Notes: Even in the slight chance we actually killed 682 with a gun 
dipped in green slime. If it killed 682 but then the curse occurred 
with it's dead body, well we'd be absoultely [DATA EXPUNGED] and 
screwed. - Dr. Church. 


Item: SCP-216 


Tissue Test Record: 
N/A 


Termination Test Record: 

SCP-682 was tranquilized and cut into two hundred fifty six (256) 
1x1x1 foot cubes. Each cube was shoved into a different 
“combination” of SCP-216, and SCP-216 was then placed back into 
SCP-682’s cell in case of failure. Two hours and fifteen minutes into 
the test SCP-682 emerges intact from SCP-216 with a lampshade 
on its head, and an appearance of complete intoxication. 


SCP-216 is safely removed from chamber when SCP-682 collapsed 
from fatigue and alcohol. 

Following this failed termination attempt SCP-682 was quoted 
saying: “Its good to go home sometimes” and “That was an 
awesome party”. 


Notes: Wha..? What? How? This raises so many questions! Does 
682 have a family or home? Are there more of its kind? Why does 
that lampshade look awesome? Requesting further look into 
SCP-216 to find out. — Dr. Sanders 


Item: SCP-204 


Tissue Test Record: 
Overridden by O5-Command 


Termination Test Record: 
SCP-204-2's danger seeking behavior was played upon to create a 
desire to test SCP-204-1's combat prowess. Through the use of 


there's nothing wrong with it. A kick often works." 


Keagan flicked the breaker and turned the generator on again. It 
made what sounded like a three-quarter turn before shorting again. 


"See what | mean?" Walrus said. 


Keagan took the phone and held it close to the dead generator, 
prodding the click wheel every few seconds to keep the screen lit. 
After a few seconds he took the power cable, gently, and followed it 
along to the small black box, half-buried by wiring. He picked it up 
and shook it, listening to the rattle. 


"You're right, there's nothing wrong with it. The problem's with the 
inverter. These things are all solid state, so that rattling's probably 
the inside of the power switch come loose. Every time someone 
pulls on one of those wires, or trips over them in the corridor this 
thing's getting bashed about and it's pretty random whether the 
switch ends up touching the contacts. Right now it seems to be 
trapped in the back here and | can't shake it into place. I'll needa 
screwdriver—” he squinted at the box—"cross-head for preference 
—and something metal and fairly pliable | can wedge into the gap. 
The back plate of one of those phones would work." 


Walrus looked at Keagan for a moment, then disappeared, feeling 
his way along the wall. He emerged a few minutes later with Bones, 
who carried more burners for light and a toolbox. They pried the 
aluminium back off a T-Mobile Jive and Keagan bent it between his 
fingers into a rough U-shape, so it filled the space the switch had 
taken up and bridged the two contacts. He slid it back into place and 
reset the breaker before turning the generator on again. The rough 
chugging and smell of diesel resumed, half a second before the 
lights came back on. 


"Man of the hour," Renton commented drily, leaning against the 
doorway of the generator room. Then: "| wonder whether Schaeffer 
couldn't use someone like you on the Project." 


"The what?" Keagan asked. 


"What | was telling you about. Our latest and greatest attempt to get 


one over on the reactionaries. Yeah, | think he'd love to have you 
onboard. You seem to have the technical know-how and you've 
been inside a Foundation—well, reactionary-controlled—facility, so 
you've got some insight into this sort of stuff. We'd need to get our 
guy in Whitehall to approve it, though." 


"Look," said Keagan, "this all sounds great, but I'm not sure I'm cut 
out for all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. You know, | think I'm going to 
head off now." 


Renton cleared his throat and Jitters strolled across the doorway in 
a manner calculated to appear casual but which Keagan realised 
conclusively cut off his means of escape. 


"| really don't think that's such a great idea," the kid said 
nonchalantly. "If our observers saw you crawl out of 882 alive—” 


"You mean 554," Keagan said, increasingly baffled. 


"No, | mean 882. 554 is what the reactionaries call it, because they 
don't have the original 554 any more. That's because we got it back 
in the 70s. It's a mirror that swaps you with a duplicate from a 
dimension with reversed chirality, for reference. Utterly fucking 
useless. Anyway, if we saw you, the reactionaries probably did, too. 
They don't have our easygoing attitude towards people who've got 
up close and personal with the preternatural, but you probably know 
that. Right now, we're offering you a job. You turn that down, we put 
you back on the streets and let you take your chances with the 
reactionaries." Renton stretched his hands wide. "Really, we're your 
best bet right now." 


Keagan thought for a moment. The men's demeanour told him they 
weren't as willing to let him risk capture by the Foundation as 
Renton implied—at the very least he knew about the cell's safe 
house and he could deduce from what they'd said that they either 
had some kind of listening post on the Isle of Wight, or informants 
within the Foundation itself. Best, then, to play along, at least until a 
moment presented itself to slip away. 


"Then | guess I'm in," he said warily. "So what next?" 


"Next?" Renton grinned widely. "| already told you. Now you meet 
our man in Whitehall. But first, we need to debrief you." 


Chapter Ten: "The Wedge" 


‘Debriefing’ involved several days of recounting his experiences at 
the Sector-25 facility on Salisbury Plain—each of the cell members 
would take turns asking questions and noting the answers down on 
a reporter's pad. Hours passed strangely in the safe house, lit 
perpetually by desklamps—if you wanted to sleep, you went to an 
unlit room for a while, with the cell members generally taking it in 
shifts over an eighteen-hour period, with another six hours a day 
when all four were working at the same time—but Keagan reckoned 
it was Friday before the questions began feeling strained and the 
cell members started spending more time talking to each other and 
distributing the information he had provided throughout their 
organisation. Somewhere between the Chinese takeaways and the 
attempts to get him to sketch out a map of the facility on the back of 
a Liberal Democrat local election flyer from 2010, he had caught up 
with himself. There's my chance to cause a time paradox gone, he 
thought. 


The immaculately polished black BMW drew up to the front of the 
safe house about twenty minutes after Renton disappeared into one 
of the abandoned rooms with a mobile they kept locked in a 
medicine cabinet, presumably to avoid mixing it up with the sixty or 
so other disposable phones scattered throughout the safe house. It 
was quickly decided that Renton would accompany Keagan while 
the rest remained behind co-ordinating the rollout of the new 
intelligence. 


How incongruous it seemed to walk out of the nearly derelict safe 
house into the plush leatherette of the BMW, the driver a large 
clean-shaven man in a tailored suit who watched them over dark 
glasses. Keagan stopped for a moment, his hand on the open door. 
He looked up and down the street, calculating vaguely whether he 
stood a fighting chance of being able to run off. Renton interrupted 
his thoughts by shoving Keagan into the nearside seat in a fashion 
that was only calculated to appear playful then jumped in himself, so 


Keagan was forced over to the far door of the vehicle, where he 
noticed central locking was engaged. 


"Just get in, will you? Sir Malcolm doesn't like to be kept waiting.” 


Keagan had seen London through the windows of his own 
Volkswagen Jetta (which now probably no longer existed), of a 
prison bus, of a police car. Now he saw it through the tinted windows 
of a sleek politician's taxi. It was raining slightly, and the last of the 
rush-hour crush was limping on, painfully, to its destination, secure 
in the knowledge that whilst they were at least forty-five minutes 
late, the weekend was only eight (or rather, seven and a quarter) 
hours away. Keagan had never understood the comments office- 
working clients made, often as early as Tuesday afternoon—how 
they wished the weekend was here! Oh for it to be a few hours 
further towards that goal. Then, when they returned the next 
Monday for their ride, they seemed none the happier for having had 
their wish—how quickly the weekend goes, they said, and then, 
back to the horror that they seemed to consider to constitute their 
lives. Of course, he had started in his trade as an apprentice at 14 
and been self-employed as a vehicle repairman by 19, so maybe 
there was some crucial difference between owning a business and 
being subject to the whims of an employer. 


Keagan turned his attention from the glum faces at the steering 
wheels around them to the BMW's other passenger. Renton kept 
shifting in his seat, looking at his reflection in the window and 
adjusting his ridiculous beret. 


"Sir Malcolm's your man in Whitehall, then?" The name rung a dim 
bell, but nothing more—the sort of name that might come up in 
passing in a news report dealing with some intricate Constitutional 
question, five seconds before Keagan flicked over to something 
lighter. 


"Yes. Malcolm Urquhart. That's who we're going to speak to." 
"So he's in charge of—the real Foundation?" 


"No way." Renton's raised voice attracted the attention of the driver, 
who flicked a look over his shoulder. Renton suddenly looked very 


sheepish and continued in a lower voice. "| already told you. The O5 
Council is the supreme authority. Even if—well, Commodore 
Schaeffer, seems to take his orders directly from Sir Malcolm these 
days." 


"Schaeffer? He's the guy behind the 'Project' you want me to help 
with." 


"Yes. If it goes to plan, the reactionaries will be severely 
embarrassed, and the UK government will have to change its 
recognition to us. It might even bring down the Coalition, which is 
why Sir Malcolm is so important, and why we have to give him 
consideration. He's the highest-ranking government official in Britain 
to acknowledge us for decades. If he could get the Government to 
recognise us as the legitimate Foundation—well, it's never 
happened before. No national government has switched back to 
recognising us after the reactionaries got hold of them. Anything 
could happen. We could be talking about the British Army expelling 
the reactionaries from Foundation facilities by force." 


"So how did you get into all this? If you'll excuse me asking." 


Renton looked out through the car door window. "Well, | haven't 
been in the Foundation very long." No surprise there, thought 
Keagan. "I started out with Socialist Students, then someone got me 
into the Art Violence movement. Have you ever heard of it?" 


Keagan searched his memory for a moment, then remembered 
Fredericka Mendelbrot and her bizarre list of supposed terrorist 
groups. "! think someone mentioned it once." 


"It's all about organising active resistance against an ossified 
political and art establishment order. You know, Art is Politics and 
Politics is Art. By making people confront Art—real Art, which is 
political thought manifest in a physical statement—you get them to 
wake up and see they've been supporting a political class that just 
imitates what it thinks they want to hear, just like old-order 
representational artists just copy what they see." He sounded like he 
was reading from a pamphlet. "I kind of burned a few bridges doing 
it. Metaphorically, | mean. Well, mostly. Then | started getting into 
environmentalist protest movements. | travelled across the country 


hooking up with other people who wanted to fight back against 
exploitation of our countryside. One of those ended..." he 
shuddered. "Not well. People ended up dead. | guess that's what 
you get..." he mumbled something mostly to himself that Keagan 
thought sounded a lot like 'taking orders from a tree’. 


"Anyway, that put me on the Foundation radar—both the 
reactionaries and the real ones. Fortunately for me, the real 
Foundation got to me first. They fixed my head, made it so | didn't 
hear ... well anyway, they set me right. The Art Violence group | was 
with used preternatural items to try and cause chaos. The 
Foundation wants to use them to make life better for everyone.” 


"The real Foundation, you mean." 


"Of course. Like | said, the reactionaries just want to lock it away 
and decide what's 'real’ and what's 'supernatural' for everyone else. 
They're a bunch of fascists when you get down to it. But | guess you 
already know that. Were you D-Class?" 


Keagan nodded. "They said the D means Disposable." 


"Really? Is that what they said it stands for? Heh." He suddenly 
looked awkward. "| mean, that sort of makes sense. Wouldn't want 
people to know what racist fucks they are." 


"What?" 


"The D. No, it goes all the way back to ASCI. The American Civil 
War. Back then, when they needed people to go into these sort of 
situations—preternatural, | mean—they would use black slaves. 
Then they invented a new psychological disorder to 'explain’ the 
disappearances, said it caused sufferers to spontaneously escape 
into the wilderness, with the inference they'd just run away and died 
somewhere. They called it Drapetomania." 


"| see." Keagan actually thought it sounded like an after-the-fact 
explanation, the sort of thing that might circulate amongst people 
with a reason to believe it—because, say, it suits you to believe your 
opponents are the successors of vile slaveowners (ignoring the fact 
that by your own story your side has the better claim to descend 


from those same slaveowners). The same went for the 'Disposable' 
explanation Dr Skinner had proffered. Far more likely that when the 
phrase 'D-Class' had first been used the higher security clearances 
had followed a similar format—'B-Class', 'A-Class', etc. The higher 
rungs had been revamped, with the lowliest researcher now at level 
1. Civilians, of course, are level 0. But what do you do with the 
people who had no clearance—no rights at all, in fact—but who 
inexplicably seem to take part in highly dangerous and sensitive 
experiments? You keep the old terminology and you make up 
various explanations for why it doesn't fit the pattern of the other 
clearance levels. 


"So where did you learn how to tail people?" Keagan asked. "Is that 
something the Foundation taught you? | mean, | thought someone 
was following me but | didn't notice you at all until | got to 
Southampton." 


Renton's brow crinkled. "What do you mean?" 


"Well," Keagan said, "you followed me all the way from 554— 
mean, 882 or whatever—all the way to Cowes without me getting a 
clear look at you once. | thought I'd shaken you for sure. Then | saw 
you on the Southampton bus but had no idea you were following 
me. It's only when | saw you on Bermondsey Street | put two and 
two together." 


"No, | was given your photo and told to track you when you got off 
the boat at Southampton. | was meeting with a cell in the West 
Country. Camped out the ferry for the best part of a day watching for 
you. | thought you might have hitched a ride on one of the cars 
coming off the ferry and got past me. As far as | know you ditched 
our man at Culver Down—ducked onto a nature trail or something. 
You're saying someone was following you before you saw me?" 


"Yes—I| mean, I'm not sure. | never actually saw anyone clearly. It 
was just a feeling."