One, two. This is , testing the effect of SCP-583. | 
start reading. "Aggo was back next. The southwest was 
barren and burnt, he swore. He had found the ruins of 
two more cities, and since, he has started coughing." Ok, 
| think it has started. I'll read further, he'll die, you'll see. 
Back to the text. "One was warded by a ring of skulls 
mounted on rusted iron spears, so he dared not enter, 
but he had explored the second for as long as he could, 
before his throat began to ache. He showed Dany an 
iron bracelet he had found, set with a uncut fire opal the 
size of her thumb. She was sick too, and the idea of the 
princess being ill like he was comforted him a little. There 
were scrolls as well, but they were dry and crumbling 
and Aggo had left them where they lay. He took a rest in 
his tent, praying a good night to his Targaryan mistress, 
and died that same night." | skip a few pages now ‘til 
Dany dies too. "Hear this: Here | stand. Look, if that is 
your pleasure, but first tell me your names. And then she 
fell." | need a book with a lot of characters in it, | guess. 
Okay, so now I'll read this Carambar joke’, so you can 
see it works with anything. Why did the chicken cross the 
road? Who cares, halfway across the road, it fell over 
and choked and died. Haha. 


End of testimony. 


Addendum 1: Class D personnel exposed to SCP-583 are to be 
placed into psychological studies to examine the long-term 
psychological effects of exposure to SCP-583. The standard 


I'm the final component. He's waiting for me. 


* 


The space beyond the airlock is gigantic, structured and lit like an 
aircraft hangar and filled with hot, stale, dry air. Wheeler, still mostly 
blind, stumbles forward across an expanse of more than a hectare 
of flat, dusty epoxy flooring. "Hughes!" she shouts into the void. "It's 
time!" Nothing comes back but the echo. 


She glances up for a second. The space is empty. The castle-sized 
memetic amplification/oroadcasting unit which Bart Hughes was 
meant to be building is absolutely absent. Hughes himself is absent. 


Maybe the entire machine is antimemetically cloaked? she wonders, 
momentarily. It would be a smart way to conceal the operation even 
from the rest of the Foundation. But her brain is curdling in the 
strongest mnestic drugs ever manufactured. There's genuinely 
nothing here. 


Almost nothing. At the centre of the space there's a small outpost, a 
group of trestle tables with tools and toolboxes scattered about the 
place. Parked behind it is an unmarked military truck with flat tyres. 
On the back of the truck is a squat, squarish machine the size of a 
shipping container, with unshielded wiring and exposed pipework, 
and a long cable leading to a heavy-duty control panel on the floor. 
To the untrained eye, it is not at all clear what the machine is 
designed to do. 


It's the antimemetic equivalent to a hydrogen bomb; the Division's 
answer to a site nuclear warhead. Activated, it would contaminate 
Site 41 and everything and everyone on it with antimemetic 
radiation. There would be no Site 41 and no Division afterwards; 
nothing any of the escaping, infectious staff did could have any 
effect on the real world. 


It's the wrong machine. 


It can't destroy or contain SCP-3125, or even injure it. All it can do is 
sterilise today's outbreak. The other symptoms will persist. Fifty or 
ten or five years from now, or maybe one year or maybe tomorrow, 


SCP-3125 will return, bringing with it its MK-class end-of-world 
scenario. Human civilisation will be entirely eradicated as an 
abstract concept, and be replaced with something unimaginably 
worse. There will be no one to fight it. 


Wheeler leans there on the ray gun for a long moment. The 
pressure of information in her mind, continually increasing, reaches 
a point where she can't take it any more, and she starts to break. 
The Class-Z has been in her system for long enough now that she 
knows for a fact she has irreversible brain damage. There is no 
antidote. She'll be lucid for another hour, then spend the remaining 
two or three hours of her life vegetative. 


That's right, she thinks. It's almost a relief. This is good. This is right. 


I've survived too long. | forgot what universe this was. For a while 
there, | thought, maybe... this was the universe where we win 
sometimes. 


The agony in her head is like an ice axe now. She drops the ray gun 
with a clatter, sinks to her knees, lies down and waits for either 
death or a better idea. 


A being superficially resembling Paul Kim arrives at the outer airlock 
door. It examines the airlock uncomprehendingly for a few moments, 
then finds the keycard slot. It hunts methodically through Kim's 
pockets, then remembers the keycard around its neck. The airlock 
cycles once more and not-Kim goes through. Behind it, the freight 
elevator is returning to ground level a third time, to fetch the rest. 


In the next room, the being which is not Paul Kim finds Wheeler, 
unconscious, with the ray gun dropped beside her. There is also a 
military truck, which it disregards. 


Not-Kim lets its keycard fall from its fingers and scoops up the ray 
gun. For a moment it contemplates the unconscious Wheeler, then 
examines at the gun itself, remembering how it works. It turns back 
to face the airlock and fires, punching fat cylindrical holes in the 
white metal of the inner door until it's gone, then the outer door too, 


breaching the hermetic seal. A faint smile returns to not-Kim's face 
as SCP-3125 and its familiar, comforting signals flood into the 
bunker. 


A dozen more non-people are arriving by freight elevator, former 
Antimemetics Division bodies. "I've found her," not-Kim calls out to 
them. It drops the ray gun where it's standing, as if it simply forgot 
that it had been carrying anything, and pulls out its knife again. It 
holds the knife between two fingers, in a casual, offhand sort of way, 
as if it were a pencil or screwdriver. 


The infected non-people gather with not-Kim around Wheeler, 
looking down at her with alien expressions of disgust, or pity, or 
malice. 


"Why isn't she opening up properly?" someone asks. "She can't 
meet them unless she wants the signals." 


"Start with her eyes," says someone else. "It'll make the rest of her 
easier to correct." 


Not-Kim leans down to start work, then hesitates, its knife a few 
centimetres from Wheeler's eye. She's whispering something, so 
quietly that only it can hear her clearly. 


"None of this happened, Paul," she says. "You and | never existed. 
There is no Antimemetics Division." 


There's a sharp click as the bomb finishes its powering-up 
sequence. Nobody in the room can hear this but Wheeler. Nobody in 
the room can perceive the bomb but Wheeler. All they can see is an 
empty truck. 


The world goes black. 


Where Have You Been All My Life 


Who the fuck infiltrates a senior Foundation official's home, while 
they're home? 


Marion Wheeler lives deep in coniferous forest, a long drive from the 
nearest major city and a long drive in the opposite direction from 
Site 41. It's late, last thing, and she's reading in bed when she hears 
the muffled, unmistakeable click of her front door being unlocked. 
She looks up, and stares blankly at the wall for a second while 
listening to soft footsteps moving into the hallway. 


She marks her place and reaches for her Foundation-issued phone. 
She has no permanent security staff at home — the Division is 
understaffed and trained operatives are in much more serious need 
on Site — but the building and grounds have beefy electronic 
countermeasures. They, she discovers, have all been disabled, 
along with the sensors and cameras. She was not notified that this 
had happened. Whoever did it had a valid code. 


Who, though? 


The Foundation has enemies. True, the list of credible, motivated 
enemies is surprisingly short, and the list of groups stupid enough to 
try to kill or capture someone at her level is shorter. But it's far from 
empty, and it's not actually so hard a feat; not too many people 
below O5 level are privileged to travel in motorcades. The real trick, 
the impossible trick, is to avoid unholy retaliation. But what if you 
really think you can? What if you've decided it's worth it? 


Wheeler triggers the silent alarm. She sets her phone back down on 
the nightstand and collects her gun. She rolls out of bed, tucks a few 
pillows in her place, moves silently to her bedroom door and stands 

beside it, listening and thinking. 


This door, her bedroom door, can't be opened silently. It creaks like 
hell, so if she goes through it she'll have to be ready to draw 


attention. There's an attic, but access is out there on the landing 
and, again, can't be operated silently. There's no alternate route to 
ground level other than jumping from the window, and someone has 
to be covering it. Even if she landed in the bushes alive, she'd still 
have to break the perimeter with a sprained ankle. 


A better question than "Who?" is "How many?" She may already be 
straight-up dead, simply due to numbers. If the attackers tread 
cautiously and try to flush her out, she figures she can Home Alone 
her way through perhaps eight of them before running out of luck. If 
they rush the second floor and have armor she might be 
overwhelmed by as few as two, even with the staircase acting asa 
choke point. All of this, naturally, assumes that the attackers aren't 
anomalous. If they are, and they're not in the, say, thirty percent of 
anomalies which can be neutralised simply by shooting them in the 
centre mass and head, she may be fundamentally helpless even 
after the response team shows up. Which will be, at best, ten 
minutes from now. 


A creaking. This damned house. Someone is coming up the stairs, 
making no effort to be quiet about it. A soft tread, though. As if they 
removed their shoes. Just one of them? That barely makes sense. 


With five seconds' grace, Wheeler casts around the dark room for a 
second weapon. She knows there are knitting needles downstairs in 
the lounge and knives, good ones, in the kitchen. But she can't get 
to them. It's too late. The door's opening. It seems like the man's 
trying to say something as he comes in, but he only gets as far as "I 
— whulp," and it's done. He's flat on his face, cheek pressed into 
deep cream carpet, with Wheeler on his back pinning both his wrists 
with her knees. She sights urgently back down the stairs for a 
second; there's no one there. She prods him in his other cheek with 
the muzzle of the gun. "You speak, you die," she hisses. "You try to 
move, you die." She glances at the windows, checks the stairs 
again, listens intently. There's no sound. There's nothing to be seen. 


The man is fifty, and lanky. He wears an expensive dark suit, 
tailored to his build. He has angular features, thick, greying hair and 
rimless spectacles, now quite possibly bent out of shape by their 
sudden impact with the floor. He wears discreet platinum jewellery: a 
wristwatch, cufflinks and a ring. 


The two of them halt like that, a tableau. He makes no attempt to 
move, although he does look askance at Wheeler, as best he can 
given his dislodged glasses. 


Wheeler asks, "Where are the others?" 
"It's just me, Marion," he answers. 
"Who are you?" 


He says nothing for a moment, but his expression slowly, subtly 
drops. "I, ah. Well. Well, it really happened, didn't it? | always 
wondered." 


"Who are you?" 


"There is a monster which follows you around and eats your 
memories," the man says. "SCP-4987. You drip-feed it 
inconsequential trivia so it doesn't go after anything important. You 
watch game shows. The book you were reading just now. On your 
nightstand. It's a trivia book. Right?" 


Wheeler says nothing to confirm or deny this, although it is true. At 
feeding time the entity manifests like a bright gold-white spot in the 
corner of her eye. It's gone now. 


She's already put the rest of it together. It is all mind-bogglingly, 
insultingly obvious. 


With a well-suppressed but still detectable note of dismay, she asks, 
"What's your name?" 


"Adam," he says. "Adam Wheeler." 


Obviously, she has the man detained. 


She instructs her people to interrogate him — lightly — and to run 
deep background research on every word he utters, while for her 
part she stands far back from the investigation to avoid 
contamination. She resists the urge to interfere, particularly to visit 
"Adam" and personally demand answers. She goes to her office, 
curls up on the couch there and tries to catch some sleep, but 
doesn't succeed in any real sense. 


Seven hours later a Foundationer knocks on her office door, 
bringing an inch-thick block of printouts and a paralysingly strong 
cup of coffee. Wheeler takes the drink first, accepting it as a kind of 
authentication step before letting the man in. She moves back to the 
couch and sits hunched over the drink for warmth, inhaling its 
fumes. 


The man settles heavily into a chair opposite. He is a misleadingly 
stocky, perpetually unshaven individual, somewhere just shy of forty, 
and inarguably the most dangerous person on the Site. He is the 
Division's physical fitness and combat instructor and the leader of 
their solitary Mobile Task Force. His name is Alex Gauss. "They, 
uh," he says, "figured | should be the one to present their results. 
Even though | didn't research one line of it. ‘Cause we ‘get along’. 
Their words. Personally, | don't see it." 


Wheeler stays focused on the coffee. "Who is he?" 


Gauss opens the first page of the report, more for show than 
anything, then closes it again. "He's your husband. Every word 
checks out. There is limitless physical evidence. Half of the Division 
knows him socially, including me. | credit your diligence and 
adherence to protocol, but the bottom line is that SCP-4987 got 
hungry." 


Wheeler nods. This assessment matches her own, pieced together 
overnight from gut reactions and analysis of the plain facts. Where 
the hell else did her name come from? She wasn't born "Wheeler". 
But she had to get independent verification. 


She asks, "Has this happened before?" 


"No." 


"Could it happen again?" 
Gauss shrugs. "You would know better than anyone." 


"| would. | do. And | can tell you this: | have SCP-4987 trained to 
follow me at my heel. | feed it according to a strict regimen, it eats 
only the memories | say it's okay to eat. A rapidly progressive, 
universally fatal memory parasite made chronic and then 
domesticated. And now, what, it suddenly breaks training? That 
adds up?" 


"If you say it doesn't add up, it doesn't add up," Gauss says, 
cautiously. "But speaking from field experience, anything can 
happen twice." 


Wheeler has waited long enough, and takes a long pull from the 
coffee. She stares into the coiling steam, as if trying to see the 
future. "But who is he?" she asks again. "At this point, you know him 
better than | do. What's he like? Do you like him?" 


Gauss grimaces extravagantly. This is the great-great-grandmother 
of all loaded questions. 


Wheeler looks him in the eye and says, "Tell me your personal 
impression of Adam Wheeler. Direct order." 


"...He's a nice enough guy." 
“Nice enough'?" 


Gauss clicks his tongue. "I don't like him," he admits. "Personally. All 
that much. We're civil. But he will always be a little bit too smug, and 
a little bit too clever. He just... grates. Would | throw someone ina 
cell for that? No." 


"Do | like him?" 


"You—" Gauss begins, then stops. He looks away. And over time, a 
soft smile develops on his face, one which Wheeler doesn't recall 
ever seeing before, not in a working relationship going back years. 
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah. He's the one."