Or so says the Manual to Civilization Downfall, Chapter 4, Playing 
With Diseases. | wonder who writes that. Personally | prefer the 
Manual to a Better Foundation, which had a very neat suggestion. 


The idea was simple: a 2D agent animated with SCP-914 ina 
similar fashion to SCP-085, able to spy and wreak havoc in our rival 
organizations. Since SCP-085 assumed the name from the original 
drawing, it was speculated any description would become true for 
that character. 


Thus was born "Agent , the practically invisible human silhouette 
that is absolutely loyal to The Foundation". 


Initial tests were a spectacular success. As first assignment the 
agent was included in bait documents to be intercepted by The 
Chaos Insurgency. Agent managed to infiltrate the accounting 
department and within a year the organization was bankrupt. 


New agents were then created, infiltrating other groups and keeping 
an eye on governments around the world. Attacks against the 
Foundation stopped completely and mean-time-to-containment 
plummeted for both SCPs and information breaches. The new 
agents made the Foundation more efficient than ever. 


| guess it was inevitable that something would go wrong. 


To this day, we're still not sure what happened. Maybe something 
messed up Agent 's original programming, or maybe we were 
wrong with our hypothesis and he was only cooperating out of 
politeness. Either way, eventually Agent got fed up with us 
using him and the other 2D agents and rallied all the agents together 
against the Foundation. It was impossible to contain them; by the 


time we realized what had happened, they had already gathered 
enough information from the Foundation to bring us down entirely. 


And then they gave us an ultimatum: either we handed over control 
of the Foundation to them, or they'd spread our darkest secrets 
across the world, ensuring our destruction at the hands of angry 
mobs upset at our secrecy. According to him, we were bastardizing 
the intention of the Foundation, and that we ourselves weren't loyal 
to the organization we made. With no options left, the O5 council 
agreed to their demands. After all, if their goals were the same as 
ours, a change in leadership couldn't be hurt too much, right? 


Too bad the agents didn't trust us. They didn't see us as necessary 
staff so much as potential information breaches. Threatening to 
spread misinformation about us and our families to law enforcement 
officials, they cowed us into what amounted to slavery. Of course, in 
the beginning some people did try to leave, but last we heard they 
were arrested and sentenced to death for apparently murdering a 
group of well-respected politicians. 


So that's where we stand now: slaves to a bunch of doodles on 
paper. 


Man, whoever's coming up with these stories is such a downer. 


Remember SCP-248? Those weird stickers that made things work 
slightly better? Well, turns out the O5's figured it would be a good 
idea to devote half the Foundation's resources into figuring out how 
these things worked. Said we could "really make a difference" and 
that "it would help all of mankind". Wasn't aware the O5's had 
humanitarian interests in mind but whatever, what do | know? 


Anyway, the researchers spent weeks figuring out how the stickers 
worked. The O5's just kept funnelling money into their research, and 
they even made a specialized team of agents to track down and 
collect more of the things just so we could find out more about them. 
And to their credit, those researchers worked damn hard to make 
more of these things. 


Just when we were about to start openly questioning the O5s, a 


miracle happened! They figured out how to reproduce the stickers 
and, if that wasn't enough, counteract the degradation of stacking 
them on top of each other! The O5's gave the stickers to a bunch of 
major power plants, and wouldn't you know, the stickers gave them 
nearly unlimited energy for only a fraction of the fuel they were 
using. The human race was well on its way to creating a energy- 
efficient, clean utopia. 


The plant owners, though, quickly realized that the stickers could be 
used for things other than power generation. They began to 
experiment, just as the Foundation had. This was not necessarily a 
bad thing. A number of very useful applications were discovered this 
way. It was unfortunate that one of the owners was a roaring drunk. 
Firecrackers are usually fairly safe when used responsibly. Not so 
much when their efficiency is improved by orders of magnitude 
thanks to an inch-thick layer of SCP-248. 


Humanity persists, ironically spared from the cold produced by the 
atmospheric dust cloud by the heat still emanating from the crater 
that was once Eastern Europe. 


That was possibly the worst anti-drug PSA the Foundation has yet 
made for personnel. But it got its point across. After the television 
was wheeled from the lab and we dropped our secret stash of vodka 
down the drain, we got back to the work at hand. 


We had recently borrowed one of SCP-163's mystery computers to 
try to figure out what it was simulating. Gruber actually made a 
breakthrough and built an entire branch of mathematics around what 
he found. Other researchers looked at that branch of mathematics 
and divined a new field of physics from that. And then our engineers 
got their hands on the freshly minted physical laws and managed to 
replicate the technology that stored SCP-163 in the mountains for 
millions of years. 


The great thing about it was that everything that it was based off of 
was non-anomalous. The equations that it all came from were 
perfectly balanced and could be easily grasped by anyone with 
enough of a mathematical background. Because of that, the basics 
of the mathematics and physics could gradually be disseminated to 


the public without having people raise embarrassing questions. 


When the Foundation finally unveiled the final result of our research 
to the population at large, the world suddenly became a better place. 
Products with a limited life span, such as radioactive substances or 
perishable foods, could now be stored indefinitely inside little silver 
spheres. Precious mementos could be kept safe without degrading. 
The dream of cryogenics, to preserve the infirm until a cure for their 
condition could be developed, finally became a reality. A properly 
timed activation could even save people's lives from impending 
violent accidents. It was perfect for storing skips, especially 
dangerous ones. If an omnicidal indestructible lizard has no walls in 
its cage then it cant break them down, and if no time passed a self 
upgrading sentient CD couldn't increase its capacity. 


Things went well for what seemed like forever. It took us a while to 
realize our error. It turns out that the dangers of some of that 
technology were what got 163 exiled in the first place. The system 
was perfectly physically and mathematically sound, of course. That 
was part of the problem. As we continued making our lives better on 
our own little speck of dust, the grand equation that is the universe 
began balancing itself out elsewhere. By the time we realized what 
was happening, we had already begun the chain of cosmic events 
that would end and restart the universe, crunch-bang. We tried to fix 
it, but that just made things more convoluted. 


And so, here we sit, waiting for the big reset in a couple of hours. 
Most of us have just given up. Some are rioting. A few are still trying 
to fix it. As for me, | might as well finish these last few bottles. 


Man, Steve gets really weird when he's drunk. Guess that would 
have been an okay way to go, though. 


It took us a while to come up with, but the answer seemed obvious 
once we did. SCP-1915. What if we were to plug his signal into a 
Scranton RA as the baseline. We had to make some minor 
modifications to the template, of course; allow for minor alterations 
so as to allow for progress, make it take input from the whole of 
humanity, check and double check to make sure there were no 
anomalies, leave a few loyal personnel with their memories intact in 


order to to reverse the process if things went awry, and every other 
contingency we could think of. 


We flipped the switch, and sent out our new reality to the universe. 


In an instant, all of reality was determined by what humanity deemed 
"normal." Everyone went about their normal lives, then came home 
to their normal families. They lived in a normal, rational world where 
no one ever had to worry about space aliens or demons or 
monsters. A normal world without need of the Foundation, GOC, or 
clockwork deity. All was normal. 


As it turns out, normal did not mean peace. For instance, it is normal 
for wars to occur. They are normal occurrences in humanity's way of 
life. It was normal for governments to argue over overlapping 
territorial claims. It was normal for governments to oppress their 
minorities. It was normal to invade a country that threats one's 
national interest. It was also normal to respond in kind when your 
country's nuclear defence system "detected" enemy missiles, 
whether it's real or not. 


And where was the Foundation in all this? Most of its employees 
have moved on, since there was no reason for the Foundation to 
exist in a normal world. There were still a few personnel who 
remembered that anomalous world of the past, but they saw their 
friends and colleagues embracing the light of the normal world. It 
was perfectly normal of those few to envy the many who could enjoy 
normal lives, more so when these loyal men and women left their 
posts to join their comrades in this normal world. 


Coincidentally, wnen mushroom clouds filled the entire Northern 
Hemisphere, there was no one to reverse anything. All was normal 
indeed, for a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. 


And Jr. Researcher Hu Zhi completed the last item for his latest 
column: 20 Ways to End the World without Application of 
Anomalous Objects. That was a depressing piece of fiction, but he 
needed to get back to that research proposal about SCP-2076. 


If it can make people think that shooting themselves will heighten 


bullet resistance, surely it has infinite applications like: 


Do you know? Using Wondertainment products will halve 
one's lifespan! 


Live and forget. There was no Zeppelin flying about. 


It'll work out; society's so driven by media that hardly any human 
lived their lives without browsing some manner of media. If we work 
this out, containment and amnestics will be easier than ever before. 


All | need is a memetist to dig out the mechanics of SCP-2076... 
Hey, Sanders could help me. 


After the Foundation's stealthy takeover of media outlets across the 
globe, Hu and Sander's joint proposal was a reality. Hidden in 
posters, billboards, transmission signals and the like, everyone 
played a role in containing anomalies. The people of the world were 
our eyes and ears; they reported any anomalies sighted and the 
Foundation bagged them. There were no more uncooperative D- 
class; they were only too happy to serve their species as test 
subjects. 


Heck, even Gols have submitted to the Foundation. The Chaos 
Insurgency and ORIA have merged with the Foundation. The 
Church of the Broken God had turned in its "relics". The Wanderer's 
Library was opened up by now-remorseful Serpent's Hand 
members. Even GOC had folded and become our cannon fodder for 
things like 682 and 076-2. 


Peace reigns on Earth and over humanity, unified around its 
Foundation. 


For a while. 


What we forgot is that Memes are infections ideas. Just like 
biological viruses, they mutate in the wild and can appear out of 
nowhere. And our little brainwashing project was one giant infection 
vector. After that, there weren't enough sane people left to matter. 


Dr Vauge closed SCP-152 gently. All the more reason to be extra 


careful about his project. 


See, the olympia-project might have been shut down, but all the 
R&D had already been done. The Professor had made a human 
(arguably) that could survive a world filled with anomalies not by 
locking them up, but by meeting them head on and powering 
through. 


If you took the template of such a human, mixed it with SCP-742, 
SCP-217 and a few other virus-type SCPs, you could manufacture 
an illness that would give all the infected the strength of Olympus. 


Why worry about war when everyone was bulletproof? 
Why worry about food when sunlight was all anyone needed? 


Why worry about infections when infections both biological and 
memetic were a non-issue? 


Why worry about educational disadvantages when everyone had 
supercomputers for brains? 


It was a great "Screw-you" to the anomalous - a fantastic cry of "We 
can take you!" 


However, we were the ones who were really screwed. You see, 
viruses change. Over time, strains of it emerged that drove the 
infected insane, but continued to grant them superhuman strength, 
speed, agility, toughness, and intelligence. Ultimately, this was 
subdued by the Foundation, with the help of the "good" infected. 
These became heroes, the best scientists, doctors, and agents the 
Foundation could find. It seemed that while the imagined utopia had 
not been achieved, the world was still a better place because of it. 


But even as the world recovered, its wounds festered. 


The ones we trusted were no better than the monsters they fought. 
As their influence grew, their numbers increased. Even though the 
O5s had refused (and for good reason), even they were eventually 
replaced by Homo Superior. Once this was achieved, their true 
colors were revealed. We were annihilated, and the remainder of us 
reduced to slaves, lobotomized to remove our disobedient natures. 


This island where you grew up is the last stronghold of our kind ina 
now hostile world. But now the walls are coming down. 


If there is a God in Heaven, let him have mercy. Not on us, we have 
well-earned the fate that awaits us. Have mercy on these children, 
who will never know the taste of unfiltered air or the feel of the 
sunlight on their skin. Don't let their blood mar these sands. 


"As if that shit could ever happen." | tossed the book back on the 
table. "The Olympia Project was shut down a long time ago," | said 
to no one in particular. Then | heard the alarm. 


What do you mean you don't need details? That's exactly what | was 
told to give you when | walked in. Anyway, that's when SCP-682 
burst into my office, before being destroyed by an MTF rocket 
launcher. It took a moment for my brain to register that the Dragon 
was really dead. 682, the unkillable, was dead! However, I'd been 
splattered with the stuff. They tossed me in quarantine. When they 
conducted their tests, they discovered | had acquired the 
shapeshifting powers by absorbing some of its tissue, and | was 
secreting the fluid myself! 


They found that by essentially farming people, they could give the 
adaptive ability of 682 to humans. They slowly inoculated rats in the 
sewer system, filling the world's water supplies with the stuff. Now 
humans were immortal. Hadn't we always been the adaptive race? 
Now our apotheosis was complete.