Marissa seethed silently for a second, then sat up and looked 
directly into Sharon's eyes, the intensity of her expression causing 
the researcher to flinch. 


"Fuck. Them." She said, her voice serious and leaden. 
Sharon stuttered. "I- What? Do you hate them?" 


Marissa rolled her eyes. "I don't hate them, | just don't give a shit. | 
do not have any shits left to give. | ran out of shits sometime around 
the point | was first thrown in a cell and | ran out of fucks when | 
realised I'd never get to leave. Why the fuck would | hate them? I've 
never met them." 


Marissa stood up as she ranted, knocking over the chair that was 
beside her small table and striding around the room. She would've 
kicked things out of the way and knocked people over if any were 
present. 


"Sure, life outside dealing with this shit isn't much better - but at 
least | could do what | liked and | didn't have shrinks and doctors 
and researchers and interns fucking poking at me and running shitty 
tests all the fucking time. At least | could wear what | wanted and go 
where | liked and | didn't have to wear this fucking government issue 
bullshit jewellery." She gestured at the metal tracker bracelet on her 
left wrist. "Fuck this 'designation' dickery anyway." She kicked the 
chair again and glared at Sharon, waiting for a response she didn't 
want but knowing that there was not really a whole lot else to do in 
the cell. 


Sharon waited looked down at her clipboard. "It sounds to me like 
your depression is getting much worse, and, uh..." 
Marissa's face twitched slightly as Sharon flipped some pages on a 


clipboard, but she waited for the end of the sentence. 

".,.you're probably developing some severe control and anger 
issues, too..." Sharon trailed off again under Marissa's enraged 
stare. 


Marissa threw her hands up in a mockery of celebration. "Well 
fucking done, doc. | think you've cured me and everyone else 
dealing with issues in a fifty foot radius! Hey, does that mean you're 
next to be locked up in one of these cells? That's gotta be some 
magical bullshit right there!" 


Sharon managed to keep her expression blank. "...I'm sorry?" 


Marissa began to stride around the room again. "Take a person, 
give them the ability to change reality, but have it only happen at 
random points and make it so that it changes to whatever they're 
thinking about. Let them have no control over this. Let them watch 
their father die because of a stray thought." 


Then, lock them in a jail and reduce their choices to 'what way do 
you want to be bored today?’ and ‘which shitty meal do you want?’, 
of course they're going to have control issues. Of course they're 
going to be angry. Of course they're going to be fucking depressed." 


"What the fuck did you expect? That I'd be the smiling ambassador 
for the magical happy land of sunshine and rainbows? Am | 
supposed to turn around and tell you how you're a real brilliant 
shrink, and this is such a great insight that | think | might be cured? 
Fuuuuck yooou." Marissa kicked the table, not really sure how to 
continue ranting but not really willing to stop. 


Sharon said, "Well, no, of course you're not going to be 'cured' 
instantly - I'm not a miracle worker. But if you work with me a bit 
here, we can get your treatment plan modified so that you're not 
dealing with quite as much depression and anger - or at least, so 
that it doesn't get any worse." 


Marissa turned away. "No, you fucking cannot. That is bullshit, and 
you know it." 


Sharon sighed. "| Know you don't trust psych-" 


Marissa interrupted her again. "I don't trust you. Not shrinks. You." 
"Me in particular? Why?" Sharon asked. 


Marissa flopped into a sitting position on the bed. "Not just you. You 
and your whole organisation. You keep me locked up here. You talk 
about 'making me better.’ You can't just fuck off and leave me alone. 
You know what would make me feel better? If | could leave that 
would be great. | like that treatment plan - you can call it ‘the most 
obvious fucking thing in the world’ and patent it for use in your 
fucking prisons or whatever." 


Sharon said, "You know we don't run prisons, Marissa - many of our, 
uh, patients would die or kill a lot of people if left to their own 
devices. Anyway, | thought you said that life wasn't really that much 
better when you were left to yourself?" 


Marissa didn't really have a good answer to the question. Sniffling, 
she rubbed her eyes. "Yeah, well, not really all that much better is 
still better. Anyway, if it's not a prison, why can't | fucking leave? 
Why do | gotta wear a damn bracelet with a designation number and 
probably some sort of tracker bullshit?" 


Sharon looked directly into Marissa's eyes. "You know the danger 
you can cause to people, even if you don't mean to. | don't think you 
really want that." 


Marissa looked away. "You don't fucking know what | want. | don't 
know what | want. | just know | don't want this life," she sobbed. "I 
just want to be left alone." 


Sharon waited a minute for Marissa to compose herself a bit then 
said, "It seems like you haven't, but | have to ask, have you felt like 
hurting yourself?" 


Marissa didn't know whether to cry or smash the television. "I don't 
want to commit suicide or hurt myself, you idiot. I'm human and 
humans want to survive, not to die. It sucks balls. | didn't ask to be 
given this, this fucking ‘desire’ to keep going, but it's bullshit. | want 
my fucking money back." 


Sharon made some notes on her clipboard. Marissa mumbled 
something to herself and Sharon asked her to repeat it. 


Marissa said, "| don't wish | was dead. No one wants that. Not 
really." 


Sharon looked at her quizzically. "What?" 


Marissa practically jumped off the bed, knocking the table over, 
looked at Sharon and, sobbing, yelled "| don't wish | was dead - | 
just wish | didn't fucking exist, ok?! Life would be better if | had never 
been born, and none of this shit had ever fucking happened." 


Sharon looked around the empty room, wondering why she was 
there. It looked a lot like a humanoid containment area, but there 
was no bed, no television, no furniture or fittings at all except for the 
chair she sat in and the standard table, bolted to the floor. Standing 
up, she wobbled on her feet a bit and nearly fell back down, holding 
onto the table to regain her balance. 


After taking a few deep breaths, she strode quickly to the exit, trying 
to tell herself that she wasn't panicking. Looking around the corridor 
outside of the cell, she saw the nearby security post was empty. 
Walking through the door of the security post, she picked up a 
phone from the desk and dialed her supervisor's extension. 


"Doctor Palmer? It's Sharon. | think | may have been amnesticised. 
My schedule says, uh -" she pulled her notebook from her pocket 
and flicked through a couple of pages, "-| was due to interview, uh, 
SCP-055 at this time? I'm at the security post outside its cell." 


The response was a few seconds coming. "...what? 055? Standby, 
Sharon, I'll send a medical team to your location. Don't move." 


Sharon hung up the phone and sat in the security post chair to await 
the medical team. She looked back through the plexiglass at the 
containment cell door and, not knowing entirely why, began to cry in 
grief, feeling as if something precious had been lost. 


AK=([9K/O8x], [OK/By], [OK/3z]) Or: Episiotometrics 


"How long have we got?" Matthew said, his stomach growling. 


Zeke had been looking at his watch almost constantly for the last 
twenty minutes. “Three minutes, ten seconds. Nine seconds.” A 
pause. “Five seconds.” 


“Which way did you Say it is?” Matthew asked. 
"How many times have you asked that?" Zeke said. 
"Too many, | think," Matthew replied. 


Zeke shuffled and looked at the backpack beside him. Fuck, | don't 
wanna carry this thing any further, he thought. Foundation tech had 
gotten to a sci-fi level towards the end, but as the seriousness of the 
crisis grew, the R&D boys just quit trying to miniaturize. This thing, 
they probably figured, would be carried on a truck. Well, that was a 
great thought, back when we had gas. 


"How much further?" Zeke asked. 


"Two miles. And we have about..." Matthew looked at his watch. "... 
three hours before the window closes. We gotta get up, dude." 


"Oh, shit, really?" Zeke said. "| was gonna suggest a quickie while | 
was flat on my back. You make this sound all urgent and shit." 


"You aren't boyfriend material, Zeke," Matthew said, straight-faced. 
"Get the fuck up. Let's go save the world." 


"You weren't so grumpy back in Atlanta," Zeke replied. 


"It's the end of the world and I'm indiscriminate. Sue me. | told you it 
wasn't something serious. You wanna wax nostalgic about a hookup 
until the window closes, or do you wanna pick up that backpack 
already?" 


Zeke was already standing up. "Come on, let's do a thing." 


Kk 


"How many times do you reckon we've done this by now?" Matthew 
asked. 


"Do you remember an apocalypse that's slipped my mind?" Zeke 
replied. "This seems pretty fucking fresh to me." 


"You know what | mean. What the Overwatch fuckers said during 
the briefing." 


"You bought that shit? Parallel universes? Other versions of Ezekiel 
Washington and Matthew Cloar wandering the countryside, getting 
into sexually confusing escapades and making last stands against 
the end of the world? You think there are really millions of us?" 


"| mean, | try not to think too hard about there being more than one 
of you in the first place, but yeah, | have no reason to think they 
were gonna make this up. It's already stupid enough." 


Zeke tried to shrug, winced with the effort. "Makes a dumb kind of 
sense to me. Get one of these scantron machines to the exact right 
coordinates, turn them all on, magic away the dying of the light. It's 
no stupider than half the other shit they apparently did that made 
this happen." 


Matthew kept walking for a few minutes in silence. "You think we're 
gonna see our families again?" 


Zeke shook his head. "Fucked if | know. | hope so. They said there 
was a Chance that when we undid this, we'd all revert back into a 
world where it never happened. | figure it'll probably be one of those 
paradox things where there's just one ideal world, and we won't be 
in it. But we'll have made it possible. Us and all the others. | guess 
that's worth something, knowing that some Libby's gonna see her 
daddy again somewhere." Zeke would have had tears running down 
his face if he had been properly hydrated. 


The walk was phenomenally boring without conversation. Just mile 
after mile of flat Tennessee countryside, the occasional hill, empty 


houses, empty towns, cannibalized rat piles, lots of tattered 
American flags still on poles from where their owners never thought 
to take them down before dying. Disrespectful, Matthew thought. 


"God damn, how much of this state got ratted out?" Matthew said. "I 
figured we'd be well into spider country by now." 


"Nah, the Proletariat never got out of Arkansas heading this 
direction," Zeke said. "| think their chairman crossed a Fifthist 
something or other, made a blood enemy out of the Lake County 
and Memphis congregations at the same time. Not easy to get 
rednecks to agree with something happening in Memphis, | can god 
damn well assure you of that." 


"Oh, shit, yeah, you're from around here," Matthew said. 


"Paducah, sure. It's across the border north of here. | mean, you 
know," Zeke sputtered. "It was north of here, before the Franklin 
War." 


"I'll pretend like | remember what that was," Matthew said. "| was 
busy with the balrog, remember?" 


"| still think that sounds like horseshit," Zeke said. "You were from 
Philly, weren't you? Not that close to the Centralia dee zee." 


"You're a fucking peach, you know that?" Matthew said, too 
exhausted to be disgusted. "You get that he got hungry after he 
picked off all the Amish, right? Trust me, Philly was definitely a 
fucking Disaster Zone. It's probably as flat as the rest of the Eastern 
Seaboard by now." 


A few more minutes in silence. "Not that you give a shit," Zeke said, 
"but at least my fuckers got got not long after they got my town." 


"What, the Franklinites?" Matthew said. "They not around 
anymore?" 


"Nah, portal sucked the whole state up, dropped them off in fucking 
Greece somewhere. Samus, Thracia, one of those dumbass islands. 
Whole state of Franklin got dropped on top of some third-world 
country out there." 


SCP-947: Son of a [EXPLETIVE REDACTED] 


Item #: SCP-947 
Object Class: Keter 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-947 is stored on a textfile 
in a USB drive. This drive is currently stored in a secure locker in the 
Site-42 Digital Armory. Junior Researcher Gautam Ramesh is 
currently working with Mobile Task Force Upsilon-4 ("Sugar Pill") to 
develop a countermemetic agent for SCP-947. 


Description: SCP-947 is a contagious, memetic expletive defined 
by its creator as meaning "a really fake, annoying person or thing 
that you wish would just naff off already"/sic]. Any English speaker 
who hears or reads SCP-947 will automatically understand its 
definition, know the name of its creator, and begin to incorporate it 
into their vocabulary. Over time, affected individuals will gradually 
replace all expletives in their vocabulary with SCP-947. 


SCP-947 first came to the attention of the Foundation on 30 June 
2017, when it was used in tweets by members of the British Cabinet. 
The anomalous properties of SCP-947 were immediately recognized 
due to the insertion of its creator's name. An investigation of the 
Cabinet's social media activity traced the meme to a tweet made by 
one Gautam Ramesh, an Indian immigrant living with his parents in 
Leeds, England. Ramesh sent the initial infection vector via Twitter 
and Facebook to the social media accounts of several British 
defense contractors, where it rapidly spread and was able to infect 
the British Cabinet within two days. 


Ramesh's initial tweet was as follows: 


You Should Check Out This Cool Technology Or Youll 
Look Like A [EXPLETIVE REDACTED] [sic] 


His Facebook post was as follows: 


Matthew snorted. "Are you seriously that inbred? You didn't hear 
about that thing down in Samothrace?" 


"Matty, | didn't give a fuck what happened down in Samez Trace or 
who the fuck knows what. All | Know is, judging from the way they 
got to die, they apparently got lumped in with the rest of the Middle 
East, somehow." 


"Oh, shit." Matthew said. "The Devourer?" 


"Fuckin' A, the Devourer. Couldn't have happened to nicer people. 


More silence. The location grew closer. The two were now on 
Evergreen Street, looking for a park. It wasn't hard to find. A small 
device on Zeke's waistband, which had been chattering quietly ever 
since they entered the Dresden city limits, started going off a little 
more frequently. 


"How many fucking skips were in this shithole town?" Matthew 
asked. 


"Enough to make this shit work, apparently," Zeke said. 


Matthew nodded. Overwatch had been very specific on the location 
of this Scranton anchor, and it wasn't a geographic coincidence; 
apparently the anomalous concentration in this town centered on 
Wilson Park, which (judging from the presence of playground 
equipment) was right in front of them. Activate this one in the right 
spot, which Overwatch had assured them would be easy enough to 
find once they were there, and something something portal to 
something something realign the dimensional something something 
and everybody gets cake and gets to go home. Matthew liked 
ragging on Zeke for being a dipshit, but it wasn't like he understood 
this any better than Zeke did. He had been a guard before all this 
started; Zeke had stacked boxes for six years.