One of the men took a knife and cut Bright's ear off. He gritted his 
teeth. 


"Was it a Muslim whose body you wear, kafir? Whose life did you 
steal? You are a ghoul!" the man with the scarf shouted. 


"Do your worst," he said, and immediately regretted it. This wasn't 
an action movie. 


The knife came down into his eye, and he saw no more. 


He woke up sometime later, disoriented. He could tell he was in 
another body. Had he been rescued? No, his hands were still cuffed 
behind his back. His knee had a sharp, hot ache. 


He shifted to a semi-sitting position. He was in a large body, he 
could tell that much. Strong. He looked around, and saw Jacobs, 
Sandler, Advani and Lopez. Realization hit. He looked down to see 
Brunwick's large frame. Those sons of bitches. 


"Brunwick?" Sandler whispered. 
Bright shook his head. Brunwick's head. 


Sandler started crying. Bright hadn't realized they were that close. A 
cynical part of his mind wondered if the man was just frightened that 
the same would happen to him. 


He looked over to where he'd been executed. The body was already 
gone, but the blood was still pooled on the dirt floor. They appeared 
to be alone. 


"How are we going to get out of this?" asked Lopez. 
"| don't know,” Bright said. "Let me think." 


The beacon was gone. The terrorists knew who he was, knew what 
the amulet did. There was no telling when the Foundation would be 
back. 


He wasn't afraid of dying. Even if they tried destroying the amulet, it 
was unlikely they'd manage here a task he hadn't managed with the 
best equipment. 


However, he didn't want to see any more of his team die. He needed 
to figure out a way to get out of this. Somehow. 


He didn't sleep the entire night. He kept trying to come up witha 
plan. If only the Foundation would hurry up and rescue them. 


In the morning, they came for him again. Again, the man with the 
scarf came in, and again the camera was set up. He was pulled to 
his feet, his knee nearly buckling under him, before they wrestled 
him into position. 


"Again, we have the kafir Doctor Bright. He lives because that 
amulet steals the life of others, puts him into their body. We have let 
him steal the life of his friend. His own friend, he steals the life from! 
Now he must die again." 


The knife came down, this time for his throat, but he was ready. 
Brunwick was nothing if not strong. He lunged with his good knee, 


this point, the human, presumably dead, was removed from the 
object, dismembered, and sorted into piles of organs. At this point, 
the barrier demanifested and SCP-957, along with the human 
remains, reappeared within the house. 


Addendum-957-Lambda: As of 13/03/2007, Foundation linguists 
have managed to translate enough of SCP-957's language to 
decipher basic sentences and phrases spoken by the entity. This 
information is not to be made known to SCP-957 and personnel are 
to continue to communicate with it solely in English. 


Addendum-957-Omega: On 06/06/2008, SCP-957 was noted to 
engage in an extended conversation in its native language with an 
unseen individual. The audio from this exchange was recorded by 
hidden audio and video recording devices within the house, 
translated by Foundation linguists, and transcribed below. 


<Begin Log> 
SCP-957: How much longer do | have to stay here? 


22: It will be a while, <friend/brother>. Your disguise is 
working wonderfully and your < UNKNOWN: "WOFRET"> 
is extremely convincing. Much better than that 
[REDACTED]. And you still get to talk in our language 
freely, right? 


SCP-957: True, true. It is just boring and tiresome down 
here. No wonder <UNKNOWN: "PLECEVIP"> destroyed 
his <UNKNOWN: "WOFRET">. These <physical/real/ 
unclean> <forms/bodies> are so <restraining/painful>. 
[SCP-957 stretches.] 


222: Patience, patience. We have to let them watch the 

few so that the <many/family/group> can work freely. We 
will be done with our <research/watching> soon enough, 
do not worry. 


SCP-957: Understood. 


222: Excellent. | will soeak to you at the next 


trying to touch the guard with his necklace. 


He had just a moment's confused vision from the man before the 
shots rang out, and he died again, twice. 


He woke up, and this time saw Advani, Sandler, and Lopez. Jacobs, 
then. Ten little indians, he thought. 


He was tied up more securely, already in the position where he'd 
been executed twice before. Gagged, too. He could feel the sticky 
blood on his pantlegs, smell the older blood starting to stink. They 
weren't taking any chances this time. 


The others were looking at him in pity, revulsion, and fear. They 
must have seen Jacobs's face suddenly go blank, and then light up 
with a foreign intelligence. Must have seen it happen to Brunwick, 
for that matter. They'd seen their own futures. Must be one thing to 
know it happened to anonymous D-Class personnel, another to see 
it happen to someone you knew. 


"Don't worry," Advani said to the others. "We'll get out of this 
somehow." They all knew he was lying, though. 


He tried to go to sleep, but Jacobs's body was still wired with 
adrenaline. He stared at the walls, at the dirt floor, anything to avoid 
looking at his team. 


He was almost eager when the man in the scarf opened the door, 
just to get it over with. 


"Once again, we have the kafir Doctor Bright. He is alive because 
that amulet steals the life from others and puts him into their bodies. 
We have let him steal the life of his friend. His own friend, he steals 
the life from! Now he must die again." 

It was the same speech from before. Bright realized that they 
probably weren't releasing his death in Brunwick's body. It wouldn't 
look as good to see him fighting back. 


This time, the knife traced a line across his head. Fingers dug into 
Jacobs' frizzy hair roughly and pulled the scalp back. Bright 


screamed into the gag. 


They took their time on him. By the end, he was silently begging 
them to finish it. 


He woke up again. It was much later. He was tied up and gagged 
again, in position. He looked around, saw Sandler and Lopez. He 
realized now that there was a pattern to their choices. First was big 
Brunswick, then guards, Jacobs and Advani. Next it would be 
Sandler, and then pretty young Lopez. They wanted to build it up. 
Escalate the "choice" of taking their bodies. They'd taken the "real" 
men, next it would be the harmless old man and finally the young 
woman. 


Sandler looked broken. Lopez no longer looked scared. She looked 
angry. Angry at the terrorists, angry at him. He might have been 
projecting the last. He certainly was pretty angry with himself. 


Something nearby caught his eye. Something was scratched into 
the dirt. It was faint, and it looked atrocious, but he could just read it. 
"HELP COMING. HOLD OUT." 


It had to be fresh, or the terrorists would have trampled it into the 
dirt. 


His heart—Advani's heart—leapt into his throat. If he could just stall. 
He could still get Sandler and Lopez out of this. Lopez for certain. 
Just a little longer. 


But the door was opening again. Here was the leader of the 
terrorists, coming in with his lackeys. Bright steeled his mind. He 
had to let them go to work. The longer he lived, the better their 
chances of rescue. 


"The ghoul Doctor Bright has taken another of his friends! He does 
not care for anyone but himself. But now he suffers! We will make 
him regret every second he is alive, and then we will destroy him in 
the name of Allah!" He waved theatrically to the camera. 


One of the men took a bucket and threw it on him. He retched when 


he realized it was dung. Pig shit, he thought. Where did they even 
find pigs in Egypt? Didn't they all get killed during the Swine Flu 
epidemic? 


The other man took a knife and began making little cuts on his face. 
Nothing terribly painful, but it was letting the pig shit seep into the 
wounds. Not that he expected to live long enough for infection to be 
a concern, but it was humiliating. Which was, of course, the point. 


"We defile him as his unclean soul defiles the bodies of others. We 
swear undying jihad against all Foundation kafirs!" With that, the 
man pulled out his sword and held it high. 


No, no, no, Bright thought. You're supposed to torture me! This isn't 
how it's supposed to go! 


As the sword began its arc, he comforted himself with the thought 
that Lopez, at least, would make it. 


The rescue came several hours after the sword. The terrorists had 
just left them alone for the night when the rescue team came in. It 
wasn't even a battle. It was over in minutes. 


Bright was untied, escorted to the evac helicopter, and loaded in. On 
the way back, one of the agents explained how the Chaos 
Insurgency had fed Hezb Alkhalifah intelligence about them, down to 
the location of their van. How they'd gotten their information, and 
exactly why they'd done it, wasn't yet known. The leading theory 
was that it was intended to keep the Foundation—and the terrorists 
—busy while they secured an unknown asset and hightailed it out of 
dodge. 


As they arrived at the secured facility, and were escorted to a 
debriefing room, he sat down between the two remaining 
passengers from the van. 


"Well, that could have gone better,” said Claudia. "Sorry. | got help 
as quickly as | could." A cigarette seemed to hang in mid-air. 


"You did your best," said Bright. "I just wish..." 


"| Know, Doctor," said Sandler. "| had hoped she'd make it as well." 


"| just don't get it," Bright said. "Everyone else they picked, there 
was an escalation. First big Brunwick, then Jacobs, then Advani. 
She should have been last." 


"You don't get it," Claudia said. "Different culture. To us, sure, the 
young lady would have been the finale. To them, though..." 


Bright stared at Sandler, at his balding head and fringe of white hair, 
and then down to the shapely young hands he wore. "Of course. 
The male elder." 


"I'm sorry," Sandler said. "| wish it had been the other way." 


There was one final execution for Doctor Bright that night. His 
handlers tried to save him, but he was just too quick. 


The Farm 


"You mean to tell me, there are four billion virtual machines active 
on one server?" Jason Ortega pointed a bony finger at the server 
rack, face drawn into a frown. 


"Not active all at the same time, no. The CPUs wouldn't be able to 

handle that, but there's a lot going on under the hood to give it that 
appearance, and it's not just one server. I'll be talking about it more 
in a few minutes, though." Terry Thompson replied, waving Ortega 
towards him as they proceeded through the farm. 


The farm. That was all it had become to Terry. Enough 60 hour 
weeks deploying a project will make the most amazing seem 
mundane. The fact of the matter, though, was the Site 11 
Anomalous Computing Center contained what was probably the 
most sophisticated network on the planet, and stood to be for quite a 
long time. It had a lot of work to accomplish, and that made today's 
"ribbon-cutting" ceremony seem like an interminable waste of time. 
Terry quietly hoped for no more promotions. 


Terry left Ortega to stand in front of the assembled crowd, some 30 
or 40 researchers, division heads, and his own technicians. 


"Alright, can everyone hear me? You guys in the back?" 
Nods from all around. 


"Good, let's get started. For those of you that don't know me, I'm 
Terry Thompson, Director of Engineering for the RAISA. Over the 
last few years, we've been doing more active research into 
anomalous Al and viruses than ever. It had also become apparent 
that we were under-equipped to properly research and understand 
their nature at times. Thanks to a significant budget increase, we've 
been able to build an ideal research and containment center. It's 
been a long road, and a lot of work. | can't call it a labor of love, but 
rather it's been a labor of necessity. The better we understand the 


anomalous nature of these objects, the better-equipped we are to 
protect ourselves as well as the rest of the world." 


Polite applause came from the crowd. Brandon caught his eye and 
gave him a thumbs up; Brandon knew how much Terry hated public 
speaking. Terry smiled in spite of himself. 


"Now, | understand there's a tour to be taken. We'll be walking the 
floor of the facility, we'll have some Q&A, my technicians and | will 
be available for two hours for any other questions, and then we're 
going to get to work. So, if you all will follow me." 


A veritable herd of nerds walked up the ramp to the raised data 
center floor. 


"The most obvious difference between the far— the Anomalous 
Computing Center and the rest of the Foundation's infrastructure is 
nearly everything here is standards-compliant, off the shelf, or both. 
We've observed that some anomalies can't or won't run on 
Foundation-made hardware, or on FoundationOS. A lot of you will 
remember the early days of so-called anomalous viruses, or 
anomalous Al, that were usually just smart programming ahead of 
their time. It's grown more difficult to determine the difference every 
year, and using standard hardware and software gives us another 
set of eyes, if you will, into how the anomaly in question works, and 
also protects the secret nature of our architecture from god-knows- 
what." 


Terry led the group to a set of six server racks, loaded to the gills 
with blade servers and fiber-optic cabling. 


"Here we have the Internet Emulation Cluster, which we've been 
calling ElevenNet. This was the most time-consuming piece of the 
Center to deploy, but we think the time will be well worth it. Any 
anomalous machine gets connected to a local area network, which 
routes external traffic to ElevenNet. ElevenNet has the ability to 
send and receive traffic to and from any of the four billion or so 
public IP addresses available on IPv4, and can also enable a virtual 
machine to listen at a requested IP in under three-tenths of a 
second. Additionally, using data acquired from public and private 
sources, each IP and port responds as its equivalent counterpart on 


the Internet. We have several thousand virtual machine base 
images, which cover 99.97 percent of the listening devices observed 
on the Internet. When an IP is requested, the corresponding server 
or network device VM is spun up and accepts the communication. 
This gives us total transparency as to the nature of the traffic being 
sent, which is logged and left in the clear for us to review. Data is 
appropriately routed through the appropriate virtual routers via BGP 
tables, latency is properly emulated, outages occur at a rate 
proportional to the real internet. The global DNS system has been 
fully emulated, bad records and all. Many websites and internet 
services work well enough for our purposes. Dummy data is sent 
back and forth across the network to give the appearance of activity. 
ICMP traffic takes up an appropriate percentage of traffic, SMTP 
takes up an appropriate percentage, and so on. We've essentially 
created a fully functioning internet, totally separate from the real 
one, and with a fraction of the resources." 


Some audible wows were heard from the crowd. Some blank stares 
were also plainly visible. Ta/k human to them, Terry, he thought to 
himself. He beckoned the crowd along. 


The next stop was a set of waist-high tables with various computers 
hooked up, with what appeared to be a camera on a tripod in front of 
each one. 


"Here's what we've got for anomalous, or potentially anomalous, 
artificial intelligence." Terry grabbed a spare camera apparatus and 
held it over his head to show the crowd.