Now, as to my business here, it seems you have stumbled upon 
something above your clearance. Well, no, stumbled is not the right 
word. Dug up? Perhaps. And you are getting to the point where 
further digging would end in some fairly lethal gunshot wounds. This 
would be a sad state of affairs, as you are otherwise quite a good 
researcher. Therefore, you are getting something very few people in 
the Foundation ever get... an explanation. 


Yes, we were alerted when you first started digging into SCP-001. 
Every researcher who's been around for a while looks into it. Most 
are satisfied when they uncover the angel with the flaming sword, 
it's buried under enough levels. But then you started looking into 
The Factory, and that is when | knew you wouldn't stop. So, here it 
is, plain and simple. 


The Factory is SCP-001. 


But it will never be written up. It was a choice | made early on in the 
creation of the Foundation, and a choice | still stand by. You 
researchers are far too curious. I'm not sure which scares me worse. 
That we'll never understand the Factory... or that we one day will. 
Ah well, I'm sure you're eager to learn more. 


The Factory was built in 1835. Back then it was known as The 
Anderson Factory, named after James Anderson, a rather well-to-do 


industrialist. It was built in, well, we'll just say America, and was the 
largest factory yet designed, a good mile across at its widest, three 
stories tall throughout, with a special seven story tower by the front 
gate that Anderson lived in. It was designed to be the ultimate 
factory, capable of taking care of everything, including the housing 
of workers. People could be born, work, live, and die, without ever 
leaving the confines of the Factory. And work they did, on everything 
from cattle raising and slaughtering, to textiles, to everything else 
under the sun. 


Now, no one knows whether James Anderson was actually a Satan 
worshiper. It's just as likely that he followed some kind of Pagan 
gods. What is known is that he was VERY exact in the building of 
his factory, and in the placement of his machinery within it. Survivors 
claim the floor was engraved with arcane symbols, that were only 
visible when blood flowed across them... But then the survivors 
claimed a lot of things. What is known is that Anderson made his 
money on the blood and sweat, and sometimes body parts of the 
lower class. His journals indicate he thought of them as less than 
human, being put on this Earth only to serve his will. 


Of course, at that time, no one knew about his predilections, and so 
people flocked to the Factory. A place to both work and live at the 
same time? Well, of course people wanted in! Never mind the harsh 
hours, working conditions, sadistic security force, and all the rest. 
Factory workers were forced to work 16 hour days, work only 
shutting down on Sundays, between sunrise and sunset. Workers 
were not given individual rooms, instead sharing rooms with eight 
other people, sleeping in shifts of three. Medical attention was 
unheard of. If you were injured in the course of your duties, which 
most people were, you were expected to just keep working. Anyone 
too injured to work was dragged off by the security, never to be 
heard from again. 


For forty years, the Anderson Factory cranked out all sorts of things 
for people. Meat, clothes, weapons. Never mind that the beef might 
be mixed with human. Don't care that the weapons were forged in 
blood. No attention need be paid that the clothes were dyed with... 
well, you get the idea. Rumors leaked out, but the products were so 
good, why bother? Until someone got out. 


| never met the brave soul who managed to escape, but she 
managed to meet with President Grant, and, in 1875, he enlisted my 
aid. At the time | was... well, it doesn't matter. We'll say | was 
military, kind of, and that my people were the same. A hundred and 
fifty good men and some few women, who were often given jobs that 
weren't supposed to be common knowledge. We'd been cleaning 
out some Confederate hold outs, and some of the worse things we 
found down South. So, we did some research, didn't like what we 
saw, and went in, loaded for bear. 


| don't actually remember much about the night it all went down. 
Most of it blends together in my head. | get flashes, sometimes, of 
the people chained to the line, living next to dead, and damned hard 
to tell which was which. Children working underneath machines, the 
majority of the flesh scoured from their bones by the great wheels 
and cogs. And the other things... 


No, I'm all right. | haven't thought about that night for a very long 
time. The security force wasn't much of a problem. But then 
Anderson's creations showed up. He'd been taking the injured 
workers and, well, experimenting on them. Men, if you could call 
them men, with multiple arms, sewn together, some of them 
combined with animals, horrible monstrosities out of mankind's 
worst nightmares. They kept coming, wave after wave of not quite 
living creatures. | lost a lot of good people that night. And then we 
found Anderson's breeding pits, girls as young as eight, chained to 
the walls, forced to be nothing more than- 


I'm sorry. Even today, more than a century later, the memory makes 
me see red. When we finally found Anderson cowering in his office, 
we hung him from his tower window, with his own entrails. As he 
died, he laughed, saying it didn't matter, we could kill him, but his 
factory, The Factory, would go on. He was still laughing 24 hours 
later when we finally cut him down, had him drawn and quartered, 
and then burned the remains. The entire time he uttered 
blasphemies that | don't like to think about. 


We spent a week cleaning that place out, freeing the workers, 
putting down the things we found in the basements and many 
lightless rooms. We pulled out things that were useful, stocked them 
in a house near the gate, tried to make sense of everything. A 


hundred and fifty of us went into that hell pit that night, and only 
ninety-three came out. By the end of that week, we were down to 
seventy-one. 


But the things we found in there, my god. Well, you've been with the 
Foundation a while, they wouldn't seem as amazing to you, but we 
found toy guns that shot real bullets. A yo-yo that would flay the skin 
from anyone it touched, hammers that only worked on human flesh. 
A breed of skeletal horse that ran faster than anything we'd ever 
seen. Cloaks that seemed woven from the night itself, and let men 
access a shadowy dimension that... | get away from myself. We 
found tools, both wondrous and horrible. And we were faced with a 
choice. 


| gathered my highest ranking, well, we'll call them officers, to me, 
and we tried to figure out what we would do. They all had opinions. 
The Chaplain, he had gone a little crazed. Thought all these objects 
must be miracles sent from god, holy relics to be worshipped. 
Marshall and his little toady Dawkins thought there was a fortune to 
be made here, making and selling these things to the highest bidder. 
The Injun we all called Bass, due to his deep speaking voice, he 
called these things an abomination, and declared that we should 
hunt down and destroy everything we could find. And Smith thought 
we should take this stuff back to the president. The only one without 
an opinion was the old man, but he never said much of anything 
anyways. We argued for hours, days, trying to work it out. Me, | 
thought we were sitting on a gold mine, all right. But that we could 
use these things, these objects, to hunt down some of the scary 
things we'd run into down South, the other monsters this world had 
to offer, and use this factory for good, as a place to contain these 
things, find a way to make them work for our fellow man, or at least 
protect our fellow man from having to deal with them. 


I'm sure you can figure out what happened. The Chaplain snuck 
away in the night with his devotees, taking a couple of small items 
with him. Marshall we kicked out when we found him... abusing his 
authority. He promised he'd get revenge, and that little Dawkins shit 
led the rest of their group off with some of the juicier items. Bass and 
his people tried to light the whole damn thing on fire, then just left 
when it didn't work. And Smith left, to report back to the president. | 


did manage to get him to promise me he'd tell Grant the Factory had 
been destroyed. | had big plans for that place. 


A'course, it was kinda hard to follow through on big plans when you 
only have 12 other people to work with. But it was a start. 


And it worked, for a while. We had these amazing toys, and finding 
people to work with us was easy. Back then, going off the grid was 
as simple as leaving town. We knew what we wanted, we knew what 
we could be. 


Leventhal set out getting us backing. A simple invention here, some 
well invested money there, it all worked out. White and Jones set out 
getting us... other backing. In our previous work we'd found out 
some interesting things about people. Some secrets that powerful 
men didn't want getting out. And, with our new position helping keep 
secrets, we got more people asking us to deal with their secrets. 
Blackmail is a dirty word, but it works. Bright, Argent and Lumineux 
got to work cataloging the items. Light and Brights' wife, the nurse, 
they made sure we kept ourselves healthy. Heh. No, it's just, 
remembering Light. She had such unusual ideas about hygiene, for 
the time. Brilliant woman. Czov, Fleischer and Carnoff dealt with 
training the troops. Tesla and Tamlin were in charge of figuring out 
how to take advantage of the items, without making it obvious. 


We were amazing. The city we built around the Factory, which we 
took to calling Site Alpha, was self supporting. Agents, researchers, 
operatives of all sorts... not by those names, of course, but those 
positions. We expanded. 


I'm sorry, | am an old man. | know | do not look it, but the body lies. 
The mind... doesn't always remember right. And sometimes | get 
lost in my memories. Things get confused. But, the long and simple 
of it is this: We used the Factory. It always seemed to have more 
empty rooms to store things in. Back then, that was the word for 
them, things. No Skips then, no. We thought we had the Factory 
tamed. That's one of the reasons | refuse to quit this job. If there's 
anything | can do here, it's remind people that we will NEVER tame 
these things. Contain them, yes, but as we saw with Able, tame 


them? Never. 


After a decade or so, we were pretty organized. The 13 original of us 
were being called by numbers, not names. We knew how to make 
things work. And, if a thing or two vanished inside of the Factory, 
still? And the occasional D-class? What? Yes, we had D-class back 
then. Disposables. That's where the D comes from. Had to have 
someone to test things on, Tesla and Tamlin were both very firm 
about that. But, yes, sometimes we lost people who didn't matter. 
Adam... sorry, Dr. Bright, was fond of saying it was the Factory 
taking its toll. You can't get something for nothing. 


1911 was when it all went wrong. Things... we called them faeries. 
An entire race of things, living beside us. They could look the same 
as you or |. The only obvious difference was an allergy to Iron. Yes, 
that's why we called them faeries. No, you haven't heard of them. 
Why? Because it's the one time the Foundation wiped out an entire 
race of things. Root and branch. And I'm the one who did it. 


We'd been hunting them for some time. We'd run into them a time or 
two before, come out on top. So, when a certain royal asked us for 
help, of course we were eager to get them in our debt. We've always 
loved having people in our debt. We sent a team to help out, take 
care of what we thought was a hunting party. The next time we saw 
them, their heads were on poles, attached to the saddles of the 
creatures the Faeries rode, when they attacked the Factory. 


It was horrible. 


Three words, but they convey so much. | have never... I'm sorry, 
please, give me a moment. I've never told this part to anyone. You 
should consider yourself lucky. And, if you ever tell anyone any of 
what | am about to impart on you, | will not just kill you, but everyone 
who shares your DNA, in the worst ways possible. You'll think 
Procedure 110-Montauk is a walk in the park compared to what | do 
to you. 


We lost. The things came, and they destroyed us. Rode over our 
emplacements, slaughtered our people, shrugged off our weapons 
like they were nothing. | watched my thirteen go down, left and right, 
just trying to hold the Factory. And I? |, their leader, their friend, their 


Incident 520-16: 


On 05/14/2016, researchers conducting routine experiments 
activated SCP-520-2 eleven times. The first ten activations affected 
Foundation-owned fluorescent lamps without incident; the tenth 
activation also changed the selection class to "BOEING 747 
AILERON ACTUATOR". Since no aircraft were present in the effect 
radius, researchers took the opportunity to test SCP-520-2's function 
in the absence of suitable targets. 


When the switch was activated for the eleventh time, however, 
researchers noted only slight stiffness in the handle. Later 
examination showed that the force applied to move SCP-520-2's 
handle was first diverted to adjust its effect-radius selection dial and 
enlarge the active zone. 


Simultaneously, Qantas flight [REDACTED] was lost near Perth with 
all 532 passengers and crew.! Foundation assets embedded with 
crash investigators successfully retrieved the airplane's relevant 
hydraulic flight control systems and confirmed all four aileron 
actuators to have been disabled by SCP-520. 


All testing with SCP-520 has been suspended pending development 
of an alternate method of changing the object's selection class. 


Footnotes 

1. No known relationship is believed to exist betweenWilliam E. 
Boeingand Pol-520-B; however, the circumstances surrounding the 
Qantas Crash closely resemble the circumstantial reports forMr. 
Boeing's death. 


« SCP-519 | SCP-520 | SCP-521 » 


father figure? Godfather to the Bright's four young children. 
Confidant, sometimes lover, always the confessor? | ran. | ran like a 
scared little school boy, deep into the dark guts of the Factory. | was 
chased by the things, always just one step ahead. | could hear them 
behind me, feel their breath upon my neck, and ... 


| came to a door I'd never seen before. A bronze door, covered in 
Arabic script of some sort. I've never been one for languages, 
especially not the curvy bullshit the musselmen use. But | didn't 
care. They were coming for me, and | threw the door open and dived 
through it. Everything inside... was different. There was a feeling of 
peace, that nothing could hurt me here. The light was this dark red, 
but still felt right. My ears were filled with the steady thrumming of a 
gigantic heartbeat. And, in front of me, were the remains of 
Anderson. It spoke to me then, but I'll be damned if | could tell you 
exactly what it said. What it told me was more meaning, than exact. 
It offered me hope. It told me... it told me that each of the things we 
had used from the Factory, no matter what we did with them, fed it. 
Helped it grow. But, if the Faeries took the Factory, they would 
destroy it, and we couldn't have that. It offered me... a deal. It could 
remove this event. Make it have never happened. All | needed to 
give it was... us.