+ TRANSCRIPT [Text-only version]

- TRANSCRIPT [Text-only version]

[A worn printed booklet. Throughout, there are occasional hand-written comments or edits in two distinct handwritings/colors: Purple and Red.]
Page 1
Sophia Light's 7 Things That New Level 3 Researchers Should Know.
[Red: Why is Dr. Sophia Light clickbaiting me?]
[Purple: ? Vaux said it would add interest]
[Red: He's not wrong]
Foundation clearances operate on a “need to know” basis, which like any long-running broad-scope policy, is a good idea that works well until it isn't and doesn't. The kind of “guide” you currently hold is unorthodox but represents what I see as the basics of being a researcher: not just at competently performing research, but in sort of the bare minimum of what you need to be able to competently think about the world – in terms of things that would have been veiled to you at lower clearance levels but are now opened up.
If you're reading this, it means I'm winning my petty moral war against the infosec department. The information herein is not so unknown to Level 3 personnel, broadly speaking, but an appreciation of its relevance is hard-earned, and I hope you learn it earlier rather than later.
Do good work.
- Light

Page 2
1.
Common wisdom holds that all regulations are written in blood. AKA: policies are created because something happened, and even if one looks odd or unnecesary [Red corrects the spelling to "unnecessary"], you'd better follow it if you know what's good for you.
This is wrong.
Actually, only 30% of Foundation regulations are written in blood.
50% of them are in place for dumb reasons – holdovers from previous procedures or causal understandings that were never updated, bureaucratic reasons, sheer human error.
The remaining 20% are because someone did it once and it seemed to help, and it's been the rule ever since, which is to say, superstition.
Unfortunately, you will not know which regulations are which. Do your research before getting into trouble.

Page 3
2.
Make friends with people in the Philosophy Department. Most Level 2 researchers either don't know what they do or think they're a joke. They're not.
(1) The name is misleading. They recruit from backgrounds, including technical ones.
(2) They hire and promote based on having actionable good ideas. They are literally paid to look at SCPs and generate predictive models of anomalous phenomena.
If you've spent the past 2 years studying a particular anomaly, it can suck to have some stranger skim your research papers and Wikipedia, and then email you a list of ideas that starts off: “1. Maybe it's sentient and fucking with you on purpose?”
I would not like it either, if those ideas weren't often good. You think you're an expert in anomaly XYZ. I'm sure you are. You're still not immune to bias, tunnel vision, or low-level memetic effects.
I'm not saying their ideas will always be right. But they are very often interesting, and if you investigate them as serious hypotheses, you'll learn something. You can either get mad about being wrong, or you can get results. I recommend the latter.
Dr. Heiden (RIP) [Red circles RIP and writes: update?] wrote a memo called “So you're requesting a philosophy consult” that's still in circulation. Worth hunting down. If you can't find it, just ask them anyway. They won't bite.

Page 4
3.
Grade PU vs AM materials. You're likely familiar with the distinction between PU and AM-grade materials, and how some research strictly requires PU or at least gets different results between PU and AM. You've probably been told that this has to do with a facet of common manufacturing processes that many SCPs happen to be sensitive to.
Grade PU materials are “normal”.
Grade AM materials have actually been replicated en masse via <⋮SCP-038>, the Everything Tree, or another anomalous duplication or manufacture process. The Everything Tree is the secret economic powerhouse of the Foundation.
While nobody likes to call it such, use of Grade AM materials in testing is technically a form of cross-testing. You thought we directly controlled 15% of the world's computational capacity via the regular economy? No way in hell. We got one really good integrated chip and then made 10 million copies. Processors: they can grow on trees if you work at the SCP Foundation. Fuck you.

Page 5
More relevant to research, Grade AM materials rarely appear in the wild (outside the Foundation.)
If you've never run into this distinction before, count yourself lucky. Either way, thank a procurement officer today – their job is much weirder than you used to give them credit for.
[Red: Add a picture or something to fill big spaces?]
[Purple: Of what??]

Page 6
4.
Some of you will have done the inter-site shuffle enough to know this already. But since there are a lot of staff who spent their levels 1 and 2 at the same site or even on the same team, it bears stating: different sites do things differently. There are sites that work like militaries and sites that work like universities and sites that work like nuclear power plants and there are sites that are huge hodgepodges. Some are strict, some are lenient, some are loud and active, some are quiet. The site's directors and your supervisors have a huge amount of control over the site culture and procedure.
Even things like routine labwork can have big differences depending on who's teaching who – without new blood, you get insular bubbles of tacit knowledge.*
If you're trying to figure out what the deal is with a new contact or with an old research paper that has some kind of apparent idiosyncrasy, keep in mind: they might just do things differently somewhere else.

Page 7
Conversely, to quote the rather evocative words of an old superior:
“If you want to kill yourself, at least try working a different job at a different site first.”
[Red: Jesus.]
[Purple: Too much?]
[Red: No. Keep it.]
Mental health resources have come a long way since I was recruited, so I'd hope this advice isn't relevant to you, dear reader. But if you need to hear it, you really need to hear it. And it's as true now as it was then.
*(The way researchers get shuffled between sites isn't just bureaucratic incompetence - it's sometimes tactical as a way to combat this. I personally think we will get better results if we tell researchers this. Previous administration didn't like to do that for some reason. So I've been trying to implement this. If you slipped through the cracks and got moved to a new site across the globe where you didn't speak the language with zero explanation, my impersonal apologies. It might be because you were good at your job! Doesn't that make you feel better?)

Page 8
5.
The moral question of D-Class personnel is not open and shut. Whatever you've been told, there's still a raging debate. Some study fields benefit more from human experimentation than others, but there are plenty who think that any use of D-class constitutes a moral catastrophe.
If you work in one of those fields of research, and you buried your ethical qualms a long time ago, get a shovel and dig them back up. That decision is still being made every day. You now have a voice in it. If you don't use it, nothing will ever change.

Page 9
6.
Scranton reality anchors are machines that are highly effective at canceling out effects from distorted reality and have numerous applications in research, containment, etc. They exist, and while they're expensive, they're reasonably compact and the Foundation can manufacture more.
That said, their distortion-canceling effects also cancel out:
• A crucial enzyme in the human body
• Certain microbes
• Many books
• Certain ████████████
[Red: Bad idea. Use ████████ as an example instead?]
[Purple: DEFINITELY can't say that. Will explain why in person.]
[Red: We appear to be at an impasse.]
• The effects of common amnestic and antipsychotic meds
• Anything manufactured in Las Vegas (!!)
• All of Aramaic (!!!!!)
The Foundation does not like to talk about this, but it should, and either way, this is a good tool to know about that you've probably never heard of before Level 3. (Or at least, you weren't supposed to.)

Page 10
7.
Please learn about significant digits / sigfigs. I went to grad school in the real world so I have the standard academia take. It bothers me when people get it wrong.
Who it really bothers people like Bill Hart, who leads Site 19 Engineering's Precision Manufacturing team. He explains it better than I could, so I got his permission to include this:
Most researchers I work with are Americans, and if you're one, you weren't trained with the metric system, so you measure feet. So you check on the internet (or with a calculator and reference table if you're real old school or actually give a shit about InfoSec protocols). You decided your spooky skeleton needs a 5' long box. Fine.
But then you plug that in, and Dr. DuckDuckGo or your calculator (because they are DUMB ROCKS and only trying to answer the question you asked them) tells you that five feet is 1.524 meters. Or worse, 1.523999951 meters.
First of all, that's wrong. 5' is 1.524m exactly. You've just been PLAYED by a floating point error. So not a good start.
And then, because you are EVEN DUMBER than ROCKS, because you are GOD'S OWN FOOL, you copy and paste that and send that along to my team. And then all nine of us have

Page 11
synchronized heart attacks because you're asking us to do nanometer-scale precise manufacturing with a week turnaround time.
This wouldn't be a big problem in any other industry. But unlike all of them, we can actually do large-scale nanometer-precise measuring. And also basically unlike anyone else, once in a blue moon, some godforsaken son of a bitch actually needs us to count out one billion five hundred twenty-three million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and fifty-one nanometers and make a box exactly that big, or else the skeleton will get out and the world will fucking end. And we will do that because it is our job and we live here same as you. But most of you? Most of you just need a five foot long box.
Thankfully, we are not idiots, so if you send us some hot garbage like that, we will email you back. (If you're lucky, it will even be more than just hilighting the last 8 digits and writing “bro??”.) But if we're busy or you stop responding to our emails, we will guess.
And our guesses are pretty good. I'm proud to say my team has never caused a containment breach by having to make a judgment call about precision. (You know what has caused containment breaches? Floating fucking point errors.) But you, you labcoated asshole, maybe you should be scared shitless, because you went to fucking Spooky Harvard and me or my guy went to Walla Walla County Technical College and you think you're deciding how big your containment box will be, but if you don't clarify exactly how precise you need your units to be, it's not gonna be you deciding! It's gonna be me!!
Swear to fucking god. Thanks, Light. Feels good to get that off my chest.

Page 12
The back cover. A small gray box reads: UNOFFICIAL PUBLICATION. FOR PURPOSES OF STAFF KNOWLEDGE DISSEMINATION. —- Share at your own discretion (see policy 02.181.0931)
[Red: Is this a thing??]
[Purple: The policy is the right one but I just made the stamp right now. Think it'll make the censors happy?]
[Red: Worth a shot]

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