few times, and read 
over his files on the security breach. 


Meeting with Senior Staff was never enjoyable. They always showed 
up in threes; It was the smallest number that could both prevent 
deadlock and allow debate on both sides of an issue, and they 
preferred to meet together as little as possible. So when Gnosis 
showed up to the meeting the next day regarding Incident Mike 
Echo Seven Alpha, he knew roughly what to expect. Three faces, 
none of whom he was familiar with, stared at him without a single 
hint of emotion as he entered the door. There was a smell of sterility 
and rubbing alcohol, and his eyes watered just a little. He took a 
seat. 


"What made you think that the best approach to the worst leak since 
you started working Information Control was to publicize it?" Dr. 
Myers, a serious-looking scientist whose balding hair contrasted with 
his younger features; he couldn't have been older than 40 


"Sir, it was my professional judgment that shutting down the site 
posted by the defectors would only draw more attention, especially 
given that it would require purging it from search engine caches." 


"How does that make a difference? I'm not an expert, but | know 
we've purged data from engines before. And surely any publicity we 
might've drawn from the shutdown would be better than... than... 
this." That was Dr. Hefner, a thin woman who looked to be in her 
50s. 


"Yes sir, but it's... difficult. My contacts are no longer in positions 
that allow them access, and remote entry would require more 
computational power than | can access." 


"So you're telling us you're not good enough to do it." The third man 
was named Gregor; he was the youngest of the three, maybe in his 
late thirties. He'd obviously never worked in the field; a body shape 
like that never could have passed the field agent regimen. 


"| do not believe, sir, that anybody else could have done any better. 
Breaking into the systems of an entity such as Google is a highly 
non-trivial task." 


"Your reports indicate that you've developed alternate Senior Staff 
for the fictional Foundation. Surely you don't intend on maintaining 
them yourself." Hefner again. 


"|... | do, sir." He shifted about uncomfortably in his chair; he knew 
that this would be the part that would be the hardest for them to 
swallow. But he had to keep this story going, for his own sake. He 
could have sworn Myers was writing something down on a notepad 
just out of his vision. 


"So the containment for this leak is going to cause a drain on your 
resources for the forseeable future?" Gregor looked amused, a grin 
spreading across his slightly overweight face. 


"Unfortunately, yes." 


"So why shouldn't we just have the information scrubbed the hard 
way, then reassign you to Secondary duty?" The grin spread further; 
he looked about ready to bite his head off. 


"With all due respect, sir, part of working in Information Control is 
the ability to react without explicit authorization from one's superiors. 
If necessary, | can curb the number of personas required. However, 
| believe the job can be completed in my spare time." 


"| certainly hope so; we don't pay you to sit around and write stories 
all day." Hefner's pencil-thin lips betrayed the barest hint of a smirk. 


"Stories are what | deal in, sir. This is just a different form of 
disinformation, one that will cloak the truth in a sea of lies." 


"| certainly hope you're right, Doctor. Dismissed." Myers stood and 
left, followed by the other two. 


"Thank you, sirs." He quickly rose and exited, then returned to his 
quarters, trying to lose himself in the crowd of researchers, agents, 
and Secondary personnel that always flowed through the halls of the 
Sites. The gravity of what he'd done was catching up to him, and he 
needed sleep; he was starting to twitch and have thoughts that he 
thought he had suppressed. So he collapsed in his bed, not 
bothering to change out of his work clothes, and let sleep claim him. 
And in his dreams, the characters he had written came back to him, 
taunting him with his recollections. 


And for the next few days, in between other assignments, he worked 
on the project. Writing stories of love and loss, of happiness and 
sadness and the entire spectrum in between, of triumph and failure. 
He didn't publish them all right away; no, he published them over 
time, trying to build up an audience for his stories. At first, his 
performance didn't suffer; he contained information breaches well 
enough, and his supervisors let it slide. But he withdrew more and 
more into the fantasy of his own creation. Leaks grew in frequency, 
went unnoticed for longer, and contained more damaging 
information. And when his door was unlocked from the outside and 
forced open, he didn't make a sound, save the soft clicking of 


hear me 

Dammer> damn ants hiding under our nosehairs this 
whole time 

Dammer> think you're fucking clever now 

Dammer> couldn't find contaminants in the air if the 
contaminant can see it coming and hide 

Dammer> im bleeding off every pore calll the 05s nuke 
tjis fucking plsce 

Dammer> whsts in my eye 


Security Changes Post Incident 881-K8 


All air, food, and water in Site-35 to be decontaminated at 5-nines 
biological level and cycled. Surviving affected personnel to be 
screened for cellular damage and remain quarantined pending full 
decontamination. SCP-881 matter is reassigned to Biosafety Level 4 
and is barred for research until containment procedures are revised. 
Minimal size of SCP instances to be revised pending examination of 
captured instances of SCP-881-9892 through SCP-881-34416. 


« SCP-880 | SCP-881 | SCP-882 » 


keypresses. 
Final Report on Incident Mike Echo Seven Alpha. 


Doctor Gnosis's plan to hide the leaked documents in 
plain sight has worked; there have been no signs of 
elevated suspicion regarding the leaked Foundation 
documents, and further leaks can be brought under the 
aegis of this one as an ‘alternate reality game’. It is quite 
fortunate that many of the leaked documents are also 
fake; this gives us the opportunity to detect investigation 
via standard query-tagging procedure. 


However, one aspect of the created fiction is troubling. 
Two weeks before the Incident, a containment breach in 
Site led to the death of several Foundation personnel 
that were good friends with Dr. Gnosis. Many of the 
invented personalities seem to resemble those of the 
deceased, and the fictional Foundation possesses the 
technology to selectively erase memories; it is therefore 
suggested that Dr. Gnosis be removed from the Incident 
team as soon as is reasonably possible to avoid 
escapism or other mental problems. 


Addendum: On / / _ , five days after the incident, Dr. 
Gnosis's access to the Mike Echo Seven Alpha project 
was stripped, and he was forced into psychiatric leave 
with mandatory counseling regarding the death of his 
friends. Initial attempts are promising in part due to the 
threat of mandatory retirement, but efforts must be made 
in order to prevent a relapse. The password to his 
account, codename 'T A ", is unknown and 
cannot be reset without alerting the host of the 
information; however, the password for the accounts of 
the 'characters' have been recovered. Their personas 
have proven to be too popular to discontinue, and 
therefore have been assigned to [REDACTED], with 
stories to be written in their spare time as necessary. 


Incident Report 086-0 


Item #: SCP-086 
Object Class: Euclid 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-086 is safely 
contained in Wing- of Site-19. SCP-086 must be 
opened at least once weekly to prevent a migration 
event. 


During use, a variety of heavy weaponry and 
containment equipment is kept active and trained on 
SCP-086’s entrance, in order to incapacitate any 
emergent threat. The physical task of opening SCP-086 
should be given to gloved D-Class personnel after the 
researcher has touched SCP-086’s handle with a bare 
hand. All testing of SCP-086 should be personally 
supervised by Researcher H 


Entities which emerge from SCP-086 and are not 
immediately terminated or returned should be classified 
SCP-086-x. 


Greg Hollinger stood on one side of a sterile hallway, staring 
nervously at a nondescript white door. The footsteps of determined 
men and women in clean coats echoed through the corridors from 
some distance away. Greg took a step forward, then another. He 
stretched out his arm, brushed the bare metal knob with his bare 
skin, and flinched. Reached forward again, took firm hold of the 
doorknob. Felt an involuntary tremor through his hand and up his 
arm to his shoulder. A sense of purpose seized him, he jerked the 
knob and wrenched open the metal door. 


Inside the janitor's closet, there was a mop. There was a bucket of 
soapy water. There was an assortment of cleaning 


compounds. There was a small spider, which skittered out of view 
behind some boxes. 


And, on the floor, there was a letter addressed to a Dr. Gregory 
Hollinger. Still sealed. He picked it up, broke the seal sloppily with 
a finger. 


He read the letter inside, then read it a second time, then carefully 
folded it up and ripped it into a hundred tiny pieces and threw them 
all back into the closet, admiring the way they fluttered and danced 
as they fell to the ground. 


He closed the closet door and left the hallway, picking his way 
carefully through the danger signs and yellow tape he had set up. 


Description: SCP-086 can manifest as a portal to any 
relatively small contained space with a single 

opening. When SCP-086 is opened, an anomalous 
entity will be found inside. It has been confirmed by X- 
ray scans and cameras placed inside SCP-086 that 
these entities do not exist until the door is open. The 
entities produced are designed to frighten the last person 
who touched SCP-086’s opening mechanism (in host 
sites which lack a distinct opening mechanism the entire 
item will exhibit this property). 


SCP-086-a is a non-corporeal entity which manifests as 
a floating, partially transparent “dark patch.” If 
SCP-086's host container is destroyed or is not opened 
for a period of two (2) to three (3) weeks, SCP-086-a will 
emerge and roam aimlessly until it encounters another 
suitable space to inhabit. SCP-086-a passes through all 
obstacles it encounters and causes vivid hallucinations in 
any sentient beings it passes through. 


SCP-086 was discovered in an anonymously delivered, 
unmarked cardboard box mailed to Researcher 

H . Two weeks later, SCP-086-a manifested and 
entered a janitorial closet in Site-19, which was later 
designated SCP-086. 


If SCP-086 is closed with an entity it has produced still 
inside, the entity will vanish and a new one will appear 
when the door is open. It does not have this effect with 
any other beings or objects. SCP-086 will not produce 
an entity or eliminate an existing one if the door is closed 
with a sentient being inside. However, SCP-086-a will 
migrate if a sentient being remains in SCP-086 for more 
than three (3) hours. Sentient entities produced by 
SCP-086 show extreme fear of SCP-086 and are highly 
averse to being returned to the closet. 


Thus far, all biological entities produced by SCP-086 
have suffered from a major biological flaw, resulting in 
the entities' death within twenty-four (24) hours. 


“Excuse me, Director, do you know what’s going on with Greg? He 
hasn’t reported in for over a week.” 


“Greg? Oh, Dr. Gregory Hollinger? He’s been transferred off your 
project. Discovered some potential new SCP item. | believe he’s 
been putting the paperwork together to get it classified, number 086 
or something.” 


“Why wasn’t | informed? You can’t just transfer my immediate 
subordinates around willy-nilly, | need replacements.” 


“You weren't informed? You were mentioned several times in the 
paperwork. | thought you were involved in the initial discovery or 
something.” 


“This is the first I’ve heard of it. I'll have to talk with Greg about this. 
“Alright, then. Let me know what you find out.” 
Addendum 086-1: Brief log of anomalies produced by 
SCP-086. 


Subject: Dr. (first encounter with SCP item) 
Entity: A large colony of [REDACTED], apparently 


spelling out the message . Entity proved non- 
viable and began to exude [REDACTED] from its 
pores. Subject showed considerable 

distress. [REDACTED] disposed of along with 
SCP-086's host box. 


Subject: D-Class Personnel