Survivor - SCP Sandbox Wiki II

2014-12-11

Whoo.

Woo. Hoo hoo.

Wow.

Heh.

Fuck.

Shit. Hoo.

Wow. So…

…I'm gonna die.

Right. I think this terminal is online…

…yes, there's a little red light in the corner.

How do I begin?

Ahem. Hello, nobody. My name is Matthew Conway. I am - I was - a Level 2 Research Assistant at the now-defunct Site 114. I've worked for the SCP Foundation for two years now.

And I'm never gonna work for them again.

See, Site 114 was going to be this high-security facility, where the Foundation kept all of its most dangerous things. 682, 239, even Able. Yeah, I know. It's actually a really shitty idea. But it seemed like it would work. The thickest walls, floors, and doors ever produced. Constant surveillance. Any behavior slightly out of the ordinary would be logged, reported, and if necessary, dealt with.

And as part of these procedures, the Foundation demanded we install something new - something called a Molecular Spacial-Displacement Drive (MSDD). In the event anything bad broke out of containment, the MSDD could be activated from Surveillance, and the entire facility would be skipped across space to a habitable exoplanet. Then, the staff on hand would do their best to recontain it, or, failing that, just wait for it to wander outside, then skip the facility back and change destinations.

Rumor has it that they got the idea from this weird parallel-universe thing that had something similar in it. But instead of just dumping a Site full of shit into a different dimension, they thought it would be better to make it be able to make return journeys too, thus saving on costs.

Personally, I thought it was a stupid idea, just like the Site itself, but they gave me some hefty paychecks, and hey, who am I to turn down a bribe?

Now, on to the juicy stuff. It was about 9 p.m PST and we were all packing up. It was three days before the Site was going to start having the Keters keetered in, and we were performing routine maintenance and integrity checks (i.e. setting off bombs in containment chambers to make sure they could hold). We were all having a gay old time. Just as we were leaving, I heard an alarm go off in the Surveillance room, so I told the others to wait for me and went to investigate.

Yeah, yeah, I know, never go into a Facility, even an abandoned one, alone. But anyway, I went upstairs, and one of the screens was flashing. All of the others were black, but one was flashing white words on it: "MSDD FAILURE". Now, if there's one thing we learned while building this place, it was DO NOT FUCK WITH THE MSDD. But, me being me, I assumed that someone had cut a cable accidentally and it didn't have power, or something. I went down into the server room - where they keep the MSDD - and had a look. It all looked fine.

When I turned to go upstairs, my foot snagged on one of the ethernet cables, which pulled a hard drive out of its casing. Suddenly, everything went ape shit: alarms blaring, lights flashing, a cold mechanical voice saying "CRITICAL FAILURE" over and over again. I stuffed the drive back in again, but the alarms didn't stop. Luckily, I noticed a trailing cable at the back, and plugged it into the drive, which made everything shut up.

Proud of myself, I backed away to make sure nothing else had happened, and walked backwards into the MSDD. Now, I feel I should mention, there are more safeguards on this thing than there are on the 001 slot, so I did not flick a switch or anything like that. I literally just walked backwards into it, knocked it slightly, and there was a massive BANG followed by a soft whump.

After inspecting the MSDD for any signs of damage, I assumed that the bang had been the systems rebooting or something - hey, the Foundation's weird sometimes - and went back upstairs. I thought I'd better check the surveillance room to make sure that warning had gone away, but when I got there, all of the exterior and interior cameras had activated.

As best I can tell, I'm on a different planet now. I guess I must have activated the MSDD on accident when I knocked it, but if that's the case then it's stupid. Why build something so important to be so volatile? It just doesn't make sense.

One would have thought that the planet would have been at least habitable, right? Given what I just said about the MSDD's construction and intended purpose, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that. But no, I don't even have that luxury. Unfortunately, one of the workers was caught just on the edge of the device's radius, and I can see her corpse from the security cameras. It could have just been the journey, but I don't think so, and I sure as hell don't want to find out first-hand.

There is, however, one small thing that will help me immensely: we hadn't fully configured the locking system when everything went down, so I don't need to worry about being restricted. I've got free roam of the facility.

I'm going to log my thoughts here because writing things down has always helped me think them through, and I figure unless I occupy myself somehow I'll go crazy. So be prepared for a lot of reading, whoever you are!

Anyway, I'd be dead by now if there were any leaks, surely. But I'd better go and do an inspection before anything ruptures.

Conway out!

FUCK.

SHITFUCK.

..huuuueeeeeegh

my hnads ae shaking too much t type

I've calmed down a bit now. So, you may have guessed, I found a leak.

All of the windows on this place were built to be airtight. Obviously, if they were going to be sending it into space, then they'd need to be. But I guess one must not have been installed correctly, because there was a hairline crack between the window and the wall.

I found it as I was walking up to the cafeteria. It was the second to last place I was going to check, and by that point it was actually pretty large. I knew, by the time I'd gotten to the nearest janitor's closet to grab some duct tape, the facility would have breached.

So I reacted on instinct. I fucking floored it to Surveillance - that's where I'm typing from, by the way - never have I run so fast before - and slammed my fist on the blast door manual controls. The blast doors shut just before the hole broke open - seriously, it could not have been any closer. Thankfully, the blast doors did seal the breach, so now only the corridor to the cafeteria is out of order. I've also turned off the heater in there, because sending heat straight outside is a stupid waste of power.

I'm glad I found it when I did, because holy shit, if the entire facility had done that it would have been like being in the middle of the most powerful tornado ever.

I don't know what brought me here. Probably just a freak malfunction of the MSDD. I reckon I'll probably be sent home soon. We'll be fitting all the alarms tomorrow - smoke alarms, breach alarms, carbon monoxide alarms. Statutory shit. Better than being stranded here though.

2014-12-12

– hide block

Well, I'm not home.

I'm surprised, honestly. These things tend to have a period of about a day. Perhaps tomorrow?

In the meantime, I'm going to see what I have to work with.

I have a major problem.

So, you remember that in my last log, I reported that the corridor to the cafeteria had breached? Well, turns out that there is no other way to access the cafeteria, other than that corridor, without going outside. And going outside would be like committing suicide, judging by what just happened.

Yeah. The cafeteria, my only long-term source of food, is currently inaccessible. In the event I can't get back home, I'll need to secure it, otherwise I'll die within two weeks. Thank Christ for small mercies, though - I do know it's still secure, because all the dainty little flowers on the tables are still alive. If I get up there, I'll be fine,

I just have to find a way to get to it.

I'm a massive idiot!

What brought me here? The MSDD!

What can get me out of here? The MSDD!

So what am I going to do? Manually activate the MSDD, and get the fuck home!

ASS.

---
SCP Foundation OS: Ver 1.4.5

C:\Users\Staff\2\ConwayM: status SMDD 
ERROR: File 'SMDD' does not exist or is unreachable

C:\Users\Staff\2\ConwayM: status MSDD
MSDD Status: Online

C:\Users\Staff\2\ConwayM: activate MSDD
Activating MSDD...
Activating MSDD...
Activating MSDD...
Activating MSDD...
ERROR: Device cannot be activated

C:\Users\Staff\2\ConwayM: prompt error
Prompt "Device cannot be activated"?

C:\Users\Staff\2\ConwayM: y
"Device cannot be activated",  t232s = < min

For those who don't speak nerd, I just asked to activate the MSDD. When it wouldn't let me, I asked why, and it said "t232s = < min". What that means is there isn't enough fuel to get back home.

The MSDD is powered by liquid fluoride and thorium salts. There's an awesome article cited in the theory paper: basically, you start off with Uranium-233, which decays and releases a neutron. The neutron can be absorbed by thorium in solution, which decays to protactinium, then to uranium-233, which can be extracted and added back in. It's similar to a fission reactor, but waaaay cooler generates less waste.

It takes thorium tetrafluoride in solution as its fuel, and I don't see any way to generate that in this shithole. So I guess I'm stuck here. Fuck.

Incidentally, before I forget, the Site itself is powered by a combination of two different fission reactors - a "breeder" reactor, which cultivates fissile fuel, and a "light-water reactor", which actually provides the power to the place. Basically, magic. So I don't have to worry about power on that front, as the two working together should provide enough power to run the facility for upwards of 350 years.

I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that my dying out here is a very real possibility. It's not a very nice feeling, confronting your own mortality. But I'm doing it, at any rate.

Matthew Conway, Level 2 Researcher. Studied for four years at uni for a BA in computer science. Was recruited by the Foundation in 2012. Level 2 application essay: using virtual environments to test infohazardous anomalies. 94%.

I'm calling it now: I'm going to die here. I'm going to die on this planet. I will be the only man in human history to die within the atmosphere of a planet that is not Earth.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to give up.

Fuck no.

Though this alien planet might give me the chills, and adversity looms against one lonesome man,

I'm going to use every one of my skills to survive for as long as I fucking well can.

2014-12-13

– hide block

Time to make a list of everything I need to survive.

Food

Water

Sleep

Exercise

Oxygen

Heat

Let's get the easy ones out of the way first. Heat is no problem, because there are heating coils powered by the magic generator of convenience in all the radiators. So as long as I have power, I shan't be freezing to death.

Sleep? No problem. I think there's a mattress in one of the containment cells; it was going to be used by one of the humanoids. Even if not, there isn't any rule saying I need to be clothed now that I'm not on Earth, so I can sleep on those if needs be.

Exercise too. I'm sure I can do laps around the corridors.

No, the big ones are food, water and oxygen. There's quite a lot of food upstairs, but I can't get upstairs because, if you remember, the corridor's breached. But that wouldn't last forever. No, I need to grow my food. Good ol' farming. I have about three days' worth of food on hand, which I can stretch to six days, and from then on out I'll be starving. So I've got about week of sapience to work out how to reach the cafeteria.

Thankfully, if there's one thing the SCP Foundation loves, it's health supplements. I reckon that's probably because they don't want anybody who's stuck indoors 24/7 to turn translucent via lack of Vitamin C. They may not be tasty, but all I need to actually grow is calories. Vitamins and stuff, I can all get through tablets.

Water is a problem. BUT! I specifically remember those assholes on the the ethics committee getting on our asses about water storage. They made us put in five giant tanks filled with water, so I might not have a problem there. We shall have to see.

Now. Oxygen. This is the big big one. You can get oxygen in many different ways, but probably the best one for me is going to be growing shit. No, not growing shit, growing plants. I read somewhere that the average human being needs roughly 60m² of crops to be able to survive and breathe in space.

The armory has a hazmat suit in it, and inside that hazmat suit is a nifty gadget called a "rebreather". The rebreather separates the carbon dioxide from my breath, and it needs to be hooked up to an external oxygen tank to function.

This means that there are three tanks of oxygen in the armory, and should things ever get desperate, I can use those. But I'll save them for emergencies.

I'll need to start working on those crops pretty soon.

My dad was a farmer. Well, no he wasn't, but he grew herbs in a pot. Well, I say 'grew'; it died after two days. But still… farming genes.

2014-12-14

– hide block

I spent today mapping the areas available to me. I'll see if I can scan the map onto the system and attach it to this log.

As of my last recon mission, this Site has:

12 containment chambers, all made of the toughest materials the Foundation can procure

One server room, hosting the Site's OS and related files

Four janitorial closets, each stocked with cleaning supplies, a mop, and a vacuum cleaner

Three dormitories for on-site personnel, each consisting of 4 sets of bunk-beds, meaning that a total of 24 personnel could sleep at any one time.

One armory (more detail on that later)

One surveillance room (which has become command for me)

Two sets of toilets each of both ladies and gents

One cafeteria and adjoining kitchen, rendered inaccessible due to an air breach

One rec room, containing several bookcases, game tables, and other stuff I didn't check out

Two labs, filled with sciencey machines that I'll probably never use.

There's also a vehicle bay, but I haven't drawn it because I would have run out of paper. It's on Level 1, at the end of the horizontal corridor.

And that's everything. There are only two other things that I think I should mention. One is the fact that every door out of the facility is either marked "DO NOT OPEN IF NOT ON EARTH", or is an airlock, which makes my job massively easier. The second is the armory, and how batshit crazy it is.

Do you have any idea the kind of stuff we have in there!? Well, actually, surprisingly few guns and shit, mostly frags and EMP grenades, rocket launchers, things meant to take down specific SCPs. But there are some really awesome weapons in there! Like chemicals designed to burn holes in things. Really strong acids, probably for 682. I wonder if they'd work on these walls.

Huh. I shall have to test that.

Also, slightly worryingly, there's a metric fuck-ton of explosives. Like, insanely many explosives. But not even normal explosives - breaching explosives. Meant to tear holes in solid material. I'm not joking about this; I may as well be stuck in space inside a multi-million-dollar time bomb. If I ever make contact with the Foundation, I'm going to give them a serious talking-to about their incendiary management.

I have a plan. I'm going to try and breach my way into the cafeteria using those chemicals. I can just about reach the ceiling if I stack up some crates. Since I can't use the hallway, I'll be going straight through. If I can't corrode my way through, I'll think of something else, but right now that sounds like my best shot.

I would use some of the explosives, but I don't know how big they blow, and I can't risk breaching the walls. That would just be… no. No.

Once I've accessed the cafeteria, I'm going to make sure the freezers are still operational, then check to see how much food I have access to, and how long it will last me. Once that's been done, I'll get started with how to farm in space.

Actually, I have been thinking about that, and I've come to the conclusion that I need to use night soil. What's night soil? Human shit. Shock, horror, etc. The problem is that there's hardly any shit here. All the toilets chemically treat waste, so there's nothing I can use there, and I've only needed to shit twice so far. Both times I've done it in one of the chambers, which I plan on using for my farm.

But I can think about my farm when I have more food.

Bad news: the acid can't breach the walls. I threw some of every single acid at a dividing wall between two chambers, and nothing budged. I think there might have been a dent, but then again it could have just been some absurd specification.

So I'm back to square one. How do I access the cafeteria…

Okay.

I know what I need to do.

Inside the armory is a hazmat suit.

Hazmat suits are mostly airtight.

So is duct tape.

If you apply duct tape to a breach, it can seal it.

I'm going to fill a hazmat suit with air, then leave it in one of the airlocks, open it, and see how long it takes to deflate.

It took all of one minute for the air to escape. Almost all of looked like it came from the seam between the transparent face-plate and the plastic covering.

I'm going to tape over that and see if that improves things.

Okay, this is good. It took half an hour to lose all of its air.

(This is obviously with the rebreather disabled)

The next step is to identify smaller leaks and patch those. In order to do that, I need colored gas of some kind. I wonder where I can get that…

What the fuck am I DOING!?

I'm typing this on the terminal in the lab. Currently, there is a canister of tear gas hooked up to the suit, and it's slowly inflating. Once it's fully inFUKC

Sorry about that. I panicked slightly when I saw how much the suit was bulging. Anyhow, it's full, so now I'm going open the airlock and see what happens.

Success! The tear gas is leaking out slowly from several small areas which I can clearly see. Once the suit's deflated, I can patch it up and then I should be able to go!

I patched it all up, filled it up with even more air, then popped it in the airlock. An hour and a half later, it still looks as though it has most of its air! Somehow, I've managed to create a spacesuit.

But it still might not be enough. I don't know how close the planet is to the star it orbits, so…

…actually, I can check that! I need to see whether the heaters or the cooling system is doing more work, and from that I'll at least know roughly how close to the star I am.

---
SCP Foundation OS: Ver 1.4.5 

C:\Users\Staff\2\ConwayM: list +c
Listing connected devices:

    heater    1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | main
    cooler     1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | main
    camera   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
     13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | main
    lights      1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | main
    doors      1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | main
    speakers 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | main

C:\Users\Staff\2\ConwayM: heater main
    Heater Main
        Consumption: 3500W
        Cutoff: 21^^o^^C
        Usage: 2956.3W

C:\Users\Staff\2\ConwayM: cooler main
    Cooler Main
        Consumption: 3500W
        Cutoff: 23^^o^^C
        Usage: 10.2W

So that means it's highly likely we're out beyond the habitable zone of the star. This means that there probably won't be too much solar radiation, but still enough to merit caution.

It's just occurred to me that I won't be going outside with this suit… at least, yet. I'm not actually sure I've told you my entire plan.

I'm going to use this suit to enter the breached area of the corridor and seal it up as quickly as possible. The reason I need the suit is that a) I need air, but also b) I don't know how dense the atmosphere is, so it might be that I would explode if I just stepped out there.

It has also just occurred to me that I'm probably going to lose air doing it, but I can see the crack through one of the cameras, and while it's pretty big, it isn't unmanageable. So as long as I get in there as soon as possible and patch it, I should be okay.

Wish me luck!

Okay, I'm all set. The suit's right next to me, and I have prepared a suitable breach sealant. Admittedly, it's five sheets of paper duct-taped together, but if my calculations are correct it should hold for long enough for me to think up a more permanent solution.

Here I go…

It worked!

As soon as I opened the door, I sprinted over to the crack and stuck my seal over it. All in all, I reckon I only lost a tiny amount of air, and now I have access to a whole load of food!

I'm going to spend tomorrow inventorying all the food I have. The Foundation like to overprepare, so I might have more than I think.

But today has been extremely productive, and I'm very happy indeed.

Conway out!

2014-12-15

2014-12-16

– hide block

Hmm. Wait a second…

Sunday's ready-meal is a roast dinner. Sadly, it's a roast with mash, so no tatties, but as a part of that roast dinner there's some uncooked sweetcorn. I seem to remember hearing that sweetcorn is actually quite high in calories.

It's a very long shot - it's a very long shot indeed. But I see no alternatives.

After some investigation, I've found a roll of aluminum foil. There's also some more duct tape, bringing the total to about fifteen rolls.

I plan on covering the inside of my incredibly makeshift spacesuit with tinfoil to ward off some of the harmful space rays. It's not perfect - hoo boy, it really, really, REALLY isn't perfect - but I suppose it can't do any harm. Then, I'll secure it all with duct tape.

Then, I'll do the same, but with 2 D-Class suits. Because I'm willing to bet space is cold. I'ma need all the insulation I can get.

It's a good thing I kept those oxygen tanks, because the rebreather can't function without a tank of aux gases. I'll be using those for my trips.

The reason I'm doing this is simple - I need dirt. There's no dirt in this facility yet, and I'm going to need about 3 cubic meters of the stuff to grow corn in.

Here's my math: the average human needs roughly 60m² of leaves in order to generate enough oxygen to survive. Since the Foundation folk weren't unduly worried about oxygen - they were planning on sending Site Skeeball to planets with an atmosphere containing sufficient amounts of oxygen anyway - they didn't bother installing an atmospheric regulator. This is what the folks in the business call a problem. The way we get around this problem is by converting carbon dioxide into oxygen using you guessed it, plants! For some reason, the Foundation likes all their lights to be as close to sunlight as possible (like the vitamins, probably so that people who have to stay inside all the time don't turn grey), which is a massive help for me.

Sixty square meters of leaf space is quite a bit, actually, so I'm going to take some measurements once the first one grows and work out how much room I need. For now, I've invented a number for the mean surface area of a leaf, and that number is 133cm². Assuming that most maize plants have six leaves (again, that number came straight out of my ass), that's 800 square centimeters of leaf per plant, which doesn't seem too ridiculous. Then it's a simple division to work out that I'm going to need 750 maize plants. Well, it's not like I was going to be doing anything else anyway.

Immediately there's a problem. 750 maize plants, getting, say, 20ml of water per day, will single-handedly exhaust my water supply in 106 days. But I'll get back to that.

Maize… well, actually, now that I think about it, maize and sweetcorn are two different things, but they're both corn, so I'm going to use them interchangeably, and screw you if you disagree, I'm the one stuck in space here. Maize is usually planted in grids, with each plant 75cm away from its nearest neighbor (according to a biology textbook I found in one of the labs). I'm going to get creative with my planting, and pack them even more efficiently, in triangle-like formations. Now, this sort of thing isn't typically done, because a) having maize plants too close to each other increases competition for food and water, which means that b) the soil dries out and becomes arid and infertile.

But amazingly, and somewhat counter-intuitively, this little piece of knowledge is entirely unnecessary, because of one detail: the MSDD. When it teleported the facility away, it also teleported a bunch of dirt, as its area of effect is, as one might suspect, spherical. This means that there's a virtually inexhaustible supply of dirt out there.

The problem with that is that, after being exposed to a planetary atmosphere of unknown composition and insulation, it's highly likely that all of the bacteria present in the soil are dead, rendering it inert and unusable. However, I don't think that really matters, not when I have a pile of shit in the corner!

No, seriously. If I use my feces to grow the corn, then they'll grow way faster.

So that's that! I'm going to be growing corn. I'll need to get quite a bit of dirt from outside - my Fermi estimation gave me 3 cubic meters - but other than that, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work!

…what's that? Water? Well, yes, that is a bit of a problem. But first of all, everything here is a closed system. No matter is lost or gained, at least, now that I'm shitting on my crops. So theoretically, as long as I come up with a way to distill my piss, I should be golden! Secondly, note that earlier I mentioned that humans would need 60 square meters of crops to breathe and eat. That's without anything else. If I have two ears of corn per day, along with my meal, it should push me along nicely without actually requiring as many crops as the textbook says.

But the main reason I'd need so many crops would be for oxygen - that is, to breathe. This Site is very big - very big indeed - and it's full to the brim with air. But air doesn't last as long as people think it does, which is bad news for me. As a matter of fact, I reckon I've used about a tenth of all of the air in this place, which means that I don't have all that much left. Well, I do, but… never mind.

Wow, I've done a lot of writing today. Tomorrow I'm going to go outside - and get that dirt if it kills me!

…which it may well.

Not much to report today. As I said, I hooked up the water condenser, and it seems to be mostly working. It certainly cools the room down.

But I have a bigger problem now. You may have noticed that 0.7% carbon from earlier. That's way too much fucking carbon. I'm likely going to die of carbon dioxide poisoning before I run out of oxygen.

Fortunately, I have a solution to this problem!

Roughly five years ago, a chemistry student won a large, anonymous grant from the Foundation when he created a miniaturized apparatus for extracting and collecting carbon dioxide. The device was developed to use heat energy to power a reaction over a catalyst too long for me to remember, which split 2CO₂ into C₂ and 2O₂. This was the tech they used to keep people alive during all the Foundation's space excursions, most notably the Peregrines.

It's a deus ex machina, right? Well, there's a slight problem. The device was made bigger and bigger, but never implemented into any systems beyond Peregrine, simply because there was never any need.

Well, except for one.

Standard SCP Foundation fire extinguishers.

It actually makes sense. Since the Foundation operates over so many Sites, it would be inefficient to manually refill every single fire extinguisher after a major conflagration. So why not just create self-refilling fire extinguishers? It's the perfect plan! It didn't even need to crack the gases!

The major problem is that there's nowhere to store the carbon dioxide, other than spewing it right back into the air. I could use one of the water tanks, but the issue with that is they're linked in parallel, so each tank drains 1 liter for every 5 liters used. No, I'm going to have to get creative.

Wait a second.

Inside the armory are high-pressure canisters of CS gas, and that shit ain't being passively refilled. I used one to test the suit.

What if I open one outside, then take the empty canister and fill it up using the fire extinguisher, then…

…wait. No, because then it would fill with nitrogen.

But if I discharged the CS canister outside, then entered the airlock and created a near-vacuum, then discharged the fire extinguisher into the CS canister…

…no, because my suit wouldn't be able to handle the pressure and would probably burst.

Hmm. I wonder how the airlock works.

I found some schematics.

So the airlock uses an automated system which logs which door has been opened, and either vents gases back into the Site while venting outside gases in, or vents gases from the Site into the airlock while venting outside gases out. Vent vent vent.

This raises an interesting question: How does the airlock distinguish between gases outside and gases inside? Answer: it doesn't. So every time I go outside, I take a little more methane in, and every time I come back in I lose some oxygen.

Basically, I can't fuck with it at all, because it's all self-contained.

But I don't need to, because I have had another idea!

The main problem with my initial plan - take it outside, blow it in there - was that there was no way to prevent backflow from the carbon dioxide, which would make it spew back out. And I don't want to waste oxygen - in any form.

However, who says I need to move it into another canister? I can just fire the extinguisher over the plants, and, because CO₂ is heavier than air, it should sink to the bottom quite rapidly.

I said writing things down helps me think! I'll give that a shot tomorrow.

Today I woke up and felt like doing some science.

I walked outside, took a small rock sample (it was mostly powder) and walked back inside. I then ran it through the MS machine:

---
SCP Foundation OS: Ver. 1.4.5

    Mass Spectrometer
        Sample 5 Results:
            48.1% oxygen
            40% calcium
            11.9% carbon
            Trace% iron

…which fits the empirical formula of impure calcium carbonate.

So I'm in space on a lump of chalk. Wonderful.

There's no organisms in the chalk. I put a slide together, but it's just this weird arrangement of crystals and gaps. I also took some of the explosives and blew a hole because scieeeence. This gave me access to some of the lower minerals.

The second strata (as I've decided to name it) is absolutely fascinating. One of the rock fragments I found has the following composition:

---
SCP Foundation OS: Ver. 1.4.5

    Mass Spectrometer
        Sample 6 Results:
            53% silicon
            47% oxygen
            Trace% iron

…meaning it's silicon dioxide, or silica. Thing is, it looks more like a metamorphic stone, which would suggest that the planet has some sort of molten core.

A molten core is believed to be the main reason why Earth has a magnetic field (which is just one of the components which made Earth habitable). I can test this out with a magnet, a needle, and some fluid.

And since I'm in the science groove right now, I may as well.

Compass created!

I filled a cup with water, stuck a magnetized needle into some Styrofoam from a packing crate, and dropped it in. The Styrofoam sank after a few minutes, but before it did, the needle definitely swung around! I dropped it in several times, and one end always swung around to point one way!

This means that the planet has a magnetic field! And I'm safe from any rogue solar flares that might have cooked me alive otherwise.

To celebrate, I'ma set off some fireworks. Pyrotechnics has a tendency to make one feel better.

Okay. Time to give this another go.

Username: O5-5
Password:

WARNING: INCORRECT PASSWORD. ACTIVATING MEMETIC KILL AGENT DESIGNATION 86

Like N^N^Newborn infants, _Loⁿg FFor the _{pure spiritual milk} , that by it y^you may grow u^p into ssssssssalvation

Username: fortosetthemindonthefleshisdeathbuttosetthemindonthespiritislifeandpeace
Password:

"When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim’s body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep."

Username: fortosetthemindonthefleshisdeathbuttosetthemindonthespiritislifeandpeace
Password: hplovecraft

34 184

Username: fortosetthemindonthefleshisdeathbuttosetthemindonthespiritislifeandpeace
Password: sohappierthanihad[…]briefanddesolatehour

Username valid. Password accepted. Enter, O5-5.

Username: valid
Password: accepted
O5-5

---
SCP Foundation OS: Ver. 1.4.5

C:\Users\Admin\O5-5:

…

…and I'm in.

So I guess the real password was doing them all in order? That's… actually really clever.

Honestly, I kind of expected more. The crescendo of music, the flashing lights, anything really… but the facility is still cold and empty. Thankfully not literally cold - the heaters are still working, thank Christ - but the kind of cold the Foundation exudes.

Man, the Foundation reeealy like their backups, don't they? I can get logs of just about anything I want on this account, including the 001s. Time to start reading!

oh god why did I start reading

Having O5 clearance means that I am privy to all of their private emails. I can snoop on exactly what's been going on within the Foundation before I, ahem… left.

And some of the stuff on here is black-mail worthy. When I get back, I will practically own the Foundation. O5-5, your days are numbered.

O5-3.

Regarding the 'accident', it would be a terrible shame to lose so many assets in such an awful
disaster. At least we would have fewer, ahem, 'problematic' entities to contain. Nobody would need
to know the full truth except us. This is, of course, if Project Monovia even succeeds.

O5-5

I have no idea what they're talking about, but so long as they don't know that… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2015-01-26

– hide block

Yeowch. Is the whole of Wikipedia on here? That seems… excessive.

Maybe it's because they needed to have a certain amount of data on-site, so that in the event that one of the Keters caused a problem that nobody knew the solution to, they could look it up.

I reckon there are about 200 drives in the server room. Each drive will be a 1TB SSD, meaning a total of 200TB of storage. Let's rule half of that out for useless intra-Site diagnostic bullshit - 100TB. One of the Wikipedia pages entitled "Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia" estimates that, as of Feb. 2013, the total size of all pages and history logs stored on the platform was 10TB.

So it isn't out of the question.

Hey, I forgot to even look for the schematics of the MSDD amidst all this excitement. Time to go and do that, I guess.

Oookay. So the thorium reactor is built in to the device, as best I can tell, which means that it's going to need a hell of a lot of modifications to get it working. Also, the MSDD needs so much energy that it would take the Site's measly fission generator up to 10 days of continuous power generation to build up enough juice. And that's with every rod in, and all the power generated being directly sent to the device. The Site needs 6 of the 10 rods to be inserted to generate enough power, and this gives 1 days' worth of leeway while the uranium is being re-enriched (I think; this is not my area of expertise, I'm just reading off the design documents). Were I to insert all 10, then they'd become depleted in 11 days' time, and there would be just 40% of the necessary power in the MSDD.

I'd need to devise a rota. Let's say I insert one more rod, with the sole purpose of being used to power the MSDD. It would take 100 days, and reduce the catastrophic reactor failure margin down to 18 hours, but it's something. 2 more rods, it would take 50 days, and the margin comes down to just under 12 hours.

What's the catastrophic reactor failure margin? Say something goes wrong with the reactor; I have this long to notice and shut everything off before shit gets wild. 18 hours may seem like a long time, but when you're sleeping and reading for almost all the time, time tends to move rather quickly. And this is the time before the alarms go off, let me make that clear.

At the moment, the CRFM is 24 hours. So really, once every day I should be checking the reactor readouts, making sure that everything is working according to the schematics, and that there isn''t any uncontrolled power generation.

In fact, I think I am going to do that.

There is, however, another option. One that would be simpler in some aspects, and way, way harder in others.

I could attempt to generate anther fuel cell.

Hold on, hold on. I know what you're thinking. Nothing, because you're a computer terminal. But I know what I'd be thinking. "That's insane! Where are you going to find thorium here!?"

This is the worst part. Thankfully, for whatever reason, the schematics for the MSDD had a fuck-ton of HTML attached, which constituted everything you could possibly need to know about operating it. This includes the history of the reactor, the prototypes, and, most usefully, how the fuel is created.

Thorium is pretty abundant in the Earth's crust - for a 'rare' earth metal, that is. One of the most prominent ways it's generated is by refining monazite. Monazite is (thanks HTML!) actually a general term for four 'sub-strains', half of which don't even contain thorium. Thorium's just sort of along for the ride, but this means it's the first to jump ship when it's being refined.

So if I could find that, then I could go through an extremely long and intensive set of extraction procedures that probably wouldn't work anyway, all in a futile attempt to create half of a fuel cell!

This is, of course, all contingent on my being able to find a sample of monazite even containing thorium in the first place. Which seems somehow unlikely when I'm flying through space on a fucking lump of fucking chalk.

Fluorine, on the other hand, is really common. Really common.

Where the hell am I going to find fluorine!?

…

Interestingly enough, I think I might have an idea about that. Remember earlier, when I said that there were all kinds of groovy acids in the armory, ready to throw at 682 if it ever got loose? Well, one of those acids is hydrofluoric acid, which I believe I can react with potassium to form potassium fluoride. If I then electrolyze a mixture of HF and KF, then I think I can get fluorine gas! I'm going to have to electrolyze it into a CS canister, though, since fluorine is known for eating through the majority of substances.

That's all well and good, I hear myself cry, but where can I find potasssium? Well, I'm glad I asked that, because I just happen to know the answer. Note that I don't actually need potassium, I just need potassium fluoride. I can perform a special chemistry magic show, known as a "displacement reaction" - remember that from high school? - and replace the chlorine in potassium chloride with potassium fluoride.

Shiiiit. This plan… it's not even a plan. It's a set of sentences that sound good together. There it literally no way this could work.

…right?

I've decided.

I am going to go with Zeus, for multiple reasons. One, if it fails, I can fall back on Prometheus, whereas once that puppy's cut open it's unlikely I'll be able to salvage it.

Two, I actually took chemistry in high school, whereas I didn't take electrical engineering. Sure, I fixed a radio once, but all it needed was a dot of solder and some wires to be cut. This, I'd imagine, would be infinitely more complicated.

Three: I actually know where to get the materials for Zeus, but I dunno where the hell I'm going to procure a length of wire and a soldering iron from in the middle of Site 114.

So that's decided.

Of course, now I need to actually work out what Project Zeus is.

I have exactly one capsule. The top has a rubber seal, and when it's inserted into the MSDD, this seal is breached by a syringe of some kind and the contents extracted. It doesn't need to be in any specific format, just poured in as a liquid. And, I'd imagine that it would be quite forgiving with the concentrations, as it's merely the decay that powers it, not any chemical reactions.

I need to fill that capsule with thorium tetrafluoride. The radius of the empty part of the container is a neat 2cm, and it's 10cm long, giving it a volume of 2²*10=4*10=40π, or ~126cm³. That's how much thorium tetrafluoride I need to generate. It's a molten salt solution, so it'll need to be hot, but "the capsule has been annealed to reflect the majority of energy, and the subsequent layers reduce heat loss to a negligible level", according to the essay cited by the schematics. If it goes in hot, it'll stay hot. Basically a thermos.

126cm³ of thorium tetrafluoride salt, at a density of 6.3g/cm³, will weigh 793.8g. ThF₄ has a relative formula mass of 232+4*19=308. Now comes the guesswork; it has been quite a number of years since high school chemistry, regardless of what I said earlier. I think I need to divide 793.8 by 308, which returns 2.57727272727272.

Ah, I remember! The relative formula mass gives a number, and that number is how many grams a mole (science measurey amount) of that substance weighs. I'm going to need 2.58 moles of thorium tetrafluoride.

Why does this matter? Well, it's important that I have enough of the ingredients. 2.58 moles of thorium tetrafluoride means I need 2.58 moles of thorium, and 5.16 moles of fluorine gas (since the gas is F₂). 2.58 moles of thorium will weigh 2.58*232=598.56g. I need over half a kilo of thorium. Fluorine, however, will weigh 10.32*19=196g. When I add 598.56 to 196, I get 794.56, which is really good news, because above I said that the thorium tetrafluoride would weigh 793.8. I've been rounding, but this goes to show that I'm mostly right, at least right now.

Let's assume I get my hands on 600g of thorium - probably within at least ten kilograms of ore. Bearing in mind how long it took me to get in the cubic meters of dirt, this is going to be funnnnnnnnnnnnn. I'll then need to separate it from its compound. In order to do that, I need to:

Grind the monazite down to an impossibly small powder

Mix it with extremely high concentrations of sulfuric acid at temperatures of up to 180^o

Add in a volume of water TEN TIMES GREATER than the original mass of ore (fuck me)

Filter out all of the wacky side chemicals

MORE FUCKING WATER. Seriously. 6-7 parts water to the monazite sulfate.

Add ammonium hydroxide to neutralize the acid

Filter to get, drum roll please…. thorium phosphate!

The article goes on and on and on about how to get all the other compounds out of there, but that's where I'm going to stop. I'll essentially be guesstimating how much I need, but ten kilos should do the trick for a starting point.

Of course, first I'll need to find a deposit of monazite. Which is easier said than done. I've decided that I'll find a cave, mark the entrance, then take copious volumes of mineral samples and analyze them. If they have thorium, fucking wow, and if they don't, next cave.

This could take a long-ass time.

Fluorine is actually comparatively easy, which is saying something. In order to generate fluorine gas, I'll need to electrolyze a mixture of hydrofluoric acid and potassium fluoride. I can get potassium fluoride by dunking potassium carbonate in hydrofluoric acid. You can get that - so sayeth Wikipedia - by spraying carbon dioxide at hot potassium hydroxide. And I just happen to have a jar of potassium hydroxide in one of the racks in the lab!

I think that's because it's commonly used to neutralize acids, but who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth? Once I've actually generated the fluorine gas, I'm going to need to hold it in the actual fuel cell, because fluorine has a tendency to set so-called 'fireproof' materials on fire.

So yeah. My entire plan could fold in a million different ways, but the first hurdle is that I need to find monazite ore.

When I was younger, about 16, my dad's car broke down. It was a Honda Accord, 217 horsepower, 7200 RPM with a 4-cylinder engine.

He took the opportunity to explain how cars work - the fuel is injected in, and the explosions generate forces that rotate a specifically shaped crank-shaft. Anyone who's performed self-maintenance on a car will know this.

I've come to a conclusion that I need to find some alternate method of generating torque. I cannot use the engine of the Rover, otherwise I will die in a cloud of fire (which, to be honest, sounds like the most metal way to die, even if it isn't strictly true). But what can I use?

Most modern electric cars use lithium-ion batteries, and consume inordinate amounts of power for relatively little torque. If the charge ran out, I would be stranded in the middle of a wasteland. Well, more stranded than I already am.

I like this! I like stating facts. It helps distract me from my current predicament.

Plus, I don't actually have any lithium-ion batteries, nor any electric motors powerful enough to make a car run across any sizeable distance. So that's out of the window.

Generating torque… generating torque…

…wait a second.

Who says I need to drive the entire Rover?

Since the inside of the car isn't pressurized, I'll need to wear my spacesuit anyway. This means I can remove everything except the driver's seat, the seatbelt, and the driving mechanisms. I reckon that's easily 75% of the car that can just go, instantly.

Even better, since it would do absolutely nothing in this oxygen-deprived atmosphere, the engine, fuel tank, and injection system can all go.

Headlights? Eh, those might actually be useful. I'll see how intertwined with other systems they are; I might have no choice but to remove them.

I made the journey to the crater in 3 hours. My average walk speed is ~4km/h, so that's 12km away. If I drive the Rover at 30km/h, that's a round trip of under an hour, which, regardless of oxygen consumption, is a massive, massive advantage.

But again… how do I generate that torque?

I set the vacuum cleaner on at 15:21 last night, and it's now 7:47. I wonder how much air it's retrieved?

Let's find out.

Fuck.

Fucking… fuck.

The vacuum cleaner actually did quite a good job. When I opened the door from the outside, there was quite a loud "whump" noise as the atmosphere flowed into the vehicle bay. I rolled the Rover in, then realized I'd been a massive idiot. Instead of air, I now had a vehicle bay filled with methane and carbon dioxide. Not ideal.

What was I to do? Well, I moved one of the carbon dioxide-absorbing fire extinguishers into the vehicle bay, which should soak up some of the CO₂. Sadly, this wasn't the biggest problem. Methane is not something you want lingering in any substantial quantity in your atmosphere.

So how did I solve this dilemma?

Fire.

Methane is flammable - precisely why I didn't want it in my base. Therefore, went my train of thought, if I allow small amounts of oxygen into the vehicle locker, then very carefully lit a flame, then it might be possible to burn off most, if not all, of the methane. It would generate CO₂ and water, thus reducing the problem to one previously solved.

While I was mulling this idea over, I turned the vacuum cleaner off.

But then I had a better idea. Why should I need to even be in the same room?

The vacuum has a 'blow' function. There's a funnel in the kitchen. I have enough duct tape to mummify myself multiple times over. So, I made a makeshift nozzle, placed a lighter close to the nozzle, vented a tiny amount of air into the room - enough to start a flame but not enough to blow me to kingdom come - then turned on the lighter and boom.

At the time, I had no idea what had happened. However, in hindsight, it's obvious: pressure. As soon as I turned the vacuum cleaner off, oxygen-rich air began to flood into the room. By the time I got round to the other side, the air was already primed to ignite. Even worse, the force of the initial explosion - which, I can deduce, hadn't burned off all the methane - dislodged the vacuum cleaner, sending it flying backwards into the facility. This provided an even bigger vector for ignition fuel to enter the ignition chamber.

So, in reality, there were two explosions. One, the first, which paved the way for the second, bigger, longer, more catastrophic one. And it was the second one that tore a hole in my arm.

As the rest of the methane ignited, my dear, dear Land Rover stood firm; however, the majority of other components in the room did not. Something slammed into my side with the force of a thousand Unrelenting Forces. When I heard the brittle 'snap', I knew something had gone horribly, horribly wrong. Aside from all the fire.

The bone of my left forearm was sticking out of my skin.

I fell over. It hurt. Moving, even the tiniest amount, sent wave after wave of sheer agony through my body. It felt like my blood was on fire and I was burning up from the inside out. Wow, did that hurt. The pain's gone slightly now, but it's still enough to be really distracting. Fuck.

Thanks to my initial resilience testing, I knew that the containment chambers could stand the force of up to three hundred tons of TNT. They then used the excess material to shore up the remainder of the walls, explaining why I wasn't freeze-dried alien fodder at that moment. Still, the metal door had been blown out of its frame, and was lying, propped up, against the Land Rover, which, miraculously, was still entirely intact. Not even the windows had broken. There was clear evidence of deformation in the vehicle admission door, but it hadn't ruptured, nor had it moved out of position.

All okay? Well, not quite. While the flames hadn't set anything on fire, the explosive force had been diverted down a small opening in the bay. It had previously been blocked by a grate, but this had gone flying across the room like a startled starling. A quick check revealed that this opening led to the reactor room - positioned, as it was, directly beneath the bay. I presume that it had been some kind of emergency escape hatch for excess steam, since the reactor used highly fissile material and was "prone to unexpected bursts of superheated steam" (quoted from the blueprints).

I dragged myself upstairs, utterly failing to ignore the torment my arm was subjecting me to, and threw myself into the wheelie chair in the surveillance room, and performed as many diagnostics on the reactor, making sure that nothing had broken. Everything seemed okay, so I turned my attention to the next problem: my arm.

At least something had gone well: it wasn't my dominant arm that had snapped. I could afford to lose my left arm… well, you know what I mean, I couldn't afford to lose any body parts.

But my God did it hurt.

My medical supplies consisted of: two first-aid kits and a book on first aid. You'd think, having so many explosives in one place, the Foundation could shell out for more health supplies than you'd find in the average phone box. Still, better than nothing. I forced the broken bone into place, then strategically waited for about ten minutes for the screaming to end. Once that phase had passed, I examined the place at which the bone had pierced the skin.

The more I looked at it, the more my heart sank. It hadn't been a clean break, as I'd hoped - there were multiple pearly-white bone fragments lodged in the meat around the wound. The first-aid book advised me not to try and move the bone back into position, and wait for the ambulance to arrive, but fuck that. Carefully, I took some tweezers, and, in what might quite possibly be the worst lucky-dip ever, used them to extract the splinters. They're on the desk in front of me right now.

Following that, I used some dinky little wipes to swab the blood off the wound. The book suggested elevating the arm above the heart, and packing the wound with ice, so I've set up my bed in the cafeteria and let my arm dangle into the freezer.

It is… 21:21. The bleeding still hasn't stopped. I think I might be about to die.

I'm an idiot.

COVER THE WOUND. I forgot to COVER THE WOUND.

Pretty much as soon as I tourniquet'd the arm, the bleeding stopped. I went back and put it on ice, waited an hour, then undid the tourniquet. After a few leakages, the bleeding stopped again. I daubed some iodine tincture around the wound, then wrapped it up in a standard bandage and now I think I'm going back to bed. Even getting up to type this made me feel like snakes were ripping my shoulder apart cell by cell.

The following transmission was a series of compressed audio files. Transcripts are provided below.

"Take On Me" is playing in the background; Conway can be heard singing along to it. Unnecessary lyrics have been removed.

Conway: …shying away, I'll be coming for your love, okay?
Take… on… me… (take on me) Take.. me… on… (take on me)
I'll… be… gone… in a-

Alarms suddenly begin to sound. Conway drops the phone.

Conway: What the fu-

Alarms are still going.

Conway: Phone, you with me? Good.

Conway: So I was doing some karaoke, using the PA system, then all these alarms started to blare! There's a screen in the surveillance room, and that might tell me what's going on. I've never seen it active, except for displaying the message "MSDD Failure", right at the beginning of all this. I'm running there now.

Conway scales a flight of stairs, then pushes open the door. Though no video was received, multiple Site-114 technicians were able to confirm that the screen would be displaying the image shown beneath.

Conway: "Catastrophic Reactor Failure"… oh no…

Alarms are still going in the background.

Conway: -the wrong button. Recording now? Good. Now I'm going to have to say it all over again.

Footsteps - it's clear that Conway is on the move. Doors hiss open.

Conway: While the reactor diagnostics are run from Surveillance, I don't think I'll get much from them - remember, it is "Catastrophic". I'm heading down to the server room, because there's a little window into the reactor chamber.

Conway: Okay, here we- oh GOD!

Conway drops the phone again. Recording ends.

Alarms continue. There's a new sound - a hissing noise.

Conway: Okay, so, right. Right.

Conway: It looks as though the explosion a few days ago scorched one of the control rods. Specifically, the apparatus for inserting and extracting it. I'm guessing that the automatic extraction system essentially 'dropped' the rod, which has led to an uncontrollable neutron chain reaction between fuel rods.

Conway: This is… not… very… good. I can see steam rising from the reactor chamber. While the reactor is prone to bursts of steam, it isn't anything near this. They're short, sharp, and sweet. This is a bloody cloud.

Conway: Alright. Think, Matt. How does a reactor work?

Several seconds of silence, in which it becomes clear that the hissing is growing louder.

Conway: Okay, I have a plan. Step 1: get the hell out of dodge.

Conway begins to run, doors slamming shut behind him.

Conway: Step 2: override automatic controls. Standard protocol for a catastrophic reactor failure is to insert the control rods completely, which should shut down any and all reactions. However, if the problem is with one of those rods, then there should, if I remember the briefing correctly, be a second set of controls, manually activated and operated, that actually control the fuel rods.

Conway: Here we are. Surveillance. The hub of all electronic operations. Let me load up the OS… aaaand… there. Now, where's the option?

No sound, save for alarms, the clicks of a mouse, and a few keyboard presses, until Conway speaks again.

Conway: Also, I wish these alarms would shut up. Maybe there's a comm- ah!

Alarms abruptly cut out.

Conway: Aaaah. Silence. Right.

More clicks.

Conway: Bugger. The manual activation is listed as one of the Site operations, which are all numerical. There should be a reference sheet somewhere around here…

Frantic shuffling of papers.

Conway: ARGH! This is REALLY not good. Like, "I think I'm dead" not good. At this point, the only recourse is to randomly try numbers. 1… nope, according to this prompt 1 is meant to trigger the MSDD. 2… nope. 3… wait, what's Monovia again?

Conway: Oh, yeah - that thing in the O5 email! Strange. Wonder what that is. It looks like it's counting down from 432,000. Well, I guess I'll find out.

Conway: 4… nope. 5… no. 6.. no, no, no, NO, ARGH! I can't stand putting my life in the hands of chance! I need to do something.

Heavy breathing. The hiss is becoming audible.

Conway: Oh, God, no. No, not that.

Conway: Anything but that.

More heavy breathing. Yet another noise becomes audible: a ticking.

Conway: I'm out of time. I need to choose: death inside, or death outside?

Conway: I'm going to go with an exterior death. Time to suit up.

Recording begins with a scuffle - seemingly, Conway attempting to secure the phone inside his hazmat suit.

Conway: -sting, testing, test… there we go.

Conway: I'm currently in the airlock. That ticking you heard was a Geiger counter. It has automatic priority over the PA system, and it kicks in when I tell it to. It was ticking, and that scared me. It shouldn't tick. At least, not as much as it was.

Conway: At the moment, the radiation levels are acceptable. So long as no radioactive material leaks from the reactor, it should return to base levels quite soon. But if they rise too high, I won't be able to go back inside the facility without constantly wearing my hazmat suit.

Conway: External controls for the reactor can be reached by a hatch at the back of the Site. Problem is, their nickname is the Christ Board, because going near it pretty much guarantees death due to radiation poisoning. It's right in the line of radiation.

Conway pauses.

Conway: I can think about that later. Let me make it round there first.

Conway: Okay, phone, I'm here. I can see a small, yellow-striped button which I think might be the button to pull out the rods.

Conway sighs.

Conway: I guess this is it. You're never going to hear this. I'm going to die here… alone, in a wasteland in the farthest reaches of space, a drop in the great ocean of…

Conway: … hang on. A drop in the great ocean of space. A drop. I cannot believe this; my skewed phraseology might just have saved my life. Who says I need to press the button? I can just drop something on it!

Conway: Thank God, there's a bit of rock over here! It must have been from when I set off those explosives to get the rock samples. Now I just have to position it over the button… careful now… aaand…

Conway: …no. No. NO! IT - SODDING - MISSED! I don't have time for this! Come on, come on…

Conway: There aren't any more rock shards. That one was the only one. Going down to retrieve it would be tantamount to bathing in uranium.

Conway: What do I have that's heavy enough to push the button? The dirt won't be - MY SHOES!

A scuffle, as Conway removes his shoes.

Conway: I don't think my feet are receiving any blood now, but nevermind. Dropping…

Conway: DAMN. Well, I have another shot…

Conway: NO! NO! NO!

Loud panting. A new alarm springs into life in the background.

Conway: I have nothing else. Goodbye, phone.

Conway: Phone… PHONE!

Conway: I'll explain what's happening once I get you back.

A lot of rustling, then silence, except the alarms. Conway drops the phone - his rebreather-enhanced breathing fades away as the alarms grow louder, before finally the phone impacts against the control panel, ending the recording.

I'm typing this - which, in and of itself, is a miracle.

In case you didn't get the audio transmissions, there was a "catastrophic reactor failure", resulting in an uncontrolled chain reaction between fuel cells. The only way to fix this involved going to the control board at the back of the reactor, exposing myself to unequivocally lethal doses of radiation.

I'd suited up, and was getting ready to essentially commit suicide when a ray of inspiration hit me: why need I go down there when I can play target practice with some rocks and shit? So I started dropping things down the shaft - a rock, a shoe, another shoe - and quickly ran out of things.

I was ready to give up when I realized I had one more chance - the phone. I'd been recording my thoughts and feelings on it ever since the alarm interrupted my karaoke, and, in order to not feel so alone, I'd taped it to the inside of my spacesuit. Problem is, the hatch was outside my suit.

How did I solve this? Well, when I removed my shoes I had to pull on these special toggle things to stop all the air escaping down my legs. In order to get my phone out, I'd need to open the toggles, which would result in death via asphyxiation as all of my oxygen-rich air escapes from the suit. Note that I specify that the air would be oxygen-rich.

In my mind, I knew that I'd be risking death, but seriously - have you read about anything else I've done? So I pushed my phone down to the bottom of the suit, undid the toggle, and felt my body begin to expand outwards. As soon as the phone hit the floor, I toggled it back up again, then disconnected the oxygen tank from the rebreather and backfilled the suit with oxygen.

This was, in hindsight, a bad idea. High concentrations of oxygen have a tendency to cause death in organisms, but only if exposed for a long time. Earlier, I estimated the atmospheric density of Tartarus to be about a third of Earth's, ergo I needed to maintain pressure within the suit lest my muscles come away from my bones. Oxygen was the only gas I had on hand.

My eyes began to water, but I picked up the phone, held it over the hatch, took aim and fired. It fell, and I had no method of checking its progress until I heard it impact the control panel. The arms activated, pulling the fuel cells out, and the radiation threat was over. The Site's batteries held enough power to keep it running for three days, which should be enough time for me to isolate the faulty rod and exclude it from the power rotation.

I stumbled back around the facility, threw the airlock doors open, and as soon as the room filled with air I opened the toggles and let the air equalize. No longer did I feel as though my lungs were filled with acid. No longer were my eyes streaming. No longer were my ears ringing.

There were still a few problems, however. When the reactor shuts down, Site 114 enters 'dormant' mode, which means that all non-essential processes would shut down. This drastically reduces the efficiency of the heaters and coolers, as well as the lights - all three of which are instrumental in my survival. Also, my boots would now be irradiated.

You may have noticed that the transmission dates skipped a day. After I broke my arm, I'd been trying to send a log once per day, to get into a routine. But after the reactor disaster, I just went to bed and slept. By the time I woke up, it was today.

I went outside again, wearing my 'indoor shoes' - the ones I'd been wearing when I got taken here by the MSDD - to pick up my phone. Sadly, when it landed on the panel, the screen broke, but the internals all seemed fine, so when I plugged it in at the terminal it was a simple matter of extracting the audio files and compressing them, to be broadcast along with this message.

If you've only received this message, sorry. You're missing out on some stellar voice-over work, courtesy of Matthew Conway, Level 2 Research Assistant and Level 99 Disaster Survivor.

Monovia Initiated - 366 918 seconds remaining.
Monovia Initiated - 366 917 seconds remaining.
Monovia Initiated - 366 916 seconds remaining.

They say all good things come in threes.

Well, I guess bad things come in threes too.

First, the methane explosion crippled me. Second, the reactor meltdown crippled my power.

Third, Project Monovia has killed me.

I was outside when the explosives went off.

See, the thorium crystal I got two days ago was one of about five close to the entrance hole. And good ol' Matthew Conway wasn't going to be satisfied with collecting ten kilos of crystal scrabbling on his side like a tripped toddler. Not when he had explosives at his disposal!

Each stick of explosives has a manual detonation cord. When you pull on it, you have five seconds to get the hell out of dodge before you get blown to kingdom come. One stick wasn't enough to clear a sufficiently large hole, so I got a second one ready. I worked out where I was going to place it and put it gently down. Everything was going perfectly to plan.

As I psyched myself up to pull the cord, I heard a noise. It sounded extremely murky - like it was underwater, kind of. But it was recognizably the "about to blow" noise. The one that the dynamite made.

It took me one second to place it. The remaining four seconds were spent running in utter ablative fear. But it wasn't enough. I barely cleared the crater.

The blast hurled me off my feet. It was even more powerful than the vehicle bay fiasco. Around me, rocks and crystals fell from the sky, pattering too gently to cause serious damage. But the explosion had left me dazed with a ringing noise in my ears.

Then the second stick went off.

My suit was yet again subjected to an extreme explosive force. Honestly, it's amazing the fucking thing hasn't melted yet. I went rolling back down into the crater, over countless outcroppings and sticky-outy parts. I don't think the hazmat material was meant to stand up to such an onslaught, but at the time I didn't realize anything was wrong. Possibly, the pressure difference had caused my trousers to form a rudimentary seal. Either way, I eventually came to rest face up at the bottom of the crater, thoroughly bojangled.

The moment my head stopped spinning, I hauled myself to my feet. This caused the seal to break, and a telltale hiss began to permeate the suit's atmosphere. That tiny rip was going to cause many problems if I didn't handle it very quickly. The hazmat material had torn, but the inner lining (an ex-D-class uniform) was helping to limit the damage. Regardless, air was escaping, and this was a Bad Thing.

In hindsight, I should have kept some spare tape within the suit, but with the gift of hindsight I shouldn't have ever left the facility in the first place. Anyhow. It sounded bad, but I couldn't actually see the tear. I had to kind of retreat inside it to reach it, which changed the tension within the suit and made it lose air faster.

What did I have to repair a tear in an airtight material? Very little. Then I remembered my earlier patch job. Somewhere near the zip at the back was a tiny flaw in the suit that I'd dealt with back when I was fiddling round with CS gas. I'd found the corresponding points on both the inside and outside of the suit, and covered them both with tape.

However, I'd later learned that you only need to fix the outside of the suit - in fact, covering the inside alone was a bad idea, because I worked out that the pressure difference alone may be able to tear it away. It's the difference between reaction forces and tension (adhesive) forces.

I carefully pulled away the inside portion of the duct tape. Bear in mind, if this didn't work, I'd have double the amount of suit breaches and be no better off. But it did work. The tape came away (with a lot of pulling on my part), and it fixed easily on the inside of my pet breach.

Remember what I just said? Covering the inside of a suit alone is risky strategy. But I had nothing better - nothing better at all. It just about stayed in place as I scuttled back to the facility.

The worst was yet to come.

I hurried back to the Site, to find one of the walls ripped open. Bad didn't even begin to cover it. There was no air visibly escaping, which either meant that only one room had been depleted of air, or the entire facility.

The moment I stepped inside, I felt my testicles retract. It was so fucking cold. Unbelievably cold. Well below freezing. Well below freezing.

I stepped out. Amazingly, it was less cold outside. Gathering myself, I plunged in again, and sprinted to the surveillance room, still wearing my hazmat suit. By the time I got there, I felt my mental processes slowing down as my core temperature dropped dangerously low. My gloved fingers fumbled inelegantly on the keyboard as I keyed in the heater command. I couldn't even tell if the command had been recognized…. my visor had steamed up. I typed it three times before I passed out.

I woke up. First surprise - I was alive. However, there was a problem, in that my oxygen tank had depleted in the roughly ten minutes I had been unconscious. I didn't have time to stagger downstairs and grab the third, and final, tank. Knowing that I had seconds before I passed out again due to asphyxiation, I made a decision. I unzipped my suit and stepped out.

There was air inside the facility. The walls and floor were covered in water - presumably it had been ice, which had then melted due to the flash freeze. The computers were fine. The reactor was fine.

What wasn't fine were my crops.

The massive drop in temperature had frozen my crops. When I tried to pick a cob, it crumbled into icy shards in my hand. They were utterly inedible.

Now, had it just been the corn, then I could have replanted the kernels from the roast meal again. But it wasn't that simple. The cold had killed the bacteria in the soil, too. The ones from my shit.

The soil is utterly infertile.

I'm fucked.

2015-03-06

– hide block

Today was a day for repairs.

I mended the tear in my suit. I repeatedly struck the armory doors to disable the electronic opening. I confronted the paralyzing existential terror that's been lurking in a dark recess of my psyche for the past…

In these logs, I try and be as upbeat as possible. It helps to reinforce my chakra, or whatever the fuck the gurus say these days. I try and focus on logging my positive thoughts.

But it's breaking down. I can't stop thinking about how close I am to death ever day. And even my naturally mad character can't defend my frail soul against such a vicious onslaught for too long.

Pretty much the only things that are keeping me sane at the moment are my primal survival instincts, and the thought that someone might eventually read these logs.

However, in indulging these dark thoughts, even that last hope is being sapped away. The probability of the Site's radio being picked up from Earth is basically zero. I'm screaming into a chasm in the slimmest hope that someone's listening.

If, perchance, you are reading this, I don't want a medal. I don't want anything to be named after me. What I want is one thorium tetrafluoride fuel cell to materialize somewhere around me in the next five seconds. The time is currently 06:31:53 03-15-2015.

Fuck. It didn't work.

I've done some more thinking.

So Project Monovia was… rigging the Site with explosives, for some reason. Okay, cool, whatever. But these walls are made of the strongest metal money can buy. How come a bunch of non-anomalous explosives were able to breach them?

I went and had a look at the ruins of the armory. It was mostly what you'd expect - a massive hole in the side. But then I noticed something odd.

One of the warped pieces was strangely shaped. It had two parallel grooves in it. These grooves ran all the way up the side of the wall, stopping almost exactly where the breach stopped.

Does that mean that this was sabotaged?

Going inside yielded another odd detail. I noticed that the wall connecting the armory and one of the containment chambers had similar grooves, except they ran along the join between walls. So was that wall meant to cave in as well?

Thinking some more led me to a horrifying realization. Remember earlier, when I was taking the rock samples? Well, I took out about 75% of the explosives, leaving the remainder inside for any future explosions (I used some of them to reach the thorium cave). So the explosion could have been 4 times biggf

wait

FUCK!

NO!

NO!

MY FLUORINE!

okay

remember i said i needed thorium tetrafluoride?

well, i have thorium

but the fucking fluoric acid was in the armory

project zeus is dead

i killed it

2015-03-07

– hide block

I need to think this through again. Things have changed.

Food

Water

Sleep

Exercise

Oxygen

Heat

Exercise is alright. My current regime seems satisfactory - starve myself and do no exercise. Don't try this at home, kids.

Sleep… I've mentioned this, and you'll know that my sleep schedule is batshite, but it seems to be working. My body clock is drifting quite severely, and since I don't have a point of reference anymore, it's probably fine.

Heat? I found out what caused the Big Freeze of yesterday. Basically, the force of the explosion rattled some of the server racks in the basement, and a few of the drives fell out. When I patched the heating controls and cooling controls into the same loop, I didn't realize that the heating controls were held in one drive, the cooling controls in another, and the script relating them to each other in a third. The controlling script and the heating script drives both fell out, and since the command wouldn't parse without manual intervention, it threw itself into overdrive and dropped the temperature to a nippy -52.9^oC.

Thankfully, the manual controls for the heating coils were stored in another drive, so I was able to restore the temperature. Otherwise I would have just frozen to death. It was obscenely cold. I've jimmied the heaters to run on the same drive as the control script, and if the control script can't be fetched, then the 'manual' controls should kick in.

And now I return to the perennial problems of food, water, and oxygen.

Water, I think, is okay. I have about a fifth of my tank water remaining, but the amount I use reduces every day. I'm approaching saturation. This is, after all, a closed system, albeit a rather large one.

Food and oxygen. Which is worse? Well, both have been affected by the crop deaths. The freezers contain enough food to last fifty-seven weeks, which might seem like a lot, but that's my ultimatum. I have until then to come up with a plan. Oxygen, on the other hand, is a lot more pressing. I currently have no mechanisms for either extracting CO₂ from the air or turning it back into oxygen.

…an idea has just occurred to me. I'll write it down on this top-secret official document, and pursue it a bit later.

Oxygen is short-term. Food is long-term. Though long-term doesn't really account for much now.

Now that the dirt has defrosted, I'm going to start planting corn again. Hopefully I'll get lucky with some of the freezer corn, just like I did last time. But that won't work.

I'll die of carbon dioxide poisoning long before the crops grow. I've checked and double-checked my working, and it's flawless. I'll need to get creative.

Time to pursue that idea.

My symbol is still on the wall. I still have hope.

2015-03-08

– hide block

This is fucking bullshit.

Absolute bullshit.

Fuck.

I cannot believe that I'm actually considering this.

So many things are wrong with this.

…I'm gonna do it.

Did you know that when you heat things up, they separate into their components?

If I heat carbon dioxide up enough, it should become carbon and oxygen. So I'm going to give it a go.

I'll need a way to get it in, and a way to get it out, as well as something to get it in and out of.

It'll need to be able to withstand immensely high temperatures - my Wiki cache submits 2000^o as the magic temperature.

…I want to test something.

Right.

Thank God for the Land Rover. Its owner can't have been too car-savvy, as the guttyworks are covered in rust. This is exactly what I want. I used a kitchen knife to scrape off some of the rust into a small plastic container.

Then, I had a quick look around for the aluminum foil I used to accessorize my spacesuit. It was exactly where I left it. I cut it into small bits, then cut it into smaller bits, before finally pulverizing it using a pair of scissors and a fork. I added these bits to the rust.

Et volia! Homemade thermite.

For those uninitiated, thermite is a combination of household components that burns at an obscenely high temperature. It might just be enough to decompose the carbon dioxide.

But where am I to put my thermite? I need something that is capable of containing ridiculously high temperatures. Where am I going to find such a thing?

What with the ease I solved the other problems, this took a surprisingly long amount of time. But the answer came, eventually.

So my fluorine's gone. That means I can't do Project Zeus. I'm still extremely salty about that, but hey ho. This means that there's a spare fuel cell kicking around which I have no use for. A fuel cell designed to hold fluorine, a notoriously uncooperative chemical. So I think that might work.

…wait, no, it's too small.

Fuck.

While I think, I'll return to thermite production. I have about a coke-can's worth, which won't get me far.

Okay! I have my answer!

Have you ever heard of an autoclave?

They're used for industrial processes where the temperature and pressure needs to be above the norm. Things like the Haber process - wait, what the shit? I haven't thought about that since we learned about it in 11th grade! My God, it's been a long time. I can still remember the optimum temperature and pressure, too. Wow.

…where was I? Oh, yeah! So the autoclave in the lab has a computer attached, and I can't get the direct communication from the computer to Surveillance without some nifty satellite work. Not that I should need to; I'm only using the chamber.

The maximum temperature setting seems to be 120^oC. I'm gonna need to go, what… 17 times greater than that? And for quite a while, too. Hm.

Can't hurt to give it a try, eh?

Right. It's on its end - it looks like some sort of drying cylinder, the type I used to use down at the pool. I have a small pile of homemade thermite at the bottom. Now, how's best to approach this…

Spraying cold CO₂ at the thermite might put it out. But then, the thermite combustion reaction doesn't actually need oxygen, so I needn't worry about integrating oxygen into the atmosphere. So, if I could warm up the CO₂, then it would probably work!

I'm chuntering. Let's try this.

I'm a fucking idiot.

Thankfully, not in such a staggeringly self-annihilating fashion as the earlier mishaps… it's just that I have no way of checking whether or not the carbon has decomposed.

…hm.

My 11th Grade chemistry has all come flooding back, and I have the beginnings of an idea. See, if you bubble carbon dioxide through a solution of calcium hydroxide, it turns cloudy. And remember what I determined this whole fucking planet is made of?

That's right. Calcium carbonate. I'll need to go and get some, heat it, then add water. Once that's in solution,it becomes known as limewater. I'll take some of the sample of the gases from within the autoclave and inject them into the limewater, and if it turns cloudy, I've failed.

Whew! This is some MacGyver shit. I'm going to bed.

2015-03-09

– hide block

I'm trying something new. So what you're reading right now are my typed-up notes. I'm writing this on a notepad right next to the autoclave. Heh… this is my version of live-blogging.

So. Remember I said that writing things down helps me consider them? That's what I'm going to do right now.

I need carbon dioxide, and I need thermite. The thermite needs to undergo its redox reaction, which should, in theory, create a high enough temperature for the carbon dioxide in the chamber to thermally decompose into carbon and oxygen.

Then, I need a way to check if the reaction has worked. This, as has already been mentioned, shall be using limewater. I've already prepared it - I went out and got some of the CaCO₃ from the planet's surface, threw it into the 'clave with some of my thermite, then pippetted some water on to it. Finally, I got the calcium hydroxide in solution. I have an assload of water, since the mega-freeze condensed all of the vapor in the air, and when it re-evaporated I souped up my apparatus for water reclamation to try and get as much of it as possible.

Limewater is out of the way. I've put Clingfilm over the top to prevent atmospheric CO₂ from tainting my sample. I also made a shit-ton of it, so I'll have enough for all subsequent tests.

…ah! I just had an idea about the CO₂. See, I was worried about some of the gas escaping when I spray it in - the exit velocity would be not insignificant. However, there's an alternative!

I can put it in while it's solid!

I have one freezer that's full of dry ice. The freezer isn't integrated into the wall, so I'm going to attempt the laborious task of hauling it down two flights of stairs and plugging it back in.

Pause for drama.

Okay, pant, I'm… pant …back.

Gimme pant a second.

…yes, I wrote those. I want to memorialize how hard that was.

I think I'd rather have gone outside again. That's how exhausting I found hauling that fucking freezer down all those stairs.

But now it's here, and it's plugged in. It actually seems like it might be airtight.

Plan: I'm going to pack the autoclave with dry ice. I'll then add a centimeter-deep layer of thermite, drop a match in there, then shut it ASAP and lean on it. Finally, once I feel lucky, I'll open it up and take a syringe of the gas within it, bubble it through some limewater in a test tube, and see what happens.

It had better fucking work after all this. Wish me luck.

…eh.

The thermite worked fine. The interior temperature monitor gave a temperature reading of 1872^oC, which isn't quite hot enough. Sure enough, my limewater turned cloudy.

Bugger.

Also, there's something I didn't factor for. When thermite gets sufficiently hot, the metal melts, so now I have a puddle of cooled metal on the floor of the autoclave. I think, in future, I'll need to pour it out before it sets - I need as much space in the autoclave as possible.

I think I'll try again, with a bit more thermite.

IT WORKED!

At least, my limewater isn't cloudy. Infer into that what you will, but I'm inferring the hell into my survival!

Today was one of those days where I woke up and just felt like dying.

But then I remembered my symbol. I went and looked - sure enough, it's still on the wall.

I'm going to muster my thoughts. Be back soon.

Alright.

Project Zeus is dead. I have no fluorine, and even if I did I wouldn't have the sulfuric acid necessary to extract the thorium. So I have no choice but to turn to the back-up: Prometheus.

I'm going to Tim Taylor the MSDD open and connect the Site's nuclear power station directly into the superposition core. Problem is, it'll need a hell of a lot of power to work. So I'd better start doing that quite soon.

There are, however… complications.

Remember I mentioned that the CRFM was down to 18 hours? Well, I worked out that leaving one rod out would drop the CRFM to 2.5 hours, and the power would charge the MSDD in 25 days.

It's a good thing I'm familiar with code, because this is my most ambitious project yet. I'm going to need to generate an "if" loop, then define two variables to be the predicted and actual reactor power output. If the two differ by, say, 1 standard deviation, it'll set off an alarm, and I'll come tearing in and see if it's worth investigation.

You know, it's interesting that this wasn't already implemented. It would make perfect sense to have this set up in a place which runs on power generated by a nuclear reactor, but hey ho. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Site was rigged to explode.

In order to manually charge the MSDD, I'll need a few things.

A soldering iron.

Solder.

HV wire.

A physical copy of the blueprints.

The blueprints I'll just copy out by hand. I have a pair of compasses, a pencil, etc, so that will take some time but it won't be arduous. The other three, though…

First, the wire. The Land Rover had in it a compartment filled with various emergency tools - a flashing sign, a first-aid kit, and, most importantly, a set of jumper cables. I'll be attaching these to the terminals and running the power through them.

A soldering iron. This is just any piece of metal which can achieve heats hot enough to melt and shape the solder. Thing is, soldering irons are designed to be used over and over, whereas mine would only need to hold its heat for a short period of time.

Somewhere, amidst all of the scaffolding, there's a long and thin iron scaffolding rod. I'll be putting that into one of the ovens, and that should heat it up enough. I read about it when I was younger. Violet Baudelaire did something very similar with some fire tongs. God, I miss home.

Aaaaand solder. Normal solder is made off… oh, I know this one… tin, usually. And lead. But some people got pissed off at the lead solder because it had lead in it, so now the standard is tin.

I can't really makeshift this, as it's pretty specific. Where can I find tin in this place, eh?

I passed a few asteroids on my way out to that desert. Some of them looked metallic. I wonder…

2015-03-16

– hide block

Never mind!

I found a roll of solder in a kit on the desk in the server room, along with a soldering iron.

Ex machina.

It's 11:32 PM.

I've spent the entire day copying out this diagram in meticulous detail. So I'm going to run through my plan once more before I go to sleep.

Here is what I know. The core of the machine is made of two SRAs. But not just any SRAs! No, these two are special. What some genius back on Earth managed to do was to fit two SRAs on top of one another. Not laterally - dimensionally. They inhabit the same three-dimensional space, but oscillate across a four-dimensional plane.

These SRAs also have special insanely high-capacity batteries fitted. They're configured to accelerate and multiply power generated by the thorium reactor (and fuck if I know how), so it'll take a lot longer to charge them from the light-water reactor. These batteries are designed, when the MSDD is activated, to overvolt and deliver a fuck-ton of power to the SRAs. Such a massive spike in power causes a glitch in of one of the pair, causing it to absorb all of the reality from the nearby area - including itself.

This reality is then deposited directly out of the other side, at the second anchor. Depending on how much power is provided, it can transport up to the entire facility at once. I won't need all that power - I'll be standing right next to it. But the problem is that the power multiplication only works for the thorium, so any and all power generated via alternative means will need to be raw.

Here I leave the warm, comforting embrace of the documentation, and enter the realm of "dear God I hope this works".

I should think a five-meter radius would do the trick. According to the documentation, the thorium fuel cell is enough to transport a 150-metre diameter, and the power-multiplier is roughly seven hundred times. Wildly estimating, I predict that I should need to run the reactor for about 25 days to generate enough power to take the 5m sphere.

Have I already said that? Probably. I'll need to solder the jumper cables to the points on Magellan (that's what I'm calling the first SRA) and then somehow plug them directly into the reactor power output, which is out by where I dropped my shoes and the rock.

Fuck, I remembered something I need to do but forgot it.

Anyhow. That's the plan. Tomorrow I'll go outside and examine the reactor power grid.

Conway out.

the quartet of terror returns

my music library has been run into the ground. i swear, if I hear ricky goddamn martin singing about the fast life one more time i'll disembowel myself with a kitchen fork.

did we start the fire? I'm not quite sure

i feel like I'm insane

there's pressure in ym head

it wants to get out, it wants to be free

why

why god

my symol's still on the wall, I can't die yey

the walls are closing in on me

they draw closer

and closer

hello, mr invisible

what a nice day it is

My memory's fading. I'm getting worse.

Day after day. I swing in and out of lucidity, catching the light at increasingly shorter intervals.

Please. To whoever's reading this.

I don't know how, I don't know why. I doubt I ever will. But I'm going insane, and I'm fully aware while it's happening.

I've survived for so long. I feel like I've had my run. Fuck the Foundation, fuck Tartarus, fuck my primative, susceptible brain for succumbing to the endless and all-consuming ocean of madness. Fuck the Universe.

fuck me.

He! Will! Wear! You! Down!

we have seen the enemy and he is is

the enmy is is

hahahahahahahahahahaaA)___

one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twele thrteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seb

Conway here. Don't infer anything into my rambles.

When my brain goes… down, it generates line after line of stupid and nonsense phrases. Most of them somehow relate to my chee r

up up and away we go

teehehe

isn't it weird that "iambic pentameter" fits a dactylic meter?

like, that never made sense to me

When my beacon of sanity breaks through the ice of whateverthefuck'shappening, I ctrl-a and delete everything in the command line. But I know for a fact that not everything gets deleted. So you've probably got line after line of mu demenyd rmblings.

It's like a sinusoidal wave function. I go up, and down, in equal measure. Down I go, then up later.

down I goooooooo

when the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep.

the last days are upon me

but I fear sleep

I'm not me

It pretends to be me, it talks well, it is me, but not me, it isn't me, i'm me, please, don't believe it

don'tttttttttttt

believe it

don't

believe me

don't

help me

don't

help me

true untrue true untrue true untrue true untrue true untrue

My peaks are getting lower, my troughs deeper.

The notes are everywhere. They cover the walls, they cover the floor, they dance before my eyes as I drift into the irradiate refuge

of sleep

How do you cope with the knowledge that you're going insane>

you don't

i can#t

i don't fear death

I don't know what fear is anymore

literally

a dead expession, turns of phrase

ring empty in my hollow skull

i know that numbered are my days,

that finite time precludes the null

to fight the light that scorches thought

to grapple with your own demise

to stall the fall of all to nought

is but a futile exercise

Matt Conway's a level 2 research assistant

his hopes of surviving are just non-existent

all crops in the chambers were frozen to death

so the clock's ticking down until his final breath

he isn't a poet, but rhyming ain't hard

i can feel my consciousness slipping from my grasp

my name is matthew conway

i'm a level two researcher at he scp foundation site-114

i've worked for them for eight years

and i'll never work fr them again

my name is matthew conway

my name is matthew conway

my body is disappering

my mind is disappearing

it's all going

going

gone

cadences, where things appear to end but don;t

but the third man said no, no, no I won't give you my grain, and the first man left, knowing that it was a lost cause.

joseph stalin, malankoff, NASA and prokofiov
rockefeller, campanella, communist block
roy con, one pair-on, toscanini, dankron
dyen byen foo falls, rock around the clock
einstein, james dean, brooklyn's got a women's team
davy crockett, peter pan, elvis presley, disneyland
bardo, budapest, alabama, cruise jet
princess grace, peyton face, trouble in the suez

carbon dioxide

decomposes

into oxygen

and carbon monoxide

why, me, you, ffuc

breaking apart the

dioxide

made

monoxide

whih causes amnesa

ehehehehehehehe

symbol stol on wll

the death of the author

how… ironic

I can see you all

typping from floor. This is he end

ican feel myself dying

tell my girlfriend I love her

fuck who am I kidding I don't have a girlfriend

if I did she'd think i was deeeead

the fuck's this ink doing on the wall?

don't worry, I rubbed it out

ehe he he heeee

life is funny

shame I'ma stop laughing forever soon

do I want to die?

I don't think so

i see it all

and it is five

55555555555555555555555555555555555555544444444444444444444444444444

zz\\\\ /\ \/ \/ \/ \/ |\/ \/| \/ \/

twence forthward, thereon

uh uh uuuuuuuuuuuuuddd

aaaaaa__

V V V V V

hjdlhdsfhc

thats the word my head mkae shwen I hit the keboard withb t

randoooooool lrpessing keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiis

jlgyucyhj. p'o98g76fcghcghcgbn,v

you'yve lost that burning feeling

it's coming

-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa_aaaaaa

it's

here

it's heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

do not go gentle into

old age must

burn

rage

dying

SCP Sandbox Wiki II

Sandbox Harder

NO!

MY FLUORINE!

Other interesting sites

CalU Secondary Education Wiki

Marble Hornets

Asegzawal

Serpent's Hand