"We're getting sidetracked. | was terrified when | watched Jamison 
die, | was. Call me crazy, but the longer | thought about that day, the 
more | came to appreciate that thing. | went back here and it was 
still there. | realized at that moment that it was the greatest work of 
art ever. Think of that statue as life itself. Look at its face. Look at 
the colors that are on there. It looks creepy, but at the same time it 
looks kind of nice. Similar to how life is generally pretty good, but 
has lots of bad stuff in it." 


"To look away from this is to reject life itself. You think it's creepy 


and you want to stop looking at it, just like you think that life is unfair 
and cruel and you don't want to be in it anymore. It's genius! 
Sometimes in order to win at life, you just need to look it right in the 
eye." 


"What do you mean you don't understand? Do | need to spell it out 
for you? This fucking thing startled me the first time | saw it in the 
barn. | don't even know how it got there. Same thing for life. | didn't 
ask to be born, and neither did you. We just happened to start 
existing when our moms gave birth to us." 


"Life comes at you fast. About as fast as this thing does when 
nobody's looking at it. It's not pleasant. It's not supposed to be. It is 
what it is. It's up to you to make your own conclusions about the 
thing like | did. Just like life. Isn't that what the best art is supposed 
to do?" 


"Just look at it! If you look at the statue head-on, then you defeated 
it. If you look at life, you've defeated it. It makes you appreciate 
how... beautiful it all is when it can be taken away in the literal blink 
of the eye. Can | not make that any more clear? Not seeing the thing 
in front of us is no different than the two of us committing suicide 
right here right now! | don't care if I'm rambling at this point! I've 
figured this thing out, so I've got life figured out! I'm trying to help 
you see that for yourself.” 


"That's all | wanted to share. You want to stay? Well don't forget to 
close the barn doors on the way out." 


Life Lessons, or You Aren't Getting Younger Every Day 


7st Lesson 


When you were quite a good deal younger, one of the bluebottle 
flies which came into the house in the summer and beat themselves 
against the windows got into your room. You caught it and held it in 
your hands before letting it go to fly away again. You hoped it would 
stay and be your friend but it didn’t, even though you could still hear 
its occasional taps against the glass. As children your age were 
wont to do, you sulked at the slight and rolled over and stuffed your 
hands in your ears. 


You found its body a few days later, curled up in the well of your 
windowsill, only a few inches away from the little hole in the screen 
that would have let it go free. Even though some part of you knew 
that’s not what happened, you feel guilty about the fly dying, like you 
were the one who killed it and not a hot sun and no food or water or 
air. 


You could have had a little funeral, but you couldn't reach the fly in 
the well of the window. When you asked your mother to get it out for 
you, and explained why, she scolded you and said that flies were 
dirty. When you were older still, you learned that the fly would have 
died in a matter of days, anyway. 


That’s just how flies were. 
2nd Lesson 


You're older now, in school, and you’ve just hit back for the first time 
in your life. Despite all the years of reading books with sounky 
protagonists learning to stand up for themselves, you do not in fact 
feel vindicated. The blood on her face from her nose and the split lip 
makes you feel a little ill. Instead of crowing in joy you burst into 
tears and try to kneel beside her, so you can push the sleeve of your 
shirt into her face and make it stop. 


She recoils and shoves you so hard into the dirt you hit your face on 
a rock and knock out one of your milk teeth, and then you’re both 
crying. There’s a humming in your head from pain and dizziness at 
seeing blood and perhaps a bit of indignation. 


It sounds a little like a bluebottle, beating itself against the window. 
3rd Lesson 


You never do finish school — you have to drop out so you can take 
care of your mum. You’re old enough to do that when she gets sick, 
and there’s nobody else around to help her, so you do. For a while 
in between hospital trips and holding a vomit pan and looking up 
palliative care and the success rates of double mastectomies, you 
try to study out of your old textbooks. It’s a hectic mishmash of 
biology and calculus and history where you can actually get past 
World War 2, forgetting which problem you were on by the time you 
come back from holding the bedpan. 


It doesn’t work, but you keep on trying until she’s dying. Then you 
give up. You give up on a lot of things while you're sitting in that bed, 
watching her try to breathe. There’s an impulse welling up in you to 
take the pillow and shove it over her face, just to stop that horrible 
rattling noise. You almost do it once, twice, then three times. 


You don’t, and she takes an extra five days after the doctor said she 
would to die, five days of piss and shit and blood and sobbing until 
they drug her so deep she doesn’t even remember your name. Who 
needs to be careful with morphine when you're going to die anyway? 
She asks, eyes wide and earnest in her last lucid moment. After 
she’s gone, you go out and sit on the curb of the hospital and cry so 
hard you give yourself a nosebleed. 


Then with the coppery taste still filling your mouth, old pennies and 
missing teeth, you go to take care of your mother’s dead body. 


4th Lesson 


You are older still, although not by too much, and you have the man 
who almost hit you with his car to thank for that. He thought you 
were a particularly soggy clump of rubbish in the gutter. Instead you 


turned out to be an mostly incoherent drunk. He still scooped you up 
and got you home and had absolutely nothing to do with what 
happened next. 


The man who showed up on your doorstep with his polite smile and 
offered you a job as a janitor was so normal you can’t remember his 
face. He could have been everyone you’d ever seen ina 
background before, a crowd shot in a television show or someone 
going by you in a busy street. 


Mr. Jones? 
Mr. Smith? 
Does it matter? 


He laughs and waves your question away when you ask him who 
the fuck would want someone as a janitor so bad that they’d be 
willing to send someone else out to a front door. | oversee all D- 
Class personnel requisitions, he replies. It doesn’t matter. But the 
pay is good, and you can drink on your off days all you want. You’d 
be living on-site, but the Foundation treats those well who treat it 
well. 


You turn and look back over your shoulder, considering the grimy 
hallway still soaked in muck from when you stumbled in last night. 
You consider the itchy corporate branded work shirt you're wearing, 
the one that always creeps up under your armpits. You consider the 
pounding hangover you've got, and the way something about the 
man’s horribly normal face suggests that saying no might not be an 
option. You think good and long and hard about your life and how 
you're living it now. 


Okay, you say. Okay. 
And you try not to think of your mother. 
Graduation Day 


You are much much older, and your knees are sore, although that’s 
the last of your worries on any given day. You don't even have time 
to consider all the different ways you've ever see people die, and to 


be honest, it didn’t even matter anymore. Blood and shit because 
they blinked, alright, whatever. It was the kind of hyperviolence you 
saw on movies and television and wasn’t it easier to just keep your 
head down and mop? 


You don’t get to know half of the things that go on here, at Site-19. 
You’re not a scientist in a white labcoat, you’re the person who 
scrubs up the piss from the tile when a junior researcher sees 
something he wasn’t prepared for. You're definitely not one of the 
skips kept behind locked doors- that’s what all the people like you 
call them, skips. There’s one of your fellow D-Class who keeps 
calling them scips, like what you do to a drink you want to savor, and 
he gets screamed down with derision in the mess hall every night. 
They’re horrible, wonderful things and if you and everyone else here 
didn’t do your part to keep them contained the whole world might 
end. 


(That’s what they call an XK. You listen more than you probably 
should.) 


You've lasted longer than most. Is it because they want you alive? Is 
it luck? Who the fuck knows? It doesn't matter to you. You're just 
living here. 


But in a way, being confined has given you an appreciation for the 
smaller things. You get three fucking meals a day (of Soylent Green- 
esque pap that you're not entirely sure isn't made of people, 
because wouldn't that be fitting) and a place to rest (small, steel- 
frame, in a room full of snoring assholes) and your job isn't too hard. 
(Mopping. Sometimes it's piss, sometimes blood, sometimes it's 
chunks of what used to be a member of those fancy on site task 
forces before a skip got them. Still better than working at Burger 
King.) 


You've finally found a place. Not your place, it's a little too hostile for 
that, but it's a place with room for you in it and that's good enough. 


You roll over and with the little metal screw you took from the mop, 
you scratch a line on the wall. It's the best way you've found to keep 
up with the time of the year, and the overseers don't seem to mind it. 
You scratch another line on the wall. You've gotten one year older, 


give or take. You're not dead yet. 
Happy Birthday. 
End. 


The first instance of SCP-894-1 was found hanging outside the 
complaint office of [DATA EXPUNGED]. There are currently seven 
copies of SCP-894-1 in Foundation hands. 


When any living being comes within five meters of SCP-894-2, and 
becomes visually aware of said SCP, they lose all ability to hear for 
24 hours. 


Copies of SCP-894-2 have most often been found in anarchist 
groups, who seem to delight in placing said SCP in public places, 
such as churches, schools, and places of business. Task Force 
Lambda-3 "No Given Nickname" is devoted to tracking down these 
groups, and liberating all instances of SCP-894-2. 


The Foundation currently has 12 copies of SCP-894-2. 


When any living being comes within five meters of SCP-894-3, and 
becomes visually aware of said SCP, they lose all ability to see for 
24 hours. 


SCP-894-3 was first encountered in the hands of a serial rapist, now 
known as D-894. There is no evidence at this time whether 
SCP-894-3 was made in smaller batches than SCP-894-1 and 
SCP-894-2, or if the current owners of copies of SCP-894-3 are 
simply better at hiding its uses. 


The Foundation currently has 2 copies of SCP-894-3. 


Use of instances of SCP-894 by research staff and D-class 
personnel to prevent the effects of objects possessing visual, vocal, 
or auditory triggers, such as SCP-1753, SCP-1752, and SCP-2599 
respectively, has proven effective means of facilitating ongoing 
containment. 


« SCP-893 | SCP-894 | SCP-895 » 


Life's Cold 


| look into the metallic reflection of myself in the elevator door. | see 
it every day. Or just about, since sometimes work keeps me on base 
for days on end. Smooth polished steel. You can see your reflection 
in it, with the bright white glow of the single light above me. In front 
of me, the door and the two buttons. Up. Down. This one only leads 
to two spots. To my left, a side of the elevator. To my right, Doctor 
MacCarrick. 


He was one of the new guys, but somehow, he’d just gotten a 
research assistantship working with Oh-Three-Five. A nasty little 
bugger, from the file | read. | had fifty bucks saying he didn't last the 
week. Sort of sick, | know, but we bet on odd things down here. 


| give my cheeks a soft slap to get some color in them and wake 
myself up, then notice MacCarrick staring at me in the reflection in 
the metal. 


"...Yes, MacCarrick?" 
"Nothing, Dr. Iceberg." 


"Just Ice," | said. | kept hoping it would catch on, but it never did. He 
didn't get a chance to respond before the elevator door opens, and 
we were herded out by the security staff on hand. | was motioned 
out into a short hall, nodding briefly to MacCarrick as he went in the 
opposite direction. | regretted it, but it was already too late. 


The trip down seemed longer that usual, but it might have just been 
the company. Don't get close to people you've got money on. Never 
ends well. 


We already passed clearance up top side, so a lot of the hustle and 
bustle down here was just for show. In spite of that, | knew full well 
that the security cameras were hidden, watching, and checking us. 
Facial structure scans, retinal analysis, or anything that seemed off. 


One thing wrong, and a security team would be in the room in 
seconds to deal with things. I've seen it happen. Not to me, 
thankfully, but still. They're efficient. Very, very efficient. And the 
Insurgency had yet to master plastic surgery, it seemed. 


As | walked forward, | eyed the rather nice reception desk. | wasn't 
sure who it was actually there for, since we didn't take visitors, but | 
assumed that all sites had one. Tradition, maybe? Or a leftover from 
another time. Sitting behind it, typing away at her keyboard, was 
Break. 


Her codename never made sense to me. | just don’t see it. Breaking 
intruders upon the rocks? Breaking fingers? | dunno. But then, you 
have other people whose callsigns didn't make sense either. Djoric? 
What was up with that? Or Bright? Whatever. Not like it mattered. 
What aid matter, though, was... 


"Hello there, Break." | put on my charming smile. Set my briefcase 
down. Lean onto her desk. 


She sighs before responding, eyes not straying from her computer. 
"Hello, Dr. Iceberg." 


"And how are you today, lovely?" 

"Good. Must you do this?" 

"Do what, Breaky?" | use my pet name for her. She loves that. 
"Don't call me that." 


"Oh, come on. | know you love it." She loved it. "| was wondering if 
you might be doing anything this week. Like, say, Friday?" 


"No." 
“Oh really, now," | started. "Then maybe we cou—" 


"No," she said. "| was answering your next question first. No, I'm not 
going out with you. I'm going to be washing my hair from now until 
eternity, Berg." 


Ugh. | hated it when she called me Berg. 


She turned her face from the screen at last, looking up at me with a 
blank expression that | knew belied her true affections. 


"Go to work." 


"Okay, okay, fine, fine... Maybe next week, then." My smiled slipped 
from charming to nervous, and | picked up my suitcase and headed 
down the administrative hallway toward the east wing. 


| wasn't sure if she knew she was in ear shot when | heard her 
mumbled "Not likely." But | knew this all too well. Honestly, | 
sometimes wonder if | may be as bad with women as Clef. Then | 
just tell myself that even I’m not that bad. | hope. | wonder if maybe 
the issue lay with her, but | decided that she'd warm up to me 
sooner or later. 


My office was placed fairly deep in the bedrock. Well, less that and 
more they gave me one back here. Considering how much time I'm 
stuck back here from week to week, it was no wonder | thought of it 
as home more so than the apartment at the nearby living facilities. 
The nice thing is that I'm still in walking distance to the break room, 
and since it's Monday, a break seems like a good way to get things 
started. 


| head out down the shocking clean hallways. I'm always surprised 
by how nicely kept they are, especially since | never see a cleaning 
crew. They must be here at odd hours. Maybe a secret fleet of 
Roombas.