The woman laughed, swatting his arm. “Oh would you lay off the ‘I’m 


The Devil, booga booga!’ crap? It’s a weird little socially awkward 
robot who has issues communicating normally. Basically someone 
made a fun-size Dr. Gears." 


"| shouldn't leave. Every time | do, things go to pot. | don't know why 
| let Glass convince me to do this," the tall man muttered. The pom- 
poms on the rim of his hat swayed gently. "Maybe | should cancel. 
Tell the others I'm staying here, just to be sure." 


"Don't be such a stick-up the ass. Try to relax, you're on vacation. 
Now, can we please go?” She grabbed his arm, starting to tug him 
away, and he reluctantly followed, craning his neck to try and still 
see the robot. 


Had he hesitated a few seconds more before being pulled through 
the doorway, he would have noticed the sudden flicker in the mouth 
screen. It was quickly back to its normal, smiling mouth, but for a 
moment, it displayed a roiling, bubbling mass of grey strings, 
wavering against an oily, black background. 


“I am the best!” 

“I am the best!” 

“No, no...me, | and the best!” 
“No, me!” 

“Damn it...” 


The security guard sighed, rubbing his forehead. The little goofy 
robot was neat, but it was about as smart as a bag of doorknobs. 
After getting it to repeat a bunch of swear words, the game was 
starting to get old. He stood, looking down at the little robot. The top 
hat tilted up, the screen flicking on to the animated mouth. 


“Damn you.” 

“...What did you say?” 
“Damn me, and damn you.” 
“Whatever, just shut up.” 


The guard was a little nervous. He probably wasn’t supposed to be 
playing with this thing, but being alone on-site at night was probably 
the worst thing ever in his opinion. Another voice helped ease things 


a bit, even if it was only from a weird little robot. Now, however, he 
was getting worried about what might happen if people found out 
he’d been screwing around with this thing. He hurriedly picked up 
his rifle from the floor and looked over the bot. 


“Everything looks ok, | think...” 

“Everything is just fine. Come to me.” 

“Listen; don’t tell anyone those things | taught you, ok?” 
“The hate pours hard in the eyes of you, you must join in.” 


The robot’s ever-smiling mouth was starting to get a little creepy, 
along with the weird shit it was saying. He backed away a bit, 
looking it over to see if there were any obvious issues. Then he saw 
the leak. He felt the blood drain from his face as he watched a slow 
drip of grayish goo drip from a seam in the back of the “head”, slowly 
slipping down its back. 


“Shitshitshitshit!” 
“Shit your pain.” 


He quickly looked around for a cloth or anything to wipe it up with, 
but found nothing. Cursing again, he reached out as tried to scoop 
up as much as he could with his hands. He wiped the oily substance 
on to the back of his pants, thankful that it didn’t appear to stain. 
Pulling down his sleeves, he used them to rub off the rest of the 
residue. Watching for a little bit, to make sure nothing else was 
coming out, he nodded, some color coming back to his face. 


“Oh, thank God...must have gotten something on you” 
“| have gotten.” 

“Yeah, | guess. Gotta be hopping little guy!” 

“Be seeing you soon.” 


He quickly walked out of the room, making his way to the closed 
offices for his rounds, ignoring the mild tingling in his hands. 
Probably some kind of chemical or something in it, have to hit the 
bathroom and wash up. As he turned down the hall, he had the 
sudden compulsion to go to the break room, or the main entry. He 
almost made a wrong turn, but shook his head and headed in to the 
bathroom. Stupid robot must have scared him worse then he’d 
thought. Although, he had made only one sweep of the entry way... 


another wouldn’t hurt. He hurriedly left the bathroom without 
washing, leaving his gun on the counter. Had anyone been 
watching, they might have had concern over the glassiness of his 
eyes, or his oddly uncoordinated walk. 


No one was, however, and he quickly walked through the double 
doors in to the main entry. The door closed behind him, and silence 
ruled the hall for half an hour. A sudden, loud shouting broke this 
calm, but was quickly stifled, the cool darkness of the site once 
again unbroken and total. 


The word processor’s animated paper clip assistant waves and 
winks at you. Your colleagues have told you multiple times that the 
thing is just a pain in the ass, but personally you think he’s kinda 
cute. Besides, he does help keep you awake at night, especially 
during long shifts such as this one. You blink hard and refocus on 
the task at hand. Before you rests a seemingly bottomless pile of 
notes to be transcribed into digital format for storage, which you’ve 
been working at all night. However, even though there’s no end in 
sight to the paperwork, you can't say that it’s not interesting. Hatbot 
is one hell of a piece of engineering, you think to yourself. 


More papers, more notes, more time spent. You look at the clock 
and realize it’s nearly one in the A.M., then groan in annoyance. You 
always told yourself that you would never end up being one of the 
graveyard shift paper pushers, not while working in this place. 
Never. 


So much for that, eh. 


Eyelids droop across your vision and you decide a strong mug of 
coffee is just what you need. It’s hot and full of caffeine, but you 
notice some odd greasy residue on your hands when you replace 
the pot on the burner. Thinking nothing of it, you wipe it on your 
clothes and return to work. The coffee helps; you immediately feel a 
bit more alert, and your productivity increases markedly. Maybe 
you'll finish after all. 


Then again, maybe not. You blink and stare at the screen in 
disbelief; this entire page is full of angry red scribbles and Clippy is 


yelling at you for being so careless. Thank god he takes the liberty 
of fixing most of your errors, but the damage to your pride is done. 
Another page and yet more typos crop up, slowing you down even 
further. You wonder what the hell was in that coffee because this is 
simply ridiculous. You make a mental note to send Mavis Beacon an 
angry letter, should you ever get time to do so. Clippy, meanwhile, 
dutifully goes about cleaning up your ham-handed mistakes. 


Blink again, look at the screen. No, Look at it closer. Your simple 
misspellings are beginning to translate into completely erroneous 
phrases. Phrases spill into complete sentences, and soon you have 
entire paragraphs of gibberish. Mash the backspace key sluggishly, 
you’re so tired that you have to force yourself to do even that. The 
cursor stops, seemingly on its own, bracketing your attention around 
a peculiar piece of writing. 


"So, we started to come to the blackness that yawns beneath the 
layers of thought, of reality itself." 


“..Did | write this?” You hear yourself ask. At the same time you 
notice your palms moisten and you draw in a sharp, fearful breath. 
Or at least you try to, instead managing to wheeze ineffectually. “.. 
Try again. Keep trying, finish up and go to sleep.” Your hands 
manipulate the keys, but what you think is not what you type. 


“Blackness awaits you. In your thoughts and in your dreams, there is 
only blackness. It awaits us all.” 


Another hard blink. “Turn it off. Turn the computer off, you're done 
here,” you panic to yourself, but your hands continue to type on a 
whim of their own. You don’t give up so easily though, you’re a 
tough girl, and it took you a lot of hard work to get here. You power 
through the mental barrier and stand, trembling, staggering towards 
the doorway. Unconsciously your hands move to your eyes; when 
you hold them before you, they are covered in black oil. 


“Get help. Get out of here.” The airlock opens with a hiss as you 
lurch into the hall and collide with one of the posted guards. Your 
mind screams at you to speak to him, but no words come from your 
mouth. Your actions are not your own anymore; you swing at the 
man, startling him, but he quickly subdues you and knocks you to 


the ground. 
“Help! Help me!” you scream to yourself. 


“You, too, will contribute to the black. The empty. The abyss,” is 
what you manage to croak. Your heart races and you sweat 
profusely, only it's not sweat: it’s that same oily mess. Your mind 
contorts in agony as the realization strikes home that you are not 
yourself anymore, this body is no longer yours. Your mind is all 
that’s left of you, and nobody will ever see the real you again. You 
lost the battle for control of yourself long ago. 


You are trapped, in this body. And all that awaits you is the 
blackness. 


Time 


Time was slowly trickling down into the deep subterranean complex 
of Site 17, flooding its corridors, conquering containment chambers, 
drowning cells and labs, seeping through meter-thick blast doors 
and laughing in the faces of armed guards. Time knew no 
hindrances. Even an almighty Foundation that stood above 
governments, defeated gods and overcame demons, even it did not 
possess a cure for Time. No special containment procedures could 
ever stop this keterest of all Keters. Humanity accepted its power 
and presence so much that it didn't even try to find a way to stand 
against time, let alone fight it. Only the digits on watches and timers 
were clicking away, grimly confirming Time's presence. And all the 
while Time flooded every room to the ceiling, dissolving things and 
events - some momentarily, like sugar, others remained longer. Yet 
all of them were dissolved eventually - dissolved and carried away 
with Time's inexorable flow. 


The keterest of all Keters was roaming among the containment cells, 
touching everyone and everything. The horns on a goddess- 
daughter's head grew by a hair's width yet again. Her screams thirty 
years ago when she had realized they were piercing out were quite 
loud. Alas, genetics is incompliant, and if one's mother was horned, 
one would be doomed to be horned as well. Now she was praying 
humbly upon a rather dog-eared Bible. Horns suited her well and her 
aging was quite slow, so she probably would have looked no day 
older than 25 - but Time scorned her skin as if in retaliation. A chain 
is only as strong as its weakest link, as they say. 


Her petite neighbor didn't grow an inch, although the changes in her 
were considerable. The only thing left of her original self was a small 
part of her brain an a right eye. Somewhere in her twenties her body 
came to think that mechanical organs suited it more than "natural" 
ones and began to reject whatever human parts were still left. That 
was when pieces of some long-scrapped gadgeteer came in 
handy, especially his artificial skin. Some ten years later the only 


thing betraying a human presence in the petite cyborgess was this 
very eye which was prone to drying out and inflammations. She 
clung to it for a long time, like a child to her favored toy, but Nature 
took its own eventually. Request for a replacement eye was pending 
approval, and a more practical implant was soon to be installed. 
That was a logical and practical decision, worthy of a perfect mind. 


Time was consuming objects and entities, events and experiments, 
leaving behind only ashes of burned logs and reports. Reading 
those still made some people's hair stand on end, but who could 
imagine the events described therein at least half as vividly? Maybe 
those who experienced them firsthand would, but their numbers 
were dwindling... some chose not to remember things. Memory was 
gone with the smoke, and documents were but ash compared to it. 
Another object decommissioned by Dr. Time due to old age, its last 
shadow imprinted on a bed sheet in its containment cell. And then 
its decrepit body became visible again. 


Some pretty resilient and pleasant memories were slowly dissolving 
in Site 17 director's office. A bunch of birthday cards with the 
number 55 were lying on the table, thrown by a careless hand. How 
many times was she 55, again? Her colleagues feared she might get 
angry, and did so for a reason. Still, a good specialist is entitled to 
her quirks. Funny thing is, these congratulations only made the pain 
worse, reminding her of her true age. So did the photos on the walls. 
Among those depicted, only the office's tenant remained alive - cats, 
dogs and even ornithosaurians have shorter lifespans. Al/ dogs. 
Even a Foundation professor. 


Time was knocking at the doors of those who sought refuge from it, 
like lumps of earth. A woman lying dormant in a containment cell 
suddenly screamed and jumped awake, pitifully gasping for air. 
"What did you dream of?" - asked Time, a stony tenderness in its 
voice. "Boiled children, maybe?" Time snorted and ran a cold finger 
across the woman's face, leaving another wrinkle behind. "You will 
cease, you will die" - hushed the whispers in the old hag's head, and 
it seemed to her that it was sand dropping on a coffin lid. For now, 
the only thing to cease in this "home" was a light bulb. Time 
chuckled as the old hag screamed and darted away from the lamp 
that cracked and went dark. "Dark in here. Grave darkness, eh, old 


involving SCP-148 are forbidden by order of O5- . 


Subject: D-19831 

Photographed Activity: Standing in an empty room, facing the 
camera, neutral expression. 

Photo Result: D-19831 is seen standing in a well-furnished room. 
In his arms is an infant child. Both D-19831 and the infant are 
expressing extreme joy. 

Note: D-19831 later confessed the infant was his one year old 
daughter. 


Subject: D-7294 

Photographed Activity: Seated in his cell. 

Photo Result: Subject is playing a makeshift cello, which appears 
to have been constructed from the body of a female mannequin. A 
second cello lies broken in the corner of the cell. 


Subject: Dr. Kald 

Photographed Activity: Filling out medical paperwork, very bored 
expression on face, one eye looking at the cameraman, eyebrow 
raised in ire. 

Photo Result: Foreground shows a man in combat fatigues with a 
gut wound. Dr. Kald can be seen in the background, sprinting in the 
general direction of the man. A First Aid kit is held in one hand, Dr. 
Kald appears to be shooting somebody with a pistol held in his other 
hand. Large sections of the surroundings are apparently enshrouded 
in fire. 

Note: .../ knew | missed working in the field, but | didn't know my 
subconscious was this...testosterone-laden. -Dr. Kald 


Subject: Dr. Trebuchet 

Photographed Activity: Reading Incident Report 811- at her 
desk. 

Photo Result: Sleeping at her desk. 

Note: Bah. Sleep can go [EXPLETIVE REDACTED] itself. I've got 
work to do. ~Dr. Trebuchet 


Subject: Dr. Trebuchet 

Photographed Activity: Passed out at her desk after 89 straight 
hours of transcribing interview logs. A small puddle of drool is 
forming on the papers under her head. 


hag?" - the darkness queried as the old woman's heart skipped a 
beat, seemingly thinking about stopping once and for all. But her 
heart went on, and so did Time. Not today, old woman. Time was 
not interested in her conscience. This time it came here for the light. 


A man in a cell with soft, padded walls raised his eyes, red and 
maddened, as if sensing some intangible presence. "You managed 
to escape death,” - Time said to him. - "Me, you will not escape" An 
antediluvian doctor, always a bother to the O5, was able to swap 
bodies as he saw fit, but his mind grew ever older, more senile, 
eventually going completely blank. New Council members - did you 
think you'd become one of them some day? - did not put up with the 
shenanigans of a doctor slowly lapsing into madness. His 
usefulness grew lesser and lesser... at first he got an SCP 
designation and a comfy cell. Later on, when people had enough of 
his suicidal inventiveness, he received a strait-jacket and a daily diet 
of sedatives.