The call came around four in the morning. It was Jo from 
the lab. She said they'd found Rao unconscious in the 
basement. At first | was confused. We didn't have any 
tests scheduled - it had only been less than forty-eight 
hours after the AWACS sim op. Then it hit me. | pulled 
on a shirt and hurried down to the lab as soon as | could. 


He had been strapped onto a cot when | arrived. From 
the adjacent room, | could see that he was wearing a 
hospital gown; Jo told me they'd found him naked. His 
skin, the gowns, and the sheets were drenched in sweat. 
His mouth opened and closed like that of a dead fish. 
Though his body was still, | could see a slight, constant 
tremor that shook through his meagre frame. The worst 
of it were his eyes. They were wide open, and swiveled 
wildly in his sockets. Jo assured me he was 
unconscious, but | saw nothing but the waking, shivering 
husk of a man with a mad prayer on his lips. If he was 
under, as Jo claimed to be, he would have to be more 
than awake - the sensation of raw, utter awareness that 
so gripped the subjects under the regimen is not 
something the official documentation mentions at any 
length. 


| asked Jo how he was able to administer the procedure 
without any help. "He didn't," she said. Her voice was low 
and grave. "Divya and the night shift found him next to 
the machines, trembling like this. We think he's under, 
but we don't know how." 


"Impossible. It's got to be something else. Catalepsy, 
seizure, something in the last dose we overlooked?" | 


scrambled for ideas, anything, a cause. "Subject 421. 
The one from the classified intake. She exhibited similar 
symptoms after her second run." 


"It's not - EEG shows otherwise. Theta waves all the way 
through. He's gone under - further than the rest before." 
As she spoke, a sudden convulsion gripped Rao's body, 
and a sound escaped from his lips, a long, low moan like 
a cow's. 


"We can still ease him out of it. Shock ejection, BZDs, 
LSPs, the works?" | asked, running down the list of 
contingencies in my mind. She shook her head. "No-go," 
she said. "His body's rejecting everything we're giving 
him. What goes in just comes out - there's nothing left in 
there to process it." 


We snaked drips in and out of him, pumped him full of 
regulators and inhibitors, watched the drugs we gave him 
flow in and out of the tubes and his body shook and 
shook the whole time, while his mouth mumbled animal 
phrases. We cycled all his blood out at one point, or 
several. | tried to make some calls, to see if we could 
involve other - other items, anything to save him, but the 
lines were silent. At one point | could have sworn he 
smiled. And his eyes, the whole goddamned time, his 
eyes - 


His body was going haywire, poisoning itself with its own 
chemicals. There was nothing we could do. Eventually, 
he stopped convulsing. His heart failed, then the EEG 
went silent. Inexplicably, his lungs continued to breathe 
for about five minutes after that - | remember his lifeless 
chest heaving dumbly under his shift, swelling and 
pulsing, sickeningly pulsing, continuing to pulse, imbibing 
and expelling dead air past his numbed lips against all 
reason. He was pronounced dead by nine. 


By ten we were getting calls from above. Regional 
Directors, Ethics Comm, you name it. Playing with 
anomalous phenomena, we knew we'd be running the 


risk that the whole thing would come crashing about our 
heads. I'm surprised they let us keep going on for that 
long. But Rao had quite the reputation outside our 
circles, and after all we did - after all the risks we took - it 
only took his death for the hammer to come down on us. 


There was one other call - from the Archival Department. 
For some reason, they seemed genuinely concerned 
about the future of our research. We briefed them over 
the phone, and they offered to schedule an appointment 
to take the project off our hands. With the amount of hot 
water we were in, we were more than eager to 
cooperate. Now, we didn't think much of it at the time, 
but we only found out much later that this missive had 
been relayed from a member of the Overseer Council 
himself. And once we had found that out, it had been too 
late for us. 


Of course, all that only happened after Rao's corpse 
began to speak. 


Archived Testimony from Jocasta Simos, Esoteric Containment 


Specialist, dated 1989/02/02: 


Franz wasn't close to Rao - don't get me wrong, he 
wasn't like Dr. Rajaputram in the slightest - but | was a 
different story. | was stationed with him back in England, 
when the powers that be decided to leave the Brits to 
fend against Dark Peak and send us halfway around the 
world to the colonies. Rao wasn't opposed to the move - 
he was born near here, actually, not too far from our 
provisional research site at the University. He talked 
about it once or twice back then, in the lulls between the 
breaches. We were close back then, I'd like to think - or 
as close as anyone could ever be to Rao, really. | knew 
him, and he knew me. And back in England, | was the 
most senior of the crew. So when it came to sending 
someone to talk to his corpse, it stood to reason that | 
was the first - and most natural - choice. 


We took all precautions with Rao. Standard first- 
responder protocol, you know the drill as well as | do - 
the basement had been sealed off with plastic sheeting, 
and the ventilation recirculated with makeshift tubing. 
Pressing against my left thigh was an amnestic 
autoinjector, set to a remote trigger. Given our work - 
mine and Rao's, and a couple of others on the team - we 
had a few other goodies, too: | spotted control sigils 
around the door frames, pocket autocasters set to purge, 
duct-taped to the corners of the room - the back-room 
stuff, you understand. And just for good measure, our 
mutual friend Divya had slipped a Class-3 ward into my 
suit - don't run all these by Ziegler and the rest, by the 
way, they haven't been cleared for those. Anyway, they 
took all precautions, is what I'm saying. 


He was on the cot with the equipment as we'd left it. The 
tech boys had reassembled the dissociater rig piece by 
piece in the hopes of performing some arcane reverse- 
engineering miracle, and all the medical gear that went 
with it had been brought in as well, along with a slew of 
other unfamiliarities. When | entered, | had to loosen my 
collar, as the sheer amount of equipment they'd dragged 
inside the room had turned it into a small furnace. Rao 
himself appeared unaffected by all this, lying face up on 
that cot... his body did not sweat or move, though | could 
have sworn | saw his eyes track my every move as | 
entered the room. 


To hear a corpse speak is a disconcerting experience. 
His words were... recirculated air. Before each sentence 
that he spoke, he would draw in a breath, swelling his 
chest like one of those hand-powered accordion bellows, 
and his words would escape his lips in a single, slow, 
breath. His entire being was like this - a single 
deliberation, a singular conscious effort on his part to 
even exist, much less speak to anyone at all. Singular - | 
think that's the right word, yes - it was that sheer 
singularity about him that made my every muscle tense 
in his presence. Never mind that | was his friend. In there 


he was singular, a singularity. 


So Rao turned his head in my direction as | walked in 
and drew in a breath. "I did wrong," he wheezed. Then 
he took in another breath and said my name. 


| asked him if he could hear me, or see me. 


Another breath, rattling from his throat. He said that he 
could, but his sight was fading fast. 


| asked him why. 

He said that he moved upwards. Against instructions. 

| asked him why he did that. 

He said that he wanted to see. 

See what? | asked. 

"The sky," he said. "The shell of the world." 

That was when you woke? You were unable to proceed? 
"No." 

Then what happened? 


"| passed through. | thought | had woken up, but | was 
still inside. Don't you see? | kept on going up. And it was 
the same. Sky after sky. Shells and shells. Our world is 
wrong. We were wrong. There is no revelation, only 
introspection." 


| asked him what the difference between the two was. 
There was a hacking, almost mechanical, cough. | think 
he was trying to laugh when | saw the muscles around 
his eyes twitch. He said: "You know, far as I've gone, | 
don't think there is any. Not in this life." 


| asked him if he thought he was going to die. 


"Certainly," he said, "but cogito ergo sum." 
The timer on my wrist sounded. | turned to leave. 
"Another thing,” he said, as | reached for the door. 


Rao turned his head towards the ceiling. We hadn't 
thought him capable of other movement save for speech, 
so his arms had not been secured; slowly, the left arm 
raised, until it pointed vertically upwards towards an 
unseen point above his head. And then he said eight 
words, the words you found plastered over Kurnool the 
day after, posted on every sign and every door. | 
remember them now, echoing in that empty voice of his 
behind my ears, exactly as | heard them that day: 


"The skies are cold. | am not alone." 


Back there, | didn't quite know what he had meant, but 
today, after what I've seen, they fill me with a certain kind 
of dread. 


Incident Report 2498/19880212: 


On February 12th, shortly following the cessation of Arjun 
Ramakrishna Rao's biological functions, strange lights were sighted 
in 15 towns and cities in Andhra Pradesh and neighbouring 
Karnataka state. Witnesses saw a chain of discs of white light 
descend from the sky and hover just below cloud level, "unfolding" 
itself from the inside-out in a counterclockwise direction. It is 
unknown if reports of nausea due to viewing the lights are a result of 
latent cognitohazardous effects or a natural consequence of 
perceiving three-dimensional projections of higher-dimensional 
phenomena. 


"At first | saw the sun start to spin. It was pale, and did 
not hurt my eyes when | looked at it, though | felt my 
head spin as if it was part of the sun itself. Then it - the 
disc of the sun - itself it descended, from above the 


clouds, and it shimmered into thirteen pieces, still dull 
like the colour of the moon. Before our eyes, they 
spiralled down like a spear, twisting and turning, pushing 
the clouds aside in their wake, and | turned to my 
husband and whispered, 'My god, the sky is broken. 
Witness statement reported in The New Bombay Times, 
dated February 13th, 1988. 


At approximately 2300 hours, the last of the lights appeared above 
Hyderabad and struck the rooftop of the city hall, setting it ablaze. 
Despite Foundation information concealment efforts, the spreading 
of rumours of holy sightings drew an estimated 60,000 pilgrims from 
neighbouring states into Hyderabad over the following two weeks. 
News of the event soon spread overseas and was reported in 
several Western tabloids. 


In the Adayah footage, one can clearly see three crowns, 
signifying the three magi before Jesus. The 
correspondent from which the photograph was sourced 
instead professes that the lights are in the shape of the 
seated Buddha. However, most of the witnesses, as our 
newspaper understands, saw in the lights the threefold 
faces of the Trimurti beset into visible form. Another 
interesting theory originates from one Catherine R. 
Ganzfeld, writing for the Californian Journal of Gnostic 
Truth: in her article, she put forth that the three lights in 
the Adayah footage resembled not divinity, but a wheel, 
and that the pattern between them formed the spokes of 
the world... - Excerpt from Californian esoteric 
publication A Discordian Directory, dated April 1St, 1988. 


On the same day in Kurnool, raised letters were found appearing on 
92 wall and door surfaces throughout the old city center. Text 
appeared as fragments in English of the phrases "The sky is cold" 
and "I am not alone", and is quickly concealed or removed by 
embedded Foundation cover-up crews. Rumours of the 
phenomenon nevertheless spread, and drew some amount of 
attention in connection with the holy sightings before being 
denounced by local authorities as simple acts of vandalism. 


Seven hours following the events of February 12, the body of Rao 


began to emit hazardous levels of radiation at up to 120 mSv/h, 
more than 80,000 times the recommended safe level. Personnel 
were hastily evacuated from the premises and lead shielding was 
installed around the experimentation room. Inexplicably, all 
equipment inside the room remained operational throughout, 
showing no signs of being affected by the radiation. On February 
14th, the decision was officially made by Dr. Rajaputram to seal off 
the remains of Rao inside experimentation room #B2-04b. 


Shortly after the room was sealed, Rao's voice began to play on the 
speakers of the monitoring equipment in neighbouring observation 
room #B2-04a. It was quickly established that Rao was able to 
communicate with personnel through the equipment, and that he still 
maintained a degree of sentience. The decision was made shortly 
afterwards to classify Rao as SCP-2498. 


> VIEW ATTACHMENT: INCIDENT 2498/19880817 


Transcript of SCP-2498 Communication Log, dated 1988/02/14: 


#: 2498/101/19870214/0901 
LENGTH: 2 minutes, 5 seconds 


<START OF TRANSCRIPT> 

Simos: Arjun, you still there? It's me. It's Jo Simos. 
There is the sound of static. 

SCP-2498: | know. 

Simos: You said that you weren't alone. 

SCP-2498: Stars. Mountains. Things move in the deep. 


Simos: Are they the reason for the anomalous 
phenomena? 


SCP-2498: As an anchor stirs the seafloor sands. 
Simos: And you are the anchor? 


SCP-2498: | think | am the ship in the storm. There are 
other ships here. They feel my breath upon the waters, 
and they wake. They are curious. 


Simos: So will you - are these entities a threat to 
humanity or consensus normalcy? 


SCP-2498: | cannot tell. They have always been here. 
Simos: If they are a threat, will you help us? 
SCP-2498: Your question hides another. 


Simos: The Foundation strongly believes you to be 
capable of large-scale changes in the physical world, 
and our specialists - our colleagues - are inclined to 
believe that you've somehow achieved a certain - 
esoteric significance. 


SCP-2498: Jo, you are reticent. Speak plainly, | can see. 


Simos: Arjun. You know as well as | do. Many of us here 
don't feel - well, | don't feel - that you are yourself 
anymore. 


SCP-2498: | know. | understand. | am sorry, but there is 
just too much here to take in. One cannot do but change. 


Simos: Well, you must know exactly what | think of you. 
SCP-2498: You do not need to apologise for it. 
Simos: | hope not. 


SCP-2498: In any case, you have my word that | am not 
a threat. | answer to the sky and the wheel. And, as the 
wheel spins, | answer to the Foundation still. But it will 
not be for long. 


Simos: What proof do you have of this continued 
allegiance? 


SCP-2498: Again, you speak from the script. | have only 
my word to give. Our Foundation will just have to believe. 
Just as it believes that the words of a friend can sway the 
mind of a god. Just as you believe that the world can 
keep on spinning even as we've seen reality bend ten 
hundred different ways in front of our eyes. 


Simos: | know you believe it, too, and | wish you well. 


SCP-2498: You would do best continuing to wish that. A 
bigger storm approaches. 


Simos: When? How? 


SCP-2498: | will need you to do me a favour, Jocasta 
Simos. 


Simos: What kind of favour do | owe a god? 
SCP-2498 laughs. 


SCP-2498: Jocasta, my friend, | will need you to be 
strong. 


<END OF TRANSCRIPT> 


Testimony from [REDACTED], Archival Department Manager, 
Liaison to the Office of 05-5, dated 1991/02/15: