No way Harken could go to a civwvie hospital. Grims was already in 
the wind, the last thing they needed was another Agent in public 
hands. Site 46 was close, and had full medical facilities: a bit far, but 
Harken was tough as a cockroach (despite his near-constant 
whining). He turned over with a groan, waving a hand feebly. “Jesus, 
| feel like ass.” 


"You don't look much better." 
"I'm hurt... aren't you obligated... to be nice... to me?" 
"No." 


Harken hissed in pain and pressed a hand to his forehead "...it was 
that... tubby bitch... Boomer... Dark's private... dog. Oooh, shit..." 
Harken rolled over and vomited. There were flecks of blood in it. "He 
blew the room... moron... thought I... was in it." 


"Shut up. We'll be on-site soon." 
"...hey, Kramer?" 
"...yeah?" 


"How about... we leave the... rich boys... alone... for a bit? Go... 
fuck around... with the Hand... or the Insurgency... or some shit?" 


"Before or after we carve up Boomer like a flabby ham?" 


"Oh." Harken's blood-flecked lips curved up into a feral grin. "After... 
obviously." 


Discussion 


Oh, the things you believe. You think that the things you see are 
really reality? That your friends and family, your Foundation, you 
yourself, everything you know, are all there is to this world? Ha. 
Wouldn't you like to know the things | could tell you? 


What's that? You do? Hmmn,, interesting. Very interesting. Let me 
see what | can do for you. What do you want to know? What could | 
tell you... 


How about what this world really is? The true nature of things? 
Would you like that? 


Ah, you would. Well, that's an answer I'm not willing to give up 
without full payment, but | can give you an idea of what it is. How 
does that sound? Does it sound good? 


Very well. These walls around us, this world, the whole of this 
reality, is but one piece of an incredibly complicated, yet well 
organized network of intersecting view points. No, a spider web 
doesn't begin to describe the complexity of this network. To you, this 
universe is all there is to it. Nothing more, nothing less. That which 
you know is the limit of your reality. But |, | can see it all. Every one 
of the lines that intersects ours, and subsequently others, and then 
more, so on and so forth to create a great mass that is reality. 


| can see variations on your human history, little bits and pieces 
changed about to create entirely new events. Assassinations 
survived, wars lost, lives saved, births that never happened. Just 
within one thread of reality, time is mashed up so tight that events 
can be changed on a whim. And when the lines intersect, then the 
whole fabric of reality is rewritten. In fact, there are trillions of 
universes where you never even existed. 


But the connections go deeper than that. Global, galactic, even 
universal events only begin the scratch the surface of what | can 


amauti, umilik. She ripped holes in it when | 
was taken. | only remember what she wants 
me to. 


LeChatlier: Playing the pronoun game, eh? 


SCP-828: Some memories stay. | lived on 
Qikiqtaaluk® in a village where the water was 
dark and cold and the bay narrow. We were 
hidden then. The invaders from the West had 
not come so far. The invaders from the East 
were yet to arrive. | had a family then. | was a 
mother. [trails off] 


Rosenthal: What do you remember about 
your family? 


SCP-828: My husband [hesitates] my husband 
was gone, | think. He died. A bear broke his 
neck on the ice. A sudden wave washed him 
into the sea. His jealous brother killed him. He 
was lost in a blizzard. Or one of the invaders 
shot him with their bows. It doesn't matter. My 
son and | were left behind. | was inherited by 
my husband's brother. | remember him 
struggling to catch enough for all of us. He was 
not a strong man. He would skulk to the sweat 
hut to commune with the shaman. We were, 
as a family, a burden to our people. Burdens 
do not last long on the ice. 


Rosenthal: How does this fit into your current 
state? 


LeChatlier: She's setting the scene, just let 
her keep going. 


SCP-828: My son was old enough to watch 
the men but not old enough to know better. 
He'd seen them hunting. Learned how. 
Watched them hide downwind of the polynya, 


see. If | just look a bit further, | can see that the thread you perceive 
yourself to live on is only one of a countless - well, countless to you - 
number of realities. They bear no resemblance to this one; there is 
no concept of geometry, time, space, life, death. All these things you 
take for granted, they have no bearing on these realities. There are 
even completely empty ones, realities filled with nothingness, and 
yet filled to the brim with concepts you can't begin to understand. 


And yet, for all their differences, all these realities, even the ones 
that don't connect, are all one and the same. They are multilayered, 
all on top of one another, separated yet together. They form a net, a 
ball, a line, shapes you have never even heard of. It's all together, 
and all right in front of your face. 


That's what | can tell you. What's wrong? You look confused. You 
don't get it? Do you want to know more? Want to dive deeper, see 
what | see, understand the insanity of the world you live in? | can 
help you. Through my eyes, you could see all. You could know the 
true nature of reality itself. How does that sound? Do you want to? 


You do? Good. All you need to do is put me on... 


Oh, look at that. | was lying. Let's see how long you last before you 
rot to nothing. 


Disinformation Bureau Orientation 


Well, | guess that's everyone. Let's get started. 


As you hopefully know at this point, the 'P' in our motto stands for 
‘protect’. There are two kinds of protection that entails - protecting 
the world at large from the effects of anomalies, and protecting the 
world at large from knowledge of those anomalies. Security handles 
the first. We deal with the second kind. 


Let me give you a little background. 


Right now, at Site-44, a bunch of folks in an identical auditorium are 
currently listening to a similar orientation for the Security division, 
the other half of ‘protect’. Security deals with the physical protection 
of society and the Foundation. Reality bender running around a 
major metro area? Security. Keter-level containment breach? 
Security. Hostile Gol attempting to eliminate vital personnel or 
acquire a valuable skip? Security. Any wars the Foundation fights, 
they man the front lines. The threats they face are the stuff of 
nightmares. They have high mortality rates, and the only obituaries 
frequently covered in black ink. 


But talk to any of them, and they'll swear up and down that they 
prefer their own job to yours every day of the week. 


Back to my - now your - job. 


The Disinformation Bureau covers the second half of 'protect' - we 
protect the public from knowledge of the anomalous. The threats we 
face are our friends, neighbors, relatives, and every last person on 
this planet that's living their life as normally as possible. Everyone 
you know remains what they are - please, keep your normal friends, 
take care of your parents. Better for the mental health. But, from this 
point forward, in addition to being your best friend - they are now 
also a possible leak. That goes for everyone you know, and 
everyone you will ever meet. 


Developing paranoia is a job requirement. 


There will be times where you will have to do horrible, inexcusable 
things to others. In the course of your job, you may - almost certainly 
will - be required to lie to, embarrass, cheat, steal from, coerce, 
blackmail, discredit, threaten, fight, torture, cripple, and possibly kill 
your fellow man in defense of the secrecy of the anomalous. 


Whatever must be done, you will do. | would use the old cliche 
‘failure is not an option’, but that would be an incorrect statement. 
That other option is mass panic and the end of the world, if not 
reality itself, because someone couldn't be arsed to break a few 
eggs to prevent that from occurring. 


Security may have to give their lives for the cause, but you will lose 
at least part of your humanity. 


Many, if not all of you, come from somewhere else within the 
Foundation. You probably feel used to seeing and dealing with 
horrible things. Show of hands. Anyone from Ethics Committee? 
Nobody? That's not really unusual. But, they're the best equipped to 
deal with this sort of thing. If you get the chance, go to their 
orientation. Really thought-provoking stuff. 


The Foundation as a whole does bad things because it has to - 
some might think of it as our hand being forced, others as sacrifices 
for the greater good. But at the end of the day, the Foundation is 
composed of a collection of actions done by individual people. One 
of those people is you. 


Up until now, you have been a bystander. There's been a layer of 
separation between you and the horrible things. You observed in the 
course of study. Defended others from the anomalous. Maybe 
sometimes even requested something that you knew would end 
poorly, but had to be tested to be sure. That's enough to give any 
normal person nightmares, maybe some mental trauma. 


Disinformation Bureau takes you a level further. You will get your 
hands dirty, and it will get to you. 


If you're on the field detail, you're burning down a house with a 


family inside of it because Mr. Simmons has put two and two 
together about what really happened to his brother. He's 
accumulated three years worth of knowledge and contacts. A 
straight up hit would be suspicious - amnestics even more so. As 
part of the Disinformation Bureau under External Affairs - it's your 
job to deal with it quickly and quietly. It won't always be a house fire. 
It might be a landslide, a car accident, or just being in the wrong 
place at the wrong time. 


You're not watching the house, or telling someone else to do it. 
You're carrying the kerosene and lighting the match. Locking the 
doors and barring the windows. Smelling the smoke and hearing the 
screams of agony. Digging through the rubble and checking the 
bodies. Finishing what the fire didn't if required. 


If you're dealing with information control, it's less gritty and a lot 
more psychological. This gets divided again into two halves. 


First half is all about coverup narratives. That's what | do, actually. 
Take a situation caused by an anomaly, craft a plausible story about 
what actually happened, disseminate. You'll get really good at lying. 
In today's world, you can usually cover things up with lone-wolf 
terrorism, cults, that sort of deal. "That doesn't sound so bad, Jane." 
Maybe it isn't. All | do is lie for a living. But it sure as hell gets to me. 


Second half is reinforcing that narrative and erasing others. That 
means cleaning up the scene and making it forensically match, and 
then dealing with witnesses. Making up lies is easy, but making 
them the truth is hard. Cleaning up the scene is pretty-self 
explanatory, but nontrivial and extremely time sensitive. The faster it 
gets cleaned up, the less media exposure of genuine anomalies we 
have to deal with. 


Witnesses. Normally, amnestics can be applied. If we catch it soon 
enough. Couple hours is best case, they'll work passably within a 
few days. After that, amnestics create more problems rather than 
solve them. They've probably written about it, or told someone else. 
Radical changes in behavior or removal of those memories would 
draw attention to the Foundation rather than away. 


People like that either need to be disposed of - which we try to 


avoid, it's pretty suspicious looking - or discredited. There's several 
different methods of doing so. In the modern era, it usually involves 
frame-ups. First path is public detraction/embarassment. Lots of 
different methods there. Whole lecture, actually. Second path is 
government intervention - plant something linking them with 
terrorism, or espionage, and whatever government is out there will 
quietly scoop them up and send them to prison for a very long time. 


For actual, physical evidence, we have to explain that away as 
digital manipulation. The problem comes in when evidence that's 
difficult to tamper with comes up. Sometimes genuine Foundation 
documents are leaked, sometimes it's analog recordings or images. 
Worst cases, someone uploads a cognitohazard. Those are nigh 
impossible to deal with directly. 


The Bureau also has a branch actively generating and disseminating 
bogus information around the clock, but occasionally the public will 
latch onto the one real anomaly in the hundreds of fakes. 


Some of you may go on to work with totalitarian governments. 
They'll be glad to have you - a lot of their weapons research comes 
from us. The Foundation does a lot of testing in backwater countries. 
Less prying eyes, suppressed media, easily manipulated corruption, 
less concern for human rights. Your job is information control in that 
particular country. Some countries like to put you in the cabinet, 
some like to keep you in the shadows. Either way, you will be 
helping to enforce the will of a crackpot dictator. Foundation 
personnel also have a nasty habit of being placed on CIA and other 
intelligence agency hit lists. Don't worry, there's training for that. 


Some of you will liaison with the Internal Security Bureau or the 
Ethics Committee. You'll have another orientation with them, but 
you'll be doing basically the same thing you would be otherwise, 
except internally rather than externally. That's one of the few places 
where even | don't have all of the pieces, so | can't really say too 
much there. 


And there's hundreds of other positions, all with vastly different job 
descriptions. The only thing that they have in common is that all of 
them, more or less directly, fuck with people's lives and how they 
live them. 


It's a lot to deal with. You were all selected for these positions due to 
your aptitude for the tasks, mental resilience, and a previous 
willingness to do whatever is necessary. The training courses deal 
as much with coping with your job and what it entails almost more 
than actual skills. This presentation is a sort of high level overview of 
what you'll learn in the next couple of months, and what you'll be 
doing after that. You'll start learning specifics later on. 


| will now take questions. 


You, with the purple tie. Who am | and why am | here? My name is 
Jane Mossbury, I'm the department head for mass disappearance 
coverups. I'm here because | drew the short straw. 


Navy pantsuit. Is it as bad as | make it out to be? That's really for 
you to determine for yourself. The hours are fortunately pretty 
merciful, and the benefits are pretty nice, but the stress will mount 
over time. I'm not sure | would call it 'job satisfaction’, but there is 
some small tingly feeling from being an integral part of a conspiracy 
that the theorists could hardly imagine. That's also discounting how 
well you put up with the tasks required of you. And the paperwork. 


Black polo. Psychiatric counseling? It's available. Strongly 
recommended. Support groups meet on Tuesdays, information's on 
the bulletin board. Next question. 


Black trenchcoat. Sorry, my apologies, other black trenchcoat. 
Travel? Varies, depending on your position. Off the top of my head, 
field cleaners - agents that go in and clean up anomalous incidents 
before anyone can get to them - travel frequently. Contingency 
planners require less. A lot of the digital folks never travel at all. 


Original black trenchcoat. My personal actions? Unfortunately, | 
can't really discuss those. We have an extensive archive of past 
actions and responses, but a lot of it is classified, some expunged. | 
can't recall which is which right now, but if you really want to know, 
you can look me up in the archive.