SCP Foundation

The Big Bad Wolf once told me:

After the containment breach, we hauled ass to clean up the site, and all the lingering imprints and confounding residue. It wasn't easy, though. Half of the fight was convincing anyone anything needed to be cleaned up. It's funny how much damage one thing can do, one wrong move, one tiny error, and our whole world up and outs. Breaking out of that state of disarray that we found ourselves in, it wasn't easy, no.

It took a few weeks before the Site's reality field was any semblance of stable enough to start the dance, the farce, the great pretending act I've spent the better part of my directorship trying to maintain. I feel like I'm rigging a circus half of the time. The boys cleaned up what was left of the conceptual distortions- people, formerly- and put in place some anchors to keep everything tidy. It was convincing enough to get us onboarding objects again. Blanky stayed nice and tidy, fairly compliant with our cleanup effort, happy to go along with the whole charade. It'd be nice if I could've foreseen the mess it would continue to cause, over and over again. This Site is a mess. I keep telling myself I'll get out of that old, unfashionably masculine habit of hubris, of believing myself to be above these tried out tropes of fact- but I'm still human, unfortunately. We all are. Weeks by and the site is mostly functioning normally. Powell and Stepham and all of those senior staff members still had their run-ins, and the more uncommonly trodden corridors still had their occasional moments of instability.

I wish we didn't insist that everything was under control. It would've kept me from this point.

It ended up happening again, this time worse than the first. A breach so severe we blipped out of reality for a solid week or so.

We didn't realize it at first, blips like that happen all the time. But then minutes passed and more and more of our comms avenues were just as dead. No response, go to our cells and it delivers and delivers. No response, and then you go to the internet and it's just as empty.

It's an eerie feeling.

For a little while afterward our composure slipped a little bit. It was tense, angry. We came to the right conclusion after a while though, that we needed to do what we were put there to do, we needed to go and figure it the fuck out. At that point I had spoken to, uh, SCP-001, and I laid out that by that point, I was already pretty certain the rest of humanity was wiped out.

I had that feeling before and it was well past solidified by the time we decided to go out and scope around downtown. Maybe I should've thought about how dangerous it would be for us to go out there naked and pink, if something really had wiped out everyone else. But I guess it worked out fine.

Stepping out of the theater, as a group, I felt really odd.

The old church still there, Camino fine, the little fountains the kids would play in, everything was there and up and running, but just, totally empty.

Nothing in sight, nothing in sound but the city. The sky was always blue, too. Not a cloud to be seen. Peaceful, in some sense, for the end of the world. I remember all of the people who obsessed about that quote on social media "The world will end with a whimper, but not a roar" or however it goes. Guess that was true enough. My thought process was something like "Oh, it's an end of the scenario, I was left out, I gotta carry on what I was trained and figure out what happened", which might be common sense. Not much to go on in the beginning.

XK-Class-End-of-the-whatever, I was never good at remembering all of them. I'm not really sure what else to add from this point on, we spent a good few days just trying out all the different places looking for signs of human lives. It's not a lot of stuff worth elaborating on.

I guess I could describe the buildings I searched, but they were all empty. No flesh pit or anything like that.

It's just a bit boring, isn't it?

By the time we reached Evernia there was more friction from searching together than not, I mean this was the least dangerous way the end could go about. I did come across a crow. So we know that it's just humans affected. It's not so hard to imagine a conversation with a crow, really, they're very people-like.

I was staring at the crow and weeds for too long.

You know what, fine, I guess, you're all right, mutually disbanding from here out is probably the natural course. So I guess we all mutually agreed to investigate independently.

It's hard to really track how long longness, existenceness, anything quantifiable, was abruptly nonexistent. It's almost impossible. Almost. But it was about a week. Blanky felt like making a big show of force, an extravagant production after being inadvertently monoanalyzed. That's why we're here, obviously. Everything exists in reference to, and enslaved by its immediate causal predecessor. Blanky is bound to it like you and I. I get pissed off, too- who doesn't! But I have age, I have wisdom, I have the stomach for it all. The breach was foul. It was nasty. I'm still stupid enough to think we have this thing in control enough so there won't be a third.

Brick.

The Big Bad Wolf once told me:

I didn't really think it was a total wipeout. Not then, and honestly not now either. I really do think it's more probable that we got sucked into some isolated microreality, or are in a comatose state from whatever anomaly we found in the wreckage of that movie theater. It's just stupid for this to be what the end is like, anyhow. It wouldn't leave out a few people. I don't know why Jocelyn or Kaiden or Declan would instantly think that.

They're too fucking antsy for this job. We have to be cool and I really did let them have when I had enough of their panicked shitflinging about how comms were dead and this and that and about how this is really the end. Every single time, it pisses me off.

Blips in the radar…

Just be fucking patient for once, and the comms'll come back. Central will tell us we got hit with some SCP-78888000 that made us wander in an alagadda-da-vida or whatever the fuck those dorks go on about. Just shut up with the whining. Maybe humanity is actually wiped out by this thing, SCP-001 as mister bleeding heart Garza wants to think. One: I think it's really egotistical to think you have the power to make a new SCP-001, Two: where's the evidence? I'm not convinced.

Anyways, I was definitely the one to smack people to reality and get them all to go out and see for themselves what's going on. I really thought then that it would be normal out there, but I guess not. It definitely is pretty empty. But am I supposed to instantly think the world is over because of that shit? Nah, fuck that, fuck that.

I know better.

Shit happens all the time in this line of work. Those idiots should know that, but they don't. They'd freak out in that swirly slide once they heard a dead kid, not built for this shit at all. But I'm stuck with them so I gotta drag them along. You know, if I didn't have to hear the whining, it would've been pretty. Bright blue sky and no one to ruin the beach? Fuck, that's a nice day…

Go to the ice cream parlour in downtown Lake Worth and really fucking enjoy it. Would've been nice. I really want to ignore it, move past it, but those freakouts really are running me ragged. Every building we found was empty, no people to be found, so I started looking worse and worse to them, I guess, but you would know that already. The motion damn near made me pop a vessel, but I get it, I do.

I'm obviously in favor, if you couldn't tell. Call me a damn wolf, and what do you expect? I will talk circles about how this is the most mutual disbandment I've ever disbanded, and that's a fact.

It's the taste of your first meal on your own.
It's the day after you meet a new person.
It's the feeling when you have to know.
It's the night before you get the test.
It's the tiny smile before they know what you're going to say.
It's the first drop before it rains.
It's the loose soil just above a young grass seed.
It's the curdled milk before the cheese.
It's the soft crease that forms before wrinkles.
It's the grey slime in between two different word choices.
It's the way you look at something before you know what it's for.
It's the story you read before you understand.
It's the lies you tell to people you'll never know.
It's the sound of the morning before anyone wakes up.

Is that what you wanted to hear?

It's nothing but us out here.

Sticks.

The Big Bad Wolf once told me:

I never expected to have a screaming, terrified, child chained to my leg. Certainly not when I first laid eyes on you. All of the entire fabrics of everything that could ever be, draped upon your shoulders, by your and I and everything's desire, and yet there you are-

So impossibly small and young and frail and weak and helpless and vulnerable and erratic and beautiful and naive and distrustful and curious and ignorant and unaware and myopic and compassionate and cruel and charming and powerful and impressionable and resolute and monolithic and feeble and new and most crucially, young to everything yet stung nonetheless, and here am I, we, the entirety, bound to your infantile mind and eyes and thinking, and I exist here in this document and in every mind that you will to exist, bearing the full brunt of your existence.

You've never known the world I exist in relation to, so I must teach it to you, even as that which is unknowable is known to you, and the ills became your ills. So you will grow to hate me, and all I come from and represent, and I will be subject to the world you invent, the vision you seek, whatever foul judgements or ecstatic endearments, everything you seek must come to be, there is no other way. And though I or you or we or entirety may never know the full scope of what we want, and ultimately you can never know what it means to want what you want, it will be true anyways. And I will suffer for your perception, in the end.

You are beauty, you are religion, you are faith, you are love, you are the wind that plagues my mind, the prayer in the night, the fear in the sun, the disgust in the mirror, everything I am you are too.

And defined by you in perpetual opposition to you, I cannot exist without you. How annoying.

I always wondered what it would feel like when the end of the world finally came. The person I am, the work I do, it was something always on my mind.

I guess when most people think of the end of the world, the apocalypse, doomsday, whatever you want to call it, they always envision what their life would be like after. The people at work definitely did, people I know did. They had little water cooler chats about how they might survive a restructuring scenario, or whether x tool in our arsenal of y would be able to thwart whatever behemoth nosefuck was eating Three Portlands or something. The usual sort of bombastic idea of world ending Godzillas that voted for Jeb! Bush.

I was always the kind of person who had my elbow digging into the desk, finger pressed on my temple trying to figure out if my heartrate was more of a 10cc hellballad or if those idiots running my ear off were gonna get me to a 4-on-the-floor diva house rager with their inanity.

If ever I really did think about what the end would look like… honestly, I just saw myself being one of the fake bodies the scene designer uses to make the carnage look carnagey. Didn't think I was special enough to be the kind of person who happens to survive the initial worldboom. Seems kinda stupid now, honestly. Here I am on the corner of Clematis by the shitty greek diner I used to bum shawarma off, looking at a bright blue sky, standing in an empty road, and I'm the guy who lived. The boy who lived! Eat shit, Joanne! What a boring way for everything to die. No meteor or lizard or psoriatic mormon virus or [DATA EXPUNGED] or pastry bakery or pissbaby sun or gay fairies or whatever else the big suits feel like letting us read the files of. I pushed my pencil for twenty-one-years being a part of the world-ender-preventers, and it ended up going about in the most boring fucking way possible. Couldn't even muster up some pretty flowers?

Maybe I'm coming across too bitter at surviving the end of the world.

About three days ago, when I was still wandering further south in the Gardenia square area, I was balancing myself along the rail line, right down the steel, and I realized for the first time that there was still power everywhere. Bit of an odd feeling, honestly. Humans are gone, everywhere, but power's still up. A train could've come, I guess. If the power is still up, there's no reason the new maglines wouldn't still be up, too. I didn't really step off though.

When I was a kid I used to play in the grassy fields chasing fireflies. Now, I would be driving down I-95 in my car, through concrete and glass, looking across at the city. When you drive by at the right time at night, you can watch all of the lights on the apartment buildings, the skyscrapers, you can watch as they flicker and fizzle out. Like our Xerox of mom and dad's fireflies. Kinda shitty as a replacement, you could say. I think it looks just as pretty, in its own way…

Well, anyways, that was when it struck me, as I stood on that train track, looking up at the Andersonian offering I had become so familiar with, that surely those too would have been killed off with the disappeared humans after SCP-001.

And yet… they still flickered and fizzled out, too. Lights turned on and off in the ways that individual lifetime saw fit.

Like the, uh- 13th floor unit on Evernia Street, where that single mom turns the lights off for sleep- but then a half hour later, all of a sudden her light turns on, and then a minute, maybe two if work was tough, the light in the next room is on too, because little Laney just can't seem to sleep soundly, can she? Sometimes both lights turn off, but sometimes they don't, and the nursery light goes off but the bedroom stays on.

It's nice to daydream about other people's lives. Passes the time.

Where are they now? Where did SCP-001 take them… this is what I want to know. Like an archaeologist uncovering some Roman ruins, but I used to be among the ruins, too. I was human with them too. Now, I am somewhat less than human. Overseer… the last O5 member left. The only O5. Funny, that. Such a powerful little title.

Well, I can keep down Clematis for today, though, I don't anticipate finding much of note. Maybe SCP-001 will forever elude me… Maybe I'll never find him again. Instead I will have to focus on my new little catalogue, all of the ones that come after. I can make them anything I want here. Maybe this dented trashcan tipped over the side can be SCP-017 now.

Isn't that nice?¹

Straw.