SCP Sandbox

Item #: SCP-855

Object Class: Safe

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-855 is to be maintained as a dilapidated structure. 2 local agents are to examine the exterior twice daily. If any evidence of infiltration or break-in is found, any records or persons involved may be suppressed in the usual manner. Federal, public, and corporate interest may be dissuaded via standard procedures FE-Pub-222-A through –E.

No one is to enter SCP-855 other than for approved testing. If SCP-855-A is engaged, outside exits are to be sealed as fully as possible. Further intervention is not generally necessary. Unusual events or occurrences are to be reported immediately.

Description: SCP-855 is a small office building in central ███████, ██████████. It is three stories tall and includes one elevator and one staircase between levels. The exterior is composed mostly of sandstone. Further detailed floor plans are available by contacting Dr. ███████ or Mr. ██████████-████.

Prior to 1999, SCP-855 was owned by a nonprofit and later a concrete manufacturing company. The company failed, and from 1999 until the present, it has been unoccupied. An attempt to purchase and develop the building in 2003 failed for unknown reasons. Currently, the Foundation owns this property.

When an individual enters SCP-855 and goes to the second floor, a man carrying a gun will emerge from the building and shoot at them. The individual, designated as SCP-855-A, does not demonstrate extrahuman capacities, but does have excellent marksmanship. Furthermore, the entity is not confined to the second floor, and if the subject successfully enters another part of the building, the entity will pursue them. It will not exit the building.

Photography and survivor reports that SCP-855-A remains the same figure every time. It wears a camouflage-print jacket and pants, and possibly a bullet-proof vest under the jacket. The gun is a Mossberg 500 shotgun equipped with a standard silencer. No attempts at communication with the figure have been successful or provoked a reaction. While not all of the individual’s shots are precise, it always shoots to kill.

When SCP-855 is unoccupied, no signs of life or heat signatures appear in the building. Nearby residents have never reported signs of life or presence in the building, apart from isolated incidence of gunfire. Additionally, the structure has no running water, and long-term surveillance has not revealed any unaccounted-for individuals entering or exiting the structure. While inspection is ongoing, it appears that the entity does not exist until the second floor of the structure becomes occupied.
Bodies left by SCP-855-A also disappear over a longer period of time.

Log of Experimentation

1. Class-D personnel, female, 38 years old.
Instructed to enter building and wait on first floor. Subject was given a magazine. Two hours passed with no unusual incidents, and subject was able to leave.

2. Class-D personnel, male, 26 years old.
Instructed to enter second story of building via stairs. After exiting the stairwell, a man with a gun emerged from Conference Room CA and shot the subject four times, fatally.

3. Class-D personnel, female, 30 years old.
Instructed to enter second story of building via elevator. After seeing SCP-855-A emerge when the doors open, subject closed the door and went to the third floor, using the doors as a shield. Subject fled down the nearest hallway to the elevator, and was met by the entity, who had come up the stairs. Shot to death.

4. Remotely-activated robot with a front-mounted camera was sent up via elevator, unaccompanied by humans.
Once it began traversing the hallway, the entity emerged from a storeroom and shot through the camera lens, causing the robot to become inoperative.

5. Remotely-activated robot with a front-mounted camera, covered with bulletproof glass. Remainder of robot was also retrofitted for security.
Sent up elevator. Man with gun emerged and shot at the camera; however, after five shots caused no damage, it retreated into a room that may have contained cubicles.

The robot followed SCP-855-A into the room, but no individual was found once it entered. A thorough examination revealed only four opened and empty cans of baked beans and one emptied can of tuna, dated from 2007. No further contact with the entity occurred, and all other entered rooms were devoid of objects.

7
Brenda was ecstatic to have me back- said she knew I wasn’t going to stay in Ghana forever, and dragged me around and showed me everything she had been working on while I was gone. Her department had been busy.

She made me look all over one cell. Inside, there was a guy who could start fires with his hands; arrested over 15 times for petty arsony. The main room was hexagonal and domed with a camera sealed off by glass at the very top. Mats- Brenda said they were fireproof- littered the floor, along with a chair, TV, and DVD player. We went up a level- inside the cell, a ladder went up to a small bedroom, separated by a screen door.

“Really?” I asked.

“Go with it,” she said.

There was a bed, mirror, and chest of drawers. There were no windows or direct screens- we were looking in through computer screens, which she said were hidden in the ceiling panels. There was a tiny bathroom on the first floor, separated by a screen.

Brenda turned to me, beaming. “Get it?”

“Not really.”

“Okay. Let me elaborate.” She turned off the screen and looked at me. “He can close the bedroom door on us if he wants. We won’t go in unless he breaks the cameras. We have permission to delay experimentation for up to 24 hours if he doesn’t come out.”

“You’re kidding me.”

She sighed. “We had to fight Ethics on it all the way- but, honestly, he’ll never force us. We had a psychologist go through his history, medical, psychological, and criminal records, found a recurring desire to be recognized as an adult. So we gave him responsibility. If he burns any of the stuff, we won’t replace it for at least a month. An architect designed it- no windows in the bedroom, no obvious cameras, it’s recessed, gives him a sense of privacy. He asked for the TV, but we’ve denied most of his requests so far. We haven’t had any problems.

“The compound’s easily mass-produced. He’s only safe, but we have very similar plans for Euclids and even Keters in the process of approval. See- okay, you’re still confused. It’s not hard to design prison cells. The problem is, once you do, you have to turn every hallway outside the cells into prisons. Every laboratory or facility they touch has to be a prison. All of that really drives up the bottom line. And everyone they contact has to be a guard. Sooner or later, they stop caring, or try to kill themselves.

“With this, containment becomes a cinch- have a guy with a gun somewhere, but most of these guys will never try anything. The biggest problem with prison cells is that if you’re dealing with our guys, there’s always the risk that they’ll do something you don’t know about and then break out. You see what I’m getting at now?”

“Sort of.”

“Lots of our subjects say they haven’t felt this safe in their whole lives. We’ve designed the best prison cell in the world- the inmates don’t want to leave.”

Dr. Yoric Elroy

Yoric “Greeny” Elroy is a large carpet python (Morelia spilota), approximately 3.4 meters long, currently with Level 2 clearance. Was originally a testing specimen in Site 17's animal research laboratories, but following incident XXX-35-5008, demonstrated astonishing powers of deduction and manual dexterity for class Reptilia, particularly a limbless one, and as such was immediately hired on as a researcher.

Shortly afterwards, it decided its own name by misreading works of classical literature, and determined that it was a doctor. Promotion was following breakthroughs in anomalous incident XX-XXXX-B.

In lieu of traditional researcher dormitories, Yoric resides in a 150-gallon aquarium with heating lamp and decorative cacti to accommodate his physical needs. Personnel are reminded not to tap on the glass in the mornings as an alarm clock has been installed for this purpose.

In case of emergencies, Dr. Elroy may be easily recognized by his green skin and distinctive spotting.

Audio Record from monitored dissection of SCP-XXX
Dr. KXXXX: Is this on? Right, beginning the dissection. Yoric, please make an incision from the base of the jaw to the high point along the sternum.
Yoric: Sssss sssssss sssssssssssssss
Dr. KXXXX: Very well. Now, I'll expose some of the muscular bands, the ribs, the beginnings of the shoulder attachment points… Oh, I'm sorry, sore point?
Yoric: Ssssssssss ssssssssssss sssssssss sssssssssssssssss
Dr. KXXXX: Right. Well, no reason to wait, I'll get the spreaders and we'll start in on the interior cavity right away.
Yoric: Sssss ssssssssssssssss ssssssssssssssss ssss sssssssssss.
(loud sounds of cracking bones)
Dr. KXXXX: Good lord, that's an abominable stench… You can stop flicking your tongue at me, you know.
Yoric: Sssssssssssssss ss ss ssssss.
Dr. KXXXX: Well, I'm going to proceed with this one way or another… Has anyone ever told you how stupid you look in that lab coat anyways?
Yoric: SSSSSSSSSSSS
Dr. KXXXX: Oh, it appears to be spurting blood! I suppose it wasn't dead after all. Look, while I never claimed to take help from constriction predators…
Yoric: Sssss ssssss ssssssssssss ssss
Dr. KXXXX: Don't say that about my mother.
(Vivisection was called off shortly after.)

Enjoying dinner

Personnel are reminded not to challenge Dr. Elroy to staring contests.

From a paper presented at the Annual Galactic Social & Anthropological Conference, Sept. 12, 4105-CE

The planet is an oddity among most spacefaring races, a small curiosity circling a star nestled between the horns of Capricorn. It was encountered first by a scouting fleet from the Baron d Baron system, who studied it from the atmosphere: noting that it was little more then a tribal planet, nowhere near approaching the age of space exploration, but that something interesting seemed to be occurring all the same.

The planet is larger then most, and more tempermental. Two oceans bleed through a single huge continent, and there are precious few forests to divide the nourishing desert that covers it. This desert is the home of the people, and they take to it with hoes and spears, with plow and with feedbag. The goat-like animals they raise follow them amidst the rocks and bones, picking at sweet grass planted in the footsteps of the tribe that came before. The People rarely starve or become lost, because day and night, they follow the Pattern.

It is thought that the Pattern emerged from cairns and trail ducks: a way to indicate to strangers where fresh water or cropland lay. Now, though, it is marked by complex patterns of rocks: points of goat skulls and long trails through the sand, which eventually lead to another node of rocks and another choice of trails. Always, it is the Pattern that tells them which one to take.

The rock patterns themselves appear extraordinarily complex, but are in reality, after some practice, little more then symbolic representations of what lays ahead, with instructions on which route to go under which conditions (rainfall, degree of hunger, smokesigns from another tribe). When faced with these simple directions, it is hard even for the People to imagine the pattern as a network- but that's really what it is, what makes it so rare: it's a pandemic machine, iteration upon iteration of social trails, a cosmic yes-no. The Pattern is appended whenever necessary- when a new watering hole is found, a few stones here and there write another step into the ground, and the pattern is made that much more complex.

The People have no written language of note, yet they appear to understand the pattern instinctively. While the duty of reading the rocks often falls to a single well-trained man or woman, even children grasp it intuitively.

When dealing with The People, it's hard to avoid the word “computer.” Well, why should we? It is not “wrong” to call it what it is, it does not “reduce the sentient and intelligent citizens of the planet to the level of mere cogs in a machine,” as some of my more vocal critics have put it. The Pattern is a series of inputs and outputs designed to process and manipulate data. Isn't it best to call it what it is, acknowledging that the People have designed a working data processor in their stone age?

To go on, we must first define the characteristics of true computers.
-They are complex machines.
-They input and refine data.
-They are programmable.

That the Pattern is complex goes without saying. It refines data as well: various elements depend on the weather or time of year, and use this to select the path that will be of most benefit to the tribes. And the Pattern, arguably, can be programmed. A section of land, approximately one thousand by three hundred miles bordering the southern ocean has been tentatively identified as a solar calculator, and has operated in its current configuration for approximately 30 years. It seems to be calculating the distance between the planet and its moon, based on easily observable measurements.

This is of particular interest to us. There is no conceivable scenario in which this would be useful for the People. Additionally, the calculations, although simple, seem to be nothing that the People (with their apparent non-interest in mathematics) could or would work out individually. The fact of the matter becomes apparent: the Pattern is performing specific, complex tasks that the People have no interest in. If the People aren't running the show there, who is? Some very interesting new theories suggest that the vast majority of the Pattern which (which, as far as we could determine prior, served no real purpose) is, in fact, of sufficient complexity to have become be pseudointelligent. I propose, then, that, yes, the pattern can be programmed- it already has been.

Moving on. It has been discussed that there must be ways of editting the pattern. Hypothetically, it could be done. The nodes themselves are not terribly complex, and a simulator could be developed which would display what we could create by moving the nodes. Here, however, the biological component of the mechanism works against us: if the People realize that huge somethings from space are rearranging their lives' work, they will lose faith in it and abandon the Pattern. The People have no idea of our existence, and by interfering, we will do just that- ruin it.

I will have to veer into philosophy for a moment. There are miles and miles, in fact, most of the Pattern, without any obvious purpose. As sentient, social beings, we can hardly not think of what could be gained from talking with a planet-sized mind. The fact, however, remains: we cannot interact with it. At the very least, of sufficient attention is drawn to this solitary planet, then perhaps in the future it will be feasible to map the entire surface of the planet via satellite, and simulate the movement of the people on its surface, effectively creating a Pattern that can be edited on our own terms. (My bias as a sociologist is that this will be a very poor substitute for the real thing. But technology continues to improve every day, and I may yet be proven wrong.)

A detailed initial survey of the planet showed a number of constructed buildings, or at least remains of buildings, that are most definitely not completable with the People's current levels of technology. In the first few years that the planet was known to science, it was suspected that the People's pattern-building instincts stemmed in some way from the prior culture: a culture so great, with such fervor, that when it went out, it not only left its ruins on the planet, but left its technological instincts imprinted on the People's minds so strongly that even today, they still follow rock lines in the dust.

We now know that is not true.

In fact, materials recovered from these ruins and analyzed has revealed pages upon pages of information on the lives of the Planet's prior empire. These details are fantastic, beautiful, and mostly trivial. Of the People as we know them, only a few paragraphs are devoted- but what we can recover from then is that the People far surpass in age this once-prosperous empire, going back at least to its roots and further.

To offer some scale, the empire fell at least ten thousand years ago.

Even the denizens of the prior empire were prone to speculating on the motivations of their nomadic brethren. “Far be it from me to know what causes the goat-farmers and grass-growers to move endlessly in their slow spirals, who will not stop for chat nor food nor threat of arms…” read the memoirs of an anonymous scholar. “But having watched them for many years, move past the far edges of Sacred Land, I can safely say that they are possessed of a knowledge granted to them by right of some unknown angel, a knowledge we cannot understand and have no reason to want to.”

Having spent the majority of the last ten years of his life studying the People and their Pattern, the author puts forth another theory: that instead of extradimensional knowledge or half-remembered urges, the existence of the Pattern is an evolutionary fluke: an unrepeatable, useless, and extraordinary fluke in the fabric of life. “Deus ex machina”, if you will.

Given the nature of the anomaly, I believe that is the best name we can give to it.

Yoric's general text, just worse and as a sonnet

The tattoo-artist's daughter was a wreck
She scratched her arms and sold her beat-up car
A reddish rose had bloomed across her neck
I saw it when I met her at a bar.
She brushed her straightened hair out of her face
“In the end, we all get tired of each other,”
She smirked and bobbed her head to techno bass.
I think she hoped I'd disagree, but other
things came up and she tried not to cry
As raunchy beats and flashing lights shone on
She wiped her bloody needles with a sigh
She seemed pissed off, but what could I have done?
And when she left for good, what could I think?
Oh baby, in the end, we're only ink.