The walls came to a sudden stop. The lines kept moving on each of 
the now separately viewable canvasses. Every little mark, every 
slash of what had formerly been Cassy, flowed like blood to the 
center of each canvas, coalescing into a single point. Each point 
pulled into itself, smaller and smaller, until each became 
imperceptibly tiny to his eyes. With that, Cassy was gone. 


John collapsed, tears streaming from his eyes, his mouth agape, 
clutching his arms around himself. The full magnitude of what he 
had just witnessed was still washing over him. The black figure 
appeared above him, floating, seemingly looking down at him. His 
muscles refused to respond as he continued to lay on his back, 
staring up at the decrepit wooden ceiling. 


"Please don't kill me," John managed weakly, somewhere between 
a whisper and squeak. 


The black figure began to fade out of sight. 
"It will not be me who kills you. It will not be anything that kills you." 


The figure faded out of his view. Each light bulb went out in 
succession, the room darkening as the dousing traveled around the 
walls, in the opposite direction of their initial lighting. John was left 
lying on the floor, in darkness. 


He heard a voice directly next to his left ear. 


"Back so soon?" 


This Is A Direct Appeal 


This is an unofficial sequel to Metafiction, written by a 
different author. 


It's almost seven PM, the designated starting time for the meeting. 
One final participant makes her way there, high-heeled white suede 
shoes clicking on the linoleum. In one flawlessly silver-manicured 
hand, she holds a latte; in the other, a nondescript green folder. 
Everyone in the room has an identical folder in front of them. 


"Hello, Hotaru. | suppose I'm late," she says to the host of the 
meeting, a preoccupied woman wearing agent grays waiting outside 
the door. 


Hotaru Morisato checks her phone. "Er, you're about ninety seconds 
early." 


The newcomer sweeps in without pause or response. 


Morisato does a quick sweep of the hallway, then steps inside and 
closes the door behind her. “Hello, everybody, welcome. | really 
hope you all did the background reading.” 


Then she takes a seat. “I guess we'll start. I'm Agent Hotaru 
Morisato. Welcome to Site Eleven. You've all been working together 
for the last eight years, though most of you haven't met." 


None of the five people are terribly surprised. It comes with the 
territory. The attendees are all from separate sites, scattered across 
the globe. They have vague-sounding titles, their own offices in their 
home sites, and unremarkable clearance levels - until they need to 
know something especially classified, when it suddenly rockets to 
the appropriate level for any piece of information, and the internal 
database's security measures part like a veil. Their colleagues know 
they work remotely for an inter-site research agenda, though if you 
were to ask any of those colleagues, they'd probably all tell you 


different ones. The group's personnel files are no help. Three of 
them, despite wildly different accents and ethnicities, have their their 
dates and places of birth listed as "January 1st in Afghanistan, 
Badakshan Province" - the first one in each drop-down menu. 


They're used to working under secrecy - under encryption, 
sometimes trading delicate conclusions with co-conspirators who 
use changing strings of numbers instead of names. If is a surprise, 
it's that their were only five of them after all. Morisato knew this from 
the beginning; as far as the others had known, they could have been 
collaborating with one other person or with thousands. But five there 
are. 


Morisato gestures first to the meeting's latest arrival. “This is Dr. 
Katy Knight, Area One Seven Nine. She's been at Eleven for the last 
two months confirming data. Before that, she and | were reviewing 
Foundation internal practices." 


"Good to meet you all," says Katy. Her immaculately-lined eyes 
survey the room over the top of her latte. 


“This is Dr. Yasmeen Sethwi, who's really running the show here, 
and asked me to host this. Just from this, I'm guessing she knows 
something the rest of us don't - but who here doesn't?” Morisato 
laughs a little nervously. “Sorry - anyway, she has degrees in 
literature and philosophy - and she's the closest thing we have to an 
expert on ‘narrative logic’. No offense, Doctor.” 


“None taken,” said Dr. Sethwi. She pushes her notes together and 
sweeps a loose flap of her head scarf into place, in the same 
motion. One gets the sense that Sethwi does little that is not 
intentional. 


“This is Hans Brannovich, head archivist for the Committee on 
Existential Threats, and the one who recommended further research 
into our side of Turtledove. Depending on the outcome of the 
meeting, we'll be sending a sealed copy notes there, and to High 
Command, once we're done." 


"Or we might just burn them,” Brannovich adds with a deep chuckle. 
He's typing on his laptop. 


“And here's Dr. Raymond Northrop, of course. One of the Turtledove 
pioneers, and our sacrificial goat for the O5 council.” 


There is a very small amount of stilted laughter at this. Northrop 
smiles wryly and opens his mouth to say something biting, then 
thinks better of it. 


“Now,” says Morisato. “Let's go straight to the point. Eight years ago, 
the results from Project Turtledove were revealed in a highly 
classified meeting. Seven years ago, Drs. Knight and Sethwi and | 
started brainstorming. We began an ambitious project to search the 
entirety of the Foundation's database and archives. Katy, maybe 
you could explain-” 


“Essentially,” says Knight, “There are many reasons for which an 
entity, or a group of entities, would be compelled to ‘generate’ a 
world such as ours. As you all know, the research from Turtledove 
and its clade of projects would suggest that we're not merely a high- 
order simulation - unless our entire dataset, including the 
connections established through the Turtledove project, has been 
faked up." 


"To clarify, there's a lot of expert curiosity that our reality is part of a 
computer simulation. This might even explain all of the anomalies 
themselves. Turtledove seemed to provide contradictory evidence 
on this front. Our current hypothesis would not require this." 


“Our first priority,” says Sethwi, “was establishing this motive for 
generating our world, our existence. Knowing this would allow us to 
understand both our own predicament, and ways of improving our 
overall outcome. It's possible that even if we are in an intentionally 
manufactured universe, we aren't at the /ocus of it, and that the 
information gained through Turtledove was accidental. The locus of 
interest could be a different planet altogether. 


"On the other hand, as far as unusual universal occurrences go, we 
must admit that the Foundation's collection seems especially 
interesting. While there are a few object listings for which the 
anomalous nature has been explained scientifically, even the 
Foundation has never been so bold as to issue the opinion that al/ 
objects will eventually explained.” 


“I'm not discounting that idea,” says Brannovich, leaning over his 
tablet computer, “But our anomalies aren't the only unsolved 
problems in the universe. Dark matter, for one. Pea equals enn pea. 
Why 'circus peanuts’ are still commercially viable.” 


Sethwi frowns. 


"Right," says Knight. She waves a manicured hand. “Still we think 
the Foundation is likely for several reasons. We began searching the 
archives because of, well, the drunkard looking under the street 
lamp - we have access to complete documentation on our set of 
anomalies, and not on anything else. We immediately realized that 
our our little database has been the 'focus' for this world's creation.” 


“To clarify,” says Sethwi, “the scans of Zayin-H-716's internet are 
almost entirely identical to ours - circus peanuts and all - with the 
exception of our uncensored database, and references thereto. Our 
final report from 2011 concluded that they didn't have an equivalent 
of our Foundation, and given this, we wanted to explain their version 
of the internet and the presence of the ‘false’ database.” 


“This is where Dr. Sethwi's area of expertise comes in,” says Knight. 


“We started," says Sethwi, "With the hypothesis that if the 
Foundation, and only the Foundation, is unique to this world - not 
our database, since the database is clearly the same in both - then 
we would expect to see a certain tone, or feeling of events, and 
described properties, not ordinarily found in day to day life. We 
tested a few hypotheses. The first was strategic planning. This lead 
nowhere. The second was entertainment. If the Foundation has 
been... well, I'll keep using the word ‘generated’, by sentient minds 
much like our own, we would expect to see certain tropes, a theme, 
repeated.” 


“And what did you find?” asks Brannovich. 


“That what | said is true.” Sethwi pauses. “We, um, adapted a 
commercial search engine algorithm. We used it to search our 
archives for intent. We narrowed the input to top-level material - 
polished documentation, official records, and explanatory materials, 
not lunch menus and spreadsheets. | won't get into the specifics 


now. What we found is what we might expect if..." 


Here Sethwi falters. Not falters - reconsiders. She strings her next 
words together carefully. "If the majority of the objects were 
designed to provoke the intent of fear. Provoking fear in a 
sympathetic agent." 


"| Know that each one of us - working here - have mused one time or 
another that the objects we work with, the burdens we bear, seem 
unfair. Seemed rigged against us. Then, we took hold of ourselves, 
accepted that this is the way the world just works. That the weight of 
our uncertainty happens to be evil. Until now, | don't think anyone 
has actually had evidence that the alternative is true.” 


“Let me see if I've got this right,” says Brannovich. “We have 
evidence, real evidence, that we and the Foundation are the fictions 
of humans in an alternate reality, which somewhat but not entirely 
like ours. Flesh and blood, born-of-woman human storytellers. And 
our genre is horror.” 


Sethwi hums and nods. "Many entries and documentation returned 
trends in other genres. Some returned no strong trends at all. But 
the program is still in its early stages. Overwhelmingly, yes." 


Northrop fiddles with his empty water glass, turning it around and 
around. He sets it down. His frown has tightened into a blank 
tension. “In my original report, | came to the conclusion that the 
alternate database's top-level archives are incomplete, but that | 
expected them to correspond with ours. Did your test-” 


“We did test the rest of our archives,” says Knight. “Most of what 
occurs in both databases returned positive. Around 50% of the 
Series documentation present in our database but nof the alternate 
one, returned positive. We're not sure what the implications of that 
are.” 


Norton laughs, entirely humorlessly. "| imagine they're filling the 
series documentation in order. They're not done yet." 


For a while, nobody has anything to say to that. 


“How much of an existential risk are we looking at?” Brannovich 
breaks in. He's pale, and his voice has shifted half an octave up. 


Knight and Morisato exchange looks. “Actually,” says Morisato, 
“Since we're not dead already...” 


“...We're probably fine,” says Knight. 


“What?” Brannovich looks between them. “The creators - the ones in 
the 'above-verse' aren't like humans to our ants, we're like 
Minesweepers or Clippys to... to their genius programmers. They 
can delete us with no repercussions, at any time-” 


“Hans, take a breath,” says Knight. “You're right. They could. But 
they haven't. What does that say?” 


Everyone thinks. 


“That we, or our existence, is serving a crucial function in their 
narrative framework, and killing us all would undermine that,” says 
Northrop. He's gone back to fidgeting, this time with a coffee stirrer. 
“So they're probably not going to.” 


“Or,” says Sethwi, "That they're writing their stories concurrent to our 
timeline and going to set them off later. Cheer up. | think the second 
stage of my theory may provide some resolution.” 


“How?” Brannovich runs an unsteady hand through his hair. 


“Well," Sethwi says, "We only have partial access to their archives. 
There's reason to suspect that the database isn't the only piece of 
media on the wikifarm. What the rest would be, we can't fathom. 
Stories, perhaps. 


"Even so, we've found contradictions that don't occur in our own 
archives. Ones that are impossible, but not inconceivable in a sense 
- that is, from an outside view, the Foundation could still function if 
they were true. There are some top-secret files that don't exist in our 
version of the Foundation, but the surface appearance to an outside 
observer would be the same. 


“An outside observer, like a civilian author," says Morisato. 


“Exactly." Sethwi nods. "Again - what does this imply?” 


“That the database contains both fiction and nonfiction,” guesses 
Northrop. “Or... perhaps that it's a compilation of information from 
alternate realities, created realities.” 


“Unfortunately,” says Sethwi, “We suspect it's the latter. Is everyone 
following? Alright. 


"Obviously, this complicates our actions. Fortunately, we have some 
architecture in which to frame this: the standard Foundation 
precedent for Multiple-Universe scenarios.” 


She knows the precedent, of course; Morisato and Knight know, 
Northrop all but wrote the precedent, but only Brannovich - ironically 
for his role, the only one obviously having a crisis - says it out loud. 
“Every man for himself." 


Then he sits up, eyes brightening. "So we coordinate. The Prisoner's 
Dilemma -” 


“We can't interact with the other worlds, so, no, unless I'm missing 
something. If we're lucky, we might be able to cooperate.” 


He sighs. "Survival comes first. There's still the possibility of being 
able to coordinate with other versions of ourselves - if other 
Foundations can be trusted to react in a certain way, we might be 
able to force a specific outcome." 


“Maybe,” Sethwi says, hesitantly. “But... Recall that we're not free 
actors here. It's possible that we'll find ourselves unable to come to 
any conclusions here with significant impact on our world, or its 
structure. True change might not be possible. It might not be 
allowed. If it is, the most | imagine we could impact is any 
immediately similar branches. The number of deviations is... It's 
established. | can work on a long-term plan, but...” 


“But the standard precedent hasn't failed us so far,” Brannovich 
says. 


Knight snorts and mutters something under her breath that sounds 
like "anthropic bias". 


Foreword: The following interview took place after 
several weeks of processing. SCP-828 had displayed 
signs of agitation, and an intervention was undertaken at 
the request of LeChatlier. 


+ show block 
<Begin Log> 


[Fullbrush and LeChatlier enter the interview 
booth. SCP-828 is restrained to a chair on the 
other side] 


Fullbrush: Good afternoon, SCP-828. We 
understand that you've been having trouble. 


SCP-828: What is "SCP-828"? 


Fullbrush: That is the designation we've 
assigned you. 


SCP-828: A name? 
Fullbrush: A designation. 


LeChatlier: You can think of it as a name if it's 
easier for you. 


SCP-828: | see. 


Fullbrush: Regardless. The maintenance and 
research staff have reported that you have 
been increasingly agitated and resistant. We 
are here to find out why. 


SCP-828: [indicates Fullbrush] Is that your 
master, Angakkuq? Does this ga/lunaat hold 
your leash? 


Fullbrush: Excuse me? 


LeChatlier: The only leash Fullbrush here