He looks back. Grey has stood up and started moving towards him, 
still with that confident smile. And there's definitely something wrong 
with him now because he's visible through the tables, like an 
augmented reality holoprojection jammed inside Kim's eyeball. 


Kim realises with a stab of fear that he can even see Grey when he 
blinks. His eyelids close, but Grey is still there, an apparition in what 
for all of Kim's life has been totally personal, private darkness. The 
only way he can avoid seeing Grey is to turn away, and even then 
he feels a radioactive prickling in the back of his eyeballs. 


Kim tries to phone one of the newbies. The phone in the newbie's 
pocket rings, and other than that, nothing happens. Nobody reacts. 


"That doesn't make sense," Kim says. 
"Do you remember your father?" Grey says. 
"| never knew my father," Kim says, edging away. "Mom raised me." 


Grey's white smile is a fixture. "These people loved your 
perspective. They were going to put you to work on anomalous 
antimemes. But they don't remember you exist. You don't exist." 


Kim says, mainly to himself, "There aren't any dangerous SCPs on 
this site. It's a Safe site. So either you're not dangerous, or nobody 


knows you exist. And if nobody knows you exist, then that means 
you're either brand new, or... you're... What's an antimeme?" 


"Hell of a first day," Grey says. 
"Are you sentient?" Kim asks. 
"You seem on edge," Grey says. 


Kim bolts. He exits the cafeteria, turns a corner and runs ten or 
eleven paces down the corridor, to where there's an elevator. He 
stabs the "down" button and waits. The elevator door is highly 
polished, reflective. Kim catches sight of a face in the mirrored 
surface and nearly falls over with shock, because it's a face he has 
never seen before, and it's apparently his own. "Jesus! Oh, no no 
no," he babbles. "What the hell, what the he/HC" 


Grey comes around the corner, still only strolling, just as the elevator 
cracks open. Kim dives in and punches the lowest floor, basement 
level 8. It's instinctive, although he could rationalise the decision in 
retrospect. (He can't just get in his car and drive. It's better if Grey 
stays on site than if he's set loose in rational "reality". And to do that 
it's better if Kim retreats to the lowest, darkest corner of the site for 
which he has access. And then waits for Grey, and then locks all the 
doors behind them. And waits to die...) The elevator starts 
descending, and the apparation of Grey - visible through doors and 
floors - disappears upwards, shrinking with distance and 
perspective, but still smiling broadly down at Kim. 


Kim paces in the elevator. / don't remember what my face looks like. 
It said it had eaten all my secondary languages, but | don't 
remember learning anything other than English. So— It's eating my 
memories. It's consuming information. And | can't contact anybody 
directly, which means I'm on my own. 


I'm not trained for this. 


He hammers his head once against the elevator wall, and stares at 
his shoes. But | don't know that. What if I've been trained, but | don't 
remember my training anymore? What if I've been working here for 
years and | only think this is my first day? Whaat if I've met this thing 


before? What if everybody on the site has met it multiple times... 
and... nobody remembers? Is this what an antimeme is? 


Kim remembers the near-empty cafeteria. And miles of totally 
unoccupied corridors and vacant office and lab space. Maybe it's not 
just eating my memories. Maybe it eats people whole, removes 
them completely from history. Maybe it's been haunting the site for 
years and that's why the site's so empty, because it's nearly finished 
exterminating us all? 


| need to get help. | need to warn somebody. How? | can't talk to 
people, | can't phone them. | should— | should write an SCP. 


But surely someone's already thought of that. 


He pulls his phone out. He pulls out the listing. Nearly ten thousand 
SCP entries. A hundred of them are tagged "antimemetics" alone. 


Kim clears his mind. Grey with an E. G-R-E-Y. 4-7-3-9. 
SCP-4739 
Object class: Keter 


Special Containment Procedures: |'m disregarding the 
format, because time is a factor. If you're reading this, 
you've already been isolated from the Foundation at 
large. Attempts to signal for help are futile. You are now 
inside 4739's gullet, after ingestion and prior to digestion. 
You need to get to lab S041-B08-053 as soon as 
possible and continue the research until you find a way 
to stop or kill Grey, before it kills you. Don't read the rest 
until you're in the elevator. 


Description: 


At that moment the elevator doors open at basement level 8. 
Alastair Grey is waiting, still smiling disarmingly. He steps forward. 


Desperate, Kim hurls his phone overarm at the creature's forehead. 
It's a solid chunk of metal and it's a dead hit. Grey reels backwards 
and cracks his skull against the wall. By the time he recovers, Kim is 


out of sight, haring away down the left corridor, just echoing, fading 
footsteps on concrete. 


Two forty-five degree turns, and room 53 is in sight, the door at the 
farthest end. It looks like a submarine bulkhead. Kim spots the 
keypad from way out. Four digits. He tries 4739, and it works first 
time. The bulkhead mechanism takes agonising seconds to open 


up. 
"Come on, come on, come on!" 


"Do you remember your mother?" he hears Grey calling down the 
corridor. 


"| never knew my parents, | was an orphan," Kim hisses under his 
breath. For a split second he wonders what Grey might really mean 
by that, but he doesn't have time to dwell on it. 


The bulkhead opens. Kim slides in and pulls it closed behind him, 
locking the mechanism up again, as if that'll buy him even one 
second. The lab inside is sizeable, windowless of course, and 
stacked to the ceiling with a jumble of equipment which Kim hardly 
recognises. There are pieces of thick shattered glass underfoot. In 
the corner there's a computer terminal, locked. Kim unlocks it, and 
there's the same entry waiting for him: 


Description: SCP-4739 is a powerful, slow-acting 
antimemetic kill agent taking the appearance of a male 
Caucasian business executive calling itself "Alastair 
Grey". SCP-4739 is attracted to dense clusters of 
organically-stored information - essentially, extremely 
knowledgeable, complicated, interesting people. 
SCP-4739 isolates its victim from the outside world by 
enveloping them in an antimemetic field which makes it 
impossible for the victim, or anything done by the victim, 
to be perceived or remembered. SCP-4739 then 
consumes the victim's memories and knowledge until 
they become vegetative and die. This process takes 
between 15 minutes and 2 hours and is described as 
being "like Alzheimer's disease in fast-forward”. 


SCP-4739 is not believed to be sentient, although it 
imitates the behaviour of a sentient being to the extent 
that it can appear sentient to the inattentive. Its victims 
are able to move and act freely, since it is impossible to 
escape once caught, or to signal for help. 
Communications such as written notes, graffiti and 
electronic mail do get sent, and persist in reality, but 
SCP-4739's effect spreads with each message, making it 
impossible for an external observer to perceive the 
message until such time as SCP-4739 catches them too. 


The SCP entry which you are currently reading is 
created and maintained by victims of SCP-4739, 
because it is only visible to victims of SCP-4739. If you 
are reading this SCP entry, SCP-4739 has caught you. 
You are now isolated from the Foundation at large and 
constitute an effective Foundation of one. You have 
between 15 minutes and 2 hours to reach Site 41, 
basement level 8, laboratory 053, familiarise yourself 
with the existing research, and continue this research 
until you find a way to contain or decommission 
SCP-4739, or, more likely, die. If your field of expertise is 
not related to antimemetic containment, we sincerely 
apologise, and advise you to start learning. Fast. 


SCP-4739 has consumed ||| [I[I] TIII TI TIE TIN TTT THI 
UVLNT UTIL VTLTT TENT TTT TINT THIIT Il] Foundation researchers 
since we started counting on August 3, 2013. (If you are 
reading this entry for the first time, please add a mark.) 
We estimate at least 50% of victims never make it as far 
as this database entry, so the true victim count is more 
than twice this figure. 


"But how do | kill it?" Kim screams. He scrolls and scrolls through 
the research, which is chaotic and haphazardly arranged, because 
nobody has found the spare seconds to sort it out. There are dozens 
of separate lines of research, contributed in patchwork by a 
succession of victims, all ending with variations on the same final 
line: "I'm going to try X. If you're reading this, X didn't work and I'm 
dead, which means approach X is a dead end, and you have to think 


of something else." 


He reads. Nobody has succeeded in physically engaging with Grey. 
Nobody can stall it, evade it, slow it down, reason with it or redirect it 
to some other target. People have tried poisoning their memories 
with indigestible ideas, drip-feeding their memories to Grey to slow 
him down, replacing their memories faster than Grey can eat them, 
and force-feeding Grey too many memories at once to overfeed him 
and blow him up. They've tried committing suicide by Class-A 
amnestic overdose. None of it worked. More than a hundred people, 
most of them apparently possessing doctorates, have slid into the 
maw of this thing, fought briefly and, with a greater or lesser degree 
of dignity, died. 


There are no remaining untried threads. 


"I'm fucked!" Kim concludes. He glances up. Grey's not in the room 
yet, but Kim can see him strolling down the last stretch of corridor. 
He's a totally intangible being, physical obstructions are irrelevant to 
him. He can't be hurt. 


Kim clutches the pocket where he used to keep his phone. 
Wait a second. 


He scrolls again. He finds the three or four sad, desperate wretches 
who died confronting Grey physically. Combat knife and Glock. 
Baseball bat (Kim looks up and checks the room; sure enough, the 
bat's there, rolled under a table). One man, an elderly botanist far 
out of his depth, said he was just going to try whatever he could find 
that was heaviest. That explains the shattered CRT television, and 
the light layer of thick glass on the floor near the bulkhead. There's 
even CCTV footage of the botanist's attempt. He accomplishes 
literally nothing. Grey is a holographic ghost, and the CRT drops 
right through him, imploding when it hits the floor at Grey's feet. The 
botanist spends the rest of the video's running time huddled in a 
corner, gradually losing his mind while Grey watches placidly. 


The difference being, Kim realises with his eyes boggling, a phone is 
a Solid brick full of information. And before me, nobody tried using 
information as a missile. 


Kim searches for the experiments - several of them, scattered - 
where the victim tried to divert Grey to a different data source. The 
general idea seemed to be to overload Grey by pointing him at 
something containing too much information: the internet, or the 
terabit feed from a live particle accelerator experiment, or a stack of 
hard drives containing the first few quadrillion binary digits of pi. But 
nobody could figure out a way to distract Grey's attention; 
prominently-placed screens full of data, he would ignore; data 
beamed at him electromagnetically (radio, laser) had no effect. And 
nobody could figure out a way to tunnel the information in through 
the victim's mind as extra memories. It was written off as impossible, 
closed as a line of investigation. 


The hard drives, Kim finds, are right there on the workbench next to 
the computer. It's a half-rack unit, a cuboidal block of metalwork as 
big and heavy as a bowling ball. One of the most ineffective 
conceivable melee weapons. 


Kim snatches up the three longest pieces of ethernet cable he can 
find, and starts plaiting them into a chain. 


Then he remembers who he is, and where he is, and what his 
responsibilities are. He goes to the computer, to the SCP entry, 
adds himself to the victim tally and writes up exactly what it is he's 
about to try. Because he might not be the last one, and the world 
needs to know that this didn't work. 


* 


Grey comes through the lab bulkhead to find most of the equipment 
in the room toppled onto the floor, to create room for the black and 
silver drive array that Paul Kim is whirling around his head, on a two- 
metre chain made of plaited network cable. It makes a low 
thrumming sound as it whirls. Grey is not intelligent enough to stop 
moving forwards, and catches the array directly in the side of his 
head, rack mount point first, like a morningstar. 


Grey absorbs a few trillion digits of the impact, but it isn't enough. 
There's a green snap of light and a noise like a subway train short- 
circuiting, and Grey's a pile in the corner, his head caved in and the 


drive array partially demolished in pieces around him. 
Kim decides that history can fill in whatever quip it likes best. 


* 


"It was chewing its way up the Antimemetics Division hierarchy," 
Wheeler tells him in the aftermath. "It was only a matter of time until 
it bit down on somebody dangerous. Congratulations on 
demonstrating a basic level of competence when it counted. Dozens 
of others couldn't." 


Kim still feels rattled. But the shock is dissipating, faster than he'd 
expected. 


Marion Wheeler, it turns out, is the Antimemetics Division chief. She 
is Kim's new boss. 


"| want to say it was dumb luck," Kim says. "I want to say that | just 
threw my phone, it was instinct, it was muscle memory. It was my 
first day, and | got lucky as hell. ...! want to say those things, but I'm 
sitting here, and turning those statements over, and none of them 
would be true, would they?" 


Wheeler waits expectantly, and says nothing. 


"You're not my new boss,” Kim says. "You're just my boss. This isn't 
my first day at all. I've been working here for... well, it must be over 
a decade, right? | think I've been a professional antimemetics 
researcher since at least the mid-2000s. It's just that the first thing 
Grey ate was my memories of everything past the first day. And 
even then..." 


"| see very little luck in what happened today," Wheeler says. 
"Instinct and muscle memory are just deep forms of training. Like | 
said, a basic level of competence. An ability to piece your own life 
and all of your past knowledge back together, faster than nearly 
anybody else. This is what we try to drill into you. And sometimes, 
thankfully, it takes." 


"This isn't even the first time we've had this conversation," Kim 


continues. "There've been other incidents. With other SCPs with 
amnestic powers. You've sat there and watched me put myself back 
together before." 


"And it hasn't gotten old yet," Wheeler admits, with something which 
might be approaching a smirk. 


"How long does it usually take for me to recover?" 


"A few months," Wheeler says. "But if you want the honest truth, 
people in this division are as competent on day one as they'll ever 
be. You come to the job firing on all cylinders, or not at all. The rest 
is just fine-tuning and chemistry." 


"So what you're actually saying is you don't care about my mental 
state and you need me back at work now," Kim says. 


Wheeler nods. "| need an updated SCP entry, just to begin with. | 
need you to nail down the model for Grey's predatory pattern and 
exactly how you defeated it. | want you to work out what it did with 
the bodies - incinerated, disintegrated, or just left them lying around 
the site in rotting perceptually cloaked heaps. And | need 
countermeasures for when it comes back."