This is about the time we started getting the complaints. Didn't seem 
like a big deal at first. So some scientists think the cold guy acts like 
a robot. We know he acts like a robot. Some agents think the MTF 
captains are too rough. Boo-hoo. But when the question of 
credentials came up, we were kinda thrown off-guard. We tried 
throwing out some biographies, trying to keep them placated, and 
we tried to come up with something. 


I'm the one who came up with it. | said that if we couldn't make them 
plausible as down to earth administrators, we'd have to make them 
larger than life. Figures that would tower over the rest of the 
Foundation, and have legends build around them. There were 
problems. They were harder to conceal, since they were now 
recognizable. Some of us thought the stories were absurd, and 
unbelievable. We managed to sell the story enough that a majority 
of them bought into it, and we moved forward with the plan. 


The first changes were mostly minor, giving details to the 
backstories. The major one was the immortal guy. We gave some 
jewelry that was supposed to house their soul. Then we started 
making some of the major alterations. We gave them the family, the 


items, the whole nine yards. We enhanced a few sites to serve as 
incident points. We even had a few of the guys who we'd found, like 
burglars and cultists who we recruited. We did foolish things too, like 
decommissioning a few of the less important objects. There was a 
lot of controversy about that, but it was silenced when morale leaped 
up in the aftermath. We stopped losing people and started gaining 
them. It had worked. It wasn't a healthy culture, and it might be one 
of the main reasons things went wrong the way they did. But they 
were gonna go wrong anyways, it was only a matter of time. 


The first sign of trouble came when we started to get the 
administrators acting out on their own. At first it was minor stuff, like 
comments on memos or acting out against researchers. We thought 
it was just a result of their minds adjusting to their identities, but as it 
went on the acting out started to get out of hand. It stopped being a 
game of who can keep them the silliest and started being a struggle 
to keep them reigned in. We got most back under our thumb, but the 
few we missed were massively destructive, and should've made us 
reconsider the whole program. 


Site-19 was one of our primary sites, and its loss was highly 
unfortunate. It should've shown us that we had created a monster. 
Instead we thought it was an isolated incident. The instance that had 
caused it was disassembled, and we stopped creating new 
production runs of it. People didn't really ask about what had 
happened to him. We spread the word that he'd been taken to some 
top secret facility for new work. You bet your ass the administrators 
asked about him. They constantly badgered us with information 
about him, and we just kept our lips sealed. | think that if we had 
taken the incident more seriously, we would've avoided what 
happened, but we were riding too high to notice what was 
happening below. 


We started talking about a new generation of administrators, 
improved with all our newfound wealth and power. The thought was 
that if we had been so successful with a dozen men and no money 
at all, we would be able to create unbelievable things with the power 
we had now. So we made another decree. We assembled what was 
left of the old team and brought in our new best and brightest. We 
dusted off the old man maker and we started from a fresh slate. 


The results don't really matter. All you need to know is that they 
didn't last in the field. We lost at least half of them in the first month 
alone. There were many causes of death-poison, fire, breach, the 
works-but the main thing was that none of them were natural deaths. 
They were killed. We tried to figure out what was going on. Was the 
machine affecting probability? Did we make a mistake while we had 
been creating them? And on top of all this, the immortal guy 
disappeared. And then the guy who messed up photos disappeared 
too. We were scrambling. We'd been leaning on these guys for 
years, and they weren't anywhere. We probably didn't need them as 
much as we thought, but it was still the crutch the Foundation had 
been leaning on for years suddenly being yanked from underneath 
us. 


As we're trying to deal with this and the deaths, we start losing 
contact with sites. It felt like a disaster had been suddenly shoved in 
our faces. We tried to tread water, but every time we did another 
ocean of problems washed over us. We recalled the MTF-O5 to 
Command and waited for the worst. 


He showed up on the monitor, telling us he was in control. We had a 
short talk, most of it inane now, but he'd already won by that point. 
He had all of our administration staff against us. All we had was a 
couple MTF's and some access codes. We hollered and screeched 
and raised holy hell, but it didn't matter. He has us in his pocket. 


They run the council now, the men we made. They just keep a few 
of us around to write the memos. | wish | could say we're working 
against them, or that you should, but it's over. They've changed too 
much. It's not the same place it was before. It lost that mutual 
respect that we had for each other, and made it into this big, 
amorphous octopus, with arms reaching in every nation. Wrong as it 
may be, thats the way it is. Maybe someday we can rise against it, 
bring it down and make things like they were before. 


We can always hope. 


Ineffective 


The dream always starts the same way. 


The prison doors slammed closed behind me. For a moment | was 
locked in a narrow passageway between two buildings— the door to 
the visitors’ entrance behind me, the imposing inner doors of the 
prison ahead. Above me, | could see fluffy clouds drifting by in the 
narrow strip of blue sky visible beyond the barbed wire. 


The door to the prison buzzed and | showed myself inside. 


| passed through five corridors and three sets of doors, waiting each 
time for the doors behind me to lock then the doors ahead to buzz 
and open. It was like passing through an airlock. 


Finally, | got there. A frowning guard showed me into a featureless, 
windowless room. 


It was a long wait. | shuffled my papers in front of me. Capped and 
uncapped my pen. Buttoned and unbuttoned the cuffs of my suit 
jacket. | didn't like to admit to myself that | was nervous. 


The door opened and | almost jumped, managing to keep it to just a 
twitch of my muscles. Still, | probably looked like an idiot. | stood up 
to cover it. 


My client walked into the room and the guard closed the door behind 
us. 


| know his name, of course, but | don't think of it in the dream. Just 
"my client." He was a young black man with short hair and a round, 
almost chubby face. 


We both sat down at the table and just looked at each other for a 
minute. It was the first time I'd seen him since he was condemned to 
death. 


"Well," | said. "How are you doing?" 

"I've been better." 

| smiled politely. 

"Listen. | want to talk to you about my options," he said. 


He was taking it better than | expected. But how did | know what to 
expect? It was the first capital murder case | had ever tried. Not that 
my client knew it. 


"You'll appeal the case, of course," | said. "The sentencing, | mean 
— maybe the trial too. You'll be appointed an appellate lawyer. | can 
try to ask around, make sure someone good takes the case." 


"You won't represent me?" 


"| don't do appeals. Anyway, you want someone new. It's standard. 
You might want to raise the issue of ineffective assistance of 
counsel— meaning maybe your appeal will be about how | could 
have done better— and | can't represent you on that, for obvious 
reasons." 


"You did your best," said my client. Always so polite. 


"Yeah, well, whatever. You want a new lawyer. And the appeal will 
take a long time. Years. Other things will come up in the mean time. 
Most people aren't — most sentences aren't carried out for a long 
time after the sentence is first issued." 


He was twenty-three. 
"What if | don't appeal?" he said. 


"What? Of course you will. | mean, what other options do you 
have?" 


For a supposedly hardened criminal, he had one of the most open 
faces I've ever seen; every thought he had instantly expressed itself. 


"You do have another option?" | said. 


"I'm not supposed to tell you about it." 


Time for another refresher on attorney-client privilege. "It doesn't 
count if you tell me," | said. "I can't tell anyone. Ever. Unless you're 
planning to hurt someone." 


"I'm not planning to hurt someone," he said. Maybe it was more like 
"I'm not planning." 


| waited him out. It only took a couple minutes. "Some government 
guys came to see me," he said. 


"Guys from the government came to see you without me?" 


"| don't know, maybe they weren't government. They were wearing 
suits. And they didn't come during visiting hours, they just showed 
up. The guards wouldn't tell me who they were. It was in this same 
room." 


| shivered briskly for no reason at all. 
"They said they can get me out of here," said my client. 


| realized he was telling me about a fantasy. He'd created in his 
mind a way to cope with his hopeless situation — which was fine as 
long as it didn't mess up the only real hope he had. He needed to 
file his appeal. 


"How can they do that?" | asked, playing along. 


He shrugged. "They seemed pretty sure. They said | just have to 
work for them for a month. Then they'll set me up with a new 
identity. They said | won't be missed." 


"Work for them doing what?" 
"Testing things." He shrugged. 
"What kind of things?" 


"They didn't say. Just things." 


| didn't like that answer. | would have felt better if he'd had some 
outlandish description at the ready. 


"They're coming back in three days," he said. "That's my deadline. 
They wanted a yes or no right then, but | said | needed a little time. 
They weren't happy about it. They said they almost never do that." 


"They can wait," | snapped. Then | reminded myself that there was 
no "them." 


"So, | might do that instead of appealing,” he said. He was trying to 
sound casual, but as usual he had no control over his expression. 
He was pretty upset. "| mean, what's the point? Everybody thinks | 
did it. Even you think | did it. What's the chance some judge is going 
to believe I'm innocent? Not even one guy on the jury believed me." 


Not one guy on the jury believed me, | thought. | couldn't convince 
them. | said the wrong things. | asked the wrong questions. | made 
the wrong objections. | had no idea what | was doing. It's my fault 
you're going to die. 


Of course | knew better than to tell him those thoughts. | tried to not 
even listen to them myself. 


We talked a little more. | told him all the many ways appeals could 
help him, or at least drag out his case until he had the chance to turn 
thirty before he died. | told him that the number of people executed 
in the United States is under fifty per year and dropping rapidly. | 
told him the death penalty is on its way out. 


He listened patiently. But it was pretty clear he had made up his 
mind. 


There's no dramatic end to the dream. | drift off into other thoughts, 
other dreams. But | almost always wake up soon after. 


This time, | lie awake a long time in the darkness, thinking. 


Of course, you don't forget your first capital murder case. | can still 
see my Client's face in my mind, as fresh as the day | last saw him, 
though it was many years ago. 


But we never had the conversation that | dream about. His prison 
transport was in an accident on the way back from the courthouse. 
The driver and the guards survived, but my client was killed 
instantly. His body was mangled beyond recognition. Poetic justice, 
the papers said. 


That's what | remember. That's what everybody remembers. 


In my line of work, you meet a lot of people on the margins of 
society. A lot of people with mental illness. With paranoia, 
hallucinations, withdrawals, delusions. I've heard a lot of passionate 
lectures about a lot of shadowy figures. The Men in Black. The 
Illuminati. The Masons. The SCP Foundation. 


| know none of it is true. But late at night, | wonder why | keep 
having that dream. | wonder what my client is trying to tell me. 


The thing is, | remember him, but | don't remember all my clients. 
There are cases that I've forgotten about. There are clients whose 
faces | can't picture. 


My clients aren't the kind of people who would raise much alarm if 
they went missing. If someone, some organization, really was out 
there, helping itself to them — | wouldn't be able to tell. | certainly 
wouldn't be able to protect them. 


I've spent my career telling myself that one client helped, one 
sentence reduced, is enough to make a difference. But what 
happens to them after | help them? Where are they now? 


By the standards of my field, I'm successful enough. But at night, 
unable to sleep because I'll see his face, | feel nothing else but 
utterly ineffective. 


The honey extracted from SCP-883 also varies in composition 
depending on how far in from the entrance it was retrieved. Honey 
retrieved from more than one kilometer in has mild narcotic effects, 
and honey retrieved from more than four kilometers is not safe for 
human consumption due to high levels of arsenic. It is not known 
where the bees get food or water from, nor has it been determined 
what supplies them with nectar for making their honey. 


Addendum 883-A: Due to the events of [DATA EXPUNGED], travel 
more than 6.5 kilometers into SCP-883 is forbidden. 


« SCP-882 | SCP-883 | SCP-884 » 


Ingénue 


Ingenue 


The butt of a baton clacked against the door. "Twenty-two hundred! 
Lights out!" 


Mitchell turned the light off and reclined on his bunk, listening to the 
kapo's footsteps dwindle as he continued his round along the block. 


Moonlight sieved through the grated mesh of the window and 
spangled the room like a disco ball. Mitchell probed under his 
mattress and withdrew a five by seven photograph. It was a close- 
shot of a woman, stretched across a bed in a pose reminiscent of 
some sort of exotic feline. She was presumably nude, a thin sheet 
draped across her body to preserve her chastity. Mitchell traced a 
fingertip along her contours. 


"What did | call her?" he whispered. 


"You know what you called her,” responded a voice from the top 
bunk. It was rich and smooth, like auditory caramel. 


"Tell me anyway." 
"Ingénue. You called her ingénue." 


"Ingénue,” Mitchell repeated, tasting the word in his mouth. "Where 
the hell did | come up with that?" 


"I'm sure | don't know." 
Mitchell laid his head back on the pillow, balancing the photograph 


on his chest. She had large eyes, irises so dark they faded into the 
pupils. "Tell me a story about her," he said. 


The voice laughed from above. "Which one? You know them all." 
"| don't care. You choose."