Foundation Research and Containment Site 75
October 31, 2013, 21:30 Local Time
Site-75 lay almost abandoned. All non-containment operations had been shut down for the long weekend and everyone who could had already left for the day.
From the one hundred and twelve regular personnel, plus two permanently stationed Mobile Task Forces, only eighteen people were present. Three on-call specialists (two engineering, one other), nine members of MTF-Iota-43 "Ol' Reliable" (three of which were scheduled to be on guard duty) and five researchers which were personally requested to work in late today by the final person on this list, the Vice Director of Site-75, Margaret Parrino.
None of them were at their designated posts.
Instead, they all were gathered in a small boardroom in a windowless corner, wedged between a storage hall and the facility's scientific library. They shuffled awkwardly around the room, finding seats on old wooden chairs. The walls were covered in whiteboards, which in turn were covered in lines over lines of tiny, barely legible scribbles and free-hand drawn diagrams.
As everyone else was seated, the Vice Director went up, latched the door and turned of the lights to reveal the room's projector already running. The sudden darkness wasn't kind to her serious face, accentuating her first wrinkles and making her look sterner than usual. Fierce, almost. Her audience had nothing but respect for her, knowing all too well that even though she never made it to director, it was always her behind the Site operating as smoothly as it did. Yet still, something about her expression today was demanding more respect than usual. She opened with a calm, determined voice.
"As you all can imagine, this meeting is not per protocol." Of course is wasn't. If it were, they would have used the new, larger conference room with better air condition and fewer coffee stains.
"You all are here because I trust you. Not the way I trust all the excellent men and women working here with protecting mankind, but the way that I trust a friend." These was no rehearsed flattery, but genuine emotion.
"Still, I can understand if some of you do not want to be involved in what I am going to tell you. If any of you" she glanced at each and every one of them "does not want to be part of this, I have a bowl of amnestics right here. You'll take a gum, I send you of for the rest of the night and you'll forget this ever happened. No hard feelings, no consequences. I won't force you."
She paused for a reaction, but for now, it seemed, nobody objected. "What I am going to tell you is above your pay grade. Frankly, it is above mine as well. Therefore, we must keep this conversations off the records." That explained the choice of locale. Better not to have the disciplinary board listen in on everything through the new surveillance systems.
She clicked to the first slide of the beamer. A file appeared projected to the wall. The logo of the Department of Science's Alchemy Division below the heading Preliminary Special Containment Procedures for Anomalous Phenomenon AP-7310-BX-05, SCP designation pending. The word Draft was stamped across it. "This document underwent a vote categorizing the described phenomenon as a Keter-class SCP-object today. It passed un-opposed on everything but minor technical details in the O5 Council. It will therefore soon be one of about twenty thousand anomalies contained by the Foundation."
She stopped to give the next sentence extra gravitas. "I believe this to be the biggest mistake in the Foundation's history and a threat to all of humanity."
She noticed the faces in the room. "Of course you are sceptical about this. You are supposed to be sceptical. I will now explain why I think this way, and encourage you to prove me wrong; I sincerely hope that you can prove me wrong."
The projection switched to the next slide, apparently the first page of many of the draft for an SCP file. "The phenomenon in question is an apparently intangible substance which appears to be a substrate and amplifier for various memetic and linguistic anomalies. Whilst in itself without any proven effects on humans," she stressed the proven, "this substance also appears to have connections on some level or another to things that the O5s don't want us to know."
She skipped ahead a few pages to the Reasoning section. Unlike the previous pages, it was almost entirely blacked. Beginning with As per the extended HOLLISTER ATZAK PROTOCOLS, paragraph by paragraph were carefully redacted. The few sentence fragments that somehow avoid the zealous censor were almost entirely sprinkled with unknown code names.
… or prenubic compound bearing a significant risk of a subsequent ΜΑ-Class Scenario, …
… Following recent breakthroughs in the study of safe dereference of semantic nulls, …
… not withstanding, Project OREXIS may pose a viable alternative to Projects KATHEKON, PNEUMA and APATHEIA. …
The Vice Director skipped through a couple more similar pages. "It might interest you that merely knowing about this section of the report requires a director's clearance, access to even just some redacted parts membership in some information compartments they won't even tell you about."
Some of her listeners were visibly uncomfortable with the facility with which she broke security restrictions written in blood, sometimes in more way than one. But the shared trust in her, and perhaps the intrigue of the implications, kept her confidants captivated. "Now, as for how to detect and contain an intangible thing, this is where our buddies from the Alchemy Division get involved."
She moved back a few pages. "In short, caramelization. The creation of caramel from sugar is a massively complicated process which involves," she circled individual words with a laser pointer, "polymerization, inversion, oxidation, mutarotation, carbonization, condensation, rearrangement, isomerization and pyrolysis. And yes, I did believe half of these words mean the same thing at first too. All that is without consideration of the internal water vapour pressure of carbohydrates and so on."
Dr. Rao in the back row, the current acting Hazardous Materials Containment Liaison, nodded knowingly, whilst everyone else appeared mostly confused by the sudden turn towards sweets. "Sanjay, perhaps you can explain this better than me." She gave him a nod.
The elderly alchemist duly rose out of his chair and begun one of his impromptu lectures. "Well, caramelization sits in the overlap area of regular and organic chemistry, and is deviously complex, as you mentioned, Ms. Parrino. That way it took science well into the modern era to notice that caramelization subtly violates some chemical invariances, and is therefore not a chemical, but an alchemical process. Although for me, this was never more than fun trivia when musing about the distinction of anomalies and parascience."
The Vice Director took back over. "Thank you. The way we even came to notice SCP-Designation Pending appears to be exactly through this: we tried making caramel and looked closely. And…"
She switched from the report to video. It showed the inside of a leak-proof combustion chamber, where a sugar cube was being held inside the oddly spherical flame of a lighter. The absence of sound in the recording aggravated the lack of expected result. "…It doesn't work in space."
Mixed reactions. Some stunned expressions. Some confused ones. A raised eye brow here and there.
Dr. Rao leaned forward, fascinated. "Or rather, it doesn't work far away from earth. We have checked it on a low-orbit space station, where it works, and in a couple of extradimensional spaces too. Wherever there is a permanent portal" she made air quotes, in anticipation of some people being annoyed by that term, "where a hypothetical substances could spill over, so to say, caramelization works as expected. But in places where our assumed anomaly doesn't reach, heated sugar behaves according to baseline physics. With that, the existence of a mysterious substance catalysing caramelization can be considered strongly suggested, if not even experimentally verified."
The video had ended whilst she was talking, and she now changed to diagram. "This chart shows super-precision measurements on the speed of caramelization in different places and at different times. We notice two trends: First, it appears that caramelization takes longer with increasing altitude. This observation is in line with our assumed density fall-off towards the Van-Allen belt. Second, and this is more important: over time, we have seen a slight decrease of the speed and availability of caramelization over time." Another chart. "The rate of this decrease correlates strongly with the estimated worldwide caramel production."
She gave the audience a moment to catch up and understand what she was going for. One of the Iota-43 members raised his hand. "That means this stuff is finite and slowly being consumed, doesn't it?"
"Yes, indeed. We have also discovered some other alchemical reactions which seem to be doing the same, some at magnitudes higher efficiency. The proposed Special Containment Procedures are basically industrial-scale use of those to neutralize the anomaly until it is reduced to a negligible level."
Confusion, but this time louder. Voice talking over each other.
"That's not containment, that's destruction."
"What do we do about caramel disappearing?"
"Multiple years, if not decades prep time to explain the disappearance of a trivial thing? That's so easy it should qualify as paid vacation!"
"Sure, there seems to be a lot of this stuff, but Keter?"
Parrino gestured silence. "Now, I know this already is a lot to take in, a crash course in a new anomaly, but we're not done yet. Please bear with me, because I have to explain something else before you can understand why this plan grossly endangers all of humankind." She looked at two of her guest. "Dr. Patty, Dr. Yamada, would one of you mind helping me explain what I mean when I say that all of us might be Homo Sapiens in body, but not in spirit?"
The two stood up. Something about Parrino simply had the authority of a class room teacher. Yamada, an slender and surprisingly tall man, spoke first. "As this is primarily a concern of palaeoanthropology, I hope that Dr. Patty will let me go ahead and give rough outlines, and then add her own linguistic perspective." The stout linguist raised her shoulders in agreement and sat back down.
Yamada cleared his troat. "To the best of our current knowledge and understanding, there has been an intrusion of sorts 70 ka where an extradimensional" he quickly noticed the others' unfamiliarity the with expression "Seventy thousand years ago the terrestrial population of Homo Sapiens, at that point already having developed civilization for the first time, was attacked by a group of entities immigrating here from another reality, either on accident or as a last resort. These invaders possessed an exceptional proficiency at mimicry, and choose the current dominant species as their model."
Parrino was secretly glad that Yamada eagerly took over the explaining of this part, so the incredulous looks were all focused on him and not her. As calm as she might look on the outside, she was close to bursting internally.
"This resulted in two physically equivalent species competing within the same biotope. It is generally assumed that the Uncanny Valley, the fear of things that appear human, but aren't quite, is evolutionary grounded in this phase of early human history. Eventually though, the intruders won and completely replaced the human population, leading to the fall of the Naacal empires, but not before the breach that granted them entry closed again. Moreover, their mimicry was too perfect, in the sense that mimicking humans also mimicked their notable absence of mimicry, leaving the intruders stuck on earth, effectively taking over the human role in the ecosystem."
He looked around content. "Indications for this event taking place are, besides contemporary witnesses, a genetic bottleneck during that time period, as well as a unmistakable discontinuities in the human cultural memeplex. I'm certain Dr. Patty can explain those more." He made an inviting gesture towards her whilst remaining standing.
"The clearance levels for this information are rather low, by the way. I guess it's one of those things classified not because it is sensitive information, but because it keeps you up at night. But if it helps anybody: this took place thousands of generations ago, so we all can rightfully claim to be human." The Vice Director shot her a glance urging her to get to the point.
"Well, so… uh…" she needed a moment to collect herself. "Languages from civilizations before that event are virtually untranslatable to us. Not in the sense that we are lacking vocabulary and context but more in the sense of trying to fit a square peg through a round hole; it won't fit into human innate understanding of language. As diverse as our languages may be, they all adhere to an underlying universal grammar, like distinguishing between actors, or nouns, and actions, like verbs. Also the fact that all human sentences, no matter how recursive, can be understood as a mere tree graph, which is one of the major limiting factors of the human noosphere. Working with such older languages, like, say, Ortothan, is like working with higher dimensions. It's possible on paper, but you are mentally incapable to really grasp what is happening. At least without mental alterations. We've been actually trying approach this subject with artificial intelligence and…"
Another sharp glance from the Vice Director shut her up. "…uh. It is likely that we mimicked the physiology of humans down to the genetic level, but not mentally, and brought our own syntax into this world." Yamada nodded in agreement.
"Thanks, both of you. Now I will present you a couple of facts, in the approximate order that I learned them myself. First…"
The projector now displayed the image of a narrow, winding corridor through what appeared be dried ocean floor. Its wall were lined with pipes and chains. Multiple parts of the image were blotted out in white, with faint, MEDUSA-generated lines of text describing the cognitohazardous imagery below. "There are certain anomalous locations which have been isolated from earth a long time ago and only became recently accessible again. These locations act as a sort of metaphysical ice core to check the conditions that once were. In the oldest of them, like this inactive part of the Factory, caramelization was determined to be impossible. This implies that the anomalous substance that enables it wasn't always here."
The next image was a grainy digitalized copy of what was once a fax. "Second, does anybody here speak Thai?" Dr. Patty raised her hand halfway, and then lowered it again when nobody else responded. "This is an official report from the secret TISTR division that would later become NARIT and GISTDA, respectively. It was written during a time of immense political turmoil in Thailand and under strict secrecy, so regrettably our archives are incomplete in this regard. However…"
The next page of the fax included a low resolution picture of a facility on the lunar surface. "If this report is authentic, the Thai space programme was the first to ever attempt raising children beyond the Van-Allen belt. Whilst data on pregnancy and childbirth in space is plentiful thanks to soviet and U.S. efforts, later also indian ones, the foremost concern were immediate complications of the birth. This might be the only available source on development of children permanently off-earth. And it is looking grim."
She hoped that everyone could follow even without extensive knowledge of the secret true history of space development. Even a Foundation employee, well aware of the many lost cosmonauts who gave their live for science might be surprised of the sheer extent of Thailand's hidden space presence.
"Not a single child raised exclusively on the moon achieved literacy, nor language comprehension beyond that of a chimpanzee. Whilst the responsible researches saw oxygen deficits during pregnancy as the likely culprit, this paints a different picture in the context of what I just told you. To make it completely clear: just yesterday I asked a contact at Area-32 to try and make caramel. He couldn't."
It was a joy to see the dawning realization creep over the faces of her confidants.
"Third, and I really shouldn't show you this, but that is slowly becoming the motto of this evening." She sighed and then continued to the next document to present. It bore the letter head of the Department of Amnestics. "This is a new amnestic compound currently in development. It's defining characteristic is that it exclusively works on textual and verbal components of memory whilst leaving the rest in tact. As mentioned previously, caramelization is not the only alchemical process which interacts with our mystery substance. And guess what the primary active components is?"
It was obvious that everyone knew by now what this would eventually conclude in, yet nobody interrupted her.
"After these, I decided to dig deeper. A report on the metabolism of word-eaters here, a dissertation on speech impediments in spontaneous full-matter replications of persons there. I found bits of information to piece together, data points to turn into statistics, and eventually the picture became clear. What is soon going to receive an SCP-designation is language. Or at least an important part of it. It got here in limited supply together with us when we invaded, and it has been declining every since. And now the O5 Council decided to contain it."
Silence engulfed the small room, only penetrated by the faint hum of the projector. Parrino had nothing more to say, so she gave them time to let everything in the past half hour sink in.
Dr. Rao was the first to break the silence. "This is indeed deeply unsettling. Thank you, Margaret, for bringing this to our attention. However, why are you telling this to us? Why haven't you raised your concerns to Director Hagen or directly to the O5 Council?"
She laughed cynically. All of a sudden, her facade of collectedness collapsed and yielded to deep tiredness in her eyes.
"Believe me, I've tried." She reached into her briefcase and pulled out multiple letters which she carelessly threw on the tables. "I have known about this for at least 4 months, during which I wrote to every position imaginable." She threw another load of letters on the table. Some of them were simply returned with a Rejected stamp, unopened.
"Director Hagen, by the way, was a great proponent of the devised Special Containment Procedures. He repeatedly told me that I was making a mountain out of a molehill and to let it simply rest. During these four months I continually was lead through a maze of shifting responsibilities and petty bureaucracy. I never got the chance to reach anybody who could fully understand what this even was about because of absurd clearance requirements. It's almost as if they wanted to pass harmful conprocs and I got in their way."
She caught herself before getting tangled up in a rant unbecoming of a Vice Director. "As I mentioned, I will not force anyone of you to leave this meeting on my side. The amnestics are still here, and I won't blame anyone if you don't want to get in over your head. I may be simply wrong, and this proposal isn't nearly as dangerous as it sounds. Even if I am right, this project will take many years, and probably show no effects within your life time. Just deciding to stand up and leave now is the reasonable thing to do."
Parrino fumbled with he projector's remote, turning it back to simply projecting a bright white square at the wall. She couldn't bear looking anybody in the eyes and stood next to the bowl of amnestic, starring at the floor.
Then Yamada rose up and walked up to her. She wordlessly passed him the bowl.
But he declined. "Then I won't be reasonable today."
One of the MTF members stood up and saluted smartly. "I trust in your assessment, Director."
After the second avowal of support the metaphorical damn broke. One after another rose from their seat and loudly declared that they believed that Parrino did the right thing.
The last one to do so was Dr. Rao. "I do believe that your concerns are well grounded, and that failure to address them with further research is gross negligence. The Council's insistence on a very destructive containment approach without reason is also alarming. But I must ask you again: what is your plan? How are we supposed to overrule a decision from the top level? If a Vice Director couldn't change the Council's mind, some of her subordinates at her side won't change that. What are we going to do?"
This question. Just as planned. Hook, line, and sinker. She had troubles overplaying a smirk.
"Well, as I see it right now, we are running this Site as a skeleton crew. There is nobody here besides us. If we act fast, we can lock them out from any remote access."
"Taking the Site hostage? I don't think the Council would try to reason with that."
"Well." She took a red pencil and begun drawing an oddly familiar emblem over the text on a whiteboard.
"Perhaps they will not listen to reason. But there are other people who will listen to what we have to say. I think it is about time I'll introduce you.
