Antimemetics Division staff, other than me: thirty-eight. Forty-two 
days until the next iteration. That's past the end of the year. It'll be 
too late. If | leave this room now, | will never be back. The plan | 
have now is the best plan there's ever going to be. 


We're the last ones in the world. After us, there's nobody. 


* 


Kim is so deeply buried in work at his terminal and the airlock is so 
quiet that he almost doesn't notice when it starts to cycle open 
again. 


"We need to check you for notes," he begins, but then he sees that 
Marion Wheeler is curled up in the bottom of the narrow cylinder, 
panting as though she just finished a marathon run. Kim holds a 
hand out but she shakes her head, electing to stay lying down, 
knees bent up to her chest, sucking down lungfuls of air. 


"What in the world happened in there?" Kim asks. 


"Just need..." she gasps, "...to breathe. Be okay in a... second. 
Haaaaanh. | think | blacked out for a moment, might have inhaled 
some. Haaaaanh. | think I'm okay. | remember the plan." 


Kim looks confused and worried for a second, then they replace him. 
"You shouldn't be able to remember anything... what did you do?" 


"Hit my head," Wheeler says, then goes back to concentrating on 
breathing properly. She suddenly becomes acutely aware that Kim 
has her effectively cornered. Disliking this configuration for reasons 
which she's only gradually putting back together, she levers herself 
up to one shoulder and tries to stand. Kim puts a hand on her 
shoulder and pushes her back down. 


"You look terrible," he says. "There's something inl fleth your neck. 
Do you see that?" He points at her throat, then taps the same spot 
on his own. 


"What?" 


"On your neck. | nefth hlai you've been infected by whatever was in 
there. We need to act quickly." He reaches for his keyring and 
unthreads a Swiss Army knife, and unfolds a short, gleaming blade. 
He does this in such a methodical, ordinary way that Wheeler almost 
forgets to react when he leans down towards her to cut her throat. 


Almost. She grips his wrist. They're locked like that for a moment, a 
tableau. She looks into Paul Kim's eye, but it isn't his eye anymore. 
She squints, wondering if she's making eye contact with anything 
but a hole in space. She already feels the force bearing down on her 
own skull, trying to drill into it, but she knows its shape and that 
means she can hold out, maybe for a few minutes. She had hoped, 
prayed, that Kim would not succumb so quickly. And in a crazed little 
way she'd thought there would be at least a sign, a theatrical 
doubling-over as his mind was wrenched out of its socket. 


Kim's wrist spasms as he tries to lunge with the knife. Wheeler 
parries and its tip glances off the airlock interior wall with a screech. 
They scuffle for an awkward second, then she boots Kim in the 
stomach with both feet, sending him sprawling in the antechamber. 
She launches out of the airlock, dives over him and sprints away 
from the containment unit. 


She feels SCP-3125 following her as she runs, like a spotlight. She 
hears a crash in another part of the Site, as the first piece of ceiling 
Caves in. 


Concluded in Your Last First Day 


Your Last First Day 


Previously 


Marion Wheeler is curled in the corner of Site 41's main freight 
elevator, descending, clutching a shiny red ray gun almost as long 
as she is tall. The gun has a two-tined prong instead of a barrel and 
its stock is a weirdly asymmetrical mass of pipework, more like a 
Swiss watch or a small intestinal tract than a weapon. The gun is 
SCP-7381, and it comes from a long-dead planet — not too distant a 
planet, when all's said and done — which conventional astronomy 
has yet to observe. 


A tornado of violence and destruction is tearing through Site 41 and 
through the minds of everybody working at Site 41. Ceilings are 
being brought down, the site pharmacy is a sucking hole at the side 
of the building. The armoury is buried; that's why she had to go 
through Area 09 and is now toting anomalous weaponry instead. 
The Antimemetics Division operatives she meets in the corridors are 
all broken; some of them curled up and raving while their minds 
evaporate and they die one memory at a time, some infected with a 
collection of ideas which compel them to shout guttural phrases in 
strange languages, and to procure blades — never guns — and 
work on those demented victims, and each other, and themselves. 


Wheeler doesn't recognise any of the people. Their faces are all 
wrong, torn up with hatred and misery and vindictive glee. She's 
been trying to avoid fighting, but she's had to kill one man in self- 
defence. Fired at his heart, SCP-7381 simply erased a half-metre- 
wide cylinder of matter, removing his upper torso and lower jaw. He 
fell to the ground in four pieces. SCP-7381's beam is invisible, silent 
and recoilless. It was like using a child's toy gun. 


Wheeler is petrified, but more than that, angry. "This is too much," 
she says, out loud, willing her heart rate back under control. "I can't 
deal with this. | shouldn't have to deal with this. It's my fucking first 
day!" 


But how much sense does that make? Wheeler studies her 
reflection in the dark glass of the elevator control panel, and she 
tours the interior of her own skull, examining her thought processes. 
There are hints there, which would be difficult to articulate to 
someone who didn't know her as well as she knows herself. She 
isn't thinking like a newbie. She's instinctively breaking the problem 
apart, the way an experienced Foundation operative should. Hell, a 
newbie wouldn't even know how to carry out a detailed 
psychological self-examination of this kind. A newbie wouldn't even 
think of it, a newbie would just suffocate. 


"The first thing it did when it saw me," she explains to her reflection, 
"was eat everything | knew about the Division. And everything | 
knew about it. If | had a plan, it ate the plan. ...But I'm still me. So | 
can come up with that plan again. It's already right in front of me, | 
just need to see it. If | were me, what would my plan have been?" 


She scratches absently at her left wrist. 


"Taking some hardcore mnestic drugs would have been a smart first 
step, | guess," she mutters. "Reinforcing my mind, so that it can't 
erase the rest of the steps. Damn." The nearest source of mnestic 
medicine is the site pharmacy, but it's already been destroyed, and 
in any case the elevator is headed down, away from it. 


No. Stop. The pharmacy's been destroyed? How do | know that? 


Well, because she was there. She remembers finding the 
pharmacist crushed to death beneath a fallen medical cabinet, her 
skull an unrecognisable splatter of scarlet. She remembers the floor 
being torn away beneath her feet, and only barely making it out of 
that portion of the building alive. 


She remembers— a modular package coloured Safety Orange, with 


an enormous black Z on it. Her heart nearly stops at this. Oh, God. 
What did | do? 


She remembers the dozens of warning signs covering the package; 
she remembers the three-factor authorisation procedure she had to 
follow to get into the sealed container where it was stored; she 
remembers the centimetre-thick book of medical advisory 
information, which she discarded; and, rolling her left sleeve back, 
she finds a fresh needle mark with a speck of blood, and remembers 
administering the injection. 


This was my plan? This is what it takes to fight SCP-3125? I've 
killed myself— 


Class-Z mnestics are the last word in biochemical memory 
fortification. Class-Z mnestics permanently destroy the subject's 
ability to forget. The result is perfect eidetic memory and perfect 
immunity to arbitrarily strong antimemetic interference. 


The dose is taking effect now. Wheeler didn't read the book because 
she already knew every word of it. She knows everything that's 
about to happen to her. She can already feel her mind hardening, 
like steel, and the developing symptoms of extreme sensory 
overload. 


She can see everything. 


There are extra buttons on the elevator control panel, the lowest of 
which, the thirtieth floor below ground level, she's somehow already 
pushed. The walls of the elevator are covered with graffiti scrawled 
by the desperate and dying, people whose conceptual presence was 
eradicated from reality years earlier by the Alastair Grey 
antimemetic kill agent, reducing them to the level of ghosts. In one 
corner of the freight elevator there is even a half-corpse, 
unidentifiable, so many layers removed from reality that not even 
flies can smell it, its cells winking out of existence asymptotically 
over the course of years. 


There is a fistful of tiny white worms exploring the floor of the 
elevator car, near where she's sitting. Revolted, Wheeler shuffles 
back from them, shaking one or two more of them out of her hair. 


The worms are among the most widespread and successful 
antimemetically cloaked organisms in the world. They are 
everywhere, in every biome, in every room. 


She can hear a long, alarming drone noise, a continual roaring 
which has the texture of ambient noise and is continually getting 
louder. It's as if it's been there for her entire life, and it's only now 
that she's begun to hear it. 


It's too much data. Too much sound, too much light. Having her 
eyes open is like jamming them full of needles. She clamps her 
hands over her ears and screws her eyes up. Even like this, she 
feels the vibration of the elevator's slow descent and the heat of the 
failed air conditioning and the movement of her clothes on her skin, 
and meanwhile her vision is flooding instead with what could be 
hallucinations. The human sensorium routinely generates huge 
amounts of data and the human brain is adapted to discard almost 
all of that data nearly immediately. Altering the brain's behaviour to 
retain that data is extremely dangerous even for very short time 
spans. 


Wheeler takes one hand away from her ear for just long enough to 
punch the metal wall of the elevator car, bloodying two knuckles. 
The pain gives her a focal point, a memory which screams a little 
louder than the rest. 


And she finds the plan. She doesn't remember it; she bootstraps it 
from first principles, in a handful of minutes, just like she's done a 
hundred times before. 


"| know how to beat you," she says. 


"No," SCP-3125 says to her. "You don't." 


* 


The elevator stops at the thirtieth floor below ground and its doors 
grind open. They wait, open, for a long time. Further up the elevator 
shaft there are the distant rumbles of more parts of Site 41 being 
reduced to crumbs. 


Still crouched in the corner, Wheeler mutters, "SCP-3125 doesn't 
have a voice." 


"Of course | do,” it replies. 


"SCP-3125 is a five-dimensional anomalous metastasized mass of 
bad memes and bad antimemes and everything in between, seeping 
through to our physical reality. It isn't coherent and it isn't intelligent. 
It can't communicate. This is an auditory hallucination." 


SCP-3125 scoffs. "You know what | hate most about you, Marion? 
You're consistently, eternally wrong... and yet you're still alive. All 
those lost battles, every year of that entire lost war, but somehow 
you always cobble together enough dumb luck to walk away 
unscathed. The eternal sole survivor. You don't deserve that kind of 
luck. Nobody does." 


While it's talking, Wheeler leans hard on the ray gun to get to her 
feet. She lodges one shoulder against the wall of the elevator car, 
still with her eyes closed. She braces herself, and opens her eyes. 
The corridor ahead is empty. There's an airlock at the far end, this 
one large enough to drive a truck through, built from ultra-toughened 
white metal alloy in Bart Hughes's established style. There's a panel 
beside the airlock. She closes her eyes again and hobbles forward, 
using the ray gun as a crutch, stretching one hand out ahead of her 
as guidance. 


"Someone has to be last," she says, gritting her teeth. "Someone 
has to be the best." 


"Your team is dead," SCP-3125 says. "Their minds have been pulled 
out, like eyeballs. They're hollow people, with holes in space where 
their brains were. The war is over! Finally! It's just you, Marion, a 
division of one! Dying from mnestic overdose, two hundred metres 
underground, cared for by no one, known to exist to no one, up 
against an immortal, unkillable idea." 


Wheeler reaches the airlock and fumbles blindly with the panel until 
she finds the slot for her keycard. For a few seconds it seems as if 
nothing is happening, then a yellow light flashes, the enormous 
mechanical interlocks unlatch and the door cycles open with all the 


fuss of a flower's petals unfurling. Noise, Hughes always held, is a 
symptom of imperfect engineering. 


Behind her, she hears the freight elevator close up and return to 
ground level, and she knows that someone has summoned it, 
intending to pursue her. 


"Ideas can be killed," she says, stepping into the airlock. 
"How?" 
"With better ideas." 


As the airlock cycles closed, so does the hermetic seal. SCP-3125 is 
shut out. 


If something can cross over from conceptual space into reality, 
taking physical form, then something can cross in the opposite 
direction. It must be possible to take a physical entity, mechanically 
extract the idea which it embodies, amplify that idea and broadcast it 
up into conceptual space. A bigger idea. A better idea, one designed 
specifically to fight SCP-3125. 


An ideal. A movement. A hero. 


The machine Wheeler needs to build is the size of an Olympic 
stadium, and she doesn't have a fraction of the heavy memetic 
engineering experience to do it, let alone the material resources or 
the time. But she knows — someone taught her, she doesn't 
remember who — that an Antimemetics Division operative is as 
good on their first day as they're ever likely to be. And the same 
must be true of the Division as a whole. 


She tells herself: We won this war on the day it began. When we 
encountered SCP-3125 for the first time, we built this bunker. Bart 
Hughes faked his death and sequestered himself here so he could 
work uninterrupted, while the rest of the Division held on for as long 
as humanly possible, buying time for this moment. | know this is 
what | did, because it's what | would have done. 


permanent, ending only with the death of the subject. 
Consult Document 583-T01 for further information. 


Document 583-T01: Recorded testimony of , after exposure 
to SCP-583's recording. Retrieved during Intervention-P12. 
Translated from French. 


Subject was given a hardbound copy of A Clash of Kings and was 
asked to read aloud from anywhere in the book. Subject started 
reading at page 201.