Underture
I have endowed myself with a fund of guilt. Make you no mistake — it is my own. I have my right in it.
I will not borrow yours, my quietude the collateral, and you are not entitled to mine.
Not at any price.
— Sir Edmond Forrestall, 1621
Truth isn't stranger than fiction.
If it were, would we need fiction? Perhaps very dull fiction, an escape from the weirdness of the world. But literature is instead flush with unlikely heroes, implausible adventures, ludicrous far-flung lands in profusion across every cultural context on the planet Earth… and beyond, for all we know. Little in reality compares favourably. There are, in truth, no werewolves. There is no bigfoot, and there never was any Atlantis. No magic, no telepathy, no immortality, no gods. What is so incredible by comparison about coincidence, or the depths of human depravity, stupidity and cupidity, or plain old bad luck that they should prompt otherwise intelligent human beings to remark: "You can't make this stuff up"? Of course you can. Even a child — especially a child! — could excel in creativity the barebones narratives we term 'truth'. But still the clichés persist. There is comfort in repetition, in not needing to think for ourselves, in paying obeisance to the variety of experience on offer in the realms of the strictly average. Because we don't really want the unreal to outpace the real, much though our souls and imaginations demand that it must, because the real is where we live. And so, we pretend.
What if we weren't pretending?
What if the truth were, in fact, a lie?
First allow that cryptids, legendary figures and artifacts of power do, indeed, exist. It's not so far-fetched; there's plenty of evidence, fragmentary and dubious though it is. Next make allowance for forces beyond our ken, mechanisms unencompassed by modern science, and call them collectively… well, everything from fire to space travel was considered magic at one time. A plausible framework for multiversal physics was laid down by Einstein nearly a century ago, so we'll have that too. New species are discovered in the rainforests at a steady rate (thanks, deforestation!) and new diseases crop up all the time (thanks globalism capitalism!), and these can seem downright peculiar by the standards of what is already known. People disappear, rigid universal laws bend, barriers are broken and dreams come true. The annals of today's science are the archives of yesterday's science fiction. Are our alleged literary inventions so incompatible with the contours of this 'mundane' existence?
In the final analysis, it's nothing more than a trick of terminology. The 'truth', improbably colourless and lacking in whimsy, is the real fiction. That fiction has an author: a supranational corporate entity whose cardinal ambition is to clamp down on everything strange and wondrous, to craft a lie they're able to live with and capable of forcing the rest of us to live within. The logistics of this shadowy cabal's access to manpower and money, and the question of its motivations, need not yet concern us. For now it's enough to agree that it exists — let's call it, for the sake of argument, the SCP Foundation — and to keep on saying that truth is stranger than fiction until its agents pass us by, content for the moment with our compliance. The axiom belongs to them, and their control extends to the very meaning of the words. They're not looking for input, they're not looking for feedback, and our consent is implied in perpetuity. They will worry about the ghosts and ghouls and goblins and gremlins so that you and I will never need to, even if that means we'll have no further recourse should their countermeasures fail. Because they haven't. Because they won't. The Foundation's been fighting the nominally-good fight for a long, long time now, and they know best. They are the final arbiters of truth, of fiction, and of the in-between states of reality itself.
Their narrative proceeds more or less according to its outline, and they've never once lost the plot.
Until today.
It's the eighth of September, 2002 at Site-43.
And it will be again.
Site-43 is impossible.
Not the garden variety of impossible characterizing the (very few) other Sites of its scale, merely ultramodern and covert and impenetrable, but ultramodern and impenetrable and subterranean. This vertical dimension stretches the already fanciful nature of an esoteric R&C facility well past the bounds of absurdity, and yet inanimately heedless of its own implausibility, it continues to exist.
The second thing to strike new arrivals at SCP Foundation Lake Huron Research and Containment Site-43 is that it's far, far too big. It lies fully one thousand metres beneath the surface of the Earth (which is, of course, the first thing to strike new arrivals), so how on and under Earth can it be so ungodly huge? It boasts dormitory capacity for an astonishing, almost inconceivable five hundred human beings. These eager beavers aren't subjected to submarine hot bunks, but instead possess spacious bedrooms and individual washrooms — individual washrooms for five hundred human beings! — and more than sufficient showers, cafeteria, laundrettes, rec rooms, meeting rooms and break rooms to keep them relatively sane in the insane setting of their insane jobs. And that's just the core of the Site, Habitation and Sustenance. The six major Sections under the umbrella of Research and Experimentation are absolute labyrinths of offices, laboratories, test chambers, storage vaults, and whatever a 'wetworks' is. You can get lost in R&E, very easily. You can get half-eaten by something, and go undiscovered for hours. The hospital facilities are similarly generous, as are the psych and parapsych wards, as are the archives, as are the computer labs and server stations and oh my goodness, the endless support facilities, and the high-tech high-fantasy digs of Applied Occultism where registered thaumaturges flex their odd talents in service of the greater neutral. And then there's the block of inescapable containment chambers, full of deadly devices and curious creatures, and the thrumming cavernous refineries of Acroamatic Abatement. None of it makes one single lick of sense.
If the words 'acroamatic abatement' mean nothing to you… keep reading!
My name is Imogen Tarrow, and I'm the Director of Area-21. We invented AcroAbate back in the 1920s, under the guidance of the peerless and much-lamented Dr. Wynn Rydderech. That worthy had a dream: a world unburdened by anomalous waste, "The true unseen killer. It's a quaint thing, isn't it? We work so hard to hide the evidence it leaves behind, which leaves us alone in this fight. If we don't clean up its mess, no-one else will — by design." Other people could track down werewolves and block up hellmouths and detain mad alchemists; Rydderech would neutralize the noxious esoteric qualities of their shed fur, and demonic brimstone, and unnatural tinctures. While the world beyond the Veil scraped coal dust off their whitewashed walls, then washed crude oil off their waterfowl, then siphoned heat off their spent nuclear fuel rods, Rydderech fought to stay ahead of a far more sinister ecological catastrophe: the total subsumption of mankind beneath a generalized magic slurry. With thousands of anomalies in containment, a sizable proportion of them producing enough extraordinary effluence to fill up all the mineshafts and deep sea ravines known to geological science, this prophecy of doom carried a startlingly proximal deadline. But the prophet's inventive efforts made Area-21 and the Acroamatic Abatement Group the Foundation's, and therefore the world's, foremost experts on converting occult sludge into… well, it varies! Sometimes less harmful, or even merely less heavy, occult sludge. Sometimes coal dust, or petrochemicals, or red-hot nuclear fuel, because what everyone else sees as hardball is just the practice pitch to us. If you're considering a career in AcroAbate, you've probably already got some experience with the small stuff. The stuff that's only killing the planet in logical, predictable ways. You've going to need to get a little crazier if you want to play our game.
One product of this endless striving to bend esochemistry into a weapon for our ever-escalating war is the hyper-advanced abatement facilities at Site-43: the largest acroamatic waste refineries ever constructed. (I'll let you in on the secret: that's what acroamatic means. Secret.) Dr. Rydderech himself laid the first pipes in the 1940s, kicking off a project so involved that he never returned to his home in Vienna. His sacrifice — an untimely disappearance and presumed death in 1966 — was certainly not in vain. With a little elbow grease and non-linear thinking, neither will yours be! Our facilities at 21 might not be as new and fancy as the ones at 43, but we treat that as a challenge rather than a liability. Limitations breed creativity, after all. And as the sea of sorcerous goop rises, we're rising up to meet it! This is a marathon, not a sprint. If you want to be a part of the solution, consider joining the AAG, transferring to Austria, and helping keep our collective heads above grey water.
As for the rest of you, remember this simple dictum: 'If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down; if it talks, call the docs!'
— Imogen Tarrow, "A Straightforward and Non-Allegorical Explanation of What Acroamatic Abatement Is"
How'd we end up wedged in this hole, anyway?
Most people arrive at a ridiculous conclusion first: an elevator shaft was dug one kilometre through earth and rock, then a village's worth of space three storeys tall was tunnelled out over the course of who knows how many years. The effort required to haul that much dense material up the shaft, and send that much advanced material back down, and the stirring lack of any good reason to do any of that, marks it immediately as a Thing Which Did Not Happen. More sensible, and therefore closer to the truth, is the notion that the Inter-Sectional Subway System was carved twenty-odd kilometres from its terminal station at the town of Grand Bend to encircle, and thereby define, the demesnes of the present-day Site which was then hollowed out one Section at a time. The horizontal dimension doesn't beggar belief to bankruptcy quite as does its vertical counterpart, but still; why dig such a long damn tunnel before settling down? Too obviously tedious for not enough apparent gain.
The fact is, precious little tunnelling has ever been done — by humans — at Site-43. Its location was no accident, its construction no folly. It would not have been possible to build something like this anywhere else on the planet; it wasn't carved out of the living rock by hand or power or tools, but rather by the peculiar race of amphibious cats which the Ojibwe call Mishepeshu, the lords of the beneath world. Unbeknownst to the military men who established Camp Ipperwash far above for the Canadian federal Department of Defence, these legendary felines had hacked out a sprawling cave system linking Lake Huron, Lake Superior, and their assorted islands and inland forests whilst all mankind was in barely-metaphorical diapers. They once roamed freely across central North America via these ancient, shadowed highways, and perhaps they do still… though today they're more likely to bide their time in the murk, where they face far less territorial encroachment.
When the Foundation (somehow) discovered this wealth of emptiness where they had only intended to erect a tiny containment Outpost, it seemed like the sort of miracle they were trained to be wary and skeptical of. But it certainly wasn't too good to be true; the cost in workers and resources exacted by the vengeful Mishepeshu during the first year of construction dispelled any lingering atmosphere of fairytale fortuity.
It matters how we see ourselves.
That belief is reflected in the worlds we create, and the words we use to describe and thereby refine them. How we explain what we are to our children, how they explain it to theirs, the continuity and change, the fix and flux of civilizations. That self-perception has power. It tells us that we have power.
One man can make a difference.
Mankind can make a god.
It is an undisputed fact in certain circles (the Venn diagram of normalcy-enforcing and normalcy-threatening organizations) that the act of belief is an act of creation. There are scientific means demonstrating how speaking an entity's name, endowing it with character and characteristics, entrusting it with information and offering it praise or supplication makes it measurably more real. Our angels and demons, gods and godlings, manitou and orenda, rites and rituals possess a force which is not inherent in them but instead bestowed by us. They wax and wane in direct proportion to our faith in their existence, their strength, their goodness or badness or inscrutable capriciousness. As with politics, there is no power inherent to the theological hierarchy which we have not collectively entrusted to it.
This is, of course, a delicate balance. Those who no longer live lives in tune with the pantheons of their ancestors no longer commune with either, and when contact is severed entirely, myths and gods may die. Atheism is not, in this context, so foolish as it might sound to we with access to Tactical Theology's extensive deific bestiary; only the faith of the faithful makes the unbeliever wrong. Were we all of us atheists, we would all of us be correct, for there would be no gods at all.
Would there?
We contend with forces beyond our comprehension. Professionally.
Outside of the SCP Foundation, saying you're a veteran of 'the forgotten war' generally makes you an embittered veteran of Korea. At Site-43, it means you've taken part in the least memorable conflict in recent 'recorded' history. The past century has seen countless battles fought in the endlessly generative realms of the mind, with the development of the scientific fields once known as cryptomancy, imagomancy and audiomancy, now collectively termed memetics. The source of this knowledge has been lost — by which I mean lost, not forgotten or misplaced; connoting even erased would be not inappropriate — but the Foundation acquired it via theft, and reverse engineering. Anomalous artists whose works of literature, art and music held remarkable influence over human thought engaged in ill-advised demonstrations of their craft, some benevolent, many malevolent, and in so doing presented us with the keys to cognition. They had themselves pilfered these powers from an ancient, extinct secret society: the giftschreiber, or poison-writers. Modern-day successors to this band of malicious mind-benders did not appreciate our intervention in their milieux, staging numerous assaults on Foundation facilities in reprisal over the course of the twentieth century. One particular target of their ire, for no reason both apparent and apprehensible, was Site-43.
To be sure, the greatest strides pacing out the limits of our collective consciousness were made here, beneath the stolen forest, but even once the diffusion of memetic knowledge went worldwide, a singular focus on the Canadian case remained consistent.
Until 1980.
It has been a long and painful struggle.
Since the seizure of our land and the advent of the army, the peoples of Lake Huron have endured the presence of outsiders in our ancestral homes. Ipperwash Park was stolen for military use, then handed to the SCP Foundation on a tarmac platter in negotiations we were not, of course, in any way party to. We were scattered, demoralized, starved and parched while others flourished in our stead. But as we have done since time immemorial, we persevered… and the signs of our success are written in the stars. The indigenous peoples of Canada today account for perhaps four percent of the total population, and yet the tangible products of our belief are universally more hale and hearty than those stemming from settler colonial practice. The Great Lakes are alive with history — our history, with no firm delineation between the sacred and profane. That isn't to say we all believe; we exist in this century, no less than do our neighbours off the res. So can a handful of faithful really project that much power? Or is there something more to our legends than there is to yours? Or is something else entirely occurring? Perhaps the unbroken chain of our stories is simply more accurate than the yellowing paper trails over which the archivists of Site-43 relentlessly labour, and our lands have always been flush with creatures owing us nothing for their origination. Perhaps we, and they, have always co-existed in mutual dependency.
In 1980, the SCP Foundation and the neue giftschreiber underwent a shocking trial together. No coherent explanation has yet been mooted for why the malignant memes suddenly stopped, why all operations against Site-43 ground to a silent halt. It was as though a switch had been thrown. Our opponents, in obvious confusion and disarray, continued to assail facilities beyond the Canadian borders, but the fight seemed to quite go out of them where once they had fought most fiercely. On the other side of the battle lines, we found critical information gone from both our mechanical and biological databases. Something had arranged a ceasefire, and nobody knew what that something was. This situation has not improved in the long interim.
Two theories have been advanced to explain the Forgotten War: first, that the rogue cryptomancers somehow achieved their secret goal, to their detriment, or second, the fire they had been playing with for all those years had finally burned them. There was little doubt that a powerful memetic effect was to blame for our collective amnesia, though some have muttered darkly on a third explanatory tangent: the fact that physical data has been deleted suggests our own complicity in the erasure, intentional or not.
In any case, having played over the course of the conflict no small role in the proliferation of cognitohazards, infohazards, Berryman-Langford kill agents and other destructive memetic effects, Site-43 remained at the forefront of the field. Its researchers shifted focus to bad actors beyond the ranks of the neue giftschreiber, most notably paranormal entertainment corporations such as Vikander-Kneed Technical Media. But lingering questions on the origin of our mental malaise, perhaps the only experience — beyond the exercise of psychological power — which we have shared with our intractable foes, hangs over us still like a shroud. One in particular has occasioned more than a few sleepless nights:
Did the war end before we forgot it?
— Allan J. McInnis, Programmatic Peculiarity: A Site-43 Directorial Analysis
We have taken the long view of history, in which all wrongs may some day be righted, all cycles swing back 'round, and nothing truly ends. Endings are terminii, and we prefer to think instead in terms of interconnection. That might help to explain why the SCP Foundation, dedicated as it is to sweeping away the webs and segregating each element of the supernatural tapestry from every other, so rapidly lost control of Lake Huron's flora and fauna. They eventually abandoned their campaign of suppression on this swathe of anomalous land entirely, acknowledging with the creation of Nx-94 that there was simply no way to contain its contents short of driving us off the land, or killing us and our dreams in a single cruel stroke. Perhaps they were further driven by the nagging doubt that even this monstrous measure could fully drive out the manitou. In the years that followed, we have tried to teach them a more holistic approach to this cabinet of wonders within which we wander; at Site-43, if nowhere else, they — or, rather, we, for I am now a man astride both worlds — have stopped at times to listen, and to learn.
For this is a lesson, and we need to heed it well… lest we find ourselves standing unprepared before a comprehensive test. There are horizons more bizarre than even those I have just related, and we have not yet even begun to find the words required to speak intelligently about them. It is an uncomfortable fact, though disputed in many circles (some overlapping with the Foundation itself) that not all gods and demigods subsist on raw belief. Some draw their energy from another, entirely unknown, source; foreign to us, to all of humanity, as foreign as the soldiers and scientists who sunk a Site into our woods once were to my forebears. They come in many shapes and sizes, and they ask us each and every to confront our own ignorance. To ask ourselves, as my people once did: from whence do these strangers hail?
What are their stories?
— All-Sections Chief, "New Lords Beneath: A Memorandum to the O5 Council"
Mythogeological boons aside, Site-43 could not have been made manifest at any other historical moment than the mid-1940s. Only a world in the throes of a World War could be convinced to turn a blind eye to all that shipping and all that building and all those people disappearing into a hole in the ground on an Indian reserve. Rumours persisted for decades that the Department of Defence had been up to something bad at Ipperwash during the Good War; the most popular involved the United States government and the production of atomic weapons. Why else the immense, fenced-in interdiction zone? Why else the eviction of the indigenous peoples to the neighbouring Kettle Point, and the dogged refusal of the military to let them come back home when the final shots had been fired? Why else the gigantic Lake Huron Supply, Control and Purification water treatment and distribution facility, which was actually the Site's false front? I imagine explaining to those energetic rumour-mongers how the initials S-C-P actually form one part of a cryptomantic bewitchment, and I imagine their heads exploding pop pop pop in satisfying sequence.
Because where we, the strange truthmongers, are concerned, the conspiracy theories are never a patch on reality. Site-43 is so big, it has its own subway. It's so big that it needs its own subway. It's so stupidly big that someone who works in Psychology and Parapsychology and bunks in the northern dorms might never meet, or even sense the existence of, someone who works in Identity and Technocryptography and bunks to the south. That sort of thing is simply not meant to happen in a structure built so far below grade. You can live with your significant other and carry on an affair with your other significant other, and stand even odds on the twain never meeting. You can avoid Dr. Wettle — or anyone else, of course, but in practice it's always Dr. Wettle — almost indefinitely, if you put the effort in. You can hide a body. You can hide several bodies. You can hide within a body.
The whole place has a curious, lopsided, twisty and intermittent shape, defined as it was first by the prehistoric peripatations of a race of aquatic myth-panthers and then by the exigencies of a global campaign of quarantine and dissimulation. Don't look too hard at any one angle. Don't try to visualize it all at once. Its truth truly is stranger than fiction — even the fiction we don't suppress.
It's been strange from the start.
— Dr. Harold Blank, Lines in a Muddle: A Cultural History of Site-43
1941
8 September
Ipperwash Provincial Park: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada
Vivian Scout reached up, snapped the brim of his fedora between finger and thumb, and tipped the water off. It rolled down the back of his oilskin, dripping a steady trail on the cave floor behind them.
"Damp spot for a rendezvous," he remarked. It was merely a remark, not a complaint. Scout never complained.
"We don't think they met here." The lead agent, a man named Strauss, briefly hooded his lamp to peer into the darkness ahead. "We're fairly sure they met in the woods, and one of them crawled here when it went south."
Scout nodded, not that the other man could see it. "Likely fancied himself safe from discovery."
And why not; this was, Scout had to admit, an excellent place to hide. He'd endured a hairy ride from the SCPS Honoré Beaugrand to the cave mouth, which resembled countless other overhangs of Canadian Shield — the continental crust of North America, exposed in a vast bulwark of reddish rock in a horseshoe around Lake Huron. Though the Shield petered out far to the north, around Georgian Bay, random outcroppings dotted the lower coast along which Scout's escorts had guided their sleek black launch. The water had been choppy and the weather had been bad, and it had looked to him like the navigator had meant to dash them against a wall of solid stone… but then they had gained the low and narrow aperture, and passed beneath to find themselves within a waterlogged cleft. Scout didn't know much about caves, but he did know they were cramped spaces with potentially deadly stability issues. Spelunking, in his view, was the act of retreating progressively from a place of safety until your surroundings either collapsed on top of you, or you fell down into them, or you simply became irretrievably lost and died of starvation, oxygen deprivation, or injury.
This wasn't that sort of cave.
This cave was… well, it was more than one cave, and those caves were tunnels, a natural network of comfortably vast thoroughfares burrowed into bedrock. The stone was smooth, there were no stalactites and stalagmites (not that he could have told the crucial difference between these), and a warm breeze prevailed throughout. The only thing claustrophobic about this arrangement was the lack of light, as it was only by the headlamps of his Mobile Task Force that Scout was able to penetrate the subterranean black. He fancied that situation was improving ahead, but it might have been the glare off his large round spectacles.
A thought occurred. "This can't be a lava tube."
Strauss glanced back again, blinking in the glare from the other three lamps (and his own, thanks to Scout's pitiless pair of reflectors). "Sir?"
The Director of Project CLIO gestured at the cylindrical passage walls. "There's no volcanic activity around here. The only thing that could explain formations like this, besides tunnelling, is a volcanic vent pumping out a lava channel. Which is impossible."
The agent shrugged, and resumed his march. "Then I suppose someone tunnelled it, sir."
This was a statement to which there could be no answer, so they hiked in pseudosilence for a while. Other than the soft tread of combat boots and one pair of creaking Wellingtons, the only sound was the explosively magnified ambient drip of water into distant water which was the sonic signature of very deep places in the earth.
"He's up ahead," Strauss reported. The light Scout had thought he'd glimpsed in the gloom was now more evident, even to his untrained historian's eyes. In short order the tiny base camp resolved itself: Outpost-43, a grandiose title for a few large industrial lamps hooked into generators, a single linen-lined hose snaking out of a narrow crack in the far-distant ceiling to draw out harmful vapours, and a cot on the cave floor containing a wizened old man in pastel blue leisurewear, stained vermilion. Three more armed agents surrounded him, and they all saluted when Scout approached. A medic was kneeling beside the cot; he nodded, before turning his attention back to his clipboard (and brushing away a few droplets of water with a grimace).
Scout also took a knee, and examined the patient. He possessed a plain, unprepossessing face, thinning grey hair and a barrel chest… not unlike Scout himself, actually. He was breathing low, but steady. His skin was tanned and wrinkled — here their appearances markedly diverged — as though someone had ironed out a mess of wet burlap. He wouldn't have stood out in a crowd, but he certainly stood out in a cave. Even lying prone.
The man's eyes opened. They were slate-grey, clear and alert. He spoke, with obvious difficulty. "Are you the one?"
Scout tipped his hat politely, and a few more stray drops pattered on the other's pate. "Vivian Scout. We're not properly acquainted."
A wet, pained chuckle, then a breath sucked in through remarkably straight and bright teeth. "You've been following me a long time."
"I have, yes." Scout tugged a small grey cloth out of his jacket pocket, removed his spectacles and began polishing the lenses. They were one-way glass, clear on his side and opaque on the other, but the clammy cave was generalizing the opacity in a most irritating fashion — not that Scout ever became irritated, at least not visibly. "And now I've found you. That's a start."
The man groaned. "You'll be wanting to complete the set."
"Of course. And I don't suppose you'd be willing to coopera—"
"I am a catalyst for master-strokes and follies." It was little more than a hiss, venomous and spite-filled. The man then jolted upright and seized Scout by the lapels — seven weapons snapped up in perfect sync, taking immediate aim — and whispered the second half of the rhyming couplet fiercely into Scout's ear before spasming back on the cot. "Tell him that," the old man sighed. "See what happens."
Scout returned his spectacles and the polishing cloth to their appropriate stations, then reached into his jacket again to withdraw a small pad of paper. His hands, he was surprised to see, were shaking. He patted his chest, searching for the telltale outline of a pen… when he suddenly realized that the impact of the words wasn't fading.
The realization that they wouldn't fade, that he quite literally could not forget them, struck like a bolt from the invisible blue.
He nodded, though the man's wild eyes were now shut tight again, and stood up straight. "Very well." A glance to the medic. "Keep him stable; we're going to be down here a while."
"How long, sir?" Strauss was still pointing his rifle at the wheezing casualty, as were both security details. "How long are we going to stay?"
Scout glanced up at the cave ceiling, then at the narrow aperture from which the hose emerged, then at the dozens of winding paths branching off in every direction. There couldn't be a metre of stone between each; a little world of possibilities, all his own.
"Quite some time yet," he mused.
