"Salah, for fuck's sake, you don't have to make a bridge every time | 
need to jump a rooftop!" She frowned as her husband drew a basic 
bridge using his pen before letting her cross. "The baby will be fine!" 


"Mary-Ann, you shouldn't even be doing this," he said the pen re- 
absorbed the spent ink. "You're pregnant, you should be staying at 
home in the panic room with Ammy and not out here, fighting the 
god-damn Foundation!" 


"Oh, so just because I'm pregnant makes me a fragile woman now, 
does it? Ugh!" She rolled her eyes and took out her slingshot, taking 
aim at an agent that was just coming in through the breach in the 
gateway. She let lose a stone which grew in size as it passed 
through the air, eventually blasting a hole through the agent's leg. 
"Damn. Was aiming for his balls." 


Salah got the message. "I'm just saying it won't be good for our 
daughter if you keep on over-exerting yourself like this." Salah 
started to draw up a chair when he noticed that an agent was 
running through the crowd, after a woman in... grey... "Shit! That 
guy, right there." He pointed at the rogue agent. "He's going after the 
Critic." 


"Already on it," said Mary-Ann, loading up her slingshot with a cherry 


SCP-571: Self-Propagating Infectious Pattern 


Item #: SCP-571 
Object Class: Anomalous Euclid Keter 


Special Containment Procedures: A single piece of paper 
containing an instance of SCP-571 should be kept inside an opaque, 
sealed container of any kind, at the center of any high security 
containment room (currently the primary containment chamber at 
Compound-1043/Site-143). This containment room must be 
equipped with incineration devices, which shall be maintained and 
tested regularly. Any site housing SCP-571 must not be located 
within 200km of any minor population center, or within 500km of any 
major population center. No devices that have any capability of 
transmitting pictures are to be allowed within the perimeter of the 
compound housing SCP-571. 


Only one instance of SCP-571 should exist at any time, except 
during specially approved testing. Should the paper containing 
SCP-571 be destroyed, another copy may be printed from the 
encrypted backup file. No other recordings of SCP-571 are to exist. 


SCP-571's containment chamber is to be monitored using infrared 
devices. Eight level 2 guards must be stationed outside of 
SCP-571's containment chamber at all times. Four of these guards 
are to wear infrared goggles during shifts. Any persons attempting to 
enter the containment chamber without authorization are to be 
terminated immediately. Upon any successful unauthorized entry, 
the incineration devices in SCP-571's containment chamber are to 
be activated immediately. 


All personnel leaving Site-143 are to be examined for potential 
SCP-571 contamination without visual contact as outlined by 
Protocol 571-Alpha. Personnel attempting to bypass Site-143 
security are to be terminated within Compound-1043's 10-mile 
perimeter. 


bomb taking aim at the runner. "Just need to account for trajectory 
and..." 


Ruiz Duchamp let off a shot at Nobody. "Hold it right there." 


The Critic turned to face him, crossing her arms with a wry smile. 
"Hello again. How long has it been since we last met? 6 months? 
7?" 


"Seven months, 18 days, 15 hours, 24 minutes." 


"Zero heartburn," quipped the Critic. Ruiz raised his rifle at her, and 
she put up her hands. "All right, | get the message. You want me 
dead." She tsked. "Ruiz, you are the very definition of obsession, 
you know that?" 


"Shut up!" Ruiz fired a bullet that grazed her dress suit. "You killed a 
lot of good people in Milwaukee." 


"For the umpteenth time, Ruiz, | did nothing. All | did was try and 
encourage a little fun." 


"Half the city died because of your ‘fun'!" 


"Well, yes. But that bug's been worked out now!" She sighed. 
"Nothing | say is going to keep you from killing me, is it?” 


"Not a fucking thing, Lady. Not a fucking thing.” 


"Very well," the Critic said as she typed one last messaged on to her 
smartphone before turning it off. "Give my regards to Pico, if you see 
him again." 


"Fuck Pico, and fuck-" Ruiz blinked at the sound of whistling coming 
from behind him. He turned to see a small cherry bomb fireworks 
sailing towards his head. It landed at his feet, the fuse disappearing 
into the casing. For what seemed like the longest time, nothing 
happened. 


And then the Cherry Bomb went off. 


The last thing Ruiz Duchamp remembered before it went dark was 
the smell of fruit, the taste of wild cherry Kool-Aid, and his eardrums 
popping. The last thing he saw was a woman in a grey suit turn on 
her smartphone as she walked off into the distance. 


The Critic 


The Critic sat silently at his desk at the front of Room 238, his long 
gray hair in a ponytail, his wrinkled, septuagenarian face frozen in 
an unreadable glare as he drummed his fingers on the tabletop in 
rhythm with his stopwatch. None of the half dozen who sat silently 
waiting were more than half the Critic's age, and some barely a 
third. The Painter, the Sculptor, the Clipper, the Builder, the 
Composer, and the Director all sat at their smaller desks in the 
almost-empty gallery. Those were not their real names, of course, 
but they all knew each other by code names in this meeting. Most of 
the time, Room 238 was an ordinary classroom, in an ordinary 
community college, in an ordinary American city. Tonight, however, 
it was the world headquarters of an international terrorist 
organization (or at least one chapter of it), and the Critic was its 
leader, to the extent that a group such as this could have one. 


What a bunch of failures, he thought to himself. 


"Can we get on with this?" the Painter asked. "We've been sitting 
here watching you twiddle your thumbs for half an hour, and..." 


"Be quiet," the Critic interrupted. "We are appreciating the silence 
and the sensation of unease. You'll know when the piece is over." 


The Painter was silent, and the Critic timed another seventeen 
minutes on his stopwatch while the six waited and watched. Having 
completed his "performance", he rose from the desk, dimmed the 
lights, and powered on a slide projector that must have been nearly 
as old as the man himself. A press of a button and a photograph 
was displayed on the classroom whiteboard - a photograph of a 
pudgy cat with grayish-blue fur, frozen in time with an unusually 
happy-looking grin on its face. The question "| CAN HAS 
CHEEZBURGER?" was superimposed over the photo. 


"Who can tell me what this is?" asked the Critic. 


"It's a lolcat,” the Painter volunteered. 


"That's right, Painter," he responded. "And how long have ‘lolcats’ 
been around?" 


"Well," he replied with the knowing confidence of an art historian, 
"the style of that particular picture originated in early 2007, but it had 
its origins several years earlier on 4Chan, and examples of 
humorously-captioned cat photographs have been found dating to 
the late 19th century." 


"Very good, Painter," said the Critic. "Director, tell me; is there 
anything about this piece that you find particularly compelling? Eye- 
opening? Mind-blowing?" 


The Director stammered, seeming surprised and alarmed to have 
been called out. It was a moment before he could muster a 
response; "Not particularly, Critic. It's just a cute little joke." 


"Then how would you justify this, Director?" The Critic pressed a 
button and a new slide popped up. It was a photograph of a parking 
lot, taken from a camera a few meters above the ground. Dozens of 
cats lay on the ground, bloodied and dead, their bodies arranged 
spelling out a message - "NO U CANT HAS CHEEZBURGER". The 
Critic brought up another slide - the same parking lot, more dead 
cats, spelling out "DED CATZ IS DED". Another click and a third 
slide came up - more dead cats, arranged spelling out the message 
"R WE KEWL YT? LULZ". 


"It was quite a bit of work acquiring these photos from the Man's 
database," the Critic said sternly. "Their intelligence indicates that 
we're responsible for this, and at our last meeting, you mentioned 
that you were working on a project involving cats. Can | assume this 
is your handiwork?" 


"Yes, Critic," the Director said. 


"Explain what we're looking at," the Critic demanded as he brought 
up a slide with more dead cats spelling out the words "INVISIBLE 
MORGUE". 


"It's produced by a memetic agent that specifically targets felis 
catus," the Director said. "They're compelled to come to this 
particular site and fight each other until they're fatally wounded, and 
to lie down before they die in patterns that spell out the messages." 


"I'm not interested in the how," the Critic said. "Tell me why we're 
seeing this. How does this installation represent our objectives?" 


"It's recontextualization,” the Director nervously replied. "By taking 
something meant to be amusing and adding to it elements of 
tragedy and horror, it forces people to look at lolcats in a new way, 
especially if their own pet cat is one of the ones involved." 


"If | wanted to see funny things recontextualized as tragedy and 
horror, | could log on to Youtube," the Critic said. "Killing someone's 
cat to open their mind is more likely to produce such a base 
emotional response that it's going to drown out whatever message 
you're trying to deliver. What I'm seeing here is a bunch of dead cats 
being used to parody internet memes in a way that makes us look 
like a bunch of sadistic Anonymous wannabes." 


"But, Critic, the current zeitgeist of the-" 


"That will be all, Director," the Critic interrupted. "I've been part of 
this organization for a long time, and I'm not going to say this is the 
worst thing I've ever seen. It's ill-conceived, it's poorly executed, and 
it's not going to achieve what you want it to. If recontextualization is 
the direction you want to go, talk to Clipper - that containment file he 
garbled all up with newspaper headlines and sent right back to the 
Man's front door was brilliant." 


"Thank you, Critic,” the Clipper said. 


"You're welcome," the Critic said as he turned the lights back on and 
sat down. "The reason | bring this up is because the problems with 
this installation mirror the problems I've been seeing in a lot of 
pieces lately. To be frank, the work that this organization has done 
in the past month or so has been very unimpressive. Sculptor, you 
made a fire hydrant that emits gamma radiation when connected to 
a firehose, correct?" 


"Yes, Critic," the Sculptor responded. 


"And Painter, you made a sidewalk mural that people get absorbed 
into like quicksand, which then adds their likeness to a crowd 
scene." 


"Yes, Critic." 


"And Composer, you produced a recording of an electric guitar solo 
that causes the listener's face to liquefy.” 


"Yes, Critic. The idea of 'face-melting awesomeness’ was first raised 
by Blue Oyster Cult in 1972, whose debut single "Cities on Flame 
With Rock and Roll" included the line ‘Three thousand guitars, they 
seem to cry, my ears will melt, and then my eyes.’ By the mid-1980s 


"Later, Composer," the Critic said. "All three of these works are 
severely flawed, and all in the exact same way. Who can tell me 
what that flaw is?" 


The room was silent. None of the six knew the answer - or if they 
did, they feared to share it. 


"| see the cat has gotten our tongues,” the Critic said, casting a 
knowing eye at the Director. "All three of these installations, ladies 
and gentlemen, are artworks that kill people." 


"Critic?" asked the Painter. "Isn't that what we do?" 


The Critic sighed. "Let me tell you a story. Back when | was your 
age, artists, rea/ artists, were all about what we used to call ‘freaking 
out the squares’. Ask your parents or your grandparents sometime 
about how closed-minded mainstream America was back then - 
blue-haired grannies listening to Lawrence Welk and Liberace, who 
thought people like the fucking Kingston Trio were dangerous 
subversives and Jackson Pollock was just an idiot with too much 
time on his hands — if they even knew who he was at all. We were 
all about pushing the envelope, blowing people out of their closed- 
off worldview, making them understand how big and crazy the world 
really was. And you know what? We were doing it. Our generation 


changed the way people think of art. We really thought we were 
cool. 


"| was doing things back then that nobody had ever seen. And when 
Andy - I'm sorry, that was what the Critic's name was back then - 
when he asked me to join this organization, | leapt at the chance. | 
did things that really had the Man running scared, things that really 
forced people to change their minds about how the world around 
them works. To me, that's what this organization is all about." 


The Composer interrupted. "But doesn't the manifesto say..." 


"There is no manifesto,” the Critic said. "Now answer me this, boys 
and girls - how can we open people's minds if all that our projects do 
is kill them?" 


"It isn't really so much for the benefit of the victim, right?" asked the 
Director. "It's more for the people they leave behind - the family, and 
the friends, and the people who happen to be standing in the right 
place. Why, that invisible shark that you yourself made back when 
you were the Director was pretty much the same thing." 


"You could say it was," the Critic answered, "and I'd say you were 
right, and I'd also tell you that the shark was a masterpiece in the 
way it exposed the bystander phenomenon and the apathy of men 
to the problems of others. But that was in 7975. Are you telling me 
that the best projects that this organization can come up with are 
recycled ideas from before you were even born?" 


The Director was silent. 


"Look, there's more to this than just making a piece of art that kills 
people and then slapping our slogan on the end of it like some kind 
of punchline. Some of our most interesting pieces have never 
claimed a single life. Composer, have you ever listened to the 
interpretation of Cage that your predecessor recorded?" 


"| can't say | have," the Composer replied. 


"Good answer. If you had, you wouldn't be the Composer." The 
Critic opened his briefcase and withdrew a cassette tape, placing it 


on the Composer's desk. "Don't listen to that yourself — give it to 
one of your friends and get them to listen while you're not there. Or 
one of your enemies, if it suits you. Just give 'em a few days and ask 
them how it's sitting with them, because this — this is something 
that grabs the listener by the balls and forces them to forget 
everything they ever knew about what music is, and so far it's never 
killed a single person. 


"I'm not saying that death can never be a source for artistic 
expression. I'm sure you all know about that contraption up in 
Alaska? My predecessor was furious at the old Builder when he 
pulled that one off. Tore him a new one right in front of the rest of us 
- how could you be so irresponsible, you could have killed us all, the 
Man is going to come down on us like a ton of bricks, and so on. | 
thought he was going to kick him out for good, or worse. But | found 
out later on that the Critic pulled him aside after the meeting and told 
him it was the most thought-provoking piece he'd seen ever since 
Chazdwick's buddy made that talking atom bomb back in sixty-three. 


"| Know most of you only came on a few years ago after what went 
down at the Baltimore Expo. | don't know why the old Critic picked 
you out of the hundreds of people he looked at, but | know he would 
have expected better than this. We can't just keep putting out the 
same stuff over and over again and slapping a new coat of paint on 
it. At this rate we run the risk of becoming predictable, and worse 
yet, becoming boring.