Then, abruptly, everything stops, and the thing that has escaped 
from the cube is before him. It is wearing orange, and for a moment 
he wonders if it is a D-Class prisoner, then he realises what he is 
seeing are robes, like a Tibetan monk. Its face is blurred and 
distorted, but there are two pinpricks of white light in it that might be 
eyes. It takes him a moment to recognise that he has been seen. 


The drone resolves itself in his mind into words. Who are you? it 
asks. It's a good question. 


"| don't know," he says, "I—I just found myself here." 
"What is it doing?" shouts one of the soldiers. "It just stopped." 


He turns to see the men repositioning themselves around the 
orange-robed thing, guns raised. 


You might be useful, it says, the voice distant in the chaos of the 
droning chant. He finds he cannot move his arms, his legs. The 
thing reaches out and takes hold of his head gently, palm over his 
eyes. Its fingers end in sharp points like talons and he feels them 
press against his temples. 


"It's getting ready to do something," decides the lead black-helmet. 


"Drive it back towards the containment unit!" 


He hears nothing as the guns fire. He thinks he must have been hit, 
for his perspective is drawing back, sinking into the ground, 
dissolving. He watches as bullets ripple through the form of the 
orange-robed thing as though through a cloud, helical spirals of its 
substance exploding from the exit wounds before inexorably falling 
back together, the gaps in its flesh caused by the passage of the 
bullets knitting as soon as they are opened. 


You neean't be concerned, it says to him. You're not really here, 
after all. Then it turns and, to the amazement of the watching black- 
helmets, walks back into its ruined cell. 


Keagan—that was his name, how could he have forgotten it?—woke 
slowly, each sense reporting for duty one at a time. Touch: cool 
sheets, crisply laid out, quite luxurious for an inmate until it dawned 
upon you that you were not merely cool but cold; the sheets 
attenuated to the point of thermal transparency by regular heavy 
disinfection and dry cleaning. Hearing: quiet bustling, a sense of 
purpose, but also the deep breathing of those sleeping under the 
influence of anaesthetics. Smell: antiseptic tang, an aftertaste of 
vaporised ink reminiscent of a printer's shop or a tattoo parlour. 
Keagan didn't even bother opening his eyes; he could place himself 
in the medical wing of the facility, where the little bald man had 
engraved Keagan's designation on his wrist and chest. 


For the first time since the death of the Judge, Keagan had time and 
clarity enough to think over his situation and weigh up the evidence, 
as one might assess a car and make an estimate of what it would 
take to make right. 


He vaguely recalled hearing of villages on Salisbury plain evacuated 
during World War 2, handed over to the Americans for training 
purposes; easy to think there could have been other small 
conurbations in the area, quietly removed from the records and used 
for purposes that could not officially be endorsed by the government 
or military. The important parts of the facility were maintained well— 
but you only had to look at areas like the D-Class dormitories to see 
the facility was decades old. Possible, of course, that it had only 


recently been taken over by the Foundation—possible too, that the 
use of D-Class as cheap, expendable test subjects in their fucked- 
up experiments was a new innovation. But he doubted it. 


From his conversation with the young researcher, Edward, it 
appeared there were strict restrictions on how and when even staff 
were permitted to interact with the outside world. Edward seemed 
like a special case—maybe others were allowed to sign a non- 
disclosure agreement and went home to their families on weekends. 
But the notion that convicts would ever be permitted to leave was a 
nonsense. Under normal circumstances that didn't leave too many 
options. The prisoners could keep track of time—with a sizeable 
margin of error, but nevertheless—and each one expected to be 
released to a gradual programme of fake addiction clinics and 
offender management schemes in about a fortnight. Could they be 
simply rounded up and told the promise was a fraud and that they 
would spend the rest of their lives in the service of the Foundation? 
Of course they could. But then, why maintain the pretence through 
the early days of the programme? Why not disabuse them of any 
notions of freedom at orientation? Keagan remembered the court 
reporter, Deloitte, saying they recruited 18 shifts a year—some 
mental arithmetic showed they must overlap for about a week. The 
restrictions on speaking to other D-Class shifts would make sense if 
the other shift had been told they would never see the light of day— 
but thus far everything Keagan had seen exactly fitted the schedule 
they were on; in another week or so they would begin to see new 
faces above orange jumpsuits—a new junior Shift A recruited fresh 
from lifers across the country—and a week after that... 


Bang. "Can | say that?" Dr Skinner's glib query, the shame-faced lab 
technicians, Edward's statement about what the Foundation's 
protection made him overlook—right now there was only one 
hypothesis, and that was that Keagan, Cameron Moat, Travis 
Lemure, Cancer, Ronny Feldspar and the rest would be quietly 
disposed of. Maybe they would be ushered into another 
decontamination room as an ostensible prelude to getting back on 
the bus, and the gas would flow out of the showerheads, and that 
would be it. Perhaps they wouldn't even get that faint hope—they 
would go to sleep on their last day of service, and petrol exhausts 
would be hooked up to the slats at the top of the wall, and the next 


day the blue-hats would clear away the bodies. Maybe that's what 
the stain around the walls was—some reaction of the paint to carbon 
monoxide or whatever else they pumped in. Or maybe they would 
be taken away, one at a time, for a debrief and introduction to their 
new identities, but the room would be dark to hide the stains on the 
floor and some grizzled veteran of the Foundation who could say 
‘I've seen everything’ would unholster his gun and press it to the 
back of their heads... 


Keagan opened his eyes and watched staff move between beds 
with clipboards in hand. The light that shone through the windows 
was real, not artificial, and for a moment he thought of the park he 
had seen on the bus journey. Ronny and Patrick were here—the 
former, both legs and one arm in splints, looked away quickly when 
he saw Keagan's eye on him, but the terror had gone, perhaps 
sensing that he had at last satisfied Keagan's search for answers. 
Ronny, on the other hand, was eyeing him as though weighing up 
his options; the stump of his shattered hand in a sling. Not good, 
thought Keagan, in a place with surgical implements. Hagman, of 
course, was nowhere to be seen; Keagan suspected the guards had 
exercised their full prerogative as soon as he was far enough away 
from the dormitories. 


Keagan allowed the people to blur away and sat, feeling the sub- 
pain granularity of the bruises over his body, the sore pinpricks on 
his arm where the taser had hit. Suddenly—and there was never a 
reason, it always seemed to happen on its own strange schedule— 
everything snapped back again and he realised the young 
researcher, Edward, was sitting next to his bed and talking to him. 
He had not registered him drawing up a chair and had no idea of 
what he might have been saying. Keagan struggled up to a half- 
sitting position and focused on his words. 


".,.Studied Philosophy, which | guess was good enough, so one of 

my duties is talking to staff, in particular D-Class, whose behaviour 
might have been out of the ordinary, and making a judgement as to 
whether it might have been influenced by the skips they have been 
working on." 


"You want to know why | attacked Patrick Goettsch," said Keagan 
slowly. 


"Yes," said Edward, yawning suddenly and stretching out the arm 
holding the clipboard. Keagan caught a couple of words on the 
printed standardised tickboxes—'Gross Material Delusion’, 
‘Undifferentiated Violence’. None were ticked, yet. 


"And if | don't provide a satisfactory answer?" 


"I'm sorry," said Edward. "| need you to work with me on this. If | 
can't provide a mundane reason for the attack they'll assume it was 
related to the recent experiments you did with Professor Reeds, and 
you'll be ruled contaminated. They need you to be—'re-usable’. If 
you're contaminated by a specific skip you'll be handed over to that 
team for destructive testing.” 


Destructive testing. Keagan saw the scalpels, the endless syringes, 
the electric saws contained within that euphemistic phrase. 


"If you survive, you won't be D-Class any more—you!'ll be 
reclassified as part of the skip; that is, part of the phenomenon the 
procedures exist to contain. I've seen it done, and | never want to 
again. Please, tell me what happened." 


Keagan took a deep breath. Just the Cliff Notes version, please: "It 
had nothing to do with Professor Reeds and his fucking dart board. 
Patrick Goettsch came from the same prison as | did; he snitched on 
me to the guards about a murder that happened inside; the one | 
was going down for before | joined the programme. It took me this 
long to get access to him—he was never in the dormitories the same 
time | was, and it's only recently | started getting left alone by the 
guards on maintenance duty." 


Edward scribbled, eyes bright. "You were just settling an old score." 
"Yeah." 


"And is this likely to re-occur? | mean, are you two likely to get into 
fights in future?" 


"| don't think so," said Keagan, watching Goettsch out of the corner 
of his eye. "It's not that | suddenly don't have a problem with what he 
did anymore, but I'm done if he is." 


Moon's orbit field and grown to its original size. 
Amnestics were successfully administered to 
approximately 78% of the Human population. However, 
0.03 milliliters of blood belonging to SCP-682 survived 
the termination attempt, and adapted from it. SCP-682 
grows to approximately the size of Saturn, and proceeds 
to destroy and eat multiple planets within the Solar 
System. 


“The moral of the story:" This is the way the world 
ends. Not with a bang, but a chomp. But for reals, don't 
fuck with the gecko. >:( 


Item: SCP-241 


NOTE: Further testing of SCP-241 was required to determine if its 
anomalous properties allowed it to be used against SCP-682. Skin 
tissue was removed from D-class personnel D-682-39, with the 
tissue then being wrapped around one end of a short steel rod. 
D-682-40 used the rod to open SCP-241, manipulating such that 
only the skin tissue touched SCP-241. SCP-241 displayed different 
recipes than when it was previously opened. D-682-40 prepared one 
of the recipes, which was then eaten by both D-682-39 and 
D-682-40. D-682-39 died of anaphylactic shock six minutes later, 
while D-682-40 showed no ill effects. 


SCP-241 was deemed suitable for use against SCP-682. 


Tissue Test Record: 
N/A 


Termination Test Record: 

SCP-682 tissue sample was affixed to end of a steel rod, and the 
rod was used by D-682-40 to open SCP-241. SCP-241 showed 
different recipes than the previous time it was opened. Of the 99 
recipes, three were in unknown languages, two were 
incomprehensible "word salad", and one was a memetic kill agent. 
Of the remaining 93 recipes, 100% had at least one instruction or 
ingredient which made it impossible to follow the recipe with 
complete faithfulness. Examples include: 


"Okay," said Edward. "Now, | should probably ask you this; it was 
asked me and | thought it was ridiculous at the time, it covers half a 
dozen minor conditions that most people don't even seek medical 
treatment for and describes a good chunk of the UK population and, 
| imagine, a greater proportion of the prison population. But here 
goes: have you been experiencing any—" he rattled off the list from 
memory: "—lost time; hallucinations; sudden mood shifts; 
encounters with anomalous—that's supernatural—entities, | should 
point out outside the supervised Special Containment Procedures; 
rashes or other illness; loss of energy; trouble sleeping; strange or 
disturbing dreams; perceptions of reality or history that are out of 
sync with others around you; or emotional or cognitive difficulties ?" 


Keagan thought carefully before speaking: "No. | know | get angry 
easily, but that's not something new. | wouldn't be here at all if it 
were." 


"Good," said Edward. "Thanks. | can take this to the Director. 
Please, just—try and keep your head down." 


"Did you say anything?" asked Keagan. "| mean, did you put ina 
good word? Is that why they didn't just shoot me?" 


Edward stood up. "Okay," he said, "I've got to get on. Serious injury 
during experimentation. D-7780. Who the hell is that?" 


"That's the skinny guy in the corner," said Keagan, gesturing. 
"Ronny Feldspar. He was the Docklands Shooter." The explication 
earned a blank stare. 


"| think | must have missed that," said Edward. "Thanks." 


He moved away, tapping his pen against his wrist. Keagan watched 
for a little while as Edward talked to Ronny. 


"Yes, there is a conspiracy," Edward was saying. "It's bigger than 
anything you've ever imagined. This organisation alone, in the UK 
alone, draws down hundreds of billions of pounds a year, including 
money siphoned from government budgets. The thing is, none of the 
organisations you're talking about exist." 


Ronny shook his head violently. "You're wrong," he said, "the 
Masons control the government, the Royal Family aren't even 
human..." 


"If that were true, we would have sent in a strike team and shot 
them. Then we would have covered it up. It wouldn't even make the 
Ten O'Clock news. The monarchy would be half-forgotten by the 
weekend and fictional by next week. Look, forget the Masons. 
There's a secret society in the UK that includes hundreds of 
politicians, tycoons, media celebrities. It's a gentleman's club called 
Marshall, Carter & Dark, and they're the reason | can't leave this 
place. They're international arms dealers, money launderers and 
blackmailers, and they have people in every national government 
and police force. But here's the thing—so do we. And so do the 
Global Occult Coalition. And the Chaos Insurgency, and the 
Russians... | admit, I'm not very high up in this thing, but | seriously 
doubt that the Overseers of the Foundation report to anyone but 
each other, let alone some sad ring of Bohemian intellectuals." 


Ronny seemed to take the news badly—after a little while longer he 
flipped over to face the wall and refused to answer any more of 
Edward's questions about how his injuries and who he felt was 
responsible. Keagan turned to look at Patrick, who had been 
watching him. 


"| meant what | said," Keagan called over to him. Patrick looked 
down. 


"| know," he said. "I'm done too." 


Keagan and Ronny were released at the same time, with Goettsch 
still laid up with multiple fractures from Keagan's beating. On their 
return to the dormitories, they were greeted with hushed whispers, 
as though they had come back from the dead. Others had not. 
Ronny, snarling at any suggestion he let anyone else handle the red 
chalk, clambered awkwardly over the bunks and scrawled shaky Xs 
with his good hand. Seven in total since Keagan had been taken 
away; including Goettsch, Shift B now consisted of 10 men. 
Cameron and Travis were gone—dead or transferred to another 
facility, no-one knew—leaving just Ronny from HMP Wormwood 


Scrubs.