The two, if not friends, then co-workers, turned their gaze on the pit 
again, and, in a sign that they had both been working together for far 
too long, heaved identical sighs, and spoke the same words 
together. 


"Fucking Mary Sues." 


Matterminded 


Philadelphia, The Navy Yard 
2031 


Dr. Vanessa Graff is sitting at a table overlooking the ocean, hands 
trembling with the greatest rush she has ever experienced in her life, 
when the woman who doesn't exist steps out from behind a building 
and waves hello to her. 


The woman's hand seems to move in slow-motion stereo, double- 
exposed afterimages of her hand flickering colours of the rainbow. 
By the time she's finished sitting down at the table, Graff is starting 
to wonder if even the trail-mix of medication she took beforehand 
wasn't enough to prevent the heart attack. The only clue she's not 
dead is the fact that she can still feel her brain frying slowly ina 
cocktail of mnestic sludge. 


"Hhi," she manages to gulp out between clenched teeth. 


Her visitor looks like a patchwork human — when she puts her 
hands on the table, her left looks baby-soft while her right is cratered 
with liver spots and veins jutting out underneath it. "Your first time on 
the Y-Class?" she croaks, pointing at the foil packet still clenched in 
Graff's trembling hand. 


"Yeahh." 


"All of the new ones had the sweats the first time they tried those 
things. Induced synaesthesia isn't easy on the brain." She smiles 
pleasantly, exposing yellow-and-white checkerboard teeth. "So, you 
found us after all this time." 


Graff nods and her hearing pops and whistles as her sense of 
balance decides to take a week's leave. "Yyou don't hide yoour 
tracks very well, Mmelinda." 


at a wavelength of ~380 nm to ~780 nm, or within the human 
spectrum of visible light. SCP-905 shows the ability to change the 
wavelengths emitted to match its background. SCP-905's lack of a 
shadow can make detecting SCP-905 while hidden problematic. 


SCP-905 shows an inability to absorb coloured lights. Due to 
SCP-905's constant loss of photons, SCP-905 must be "fed" 
regularly in order to maintain a "healthy" body volume. 


Conversely, “feeding” SCP-905 too large an amount of photons 
causes SCP-905 to experience an over-saturation. SCP-905 finds 
this extremely painful, and describes it in a similar manner to human 
burns. Placing a mirror near SCP-905 in an attempt to "feed" 
SCP-905 its own emissions results in SCP-905 expressing extreme 
discomfort. When questioned, SCP-905 replied, “Would you enjoy 
eating your own [EXPLETIVE REDACTED]?” 


SCP-905 was discovered at the [DATA EXPUNGED] entrance of 
Site- . 


Addendum 905-1: The words "Mr. Chameleon, from Little Misters ® 
by Dr. Wondertainment" are printed upon SCP-905's left "calf". 
SCP-905 shows an inability to change the wavelength emitted by 
this print. This designation appears as "1" in Document SCP-909-a. 


« SCP-904 | SCP-905 | SCP-906 » 


"Well, you're right. We didn't. Didn't think we'd need to at the time, 
not that it was ever our choice to begin with." Melinda Williams 
breaks into a coughing fit, and when she stops, she sounds about 
an octave younger. "So what ratted us out then?" 


In response, the doctor gestures at the space around them. 
"Seemmed pretty obvious to me," she says, and even her rising 
gorge isn't enough to suppress her smug grin. "I think yyou know 
what I'm talkking about too." 


Williams nods and leans back in her chair, staring out at the ocean. 
"Do |?" 


"Does Project Viewpoint ring a bell?" Graff shudders as another 
wave of nausea wracks her body. "| wwas part of the research 
teaam on the skip for a while, beffore | got my docctorate. You 
knoww, | thought it'd be easier to find more about the project, but 
most of the ddata was lost. Even after trying to... convince the 
higher-ups that | needed the information, it turns out we just didn't 
have any of it. All | had was a couple of internal memos, but that 
turned out to be enough. 


"| grasped at straws and wwondered if there was any more 
information on the personnel behind them, so | did a cursory search 
on your name and got a couple of iinteresting results." 


Even before she pulls out the roughly crumpled piece of paper from 
her pocket, Williams can tell what's on it. Her guess turns out to be 
dead right: 


Item #: SCP-320i 
Object Class: Keter 


Special Containment Procedures: [PREVIOUS 
PROCEDURES IRRELEVANT] Each SCP-320i instance 
is to be contained through the use of a Mariotte-Pashler 
antimemetic perception filter. Each SCP-320i instance is 
to be placed at a location which experiences large 
amounts of traffic and/or has a high population density... 


"Yyour watermark was amusing," Graff continues, "and it took me a 
little over half an hour to break it. Neat trick with the blackbboxes, by 
the way." 


"Thank you." 


"| Knew someone had allready pulled the wool over RRAISA's eye 
with that particular ttrick, so | applied it to a ccouple other memetic 
skips where | had access. Turns out you ccould find all sorts of 
interesting things if you did that — perhaps an entire database to go 
with the new numbering system. And then someone emailed me, 
claiming to be from your department, and the rest fell into place from 
there." 


"Good. Excellent. Very well done, Miss Graff." Williams smiles. "So 
why didn't anyone think about this sooner?" 


Graff blinks as her train of thought is roughly shunted into a different 
yard. "Huh?" 


"| don't doubt your ability for one moment, but surely someone else 
could've come up with this. Like you said yourself, if we left that 
many trails, someone else had to have found them. Who says 
nobody else did what you did?" 


"Nnnobody." Graff thinks about what she's just blurted out for a few 
seconds, then slowly begins conjecturing into the darkness. This 
only exacerbates the throbbing in her temple, but she keeps going. 
"Of course someone must've done it before me. Vang probably 
could've blitzed that encryption, if he'd seen it. Hell, anyone of the 
fucks back at Info Haz. could've done it, bbut... but | just don't 
remember them." 


The pain fades in an exhilarating rush as she continues her train of 
thought: "Of course | don't remember them. That's why | needed the, 
the—" She stabs at the crumpled foil packet. "—mnestics, isn't it. 
Something happened. Something big happened to you and that's 
why anything, anyone you touched can't be remembered." Her grin 
gives way to a look of puzzlement. "So what happened?" 


Williams' mouth opens as if she's moving to speak, but after a 


protracted moment of silence, her face drains of colour and she 
leans back in her chair, forehead sheened with sweat. "I—" Again, 
she tries to speak, but it's like her words are being snatched out of 
mid-air and eventually she just gives up. 


"A-are you okay?" Graff leans in and briefly wonders if she's going to 
need to explain the dead body in a couple minutes, before realising 
something that's been staring her in the face: "Wait, you're not 
gonna be able to rremember it either. You'd have a gap in memory, 


a bloock..." ... and that's the thing you're trying to get past now, she 
completes in her head. 


As if nothing's happened, Williams relaxes in her chair and says, 
"Who says nobody else did what you did?" 


Graff swallows before she speaks, lips dry with fevered dehydration 
and the sudden realisation that she's far out of her depth now. 


"Nobody," she repeats. "Ssomeone could've easily done somethiing 
like what | did, you left too many trails to folllow, it's just we forgott 
them all. Or | did. Or the peopple | work for." This time when she 
moves her head a little, there aren't as many half-shadows spilt 
across the pavement. The mnestic's starting to wear off and she 
only has so much time left. "So ttell me. What happened at 
Viewpoint?" 


Williams draws a shuddering, deep breath and suddenly she's aged 
a decade once more. "It... | know it didn't start with Viewpoint. 
Something came before that, but I'd loop myself if | go back any 
farther. But everything after Viewpoint, that's all crystal-clear." She 
coughs again and Graff notices something like an IV running down 
her arm, gold liquid seeping into her vein. 


"Viewpoint started as a U.S. propaganda effort and mutated into an 
attempt to build a memetic panopticon. We were experimenting with 
the idea of breaking the ideological machine altogether by just 
beaming whatever we wanted straight into people's minds. We were 
building an infolaser, and we were making progress on the theory 
fast. Far too fast, but we didn't know that at the time — we were just 
happy to be making some serious progress on what half the world 
would've called pseudoscience at the time. 


"So when we found the first abnormalities in practice, it was like 
hitting a skyscraper in the middle of the desert. Turned out when we 
were broadcasting the first of our test signals, something or 
someone was absorbing the signals at- at an informational level. 


"We thought we were shouting at someone on the other end of a 
room without noticing the brick wall between the two of us. So we 
investigated further, sank even more time and money into these 
things we thought nobody had ever come across before. Men like 
holes in space, spiders on faraway islands, graffiti on the walls — all 
of these things. And then we found something we'd made, years and 
years ago. An antimemetically cloaked frigate, the USS Eldridge. 


"Turns out we- we must've looped ourselves. Somewhere back then 
we must've tested some form of antimemetic weapon on ourselves, 
something that made us all collectively forget. There were 
signatures on the cloaking device, names of people | didn't, maybe 
couldn't know. Did we split from them after we got looped, did they 
die in the blast?" 


Her face slackens again in the way it did the last time she tried 
talking about this and Graff can't help but jump. Something in her 
gut is being pushed away from Williams like an solid lump of iron 
and she can't help but feel intensely nauseous. The veteran doesn't 
look much better either, as her face has gone sallow and her brow 
sheened with sweat. 


"It only spurred us on, of course: we rebuilt infodynamic theory in a 
matter of weeks, made headway into psychotropic biochemistry — 
we got to the point where we could have entire fleets camouflaged 
with a device the size of a cupboard, you know that? And then we 
decided to point the Viewpoint array at the sky, and we found that 
breakthrough. And none of us remember it. 


"Whatever that thing was, it destroyed a little under half a decade's 
worth of work. Viewpoint's probably gone now, isn't it? Whatever the 
thing was, it must've destroyed it, taken out any traces of the thing 
what found it, anything... in mental proximity... it corrupted 
everything we'd done, mangled the ideas behind it. And then two 
decades later | woke up at the Foundation, heading an entire 
division." 


Williams takes a deep breath to recover from her sudden outburst 
and suddenly, she's staring straight-ahead at — no, behind her, 
Graff notices with creeping dread. More importantly, she realises 
that this is the most lucid Williams has been about whatever 
calamity befell her team that day. 


She's remembering, and Graff can't afford that. 


A moment stretches wide over an eternity — wrinkles begin to pull 
away from Williams’ eyes, liver spots begin to fade. She's in the grip 
of something and Graff starts backing her chair away from the other 
woman. "Who got you to come here?" Williams asks, lips pulled tight 
over her teeth. 


Graff fumbles for words. "| got an email." 


"From who?" The whip-sharp way she snaps those syllables carries 
youth with it, carries confidence Graff didn't see in the mangled 
mish-mash of body parts that was her former body. 


"E-Elizabeth, Liz Day, she said she was your assistant—" Graff is 
beginning to notice that the harder she looks into Williams’ ever- 
increasingly youthful eyes, the more she thinks she can see 
something moving behind there: something that's ugly and writhing 
and painful. Then she blinks and in a matter of moments the mnestic 
adrenaline seems to be leaching away from her limbs and Williams 
is running away, oh god she's runnning away— 


Even with the sudden tiredness weighing her down she's still more 
than a match physically for Williams and in a matter of moments 
she's caught up. "Doctor!" 


"Stay back! Tlaol assistant is an antimeme, you're an antimeme, 
she's—" Williams collapses to her knees, fumbling and scrabbling 
for something in her pocket. "X-X-class, gotta..." Her eyes are rolled 
to the back of her head and her body continues to pop and squirm 
as something moves undeneath it. "Ojobiru, we... mlgn have found 
something important, hlai get to Marness—" 


That's a bad name, bad concept, and Graff can feel it like a 
sledgehammer to the frontal lobes as something tries to push its 


way into her head, the only reason she's even staying conscious at 
this point the leftover mnestics still flowing through her system. 
Drunkenly, she runs away, limbs weighed down by the continued 
command, Forget, forget, forget, forget, runs towards something that 
should be there — something that should be there if her conjecture 
is right. 


She runs off the pier with the last spurs of fight-or-flight energy 
coursing through her body and jumps. 


And strong arms appear out of nowhere to pull her up. A voice, 
asking her: 


"What's today's date, Vanessa?" 


"The date..." Graff squints at the woman's face, but her vision is 
blurred and the stranger's face is slipping away from her. As is 
everything, really: the floor and walls are sliding into a mess of steel 
and rivets and lifebuoys... 


And then it stops abruptly as it started and the only reason Graff isn't 
celebrating how her bet's paid off is because she doesn't ever 
remember making it in the first place. That, and the fact that the Y- 
Class seems to have found her way into her body again and it's 
taking quite a lot of her concentration to not vomit all over the floor in 
front of her. 


"I'm." Graff opens and closes her mouth blankly for a few more 
seconds, before finally getting a hold on her larynx. "How did | get 
here?" 


Liz Day sighs deeply and rubs her eyes. "I don't think you want to 
know. I'm not even sure you can know." 


"Oh." Then Graff realises — holy shit, she's been abandoned on the 
deck of a ship. One that seems to disappear when she's not looking 
at it, one that she can just barely keep in her mind's eye, one 
that's... "Oh." 


"You're back with us, then?" 


"This is it, isn't it," Graff says. "This is the Eldridge, the lost ship of 


the Counterconceptual Division." 
"And," Day adds, "It's also just lost a captain." 


"You... you're not." Graff bursts out into a brief cackle, before 
choking it off. "You're not seriously saying.” 


"Well. We have an unfinished trip to a place called Samothrace, and 
no captain to sail us there." Day grins, shrugs and starts walking 
away. "Your call, really." 


And Vanessa Graff finds herself on a boat that shouldn't exist, 
watching a woman who doesn't walk away. 


May 13th 


Personal audio log for Agent Jason Finch, May 13th. It is... 13:02 
where | am right now. Currently on route to a reported anomalous 
incident in the town of Pete’s Point, Washington. | have gone over 
the details of this case, and checked it twice. Travelling via car to 

move inconspicuously. 


Not like the Foundation could have sprung for plane tickets. | guess 
that wasn’t in their budget for the year. ‘Hey, let’s send one of our 
agents on a slow-ass road trip to the possibly dangerous anomaly!’ 
Pricks.