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Wild Light
The meeting room is Containment Unit S167-00-1006, which is the skull of a stillborn Cryptomorpha gigantes.
The hollowed-out space inside the skull cavity is the prototypical Vegas room — a place where what happens, stays. People go in, they come out, their memories are sieved out of the universe as they leave, and they remember nothing. The skull was acquired in the Nineties. The information suppression effect is a byproduct of the species' natural antimemetic camouflage, a phenomenon which made the colossally tall creatures somehow nearly impossible to observe in the wild. It's a phenomenon Dr. Bartholomew Hughes and his team spent years figuring out how to replicate. They've got it, now. They can synthesise C. gigantes bone, extruding it in prefabricated pieces from steel grids. They can bolt the plates together to make hermetically sealed boxes. They've begun building containment units out of the stuff, units where otherwise cataclysmically dangerous memetic and antimemetic phenomena can be experimented with safely.
But S167-00-1006 is the prototype. It is forty-five metres long, sixteen tall and fifteen wide. It sits inside an aircraft hangar-sized containment unit of its own, fluorescent-lit around the clock, alongside miscellaneous analytical equipment and rows upon rows of filing cabinets containing hard copy experimental observations. Vast, bulky liquid containment vessels along one side of the unit contain Olympic swimming pools' worth of harvested brain matter and skin tissue. The vessels don't need to be too strong; some kind of secondary adaptation renders the material, which should mass thousands of tonnes, almost massless. One day they'll crack that technology, too, Hughes hopes. Two more cylindrical vats contain the unborn creature's huge, blind eyeballs.
Hughes may never get used to the final approach on foot. When he enters the warehouse unit from the main clutch of buildings making up Site 167, the C. gigantes skull is there in profile, facing left, decorated with wires and disused rig — and it's impossible to grasp its scale. At first glance, it looks like a giraffe's skull or an elephant shrew's, sitting on a shelf at eye level. But then he starts walking towards it. And it takes minutes for him to get there. It grows and grows in his field of view until there's nothing in front of him but a curving, undifferentiated wall of dead white bone.
Hughes has to remind himself that this individual, SCP-2256-30941c, is one of the tiniest examples of its species. It's smaller than the smallest baby SCP-2256 on record. It hadn't even been born when it died.
Someone hurries up to meet him, emerging from the right side of the skull. Where there used to be the creature's first neck vertebra there is now a large compound mechanical airlock, and a ramp and some steps, and a staging area. The staging area serves as a miniature customs desk, tracking every person and item entering and leaving S167-00-1006. Although memories are wiped on exit, written and electronic records from inside have to be handled manually. Standard procedure is for the first person exiting the room to bring written instructions for the Filtration Officer, telling them what other information from the room interior needs to be scrubbed, and what is safe to retain. Usually the second list is very short.
There are seats, scanners, a coffee machine, a trolley loaded with cleaning equipment, and a stack of cages for the germs.
"Where's everybody else?" Hughes asks the woman who meets him, whose name is Bochner.
"This way, please," she says, leading him to the staging area and sitting him down. Hughes has gone through this procedure a dozen times now, so he knows to hold his left arm out. Bochner pulls the wrapper off a bracelet-like sensor and clamps it around Hughes' left wrist, watching a nearby screen. "They went in almost an hour ago," she says.
Hughes frowns. That's not usual. Why would they tell him a different start time? Why would they need an hour of preparation time before he showed up? "Did they say anything?"
"Of course not. Open your mouth, please."
Hughes hasn't the slightest clue what this meeting is about, or what any of the others were about, or even if they have a common topic.
Actually, he does have some clues. The list of attendees is a pretty serious one. The Directors of Sites 167, 41 and 45 are in attendance, along with several scientists from Hughes' own organisation, and a man called E whose position in the Foundation hierarchy is somewhat murky, but who seems to circulate slightly below the level of O5.
The timing of the meetings is also a clue. There was one at first, and they all emerged — amnesiac — clutching instructions apparently written by E to continue meeting monthly. Then they became weekly. There were three last week. After the last one, they created a new schedule: they meet for two hours every morning, starting today, Monday.
Bochner puts a disc-like cap on Hughes' head, presses an emitter to the roof of his mouth, and fires two pulses of radiation through his brain. "Any psychic intrusions?"
Muffled by the emitter, Hughes manages, "No."
"Did you experience REM sleep in the past twelve hours?"
He wipes his mouth. "Yes."
"How many digits do you have?"
"Ten."
"Count them for me, please."
Hughes spreads his fingers and counts them. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten." His right thumb is "five".
Bochner injects him with a substance which will prevent his body from rejecting the germ, then lifts a germ out of one of the pools. It splays its tendrils out, confusedly, not a fan of being picked up. "Tilt your head back and look at the ceiling, please. Eyes wide open. And, if you could take off your glasses."
Hughes obliges, handing his glasses to Bochner for scanning. "I dislike this part," he states.
Bochner has no comment. She lays the germ over his eyes, like a sleep mask. There's a cold, sludgy sensation as it wraps itself around his chin and hair, then the tendrils meet behind his neck and begin knitting with his spine. Hughes sees darkness for a few worrying seconds, then a circular indentation forms in the germ's hide over the top of where his right eye are placed, and there's a feeling like part of his brain dislocating, and a fake eye opens where his real one would be. The fake eyeball is around four times the size of his own. Though it is singular, its two pupils grant him decent depth-perception, and he can see a little way into the ultraviolet.
The germ is acting as an external block of short-to-medium-term memory, and as a proxy between the conscious Bart Hughes and the real world. When the meeting is over, the germ will be removed and incinerated, along with all memory of the meeting.
There are other amnestic approaches — gas, injections, mechanical procedures, spells. These are safe, proven technologies for mass use on the general public and Foundation staff alike, but they all operate on the same essential principle that the unwanted knowledge has already entered the mind and must now be removed or suppressed after the fact. Memory removal can leave critical fragments behind, occasionally enough for people to rebuild dangerous wholes; and mnestic technologies for causing suppressed memories to reassert themselves are continually advancing. Recent developments on the latest-generation family of biochemical mnestics, Class Z, seem likely to produce a substance which renders all after-the-fact memory erasure techniques irrelevant. The only amnestic defence against Class Z will be decapitation. So, if there's advance warning time, it's better to physically compartmentalise, to airgap; to outsource the memory to another organism entirely and never let it touch your own mind. You can't be forced to recall something you never experienced.
It's a complex and dynamic field, one of several fields in which Hughes is a world expert. There are mechanical techniques too, but Hughes would rather die than submit to interfacing his brain directly with a computer, especially a Foundation-made computer. A condition in his will is that he is not to be uploaded. It sounded ridiculous when he put it in there, years ago, but it's become more and more relevant as time has gone on.
Of course, using both the germs and a Vegas room feels rather like overkill. That's a third clue.
"Your belongings have been scanned," Bochner tells him. He refills his pockets and takes up his laptop. Walking slightly unsteadily because of the new weight he's carrying on his head, he climbs the stairs to the airlock.
*
S167-00-1006 is surprisingly pleasant inside. Compared to most Foundation facilities it's spacious, modern, well-lit and colourful — almost no exposed concrete in sight. It's not a single room, but a small suite of rooms, laid out on two floors. There's a central meeting area with a double-height ceiling, a long oval table and Herman Miller chairs. Off to one side there are smaller breakout rooms with frosted glass walls and doors. Upstairs there's a kitchen area, in the back are restrooms.
The place is well-ventilated and smells of coffee. There are four people in the room, two chatting at the back of the main area, one seated at the main table and one upstairs, having just made herself some coffee. All of them look in his direction as he comes through the last door. All of them are wearing germs, which makes for four huge, single eyeballs swivelling in his direction at once. Hughes smiles back, but the smile has some strain behind it. He had to use a little effort not to flinch at the effect.
"You're here," E says. He's one of the two at the back. Hughes guesses, correctly, that there's been an hour-long pre-meeting, and then everybody broke for coffee, and now they're resuming. The others gather around the table.
"So you're all caught up?" Hughes asks. The nature of asynchronous work is that the first thirty minutes of any meeting in this room is spent reading notes left from prior meetings.
"We are," E says. He indicates a particular vacant chair at the table, where a printed document is waiting for Hughes to read it.
Hughes sets his laptop down. He's sitting opposite the Site 41 director, Wheeler. "You want me to read this now?"
"Take as long as you need."
"Where's my team?" Hughes asks. He was expecting a few people to be here.
"Read the document, Dr. Hughes," E says.
Hughes does so.
The document is a scientific paper authored by — apparently — Hughes himself, and several of his fellow researchers. Hughes doesn't recognise the paper's title or content, but that's nothing unusual in his line of work. The text is written in his own formal, academic style, so he has no reason to doubt its authenticity.
It's a brisk read, very dense and to-the-point, written for a target audience already familiar with the absolute latest developments in anomalous memetic science. In the abstract, it announces the observation of a new, titanically powerful and dangerous (anti)memeplex, tentatively designated SCP-3125, for which the authors plan to seek Apollyon classification. The main body of the first page describes seven or eight different phenomena, most but not all of them anomalous, most but not all of the anomalous ones controlled by the Foundation and having SCP designations. From a cursory glance, the phenomena appear to be unrelated.
Hughes flips the piece of paper over. The whole document is just two sides of A4.
The other side is mostly mathematics. There is one graph, and one equation, and a brief technical description of two highly novel idea-transforming procedures, which the authors dub "amplification". When Hughes reaches the crucial conclusion, Hughes jumps. It's like a jump scare in text form, everything locks into place so suddenly for him. Even primed to expect something seriously nasty, he physically shudders, and can't stop himself from saying, "Oh, fucking hell."
Nobody else says anything for a long time. They wait, expectantly, for Hughes to gather his thoughts and draw some conclusions.
The sheer scope of the anomaly is beyond him. He would need time in front of a computer to play with the results to get a grasp of it. He tries not to think about that part and asks himself a different question: what would happen if it arrived here, and what the Foundation would have to do to contain it.
He looks up. "Did we obtain Apollyon classification?" he asks. Apollyon classification is reserved for highly destructive active anomalies which are functionally impossible to contain — something past Keter. An Apollyon-class anomaly is an anomaly more or less guaranteed to ultimately destroy the world, no matter what is done to stop it. The only thing which can stop it from happening is if something else — likely some other Apollyon-class anomaly — destroys the world first.
"No," E replies. "Current thinking in the O5 space is that Apollyon classification is a confession of defeat. It's bad for morale. It cultivates defeatist attitudes. Aside from special classifications, Keter is the top of the hierarchy as of right now, and existing Apollyons are likely to be re-evaluated and re-classified over the next year or so."
"And," Wheeler adds, "SCP-3125 isn't uncontainable in any case. In prior meetings you've pitched several methods for containing it."
"…We could exterminate all intelligent human life," Hughes says, staring darkly at his paper. "If there are no sapient hosts in this universe, SCP-3125 can't incarnate."
There's a faintly stunned pause. "Yes," Wheeler says. "You've pitched that approach before. And I don't think any of us here have ever been completely sure if you were serious."
"I'm completely serious that we could do it and it would work," Hughes says. "Our mission statement is 'Secure, contain, protect'. Somewhere down the line we really should look into adding 'and keep as many humans alive as possible'. Feels like kind of a glaring omission to me."
"It's implicit that humanity is what we protect," the director of Site 45 says.
"It's the anomalies, Li, how does it scan otherwise?"
"We're getting off-topic," Wheeler says. "We're not exterminating all sapient life."
"We could immediately terminate and suppress all memetics and antimemetics research worldwide," Hughes says. "We would have to systematically dismantle the whole scientific field forever. Stop all the experiments, scrap all the research, brainwash all the researchers. If nobody actively researches this field, nobody will ever find SCP-3125. It stays buried in the farthest reaches of ideatic space indefinitely, like radioactive waste." He looks up at the ceiling. The problem is interesting. "Ironically, the most practical way to do it would be to develop an artificial meme which encodes the idea that memetics research is dangerous. Enrich it with religious or pseudoscientific virals and release it to the general public. A year after it got out we'd be tearing our own labs down. Unless the Antimemetics Division's institutional immunity to that kind of external threat was hard enough to stand up to the external pressure. Interesting scenario. Even if we don't go in that direction we should definitely think about wargaming it in simulation—"
"Bart," Wheeler says.
"Shit, that wouldn't work. It could be introduced externally or occur naturally—"
"We know. Bart, that's already happened. SCP-3125 is incarnating. It's here."
"If that were true, the world would be melting down," Hughes says.
"It will! We're in what you called the foreshadow right now. But a night is coming…"
Wheeler's referring to models Hughes which must have created himself during prior meetings, models with which he doesn't have time to familiarise himself again. Still, he gets it. He covers his mouth and nose with his hands, thinking rapidly.
"We cannot contain this entity," he says. "If it's live in consensus nominality right now, the game is over. SCP-3125 is functionally uncontainable."
"We don't want you to contain it," E says. "We want you to kill it."
Hughes blinks.
E says, "The objective of the Foundation is protection. In the majority of cases this involves the secure containment of anomalous entities; the establishment of secure containment protocols such that such entities can be kept safely, and indefinitely. Standard guidance is against neutralization and to avoid destruction at all costs. However, senior Foundation officials have the right to waive that guideline. I am exercising that right. In our reality, SCP-3125 cannot coexist with human civilisation. We're going to destroy SCP-3125. Forever. Does that change your outlook any?"
Hughes' expression is worsening minute by minute.
Wheeler says, "I know we're basically asking you to kill a god."
"No," Hughes says. "The Foundation has killed gods before. We have that technology."
"We do?"
The Site 167 director shrugs. "Abrahamic religions have not always been monotheistic. It's believed the more powerful of the two Gods was killed by a Foundation precursor organization. Probably just a myth."
Hughes says, "We can kill gods with modern memetic technology. This is different. It's the framework which bad gods are defined within. It's like trying to kill the complex plane."
