“| don’t understand,” she said. “I thought that we’d be discussing 
meds today. You know. For, uh, for the insomnia?” 


“| know,” Dr. Garland said, clasping his hands together. His face was 
pinched in something that looked like frustration. “And I’m sorry. We 
want to be absolutely certain that any medication we give you 
doesn’t interact in unexpected ways with your anomalous condition. 
We're still not sure if the condition is biological in nature, and if it is, 
we certainly don’t want...” 


“Right.” 


Dr. Garland coughed. “Yes. We’re going to have to wait on 
medication.” 


“It's just—” 


This was a pretty serious problem, wasn’t it? SCP-2156 had learned 
that life was hemmed on both sides by antithetical contradictions. 
On one side was the eternal sleep of death and on the other side 
was the waking death of insomnia. She walked through the valley of 
two deaths and was not afraid. But regardless of poetics, the waking 
death was miserable, and even if SCP-2156 didn’t want much she 
still wanted sleep. 


Once upon atime she had been pretty sure that if she went crazy 
there would be some sort of procedure for either making her sane 
again or else quarantining her from the sane people who didn’t 
deserve to be in contact with her, but actually going crazy and 
discovering that there was some inscrutable and hideous enigma 
wrapped inside her bones had taught her that no such procedure 
existed. Therapy and the Foundation were bullshit. Garland was 
pretty nice though. 


That was it. 
“Yes?” 
“Nothing.” 
“Well...” 


SCP-2156 stared at Garland. She wondered what it was like to be a 
therapist working for the Foundation. How much did Garland think 
about his own work? How much did Garland’s consciousness press 
against the confines of the Foundation’s bars? It was trivially easy to 
manipulate and lie. SCP-2156 wasn’t stupid; Garland did it to her 
every day. Was it to help or to control? To accept or to assimilate? 
There was no observable distinction between any of those things. 


But most of all SCP-2156 was struck by how well Garland hid the 
signs of helplessness and impotency that brewed within him. People 
had layers. All she did was shuffle them around. The whole was the 


sum of the parts and summation was commutative so what did it 
matter what order people were in? Whether it was ugly or beautiful 
all of it was you. All of it was her. What did she want? She didn’t 
know. Nothing and everything. Shuffling herself was hard. 


“If there’s anything you’d like to talk about...” 


There wasn't. 


She was being led back to her room. She didn’t know why she had 
been taken out. The blank, sterile hallway was marked at regular 
intervals by the pattern: guard-door-guard, guard-door-guard. She 
didn’t know where the Foundation got this many people to dress up 
in black combat gear and stand still. She could not see their faces. 
They flashed by like rows of orchard trees planted in the 
nothingness between San Francisco and Los Angeles. They flashed 
by like a deck of cards being shuffled. They flashed by like a flipbook 
animation. Stillness begot motion. There were contradictions hiding 
in the fabric of all things. 


One of the guards was shuffling a deck of cards in his hands. 
SCP-2156 heard the machine-gun flickering of card slapping against 
card over and over. The next guard was also shuffling a deck of 
cards. The third one was playing with a matryoshka doll. 


She was in her cell again. There was another matryoshka doll. Who 
cared? Strange things happened. 


SCP-2156 sat down by the doll and figured that she would unravel 
the secrets of the universe. 


One layer gone. Capillary beds. She had never needed to play 
solitaire with her body to figure out what was one layer down. Red 
flesh. Raw, stinging pain. She winced as blood flowing from the 
ripped skin around her nails dripped onto her calculus final. 
Professor Davidson never noticed it. She remembered not being 
able to sleep for the first time and wondering if she was going 
insane. 


Two layers gone. She had broken her arm playing basketball. The 


bone stuck through the skin. Morphine coursed through her veins, 
and she understood why people said that morphine was addictive. 
Addiction was another paradox, like life. On either side of the valley 
there was the sleeping release from pain or the waking embrace of 
it. A body anesthetized and a mind awakened were in symmetry. 
Millions of people needed to dig to find emotion. 


Three layers gone. The world was far more complicated than she 
had imagined, and nobody was in any position to understand it. Did 
they try to understand her? A girl who played solitaire with the 
world? She looked inside her and saw nothing but black and red, 
flashing and shuffling. Black blobs—might be a card—stood on 
either side of her. White bloo—definitely not a card—explained what 
they did. The goal of the Special Containment Procedures 
Foundation was to observe preternatural phenomena and develop 
new theories of science based on their behavior. She knew with 
complete certainty that white blob was lying to her. 


There was nothing predictable and certainly nothing understandable 
about the world. She saw the universe and all its layers. She saw 
gloved hands hiding red skin shuffle the layers of the universe over 
and over and over again. If she were to stop those hands then she 
could finally flip through the cards and figure out how the universe’s 
cards were stacked, but nobody would ever stop them. They were 
eternal. 


Four layers gone. She dried off her hair, checked to make sure her 
roommate was still out, and started crying. Mom called to ask her if 
everything was all right. The boy two rows down and three columns 
to the left said, “Don’t stick it in the crazy.” She looked at a piece of 
paper and saw nothing but a game of windowed solitaire. She 
realized that she could not learn or excel in school. She realized that 
nobody had the patience to put up with her. She realized that there 
was nothing connecting her to the world, and all the realizations 
mounted higher until she reached the truth of the world, placed upon 
a glowing pedestal—the world could not have her. 


She saw red and black—black hair sticking out of red flesh. Red 
blood and black bile. 


She removed the fifth layer. The doll was smiling at her. She began 


to fall through the layers, and as they flashed by they showed her 
the stuttering, banal flipbook movie of her existence. There was 
neither end nor bottom; there was only the truth that the fifth layer 
was oblivion and that oblivion was all she would ever be. 


Her skin was thin and fragile, and inside of her there was nothing. 


“How’s your sleep been?” 
SCP-2156 stared at the wood grain of the table. “It’s been all right.” 


“Nothing too out of the ordinary going on with your sleep patterns 
recently?” 


The creases of her gloves were like the weathered face of an old 
lady. She was wearing somebody else’s skin because nobody, least 
of all herself, could stand her own. 


There was a red pen in front of Garland. She wondered why he 
wrote in red. 


The wall was monochromatic. It had always been monochromatic. 
What a dumb observation. 


Garland coughed. “SCP-2156?” 


“Sorry. | just...yeah.” SCP-2156 looked Garland in the face for a 
second, felt him staring back at her, and then looked away. “I think 
that everything’s been fine.” 


She remembered the matryoshka doll. Ever since she had come into 
this cell she had realized that she was self-aware of much more than 
before. When she went into the temporary nirvana of re-shuffling 
she could feel each layer of her mind shift against the other until for 
a moment, perfect harmony and order was achieved, before entropy 
piled up while doubt and hate bred and multiplied in the recesses of 
her mind. She could touch each layer of her soul. And now, she 
could feel the matryoshka doll imprinted on every one of them. 


“Are you sure?” 


Who the hell did Garland think he was? A ball of good intentions and 
mediocre actions trying to read her mind? She was the one who 
could see the layers, not him. He was a man with the insight of a 
toddler. 


“Yeah.” 


Garland scratched his neck. “We really can’t proceed with the 
sleeping medication matter until we’re absolutely certain that nothing 
unexpected is going on with your condition. We want to do 
everything possible to help you, SCP-2156, but | must remind you 
that we are an organization that serves the public first and foremost. 
We can’t afford...” 


“I’m not hiding anything.” 


Her matryoshka doll reshuffled until the dream became the deepest 
layer. 


SCP-2156 pulled on her gloves. “So that’s a ‘no’ on meds, | guess.” 
Garland nodded. 
“How am | supposed to sleep?” 


“Well, we can keep working on your anxiety. Until | receive a green 
light for some sort of sleeping medication, that’s the most we can do, 
unfortunately.” 


SCP-2156 sat in silence. She felt her cheeks begin to tingle. She 
didn’t want many things, but those things that she did want were 
beginning to pile up. She wanted sleep. She didn’t want to keep 
talking to Garland. She wanted nothing more than to disappear, 
because she could be completely certain that absolutely nobody 
would miss her. 


“..meds.” 
“I’m sorry? | didn’t—can you speak up?” 


“| just want some meds, all right? | know I'm a threat, and | know 
that I’m dangerous. But | really don’t know what | deserve, or if | 


even deserve anything—| just—this is all that | want, | swear, | just 
want some sleep. Do you have any idea how boring it gets in here? 
Four walls, some shitty books, and a brain that doesn’t know how to 
fucking go to sleep? | know you know it’s boring, that’s why you 
keep sending people, but do you have any idea how much time | 
spend in here with nothing but my thoughts—* 


They flickered one after the other after the other, but no matter how 
fast they raced they would never go fast enough to reveal the truth. 


“— about how—about how—* 


There was the world, comprised entirely of this cell. There were 
people who day by day were unaware that the present was slipping 
them by and that a stranger would be occupying their skin in the 
next second. They didn’t have to care. The world was in a state of 
perpetual blissful innocence. It was painted in colors that would 
make a baby laugh and coo, hues of industrial ink that were to be 
played with by smooth hands. 


The world had one layer. It could not be shuffled. There was no 
place in it that she belonged. 


It was at times like these that the miasma of SCP-2156’s thoughts 
coalesced into something that could be called emotion; this time, like 
most times, that emotion was fear. A red sliver of skin poked through 
the gap between her right glove and her wrist. It was the same color 
as a clown’s nose or a sports car, except her skin was dull and dry, 
giving it a grayish tint. 


She had been kneeling on the floor of her college dormitory when 
she saw herself in the shattered remains of a mirror, face bright red 
like a caricature of a human being. God, she was hideous. 


“| just want some sleep,” she said to nobody. Garland was long 
gone. 


All seven face-up cards were red. She screamed in frustration as the 
world fell apart around her. 


“Hey, have a seat. Sorry we’re out of coffee. And donuts. Also sorry 
that we had to call you over on such short notice, Doctor, uh... 
Garland. Been busy.” 


Garland nodded. “I understand. Please, take your time.” 


The meeting room was a perfect example of the Foundation not 
really getting aesthetics. It was blandly pleasant, but it made 
Garland feel detached, like he was an avatar projected into this half- 
real room. Everything was too bright and too smooth. The room felt 
like it was melting. 


Garland briefly wondered how the researchers could put up with 
such a charade, because they knew the internal anatomy of the 
Foundation, what fueled its beating heart, and what perverse blood 
flowed through its tortuous limbs. Everything was so much more real 
when the skin matched the flesh in barren, ugly containment cells. 
Garland almost felt more at home there, where at least the 
Foundation achieved some sort of consistency. If he could choose 
one thing to fix about the Foundation, it would be the incoherency in 
the inoffensively flat décor of the offices. 


“Right. As you probably know, I’m the HMCL supervisor for 
SCP-641. Uh, you've read the file?” 


Garland nodded again. 
“Fantastic. Nice to meet you.” 


They shook hands. Garland smelled his cologne. His palms were 
crisp and perfectly dry. 


“Mm. | understand that, yesterday, SCP-2156 underwent one of 
its...active phases? And that you were present?” 


” 


“Yes. 


“Report says that you were almost...mm. Kind of dangerous, isn’t it? 
I’d talk to your HMCL guy about modifying the containment 
procedures, honestly.” 


Garland shrugged. “There are hazards. Humanoids can get upset 


during sessions. It’s happened before. | have a decent bereavement 
package, so | don't complain.” 


The HMCL supervisor laughed briefly and loudly. “Of course. 
Anyway. A strange coincidence happened. At the same time as that 
active state, SCP-641 showed us some, uh, previously unobserved 
behavior. Spontaneously started disassembling itself.” 


“So you’re hypothesizing a connection.” 


“Hey,” the supervisor said, throwing his hands in the air. “We scan 
the event logs for this sort of coincidence for a reason. One skip is 
containable. Two is bad news. If one of those two is a humanoid, 
worse news. Look, I’ve been in this for some time, and honestly, ten 
years ago, this happens, | commission Telekill rooms.” 


The supervisor laughed again, loud and short like before. “Yeah. 
641 has mind-affecting abilities, which nine times out of ten implies 
some sort of psychic potential, and from the file, 2156 sounds a lot 
like a bixby—* 


“Bixby?” 


“Uh, reality warper. Excuse the slang. Some of my retrieval buddies 
have rubbed off on me. It’s a reality warper.” 


“SCP-2156 hasn’t really demonstrated any willful control over its 
anomalous properties, and | was under the impression that was one 
of the criteria to be considered...” 


The supervisor waved his hand. “Criteria don’t matter. You can’t 
categorize something if you don’t understand it. Functionally 
speaking, it might not look like a reality warper, but the nature of its 
abilities would seem to suggest—look, this is a discussion | should 
be having with 2156’s HMCL supervisor. Sorry. Let’s get back on 
track. What we need to know is if 2156 has been behaving normally 
lately.” 


“Would you like suspicion or fact?” 


“Suspicion is usually more useful.” 


“There have been subtle irregularities. | think that it’s hiding 
something. Besides the recent preoccupation with sleeping 
medication, it becomes nervous each time we discuss its dreams.” 


“Right. I'll have you submit a formal report later. We need to 
document these sorts of things. Besides that, though, | just thought 
that I’d give you a heads-up that you might not be working on the 
2156 project for much longer.” 


“Excuse me?” 


“First of all, this isn’t set, because if it were, your Supervisor would 
be the one telling you this, not me. | don’t know anything for certain. 
I’m just speculating. And second of all, this isn’t a reflection on your 
capabilities whatsoever. In fact, it has nothing to do with them.” 


There was a moment of silence as the HMCL supervisor sighed. 
“There are just patterns, you know. I’m speaking here as an 
employee to an employee, not HMCL staff to skip therapist. The 
Foundation’s going to cut its losses soon.” 


“| don’t understand.”