Interview 8, Early
The doctor sat in red plush chair behind a sturdy oak desk, tapped his feet, twiddled his thumbs, shuffled the papers on his desk without really reading any of them, looked at the clock, sighed, and went through as many other boredom-resisting techniques as he could devise as time slowly moved forwards. Eventually, the long-expected knock on the door came, and the doctor yelled “Come in!” with carefully disguised relief.
“Sorry, doctor,” said the sturdy gentleman who came in and closed the door behind him. “I’m still getting used to the layout of this place.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said the doctor good-naturedly. “You’re not that late.” In fact, MacLean had arrived exactly when he had been expected to, which happened to be twenty minutes late. Doctor Benson was very annoyed by this procedure, but the higher-ups were eager to know anything MacLean could tell them, and that meant MacLean had to be put at ease. Interrogations, in Benson’s experience, went best if the subject did not know or did not care that they were being interrogated.
“Before we start, I’d like to thank you on behalf of the G.O.C. for agreeing to talk. Are you ready to begin?” asked Dr. Benson. MacLean nodded and took a seat in the black chair Benson had placed before his desk. Benson leaned forwards and touched a button on a machine in front of him. It clicked and began to let out a soft and very high-pitched electronic whine. “Alright then. Please state your name for the record.”
“My name is Malcolm Fitzpatrick MacLean.”
You should know my name.
“And your profession?”
“I am currently unemployed. My most recent employment was as Mobile Taskforce Leader ‘Pegasus’ of MTF team Epsilon-2, for the SCP Foundation.”
“Please describe your previous experiences with the Foundation.”
Awful. Terrifying. Traumatizing. Stressful. Disillusioning. Unkind. Unwelcome. Undesirable. Fearful….
MacLean opened his mouth and then paused, seemingly at a loss. Benson smiled. “I’m sorry, that question was rather vague, wasn’t it? Why don’t we start from the beginning? Summarize briefly your career up to the point where you were inducted by the Foundation.”
MacLean breathed out and started over. “I was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, Force Recon.”
“And how did you come to join the Foundation?”
“I was told that, due to outstanding performance while serving in Iraq, I was being considered for placement in a special international operations group. I thought it might be a good career boost, so I accepted. Me and a bunch of other coalition troops got shuttled off to a base in the Midwestern U.S. that I’d never heard of before-“
“Pardon me for interrupting, but do you know the location of this base?”
“I memorized the GPS coordinates, but that won’t do you much good. The place is gone now.”
“Gone?”
It got blown up with a nuke after the frog-thing got out.
“Yes. I’m told that a lot of Foundation bases are mobile. Not all of them are; for instance, the bases that hold Keter-level stuff… the nastiest monsters… often can’t move because the things they contain can’t be moved. For the rest, you’d be surprised what you can do with enough trucks and lightweight pre-fab materials.”
“I see. You were telling me about your induction?”
“When we got to the base, they shuffled us all into an auditorium, and showed us a movie describing the SCP Foundation. I thought it was crazy, but after the movie they gave us a tour of the base’s containment facilities, and half the… things… in the film were right there in the base, snarling at us. Most of us were pretty freaked out. Then they herded us back into the auditorium, and told us that we were top candidates to be the Foundation’s monster-hunters. If we accepted, we’d have to take on codenames and ditch our old lives completely. If we refused, we’d be given pills to forget everything and be sent back out to fight terrorists. Real MIB-type stuff.
The mystery and magic is how they get you.
“Well, I have to admit I was impressed. I didn’t especially like the idea of having to ditch all my old friends, but I could tell this was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things, one of those choices which change everything. I wanted to know what would happen if I went along. So did most of the others with me, I guess.”
“Most?”
“Yeah, most. About twenty of us came in, only four or five went out.”
“What happened to the people who refused the offer?”
MacLean looked at Benson’s face and smirked. “I never saw them again, but after all I’ve seen of what the Foundation can do, I’m still pretty sure that amnesiacs were all that happened to them.”
Clichéd as it is, they were the lucky ones. Bastards.
Benson let out a sigh. “Alright then. What happened afterwards?”
“We got to pick our own names out, and I went with ‘Pegasus.’ I think I chose it at random, because I don’t remember my reasoning anymore.
I wanted “knife,” but a couple of Agents called Fork and Spoon didn’t seem happy with that.
“What happened afterwards was a bit like boot camp, only with less verbal abuse and more open threats of death. We were already pretty physically fit, so most of our training consisted of a senior Agent or MTF guy telling us about all the ways we could die and how not to get killed. We practiced a bit with some of the more exotic Foundation equipment, too.”
“Can you tell me more about this equipment?”
Wait… I remember something about this…
MacLean smirked again, and Benson was sure this time that MacLean knew he was fishing. “If you don’t already have it, chances are I can’t explain it to you. I never did learn how most of it worked. There were a whole bunch of toys to disable mechanical or electrical machinery, memetic weapons, anti-memetic weapons, plasma and laser-based weapons that, last I heard, were still in development. They showed us some SCP weapons, too. I remember this one submachine gun that actually was alive, and shot teeth…”
“Maybe we’ll come back to this later,” interjected Benson, smoothly. “How long did you spend in training?”
“Training never stopped, really. We studied SCP stuff for about two months, and then after that we settled into something like a standard military base routine. You know, get up, exercise, eat, exercise some more, study, eat, study, exercise, eat, and then relax once the sun’s down. They were always showing us new SCP materials, new threats they thought we might face.”
“Were you told what you were preparing for?”
Death. Everything. Nothing. Lots of shit.
“Not as a group, no. But people were coming on and off the base all the time. New recruits would go through the same orientation and then join the routine. Mobile Taskforce leaders would come in, pick out one to five people out of training, and then take them away to who-knows where. We were trained at this point specifically not to ask questions, so we didn’t. I figured that eventually, I’d probably get selected for some specific MTF and that’d be it.”
“Did the leaders come in to recruit people often?”
“…Yeah. Yeah, they did. In retrospect, I should have wondered about that.”
“You mentioned you were Leader of Epsilon-2?”
“Yeah, but not right away. I was first put on Lambda-8, which was based in another mobile base in Central Africa. They’d lost a man, somewhere, and they took me on to replace him. That… wasn’t a good assignment.”
Understatement.
Benson looked closely at MacLean’s face. It was fairly obvious that MacLean had bad memories of Lambda-8, but were they necessarily important to Benson? The doctor decided yes, they probably were, and even if there was no intelligence value to them it would probably be helpful to learn a bit more about MacLean before the next interrogation session.
“Tell me about your service with Lambda-8.”
MacLean gave Benson a sad smile. “Service? I lasted a week. One week, and transferred out.”
“Why did you transfer out?”
“Well, I say ‘transfer’ because… You know what? Why don’t I just save us some time and tell you about my first and only mission with that team?”
Why not? Because I hate my memories, that’s why not. You always have to dredge them up, don’t you?
Benson stayed silent and waited for MacLean to continue.
“See, here’s how the Foundation usually works. There’s field operatives on the ground pretty much everywhere people live. They don’t do any legwork; they just keep their ears to the ground. And if there’s something weird in the neighborhood, they call in an Agent. The Agents are the ones responsible for finding, and, if possible, capturing any SCPs that the spies sniff out. If the Agents fail, or can’t do it alone, they call us. Lambda-8 was an MTF that was supposed to be a fast-attack and recon team for the region it was based in.
“So, I spent five days with Lambda 8, training, getting to know the group. Then we got a call from an Overseer, telling us they’d lost contact with three Agents they’d sent to Tanzania after some artifact or another. “
So, obviously, the next thing they thought of was to send in a larger group of people with guns. Figures.
