The voice over the intercom would have interrupted his anxiety, had 
he not known the interruption would happen. "Mr. Boeing, sir, five 
more minutes until onset," was what the thing the pilot said sounded 
like. 


William E. Boeing got out of his seat and waited patiently in front of 
the center left emergency door. He looked at the rows of corpses 
seated next to the emergency exit door. All the corpses were of 
William E. Boeing, and each one of them was burned in different 
ways to different degrees. The sacrifice it had taken to bring him this 
far had been immense. Not just the personal sacrifice he was 
witness to right now, but the sacrifice of the countless others, in the 
past, the present, and the future, as well. 


But William E. Boeing was not a mad murdering maniac; he was a 
businessman. Mad murdering maniacs would eventually get hunted 
down and stopped, no matter how succesful they initially appeared 
to be. And the truth of the matter was, his aircraft had a better safety 


refused to give us any assistance in discerning the 
machines' composition. Perhaps if you told us more... 


SCP-744-1: Don't talk nonsense! I've told you everything 
you need to know. Any more information would 
compromise the nature of the purpose. 


Dr. B_ : And that's another thing, you have yet to tell us 
what this "purpose" is. Can you elaborate? 


SCP-744-1: You know | can't tell you that, doctor. Just... 
fix this place already. 


<End Log> 

+ Show Interview 744-C 
Interview 744-1-C 
Interviewed: SCP-744-1 
Interviewer: Dr. B 


Foreword: This interview was taken two years after 
Interview 744-B. 


<Begin Log, [optional time info]> 


Dr. B_ : ...Look, we've told you again and again, we 
don't know when the facility will be operational again. We 
have people working day and night- 


SCP-744-1: Bullshit you do! | see your people working, 
they don't do shit! You and your people have been lying 
to me, doctor. | don't appreciate being lied to. 


Dr. B_ : Nobody is lying to you, we want to have this 
facility operational as much as you do. 


SCP-744-1: Don't think of me as a simpleton. | see how 
you react to the purpose. You don't know what it is, and it 
scares you. 


record than most of his competitors, so statistically he was actually 
keeping people alive. But with misfortune and mechanical defect at 
some point being inevitable, he might as well collect the lives lost as 
sacrifice; all in all, it made good business sense, for the aircraft 
division as well as the other. 


At exactly the right moment, the center left emergency door started 
to open. At exactly the right moment William E. Boeing started to 
scream in terror at what was outside that door. Flames burst inward 
and set fire to the closest row of corpses, which now were animate 
and, for those with a working voice box, screaming as well. On the 
precipe, William E. Boeing wrangled with the now closing 
emergency exit door with all his might, trying to keep it from closing. 


William E. Boeing jolted into consciousness in agony. His upper 
body had severe burns. He was strapped to his seat. The thing he 
tried to say amounted to nothing, because he no longer had a 
working throat. If he would have had a working throat, the thing he 
would have said would have sounded exactly like the frantic 
screaming of someone who was on fire. With his working eye he 
saw William E. Boeing wrangling with a closing emergency exit door 
with all his might, trying to keep it from closing. His eye stopped 
working. 


Normally, being dead would be the end of things, even for people 
who were outside of time, though they would have the benefit of 
knowing how and when they would die, even if they could do nothing 
about it but act out the appropriate death scene. But William E. 
Boeing was a businessman, and few things were as disruptive to 
conducting business as being deceased. So William E. Boeing 
made sure to make sure that — to put it in inside-time terms as 
accurately as possible — "William E. Boeing, was always going to 
be, and would always have been, William E. Boeing." 


That is what the thing he said sounded like at the particular where- 
and-when where he was sitting upright in a casket somewhere in a 
gigantic warehouse. There were a few dozen of additional caskets 
propped up against the nearest wall. Where the caskets touched the 
platform that supported them a white mist hung in stale air. The 
transparant lids of the caskets were covered in ice flowers to the 
extent of being opaque. Not that it mattered much, William E. Boeing 


knew who was inside. The inside-time description would be that he 
could remember stepping inside each one of them at different times, 
but outside of time, William E. Boeing was laying down inside each 
one of them concurrently, and slowly began drifting off on behalf of 
the various chemicals, to start the long wait for when he would be 
William E. Boeing once again. Well, not "wait for", he knew perfectly 
well at what where-and-when he would be recalled, or, in the case of 
3 and 7, never at all. But being William E. Boeing, such things 
mattered little, and even if they mattered, nothing could be done to 
change it anyway. William E. Boeing felt himself slowly drifting away 
into unconsciousness as a comforting freezing cold started to set in 
around him. 


William E. Boeing regained his faculties upside down with blood 
trickling from a split lip down into his eyes. The inside of the car 
smelled like gasoline. He had been speeding, and he had been 
distracted by the pretty girl of french heritage that sat next to him. 
Her name was Ronda. Ronda was unconscious now and would 
soon be dead, even though William E. Boeing was going to be okay. 
Still, he had no options left other than panicking. 


He called out her name repeatedly to no avail. Then he called out 
her full name repeatedly, hoping that the familiarity of it would trigger 
something, would elicit some sort of response. She would remain 
unconscious for the next few minutes up until the time the fire would 
reach her. 


The whole accident gave rise to one of the funnier aspects of being 
William E. Boeing. You see, the full name of the girl was phonetically 
very similar to a model of compact car of japanese manufacture that 
would be produced several decades into the future, resulting in him 
erroneously producing about a hundred similar compact cars that 
were also William E. Boeing. 


William E. Boeing realized that mistake, of course, then, as now, as 
always. But the mistake was made, had been made, and would 
always be made. He would have laughed at the mistake if he would 
have had the opportunity, but he didn't. He was now stuck in the 
routine of being William E. Boeing being stuck in a wrecked upside 
down car that was about to catch fire. The car caught fire. 


William E. Boeing was at the seashore again. The thing he said 
roughly sounded like "Hmmmmm'", as he was enjoying a cool 
inbound breeze on a sunny day. William E. Boeing found himself 
staring up at the blue sky, and he felt himself raising his arm and 
pointing upward. William E. Boeing heard the voice of this father — 
his real father, not William E. Boeing — from behind him. 


"You want to fly boy ?" 


His father picked William up by the waist and lifted the young boy 
over his head, holding him upward as if proffering him up to the 
heavens. William stretched his arms outward as if they were wings 
and closed his eyes. 


William E. Boeing was back in his study. There was a man he didn't 
know standing in front of him, talking to him. The thing the man was 
saying sounded like this: "William E. Boeing?" 


William E. Boeing wasn't sure what to make of the question. 


Surveyor 


Senior Agent Jehr stretched as the secretary paged his 
commanding officer, taking the time to enjoy his first real eloow 
room in six months. While the survey cutters used by the Foundation 
had markedly improved in the thirty years of his service and the 
current generation of field agents were practically coddled by 
comparison to when he was a fresh rookie, spending half a solar 
year in deep space in the cramped cabin with five other surveyors 
and specialists could make anyone appreciate the ability to walk 
around and stretch their limbs. 


Of course, this particular tour hadn't lasted quite that long. Rather 
than mapping a distant, unexplored planet, Agent Jehr was now 
standing before the door of one of the most senior personnel in the 
entire organization, fidgeting in his dress uniform and not looking 
forward to having to explain why his last trip out had been cut short. 


Staring out through the broad viewport at the vast, expansive orbital 
installation that was the primary service station for ships such as his, 
Jehr contemplated what it might have been to be a field agent in the 
earliest years of the Foundation. He remembered reading about 
those days, when the brave men and women of the Foundation 
fought a secret shadow war against encroaching anomalies and 
other organizations alike, when nothing was understood and every 
day the world didn't end was a victory in and of itself. 


But then came the Beyril-Veren Unifying Standard Theory, the 
breakthrough in theoretical physics that peeled back the veil 
guarding the secrets of the universe. Almost overnight, anomalies 
turned from nightmares and things whispered about in hushed tones 
to curiosities that could be contained, disassembled, and discarded. 
The Foundation, its own veil of secrecy no longer necessary, 
became a public organization overseen by governments and 
politicians, one that would spearhead exploration into deep space 
and remove the cosmic errors it once zealously guarded in 


preparation for civilian colonization. 


The secretary made an acknowledgement over her headset and 
nodded at him, signalling that his boss was ready to see him and 
bringing him out of his reverie. Composing himself, he walked up to 
the door, which slid open with a muted click. 


"Jehr!" he called out from behind his desk, with a booming, 
boisterous voice that belied the cunning and cut-throat efficiency he 
was Capable of. "How are you, you old fossil?" 


"Fleet Director Lum," Jehr replied, saluting sharply. 


"Always business, | see," the huge man smirked, returning the 
salute before chuckling out loud and gesturing towards one of the 
chairs in his office. "Come, sit. How's my best field agent doing?" 


"Yes, sir." Jehr answered, taking his seat while turning down an 
offered drink. "I'm fine, sir; we've been training a fresh rookie right 
out of the academy but she's catching on quick. | think, with a 
couple more trips out, she'll make a great surveyor." 


"| expect nothing but the best with you in charge," Lum continued, 
chuckling as he set down the glass, picked up a digital pad, and slid 
it across the desk towards him. "Now, then, what's this anomaly you 
have for me? | have your preliminary report here, but I'd like to hear 
it straight." 


"Yes, sir. We were on our third stop; the first two had been simple 
mining surveys, which we didn't have any problems with. The third 
one, though, was a green-zone survey and we found a pre-existing 
civilization. Well, what was left of it, anyways." 


Lum nodded. "That's nothing new, and certainly not something I'd 
expect you to cut your tour short for. Go on?" 


Jehr took a deep breath as he went over the details in his head one 
more time. "Well, sir, we had jumped in under standard green-zone 
survey protocols, tagging but not performing detailed scans of the 
outer planets. Passive sensors were zero across the board on the 
entire way in, so we had assumed there wasn't any intelligent life in 


the system." 


With a flick, Jehr copied a report addendum from the pad to the 
holo-projector and an orbital diagram liberally covered with 
annotations appeared in the air between them. 


"When we short-hopped into orbit around the target, though," he 
continued. "We discovered we were wrong. The gravity well was 
almost completely filled with debris, mostly loose fragments but 
several still-intact satellites as well. It's a good thing that Gren 
always flies by the book, because we took a good dozen minor 
impacts to our shields before we could pull into a higher orbit. 
Something definitely used to live there, sir." 


Lum nodded again, gesturing for him to continue. Another flick from 
Jehr, and the projected image changed to a montage of recovered 
images as well as a computer-aided physiological reconstruction. 


"From what evidence we found, it appears that they were pretty 
typical: carbon-based, oxygen-breathing, gravity and atmospheric 
pressure only slightly higher than ours. They'd colonized their entire 
homeworld and obviously advanced to shooting stuff into space, sir, 
but we did not find evidence they ever achieved FTL." 


"What killed them?" Lum asked, as the image panned across the 
ruins of a destroyed city, the last remnants of crumbling stone and 
rusted steel fighting a losing battle against the encroaching forest. 


"Reality corruption, sir." 


Lum paused to stare at him for a moment. "Corruption? Are you 
sure?" 


"Yes, sir; the evidence was all over the place. Our analysis indicates 
that the process had started earlier in their development than it did 
for us; they ended up having to devote what technological resources 
they had just to keep it in check, and eventually they just got 
overwhelmed. That was, I'd say, probably around a thousand solar 
years ago. Everything in that gravity well is now either poisoned or 
dead." 


Lum went silent again, mulling over the information. Something was 
still bothering him. "Ten is going to be pissed to hear that a perfect 
green candidate is going to be completely unusable. Still, this isn't 
the first time that that has happened either, so why come back to 
deliver the news yourself?" 


"Well, sir," Jehr started, cringing inwardly as he prepared to drop the 
bombshell. "We retrieved some samples from the surface." 


"You what?" he said, rising out of his chair. 


"We followed the book, sir. All the standard quarantine procedures 
for objects retrieved from corrupted regions, isolated containment, 
everything. It's completely clean, | just... we saw something while 
we were mapping the surface, something we'd never seen before. | 
had to confirm it, sir, and | think you need to see this too." 


Under Lum's suspicious gaze, Jehr pulled several sealed sample 
bags adorned with brightly colored hazard labels from his uniform 
jacket and set them on the Director's desk. 


On top of the small pile was a white plastic identification card 
adorned with the all-too-familiar black shield emblem with its inset 
ring and three inward-pointing arrows, clearly visible despite the 
artifact's age. And yet, printed on its smooth surface in ancient ink, 
was an unmistakably alien portrait and accompanying script. 


"They had their own Foundation, sir. | dug these out of an 
abandoned underground facility that had been peeled open by a 
thermonuclear detonation. We got samples of some documents for 
the cryptos too, but this... well, it would be a hell of a coincidence, 
sir. They even had the same logo and everything." 


More silence. 
"You know what Ten is going to say, don't you?" 
"Yes, sir." 


"The planet is hereby classified as a Veren-level object. Get Sira to 
give you a file number on the way out and get the write-up together, 
I've got to make an appointment with Ten. Dismissed." 


Jehr saluted sharply once more and turned to leave, breathing a 
sigh of relief while simultaneously recognizing that his day was far 
from over.