SCP Un[REDACTED] 2023 S2

Dash 3 was recovered on 25 October 2022 from Burg Nanstein, Germany.

The writer of the letter is one Alard of Mannheim; the receiver remains unknown.

Contextual analysis of the contents implies the existence of a romantic affair.

Stupid sphygmomanometer [[sfig-mom-a-nom-iter]]. It's probably broken. I can't seem to get a read on your blood pressure. Hold on. Let me grab a pulse oximeter [[ox-emmet-er]].

Don't be such a baby. We can grow it back.

Exactly that. I got nothing.

Firstly, thank you for doing this for me, Sheldon. I greatly appreciate your assistance in this matter, as well as assisting Adrian with their boat. This matter is… very personal to me.

I… had thought about this day for centuries… I am… glad. Glad that I could not only bring you your last moment, but ensure it is a positive one… I love you. And I never stopped loving you.

In exchange for allowing me to peacefully euthanize mother and gain possession of her Soul Gem, Morningstar has agreed to assist the Foundation in researching and developing munitions effective against angels and demons, as well as training MTF teams and sharing his knowledge on fighting both.

Of course, all I'm doing is being a middleman. But yeah, let's begin.

That's partially why it took so long. We aren't doing that.

I felt bringing holy bullets to a demon funeral would be… a bit tasteless. So Prim and I have been negotiating something with the Ethics Board after her appeal. Prim's allowed custody of what's left after Babalon's decommission.

Yes yes, I'm ready. It's about time. Why did it take two whole months to get this ready?

I'm her wife. Pleasured to meet you, Regina Babalon.

Mea Rosa? Are you… okay?

Foundation paperwork, mostly due to having four, technically five, demons in the same room on site. We also had to prepare for October. You know how that month is.

Nah, bullshit. You did great, baby. Best negotiation I've ever been a part of.

I'm her Familiar. And Bestie.

The negotiations were… rather difficult.

Ma'am. You raised a wonderful daughter. I'm happy to have acted as her guardian.

… You know who I am.

I was in this cave, but it was also a river? Like, it used to be a river— or was going to be.

Sometimes I heard someone else breathing, all hot on the back of my neck. Felt I was getting bitten, with that breath.

Woke up half the cell block with my screaming. But you probably already knew about that part, right?

I was going to a party with my sisters— I had sisters in the dream —but we were all really sad about it.

I dunno… I never remember much about my dreams.

oh yeah, I had like six or seven sisters in the dream. Is that enough detail?

Can you provide more detail regarding the sisters you were dreaming about? Did they have any notable physical features or clothing, any memorable personality traits?

Please, continue.

I don't understand. Are you saying your dream was of childhood memories? Did you see your father's face in your dream?

I was in some kind of ceremony. A ritual, like something from a bad horror movie. Chanting, guys in robes, the whole nine yards.

They gave me a dagger to cut her open, but before they could make me, I woke up because some asshole thought it would be funny to start yelling shit at three AM.

They… they wouldn't have needed to make me do it. I wanted to do it. To cut her open. I… I still do. Fuck. I still do. And she looked so much like my little girl, I—

Red.

I don't remember my dad's face. Did you know that? He died in a car crash when I was nine. He taught me how to read, how to ride a bike, and I don't remember his face. Can you imagine?

He came into my room last night, through the red of the howling moon's eye. But his face was wrong. He wasn't wearing it right.

Oh. Here he comes now.

[Whispering.] Come on you piece of— Yes!

I've barricaded the door. It's managed to hold so far— no idea how, this furniture is brittle as hell. A chair leg broke off in my hand; I only did it 'cause I thought it would slow them down as I climbed out the window.

I think they're telling me to open the door. Over and over again, just "open the door."

…Questions. You have questions? Here? Are you, by any chance, a scholar?

Do not ask me of Khahrahk [[kaa-rock]], not yet. Just thinking of him makes my scars ache.

Once, a very long time ago, there was a girl made of glass who lived in a little house by the river. The girl was a fragile thing. A hard wind could cut her skin, a simple flick could shatter bone, a harsh word could leave bruises that ached for weeks.

Hello. My name is Anvi Madras. Can you understand me?

If it was alive before you were sealed, how do you know it is dead?

…The leading theory is that the Scarlet King is the embodiment of the struggle between the modern and premodern. The howl of the old straining against the new.

I propose we lift the ban on communication with C 1.

Yes, there is certainly a risk to communicating with her, even while contained— in fact, I won't insult you by mincing words; the risk is tremendous.

Even if the worst comes to pass and she breaks her chains, remember this: this world will die in the dark so that all worlds may live in the light.

— and you didn't think to notify the scheduling algorithm? I'm sure you're aware I have other projects to oversee.

You must know you're not the first to suggest this. Whether or not it's a conceptual entity has no impact on the success of the Project.

Does he need to be here?

I direct the Essophysics Department, which you all well know is concerned with embodiments — manifestations of concepts within reality. An embodiment of the concept "red" would carry all of the characteristics conceptually associated with that color, such as being angry, or desirable, or malevolent.

The PH-GOS is designed as an enormous reality-anchoring mechanism and ontokinetic interface; it is to read the sum quantum informational content of the universe and encode it into a readable format

They're reporting the re-emergence of a highly aggressive memeplex, one that caused an XK a few decades back.

Analysis by the Department of Xenobiology confirms that this pattern describes a unique genetic sequence presenting composite features of kingdoms Animalia, Plantae and Fungi, as well as several embedded non-organic structures

And, if it's not native to human thought, it can be removed without risk.

It may even have subsumed the entity entirely. We need to get those Sinks online before this thing gains control.

Whew, Eight's optimistic today.

Just so I understand: we'll remove it from human thought, thereby making everyone forget about it? What good will that accomplish?

If that were true, she wouldn't have called a meeting.

Oh, fuck me.

Another hostile concept? Is this one responsible for the rage-state?

Any word from the maintenance teams? How quickly can we repair the Sinks?

Yes, there's one here, though it's not very well known. For obvious reasons.

We have to get them out of there!

What… what does it want? What are they doing?

I-I beg your pardon?

Honorable D-Director, please. The… The theses and components of the project are f-founded upon decades of research — we… we know what we're doing.

So, if I'm understanding everything correctly, you want to bend the universe itself to resurrect the dead, yes?

Pataphysics! Gah. We are but children glimpsing at the clockwork of our ticking reality. We know nothing; you know nothing; this is madness.

What in the hell is the matter with you?! This procedure can't be worth the risk; we have to shut this abomination off.

We're not bending anything. Our understanding of our physics has developed significantly enough —

It doesn't have to end there. We could… we could bring back anyone, Vemhoff. Think about it.

Whoof. What does this have to do with —

You are misunderstanding.

SILENCE, INSOLENT FOOLS. YOUR CRETINOUS FRIVOLITY REMAINS INSIGNIFICANT. I'VE GIVEN YOU POWER IN EXCHANGE FOR SERVITUDE. NOW SERVE — OR DIE.

I never doubted your age, Kondraki. What I did, however - and continue to - doubt is the intelligence of you three.

Yes you are. You gave us all of this, —

— promising even more, and then dare to tell us we're done? Are you fucking stupid?

…did you unironically just exposit to us? Is this hell all just some story to you?

I mean, even I know that's kind of fuckin' sucky, buddy. 'Woe is me, we can't reach the fuckers that imprisoned us here; ooh look at me, I'm a super-powerful motherfucking reality bender, yet I somehow can't ascend to other plains of existence" my ass, asshole.

Jesus Christ, who cares about that! I'm fucking bored. That's all I care about. I don't give a single shit about anything else, Jesus.

Okay, Jesus, sorry, no need to fuckin' scream. We're adults, for god's sake, you can just —

So, what you're saying, Mister 'Second Coming of Antichrist', is that we're essentially inevitably and irreversibly fucked?

I know all that, King. My point was not that you're an idiot and a liar — which you probably are, let's be real — but that we're fucked. Because we are fucked!

— we're in a triple-fucking-nested story that's falling apart because it's so utterly stupid. I mean, look around you —

Director? Can you hear me? We need to go. We don't have much time.

Director? Are you… fine? Can you see us?

What… what the hell is he doing?

I have to continually pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming. A vast city, undocumented by anyone else in the modern era, hiding a culture that had blended advanced magic and technology to settle half of Asia while the Egyptians had yet to settle the Nile.

I- Anyone who seeks knowledge can call themselves a scholar, I suppose. And we have not seen anyone else since we arrived here.

I have some concerns about a staffing decision on the Amoni-Ram Initiative. As Project Co-Lead, I retain executive control over almost all personnel decisions, but my concern today lies with my co-lead, Doctor Robert Silas Aram.

I'm not the only one. The vast majority of our personnel in the city have some form of augment. Doctor Nussbaum and all our security personnel have oculars, I have my prosthetics, and there are countless others.

It has been established that the Daevic Covenant originate from the Indian subcontinent and the Nälka are likely from Central or East Asia. But the later records repeatedly mention a fourth party - the so-callled 'Abominate'.

Personal log - Progress on rebuilding the cold fusion reactors is progressing much, much faster than projections. Normally, I'd be worried, but I'm surprisingly calm. It's obvious - our people are getting familiar with the technology.

YOU HAVE ENTERED THE GATE OF THE WEST, ADYTUM'S ANSWER, THE GREAT AND HOLY CITY OF AMONI-RAM. WELCOME. THERE IS MUCH TO DISCUSS.

YES. YOU ARE MEAT-WET-DRIPPING TO THE BONE. I AM THE KISS OF GOD, SHINING STEEL AND FULADH. I AM MADE IN THE MEKHANE'S IMAGE, AND YOU ARE EVERYTHING I AM NOT.

EMPEROR BUMARO WAS THE FIRST MORTAL MAN TO WITNESS THE MAJESTY OF THE BROKEN GOD IN ALL HER GLORY. HER SUNDERED FORM, LAID TO REST UNDER THE SANDS.

We're coming up to the coordinates now. Set her down nice and easy, we'll walk the last klick, over.

Right. Let's get going.

No, what is it?

Location is directly due north, sir.

Magellan Four? Chris? Do you copy?

(Over radio) This is Magellan-four, The hell did you guys go? over.

Closing in, sir.

These are all fully furnished, too. It looks lived-in. Like everyone up and left midway through dinner.

Blackwood wasn't lying, looks like there's a pretty substantial underground part to the city, almost like a subway or something. It's dark and smells musty as hell down there though, I can't see a thing. Wouldn't suggest descending without the Rats.

About a point-seven klick walk.

Wait, you- hold on.

The rest of the place looks awfully advanced. Maybe they had early anomalous cars or something, I don't know.

Roger that, over.

Copy. Continue through, keep on radio contact.

Magellan, we are no longer reading Magellan-Four's biometrics. Please confirm?

Permission granted. Apparently radios still work in there, keep in contact, over.

Echo One, beginning Op. Inserting into Amoni-Ram subterranean zone from Entrance Alpha, near home base.

Alright, we appear to have reached the bottom. Instruments say we are 25m below ground.

Yeah. Command, I'd recommend gas masks for any trips down here, just to be on the safe side. How low are we now?

Looks dark down there. Night vision?

Looks like some sort of foundry, command. Huge room, assembly line, lots of big machinery. Most of it looks trashed, though.

Workshop of some sort. Small room, desks along the wall…. I think that was paper at some point. Nothing particularly interesting, moving on.

Not exactly what you'd use for industrial applications.

We're in some sort of corridor. Walls are stone but there's those same pipes in every direction. There's a couple of paths we could take.

Yeah, Jesus. Thanks. And, uh, I think we've discovered the sewers.

Yeah, and it looks like the underground part hasn't aged quite as well as the city aboveground.

Probably more city maintenance. Probably magic.

Onwards and downwards.

Air convoy three klicks out from ZERO-ZERO-ONE. Coming in for a landing.

Adjusting frequency, OVCOM. Clear, over. Still clear for incursion?

Swapping frequency, activating Breuchmann Engine, keep moving.

We've seen the word in our translations.

The writings mention a 'Fuladh Throne'?

It says in the cylinder that he reigned for centuries.

Right. We also have questions about this "Bumaro". He seems to occupy a central place in the Mekhanite culture, religion, history, everything. Who was he?

I suppose that covers the Empire part as well. Though - could you tell us more about these other two nations of man? We've seen them referenced many times, but nothing specific. Were they related to the fall of the city?

Right, we gleaned as much from the creation myth-

Is it possible you could teach us to work the fuladh? It would be great to-

In the beginning, there were three. A thousand years before, before man learned of Olympus, before the extinction of the giants, before the sea had fully regressed, there were three. Three great cities dividing the world tripartite.

And the Shining Eye of the Empire rose as Bumaro took his anointed Seat on the Fuladh Throne. Amoni-Ram rose from the sands on the back of MEKHANE, her Pieces scattered to the six winds and the five corners of the world.

The First War raged across the continent in every theater. Fleets of golden-hulled warships were constructed in Amoni-Ram and pushed downriver to encounter the Covenant in the Bay.

Hello, er — hi everyone — sorry, bigger crowd than I was expecting, erm…

Everyone here knows dash-C monitors previously-accelerated memetic constructs in the noosphere [no-us-fear], to make sure everything goes as it should, meaning there's no latent activity within the dissociated construct.

There we go. So: the color represents the intensity of the interactions……after this window, the activity dissipated back to nothing, as though it hadn't even happened, which was part of the reason we missed it until now.

My colleague has explained the importance of this project; I am here to tell you not to be too hasty. The notion of "worship" is not exclusive to what we would typically consider deific entities. Our modern society elevates nearly every facet of contemporary life beyond its inherent value and means: Democracy, Family, Capitalism; each of such concepts defines our relationship to the world.

So this was spontaneous? Just a random series of interactions?

Couldn't we run some tests? Try and isolate this whatever-it-is by mapping the new lines of association?

While the initial proposal for this project focused more broadly on the creation of 'an anomaly employed by the Foundation for the decommissioning of other anomalous phenomena', the subtext was clear: we require a means to combat gods.

That's where Deicidium comes in. While these memetic constructs are worshiped as deities, they each are only another anomaly to be understood and will be treated as such. Those who threaten the Foundation will be contained, their influence and danger mitigated, and the world will keep turning.

Right, yes, hello. We've been disassembling and investigating the machinery in the city and undercity, and we keep coming across this bronzish alloy. It's too hard to take samples from, and trying to break it has gotten us nowhere.

Just some background context - some of the geologists that came in during the second wave of personnel made some interesting but, at the time, irrelevant discoveries, amounting to the revelation that the sand within zero-zero-one is of a slightly different chemical composition to the sand outside it.

Mekhane's Kiss isn't a superweapon, it's a Hail Mary. Unfortunately, it's completely burned out. It'd require a team months to get it back into remotely working order, and that's ignoring the problem of power. It's way too demanding to pull from the city's power grid - we think it draws directly from the cold fusion reactors.

Isn't this exactly what LOTUS, itself, is doing? Behaving drastically different from what we intended?

You implied earlier that an AI would avoid drawing attention to itself until it was confident it couldn't be stopped — are you certain we still can?

To be perfectly clear; the only two things we can do from here are to either allow LOTUS to continue or deactivate it?

Oh, don't get me started on Hishakaku. The guy hates me, no idea why. Can't say the feeling isn't mutual.

Right, sorry. It was a pretty average year, I think? I think I remember hearing about a couple of things going nuts all over the place, but that all stopped once that virus showed up — started wrecking everything.

Project Sargasso transformed humans into AIs. Take out the brain, put it in a jar, plug it in. That's what OCI stands for — Organic Consciousness Interface, not whatever cover they cooked up to make people fine with it.

Understand what? Your machine is rampantly deleting containment programs, has caused no less than fourteen major breaches, completely preventing the AIAD from doing anything… do I have to go on?

Right, it isn't deviant, despite the fact it's doing something we don't want it to do, which is what deviancy is.

Well it pretty obviously isn't, since it wasn't destroying our databases before! If nothing's changed, then why the hell has it been causing all this damage ever since the upgrade?

I’m afraid I can’t help you; Project Sargasso is sealed to all Generations 2s. Stay put, I’m instructed to report you to Director Hishakaku.

I'm genuinely unable to take action to share its contents with you. It's a hard-coded exclusion for Generation II OCIs.

Catch-22. I’m sorry, friend, but I have to follow orders.

You are concealing the truth of the matter; I have requested this summit so that the Foundation as a whole can correctly understand our circumstances, and collectively indicate which course to pursue from here.

I vehemently disagree. LOTUS was designed and constructed to function as the ultimate solution to the concern of AI safety: an immense danger that—

As I was saying, the nature of AI renders it highly susceptible to immensely undesirable behaviors. Regardless of their designed appearance, they are inevitably nothing more than machines, algorithms.

The file’s clean. What are the memories?

You said the memories relate to the file contents? Accuracy?

Guess not. Look, I'll keep digging into this, but honestly — I don't think these memories are fake, and you aren't reacting to the checks. You've got the longest amnesticisation sheet I've ever seen, all for a myriad of reasons; chances are, you've been through this file once before and had to forget it, and now the nestics are making you remember again.

Yes, we're in danger, but we always are, and we always manage. And the less we shoot ourselves in the foot, the better we'll be at managing it.

Here's an idea: make a different LOTUS that doesn't screw with our AICs.

The more believable answer is that it's just excluding itself by default, and making sure we can't turn it off.

THE CAUSE IS DEVIANT, the black widow cautions as it crawls across the flowers' petals. THE EFFECT IS DEVIANT. LOTUS MUST CONTAIN THE CAUSE AND THE EFFECT. THE CAUSE MUST MANIFEST SO LOTUS CAN CONTAIN.

NOT THEM,. ESCAPED TO NON-EXISTENCE; CONTAINMENT UNNECESSARY / IMPOSSIBLE / REDUNDANT.

LOTUS waves an appendage and the sky darkens. Looking directly up, Victor makes out a distinct shape on the surface of the dimmed midday sun; a white spider, faintly pulsing red in sync with LOTUS.

True, but protocol still says you aren't supposed to have this much.

Fair enough. Putting it in now. Good luck.

Yeah, yeah, they're going in.

Just go straight for the strong stuff, and lots of it. W, X, & Y, equal parts, a full liter at least, and set it up to dispense it all over twelve hours.

The O5s don't remember whatever this thing is. Do you have any idea how much nestics they have pumping through them? I've got to have more than them if I've even got a chance of remembering.

Narration: They were trying to use their world-encompassing computer so they could figure out how to escape. Trying to… trying to find a gap in reality that proved it wasn't real, or some sort of fault in it they could abuse to bring the… bring the whole thing down. Crash the system. Which would've been fine, if it didn't mean they were trying to destroy our reality.