Pickman-Blank Proposal Offset 1

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Item#: SCP-001
Level4
Containment Class:
aegis
Secondary Class:
{$secondary-class}
Disruption Class:
ekhi
Risk Class:
notice

Frontispiece1.jpg

SCP-001, selected examples in situ.

Special Containment Procedures: The maintenance of SCP-001 is paramount to the continued existence of the SCP Foundation and the Veil of Secrecy. Research into sustaining, extending and strengthening its memetic properties is an Alpha-One priority at all times. Individuals found resistant to SCP-001 are to be amnesticized, detained, or terminated where appropriate and/or necessary. All SCP Foundation personnel rated above Class C must undergo Antimeme-001 inoculation.


Everest.jpg

SCP-001 instance.

Description: SCP-001 is a memetic complex known internally as "The Frontispiece" residing in the human collective consciousness. It exerts an anomalous force upon all initialisms.Abbreviations consisting of initials which are read and spoken individually. containing the Latin letter sequence S-C-P: without Antimeme-001 inoculation, considerable memetic conditioning or thaumaturgic/ontokinetic capabilities, no human being encountering such initialisms is capable of mentally connecting them, or whatever objects, personages or organizations they are applied to, with the SCP Foundation. The Frontispiece therefore allows the Foundation to operate public-facing front organizations which are simultaneously identifiable at a glance to agents in the field, and veiled from hostile operatives or the general populace. For example: all "Snooze 'n' Cruise Palace".A chain of novelty retro-style hotels and restaurants with over two hundred locations, primarily in the South-Western United States. franchise locations also operate as Foundation safehouses, while "Sawyer's Cheesy Pretzels" eateries.A chain known for specializing in soft pretzels seasoned with a variety of high-quality cheeses, operating locations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Japan. act as intelligence-gathering hubs and launching points for Mobile Task Force operations.

Website.png
SCP-001 instance.

SCP-001-1 is "The Sigil," a non-linguistic visual trigger mimicking the SCP-001 effect. (See Addendum 001-3.)

Antimeme-001 is a thaumaturgically-produced inoculant for SCP-001, supplied to all Foundation personnel on a regular schedule.

The Frontispiece possesses a singular fault which to date remains unexplained by anomalous science. There is a non-zero chance that it will entirely fail to operate on individuals who frequently encounter anomalous phenomena, or who were exposed to it during their youth. Such individuals inevitably come to recognize the connection between Foundation front organizations and, eventually, the Foundation itself. This most commonly occurs with agents belonging to Groups of Interest, hostile or not. It has been hypothesized that exposure to a presently-unquantified element common to all anomalous phenomena carries an inoculant effect similar to that of Antimeme-001.

SCP-001 was intentionally created and implemented by the Foundation in 1969, at the height of the Panopticon Crisis.


Addendum 001-1, Panopticon Crisis Overview: In the 1960s the SCP Foundation drew the ire of multiple national governments when it was discovered that Overwatch Command was simultaneously aiding and hindering all major players in the Cold War.

Canada was among the first to withdraw support, in 1964, after the actions of [DATA EXPUNGED] resulted in the violent death of Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Raynard Watts, chair of the Occult and Supernatural Activity Taskforce. Israel and Lebanon mutually agreed to cut ties with the Foundation following the disastrous outcome of 1965's Operation EIGHTH TRUMPET..While successful in halting an XK-Class Scenario, the damage to Tel Megiddo resulted in the loss of an unknown quantity of artifacts relevant to all Abrahamic faiths. In 1967, Egypt and several other North African states withdrew support after it was discovered that the stranding of the so-called 'Yellow Fleet' in the Suez Canal was caused in part by the Foundation, due to an anomaly in transport aboard the SCPS Conrad.Publicly known as the Swedish ship MS Nippon. breaching containment.

The most devastating withdrawals came from the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. While providing materiel and personnel to the U.S. government during the Vietnam War, the Foundation was simultaneously working with communist regimes to secure both funding and a sustainable D-Class personnel population. When President Lyndon B. Johnson was informed of Overwatch's involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis.During which prototype teleportation technology was provided to the Cuban government for the purpose of transporting radioactive material, in exchange for access to samples of Fidel Castro's hair and blood for use in a thaumic contingency. in 1964, he terminated all financial, tactical, and personnel arrangements, only allowing the Foundation to continue operations on U.S. soil after a United Nations resolution backed by the Global Occult Coalition.

The USSR was alerted to Foundation involvement in the development of the Enigmagraph.Developed under Project Paperclip, the Enigmagraph is an anomalous derivative of the Nazi Enigma Machine; unlike the cipher-based encoding of an Enigma Machine, the Enigmagraph creates messages that are only decipherable by the intended recipients. It was later a key element in PROJECT:ROSETTA, resulting in the creation of 8-Ball.aic by the AIAD. and its extensive use in western espionage operations. The Foundation was ousted from many Soviet territories, only maintaining scattered Sites outside Western Germany.

This left the Foundation's sole strongholds in Japan, South America, Latin America, and the Bahamas; even then, the relationship with Cuba had to be bolstered with donations of early-stage cloning technology, to assist with Fidel Castro's failing health and need for organ donations.

Each of the incidents described above was exacerbated by the intervention of a hostile agent identified as PoI-001.

Profile: PoI-001
Name: Unknown
Occupation: Operative (various)
Primary Alias: Elizabeth Crocker

"Elizabeth Crocker" joined the United States Central Intelligence Agency in 1959, brought on as part of MKISOLDA.A CIA research project focusing on the creation and weaponization of an anomalous religion dedicated to the worship of the United States of America. and rising through the ranks until becoming personal assistant to Director John Alexander McCone.

Crocker.jpg

PoI-001

Shortly after joining the CIA, Crocker developed a romantic relationship with Dr. Alexandre 'Hill' Hilbert, a CIA researcher responsible for the development of the 'Quantum Brace', an experimental eigenweapon capable of altering probability. Hilbert was killed in 1964 during a test of the Quantum Brace, shortly after the Foundation attempted to recruit him; Crocker incorrectly believed the test was sabotaged by the Foundation following Hilbert's refusal of said offer, and subsequently leaked Overwatch's involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis to President Johnson.

Crocker is a Class-3 ("Magus") Thaumaturge with training in cryptomancy, a branch of thaumaturgy dealing with anomalous symbology, language, and codes. Her training predates her recruitment into the CIA, though her exact date of birth, and therefore the timeline of her training, is unknown.

On 10/19/1967, Crocker disguised herself as O5-7's personal driver and proceeded to shoot her over one dozen times before leaving her body in front of a Foundation safehouse in San Francisco. A note was attached to the corpse.

Do you know the secret to democracy? Here's the most common wrong answer: "One man can make a difference." That's not democracy at all, of course, it's autarchy. One man making all the difference is no different from, say, thirteen men doing it.

Oh, the violence that misconception lets people like you perpetrate! It conditions us to tyranny in the name of the greater good, as defined by the lesser evil of tyrants. You want us all marching to your master plan, and you don't care who has to get tread under foot on the way.

No, the real secret to democracy is that no two people want to make the same difference, and when they see how different their friends and neighbours and colleagues already are, it makes them so goddamn hopping mad. Nobody likes to confront the fact of someone else's reality, nobody wants to toil toward someone else's utopia, and everybody, everybody, loves to play the blame game.

They've got a lot of grievances to lay blame for, right now. And as luck would have it, they've also got a ready-made scapegoat sitting right under their noses.

It's high time somebody broke up your tidy little racket. No, more than one somebody.

Everybody.

We're going to contain you, and you're going to suffocate.

The assassination of O5-7 created a vacancy in the O5 Council that could not easily be filled, more often than not leaving Overwatch deadlocked on major decisions. This marked the beginning of what Archives and Revision personnel have subsequently termed the "Panopticon Crisis," due to the constant scrutiny from world governments precipitated by PoI-001. With the Foundation haemorrhaging resources and the increasing difficulty of operating in a clandestine manner, it was feared that an LV-1 "Burning Veil" Scenario would ensue, culminating in an LV-0 "Broken Masquerade" Scenario.

On 11/23/1967, Overwatch Command issued a radio transmission to all surviving Foundation Sites ordering their personnel to attempt amelioration of this situation by any means at their disposal. Site-01 subsequently enacted complete radio silence, as Agent Crocker and a team of anomalocryptographers were then finalizing the process of deciphering the Foundation's most secure communications ciphers. The following transcript is taken from a brainstorming meeting between several members of Foundation personnel trapped in Havana, Cuba in January of 1968.

The situation at Site-43 is best explained by the following report, prepared for the Canadian Prime Minister by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE

OCCULT AND SUPERNATURAL ACTIVITY TASKFORCE

OSAT.png

On 01/03/1968, the Prime Minister revoked the provisional authority of the Secure, Contain, Protect Foundation.Officially the "SCP Foundation," full name presumed based on contextual clues. to operate a subterranean research facility beneath Military Camp Ipperwash, known internally as 'Site-43'. Department of Defence forces attempted to enter the Site, without effect; on 01/07/1968, therefore, two OSAT teams were dispatched.

Teams MACDONALD and STEELE entered Ipperwash Provincial Park without incident, but expected heavy resistance when attempting to enter the camp itself; similar attempts on previous occasions had been thwarted by mythological figures belonging to the nearby Indian reserves, which typically ignore the soldiers stationed at Ipperwash. This experience was not repeated, however; though a number of supernatural beings residing in the woods, and beneath Lake Huron, observed the advancing teams, they made no effort to interfere.

Team STEELE's Grade-1 clairvoyant was able to 'read' the Foundation operatives within the structure housing the Site's sole service elevator. Taking advantage of a shift change, Team MACDONALD successfully entered and disabled the guards within. Under interrogation, these guards revealed the construction of a subterranean rail network reaching to Grand Bend, Ontario, as well as rumours of tunnels beneath the bedrock; Team STEELE is presently engaged in sounding Ipperwash Park to determine the precise location of either feature. The elevator has so far resisted attempts to summon it or to breach its shaft, but with the camp under OSAT control, it is only a matter of time before the Foundation is forced to face their eviction.

— Sergeant Gordon Shine, Chief Superintendent, OSAT

Without elevator or subway access, Site-43's topside operations were restricted to only those assets already located beyond the interdiction zone and capable of radio communication. Chief of Security and Containment Martin Strauss and Site-01 liaison Dr. Edwin Falkirk briefed these agents and researchers daily; the briefing of Dr. Izaak Okorie, thaumatologist and Researcher in Acroamatic Abatement, for 03/10/1968 is appended below.

Chief Strauss briefed Dr. Okorie on the particulars of PoI-382 — including information which would not be incorporated into the SCP database until the late 1990s, regarding Dr. Scout's unsanctioned collusion with said individual. Dr. Falkirk was not cleared for the full extent of this information. The present-day iteration of PoI-382's profile is appended below.

Profile: PoI-382
Name: Thilo Zwist
Occupation: Memeticist-at-large
Known Aliases: Ira Braun, Dr. Bromide, Tolliver Brumley, Will Deaver, Mr. Gloss, Joseph Heino, Dr. Jim, Angela Mercy, Reiki Rick, Alexander Scoffield, Uncle Teddy, Hammond Washburn, etc.

Thilo Zwist was apprenticed into a now-extinct ancient society of highly advanced cryptomancers known as the schriftsteller (the Writers), a society of which he is now the only known surviving member. Zwist is believed to be the most proficient cryptomancer presently active on the Earth.

Zwist2.jpg

PoI-382

Zwist is functionally immortal, and has proven capable of producing anomalous effects on a global scale. In his youth he altered the Germanic language family to incorporate a deadly disease trigger — accidentally — and a decade after the Panopticon Crisis ended he insinuated a nonexistent political personage into the historical record. The latter act was at the behest of the SCP Foundation, with whom he is nominally aligned; Site-43 Director Dr. V.L. Scout spent many decades ostensibly pursuing Zwist, but the two were in fact engaged in a covert collaboration to advance the aims of societal survival and stability (though they would never meet in person). The primary reason for this collaboration was the resurgence of GoI-5054, the giftschreiber (the Poison-Writers), first in the form of a right-wing Canadian think-tank called the Righting History Institute.

For unclear reasons, the giftschreiber have engaged in periodic attacks on societal stability worldwide. Their anarchic activities are primarily attested in the western world, but Archives and Revision research has uncovered giftschreiber activity in over one hundred and forty nations worldwide. Their attacks are invariably memetic in nature, though the form varies; many giftschreiber utilize the written word, while some use images, and others employ audio.

Zwist himself has proven capable of using all aforementioned media, though his primary area of expertise is written memetics. His command of this skill is such that he is essentially impossible to detain, and he has gone unmolested by the Foundation since the early 1980s.

Armed with the 1968 equivalent of this information, Chief Strauss advanced a theory: via a Foundation thaumatologist in Cuba, Dr. Scout had planted a reference to the giftschreiber in Dr. Okorie's mind to suggest that PoI-382 be contacted about crafting a cryptomantic solution to the Panopticon Crisis. (This would later be proven correct; the thaumatologist in question had been Dr. Euler.) As Dr. Falkirk was not cleared for this information, Chief Strauss and Dr. Okorie planned their response in private. Two of Site-43's Mobile Task Forces regularly attempted pursuit of Zwist — for training purposes only — and a raid on his last known place of business had in fact been in the late stages of planning when the DND and OSAT occupation made egress impossible. Without MTF support, Dr. Okorie would attempt to make contact with the cryptomancer on 03/12/1968.

One week after this meeting, Zwist presented Dr. Okorie with an anomalous logo design for the nonexistent "Scout's Cargo Packing," and the chemical formula for an inoculant (later developed into Antimeme-001). As Zwist's dealings with Dr. Scout were at this time unknown to the Foundation at large, Dr. Okorie claimed to have captured these items during his supposed raid. A quorum of the Site Directors' Executive Committee of the Whole rejected the use of this untested thaumaturgy, but in light of the Foundation's vastly reduced budget and the absence of safer solutions, they were overruled by the O5 Council. The logo was printed on moving vans under Zwist's covert direction, and the Foundation's first Panopticon Crisis-era front company was commissioned. Its cover as a courier service allowed for the transport of personnel and materials across North America without interference from various world governments, allowing for the limited re-establishment of supply lines between various Sites across the Continental United States, Canada, Mexico and Central America. OSAT was ejected from Camp Ipperwash, and Dr. Scout was able to return to Site-43; Dr. Euler became a consultant for Scout's Cargo Packing, as he was very eager to examine Zwist's work and attempt to decipher it. With the Crisis by no means over, extending this cryptomantic umbrella over the entirety of the Foundation was designated an Alpha-One priority. That project therefore became, by default, SCP-001.

Packing.jpg

SCP-001, first iteration (civilian period photograph).


Addendum 001-2, Creation of the Frontispiece: In May of 1968, a collision along Route 66 in the central United States rendered an instance of Zwist's work unusable. He had stressed to Dr. Okorie that the products of his Writing were dangerous if damaged, and Dr. Okorie therefore personally supervised the acroamatic abatement of such instances whenever accidents occurred.

This particular instance and its handlers — Dr. Euler among them — were stopped at the Canadian border by enemy agents. The ensuing incident is recounted by Dr. Euler in his testimony excerpted below.

The destruction of all non-functioning instances was halted in order to subject them to more rigorous investigation. Dr. Euler formed the Mimesis and Cryptomancy Research Group with acroamatic abatement specialists Dr. Okorie and Dr. Ilse Reynders. As the latter suffered from a condition which did not permit her to leave a sealed chamber at Site-43, communicating only through its single window, O5 Command re-assigned Dr. Euler to that facility.

Damage.jpg

SCP-001 instance, damaged.

It was quickly determined that, contrary to Zwist's warnings, examples of his Writing did not become universally fatal when damaged; their cognitocatalytic qualities instead took on new, though admittedly mostly undesirable, attributes. Dr. Euler began breaking down each damaged instance via thaumaturgy, with the ultimate aim of producing further examples for more varied purposes. Dr. Reynders designed microscopy equipment capable of examining the decomposed cryptomancy at the atomic level, while Dr. Okorie researched remote reading and the collective unconscious in order to better understand how Zwist's powers acted so effectively on human communication.

Meanwhile, what remained of the Foundation's facilities in the Soviet Union was slowly being destroyed. The GRU Psychotronics division's inexperience with, or outright apathy toward Foundation containment methods resulted in over seventy anomalies breaching within Soviet territories during the 1960s. This culminated in June of 1968 with the Soviets raiding an isolated, abandoned Biological Containment Site near Lake Baikal, unleashing an anomalous mutagenic virus resulting in [DATA EXPUNGED]. This is widely considered one of the most disastrous events of the Panopticon Crisis, and it resulted in Leonid Brezhnev issuing the order to surrender all remaining Foundation facilities. Threatened with overwhelming force, Overwatch reluctantly agreed; a hurried evacuation commenced.

A shipping container labelled with the insignia of a former Foundation front company was discovered by operatives embedded in the Port of Los Angeles on July 2, 1968, containing a badly-beaten but still alive Site-03 Director Abrasha Sokolsky. The following note was pinned to his necktie:

Can you feel the noose yet?

Unbeknownst to the Soviets, Site-120 in Częstochowa, Poland remained operational. Personnel had evacuated into the extradimensional Free Port of Esterberg, accessible via a Way.A thaumaturgical gate. within Site-120 ten days prior to Soviet occupation. In the process, they removed all documentation and took with them whatever anomalies were feasible to contain within a pocket dimension.

Brezhnev's orders would have resulted in the deaths of dozens of biological and/or sapient anomalies if not for the actions of Anna Wójcik, a Site-120 thaumaturge. Wójcik was able to curry favour with the Kapuza Bazyliszka, a Polish sect of the Serpent's Hand whose views ran counter to Soviet interests. The Kapuza mobilized allied cells across the USSR to care for the isolated anomalies and maintain containment where necessary. While inevitably many items were still lost, Europe and Asia were spared an undoubtedly cataclysmic mass containment failure due to the efforts of the Kapuza Bazyliszka and Wójcik. This uncharacteristic cooperation is credited as a major reason for the warmer relations between the Foundation and the anomalous community in Eastern Europe today as compared with the rest of the world.

It was a scientific breakthrough in late July of 1968, however, which was to permanently alter the course of the Panopticon Crisis.

Dr. Reynders theorized that this apparent accident of grammar had aided the construction of Zwist's cryptomancy, and might allow for far more comprehensive applications once the field of study was better understood. If the Scout's Cargo Packing emblem did in fact rely on the SCP acronym, then the Foundation would not necessarily need to create many new fronts to alleviate its international pressure — the thaumaturgic processes functioning within the existing sign could, in theory, be transferred to another without completely understanding the means by which Zwist had set them in motion. The Site Directors' Executive Committee of the Whole recommended that work on this stop-gap measure be matched with a parallel program of research into the actual origins of Zwist's cryptomancy. The following day, after a mass containment breach occurred at Area-97 due to poorly-maintained facilities, the O5 Council again overrode their concerns.

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Simpson Centre for Policy signage.

Though the practice had fallen out of favour in the post-war period, many early front organizations had already employed the SCP acronym in their titles for purposes of deniability. Site-43 itself had immediate access to two of these: Lake Huron Supply, Control and Purification.The surface front for Site-43's acroamatic abatement network. and the Simpson Centre for Policy..A deprecated think-tank in Toronto which served as the original front for what became Site-43's Archives and Revision Section. As these fronts still had public-facing functions, however, Dr. Scout would not release them for thamaturgic experimentation until the working theory was proven correct.

In August, the Foundation lost contact with Regional Command in South Africa. Agent Crocker had infiltrated Site-52 in Johannesburg some years prior under the alias "Dr. Gabrielle Fish," and in that time had been inciting distrust between white and black personnel throughout the region. This culminated in Regional Director Rupert Jansen issuing an ultimatum on 16 August 1968 that all non-white Foundation personnel be removed from the country immediately, or else face execution. This was only possible due to the fact that Dr. Anje Verhoten, the previous Regional Commander, had been de facto removed from her position by way of being stranded with her family in the central United States by the 1967 radio silence order.

Crocker's manipulations led to the loss of over two hundred members Foundation personnel, along with the last Site south of the Congo. The only active facility in Africa until the end of the Panopticon Crisis would be Site-27 in Tanzania, presumably overlooked due to its isolated location and the low-risk anomalies contained within. Crocker executed Jansen, then proceeded to give the Fouché administration access to anomalies they would use to attempt to silence the anti-Apartheid movement gaining traction throughout the nation. Jansen's freeze-dried but thawing corpse was discovered by a routine patrol of the Site-19 interdiction zone following these developments, a note in his jacket pocket:

You're running out of continents.

On 09/03/1968 Drs. Euler and Okorie successfully isolated a series of stable, unidentified anomalous particles in the abatement residue from a Scout's Cargo Packing instance. Dr. Reynders' monitoring equipment had been so precisely tuned that the research group believed they should be capable of re-applying these particles to a new logo, potentially re-creating the effect with a different front organization. A meeting was held with Drs. Scout and Falkirk to develop potential candidates.

On 09/15/1968, Dr. Euler broke down a fresh, undamaged instance of SCP-001 and with Dr. Okorie's assistance transferred the anomalous particles to signage for the Shell Construction Partnership. Class D personnel exposed to the new instance experienced disorientation and a lack of recognition of their surroundings; while the effect was nowhere near as strong as with the Scout's Cargo Packing emblem, the results were nevertheless extremely promising. (It was assumed, as would later be proven correct, that Zwist performed additional thaumaturgy during the application of his art which could not be replicated without his aid.) The company was put into full operation, and began managing the legal and materiel processes for the creation of new fronts utilizing the SCP initialism.

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SCP-001 instance.

After acquiring numerous subcontractors and setting up separate offices in five major North American cities, the Shell Construction Partnership came under legal threat by the Royal Dutch Shell petroleum conglomerate. It is believed that Agent Crocker was responsible for alerting them to the front's existence. Shell asserted that the new company was guilty of serious copyright infringement. However, they proved unable to successfully execute their lawsuit due to persistent confusion, demotivation and even amnesia on the part of their legal counsel — particularly in preliminary hearings with the Partnership's own counsel, the hastily-empowered fictional law firm of Sloane, Corbin and Paiva — providing the ultimate proof that the research group's program of study was a promising one. Dr. Euler began studying the composition and behaviour of the anomalous particles in earnest, while Dr. Reynders conducted research into linguistic and paralinguistic theory. Dr. Okorie was further able to occlude the activities of the Simpson Centre for Policy and Lake Huron Supply, Control and Purification, but no further progress on this front was made in 1968. Zwist had determined that enemy action could not possibly be responsible for damaging the quantity of his Writing Dr. Okorie had asked him to replace, surmising that the Foundation was now attempting to reverse-engineer his work; he therefore cut off all contact.

Months of intensive study followed, and on 02/17/1969, the research group submitted the following to the O5 Council.

The Site Directors' Executive Council of the Whole strenuously objected to this project on the basis of its potential to injure the combined cognition of mankind. The research group acknowledged this point in private correspondence with Site-01. The O5 Council's response was to suspend all meetings of the Executive Council until the conclusion of the Panopticon Crisis, at which point they would be free to again air their concerns.

Cheyenne.jpg

SCP-001 instance.

Crocker’s campaign against the Foundation continued. In early February, whilst the Foundation was attempting to negotiate a new treaty with the People’s Republic of China, she used cryptomancy to instil a sense of severe paranoia in Chairman Mao Zedong (who had made the unusual decision to attend the talks in person). Mao specifically believed that the proxy for O5-10, Dr. Amity Noble, was wearing recording equipment broadcasting to western intelligence-gathering bases. The talks rapidly deteriorated until Mao ordered the People's Liberation Army to forcibly eject the Foundation representatives. While Dr. Noble was able to escape unharmed, this event left the Foundation without any foothold in China until after the end of the Cold War.

Dr. Noble discovered a note in her personal effects upon arriving safely at Site-01:

Five minutes to midnight.

Crocker went on to infiltrate Site-95.A facility discovered by the Foundation in Alaska, notable for containing twelve large rooms whose gravity matches that found on other bodies in the solar system while maintaining a terrestrial atmosphere, making it useful for testing of space technology; the origin of this facility remains unclear. for a period of two months. She alerted President Nixon to its existence, and Nixon ordered the US Army to storm and occupy the facility for the sake of national security. It is believed that USGOV intended to use Site-95 to falsify photographic evidence in the event that the Apollo program proved fruitless. Ultimately, Apollos 9-12, 14-17, and 19 were all successful in their missions to the moon, with Apollo 13 famously suffering a mechanical error and Apollo 18 [REDACTED], rendering the occupation moot. Site-95 would only be ceded back to the Foundation in November of 2001.

As the urgency of the Frontispiece project mounted, Drs. Euler, Okorie and Reynders began confronting the reality of what they were about to do. It became apparent that only direct contact with, and alteration of, the collective human consciousness would be able to effect the changes required to make the Frontispiece operative. Having intensively studied the budding field of noetics via the works of chemist Vladimir Vernadsky and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Dr. Okorie declared the experiment technically possible. Troubled by the moral implications and desiring to commit their reasoning to posterity, however, each doctor typed a single note to be opened only when the full history of this event might finally be written.

The brutality of Crocker's methods continued to increase. She began killing Foundation personnel indiscriminately, using cryptomantic runes to induce targeted cardiac arrests or aneurysms; the runes would then dissipate before causing collateral damage. In May of 1969, Crocker used one of the first known instances of an auditory cryptomantic agent (embedded in a recording of The Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand") to kill ten members of Foundation personnel meeting in a safe house in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Produce.jpg

SCP-001 instance.

While ignorant of the Foundation's reverse-engineering of the Frontispiece, Zwist had supplied a series of single-use counteragents to Crocker’s cryptomantic assaults. These typically took the form of text and/or imagery which appeared at first glance to be non-anomalous.One instance, which remains framed in the Director’s Office at Site-43, is a replica of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images; long-term exposure leads to complete immunity to hostile cryptomancy. and could easily be concealed until needed. These were now pressed into service, and demand very quickly outpaced supply.

The research group was now producing linguanons in vast quantities, including a very small supply of orthons. The Shell Construction Partnership oversaw and underwrote the creation of nineteen functioning front companies, primarily those which could be made financially self-sustaining; the Foundation's overall program of SCP research was reduced by nearly forty percent to support the startup costs. While these organizations were not fully immune from persecution, as they would be when the larger work was complete, their cryptomancy-empowered logos were sufficiently disorienting to enemy agents to supply a field advantage to Foundation operatives worldwide.

This chain of events came to a head when Crocker, leading a squadron of OSAT agents, commandeered a Foundation vehicle and used it to infiltrate Site-43 on 07/04/1969.

A note was discovered in the topside elevator subsequent to these events:

It's not whether you win or lose…

The singer of the apparently anomalous song which removed Crocker's cryptomantic glamour was identified as famed folk musician Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie..Guthrie had already died of natural causes before his connection to Zwist could be fully investigated. Investigation of his descendants is ongoing.

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SCP-001 instance (postcard).

Agent Crocker disappeared from Site-43 after her defeat by Zwist, and remained at large. The Occult and Supernatural Activity Taskforce began an intensive procedural review to determine how she was able to infiltrate their ranks so effortlessly, issued a warrant for her capture, and withdrew from Camp Ipperwash after issuing an official apology to the Foundation. (Notably absent was any admission of wrongdoing on their part.) No further interference with the Frontispiece program was experienced, and Drs. Euler and Okorie prepared to implement it at Site-01 (with Dr. Reynders participating remotely via radio) by special dispensation from the O5 Council on 07/09/1969.

Though both Drs. Euler and Okorie were severely drained by the process, the Frontispiece was successfully applied. Within two weeks its obfuscatory effects could be observed worldwide, as fronts which had formerly offered only limited protection now thoroughly frustrated enemy agents and offered obvious succour to Foundation operatives. It was found that continuing to apply linguanons to each sign produced an amplified effect; the practice therefore continued, as did research into more sophisticated applications.

The creation of new front organizations took place at a feverish pace. The Foundation re-established its revenue streams, and was able to fully resume normal functions in the western world by June of 1970. By 1971, revenue had reached the point where ten new high-cost containment Sites could be built each year. Governmental relations were essentially 'reset' during this period; each outgoing administration carried their anomie towards the Foundation with them, and the Frontispiece prevented the new arrivals from acquiring the leverage their predecessors had enjoyed. The Panopticon Crisis was essentially over.

Frontispiece2.jpg

SCP-001, selected examples in situ.

Dr. Euler took up permanent residence at Site-43 as the head of the new Mimesis and Cryptomancy Section, known today as Memetics and Countermemetics, and intensified the Foundation's investigation of anomalous writing and speech.


Addendum 001-3, Panopticon Crisis Aftermath: In August of 1971, an incident in the German Democratic Republic exposed a crucial vulnerability in the Frontispiece.

Despite Dr. Scout's objections, Dr. Euler was able to successfully commission PoI-922 to create an imagery-based version of SCP-001 compatible with all known languages — SCP-001-1. This action inadvertently brought PoI-922's attention to his own innate cryptomancy, of which he had previously been ignorant. Following his death in 1987, members of PoI-922's workshop would form the artistic terrorist group "Are We Cool Yet?" using his cryptomantic art as the basis for their own interventions.

Sigil.jpg

SCP-001-1 instance.

In 1975 O5 Command ordered a sweeping overhaul of Foundation nomenclature, standardizing the SEKTANA Object Class system. Safe, Euclid, Keter, Thaumiel, Apollyon, Neutralized, Archon. and discontinuing terms such as 'thaumatology', 'deific' and 'eigenweapon'. While several of these decisions have been revised or reversed in the intervening years, the terms 'Quantum Linguaphysics' and 'cryptomancy' remain discontinued, as does the 'imagomancy' performed by PoI-922. All three of these terms are now jointly covered by the blanket term memetics.

Elizabeth Crocker eventually resurfaced in Canada, having founded a think-tank known as the Righting History Institute under the assumed identity of conservative political scientist Ophelia Righting. The Righting Institute had been working with a giftschreiber front in order to disrupt the 1979 Canadian federal election. A team of thaumaturges under the direction of Dr. Okorie raided the Righting Institute and drove out the giftschreiber in late 1979, though no prisoners were taken and Crocker again escaped custody.

On January 1st, 1980, Dr. Okorie was found dead in his family home, apparently murdered by an unknown assailant. Three weeks later it was discovered that he had used thaumaturgy to capture audio of the events leading up to his death and imprint them on an EP vinyl record originally containing the Marvin Gaye album What's Going On.

In light of these revelations, the re-convened Site Directors' Executive Council of the Whole recommended that all memetics projects be immediately terminated and the SCP Foundation's name be reverted to its original form. The O5 Council dismissed these demands, citing the invaluable protection conferred by the Frontispiece and the need to prepare for the worldwide escalation of memetics prophesied by Crocker (and attested by the formation of Are We Cool Yet?).

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SCP-001 instance.

Crocker herself remained active throughout the 1980s, passing on her knowledge of cryptomancy in the USA and Canada, in particular falling in with members of the 'phone phreaking' community; she may have been involved in the 1980 ARPANET Crash, as signs of cryptomancy proliferated through it, then the CSNET, and finally the internet.

As she had predicted, President Reagan proved less susceptible to SCP-001 than Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, to the point where he promised to expose the Foundation in February of 1981. The attempt on his life on March 30th provided the Foundation an opportunity to expose him to memetic reinforcements while he received treatment at George Washington University Hospital. How Crocker knew of Reagan's Alzheimer's Disease over a decade before his official diagnosis remains unknown.

It is believed that Crocker is deceased as of 2021, barring access to anomalous life extension means; she would now be over one hundred years old. Fragmentary evidence suggests that an individual fitting her rough description was involved in the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2004, however, and the name "Ophelia Righting" appears on a roster of campaign staff. "Lisbet Geschenk," another likely alias, is on a list of financial donors.

For nearly four decades Dr. Euler refused, on practical grounds, to consider further alterations to the noosphere. The O5 Council also approached Dr. Reynders, who claimed to have exhausted her insights into the field of memetics. Dr. Euler declared the research group defunct, and was transferred to Site-87 in 1984. He and Dr. Ryan Melbourne collaborated on several more immediately practical projects, including the Memetic Resistance Index, Cognitive Resistance Value Index, and the Euler-Melbourne Memetic Resistance Test — all designed to combat the effects of cryptomantic proliferation.

When he was again pressured to resume large-scale experimentation in 2007, Dr. Euler travelled to Site-01 and demanded a formal injunction.

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Dr. Arik Euler, 2007.

You want me to make you a Zwist Army Knife, a tool for every occasion, and that's fine. In fact, it's far better than fine. I agree with it! But if you want me to help you bring an end to occasions, set the human race to a rigid schedule, take the uncertainty out of life beyond what's needed to keep life worth living… no. I agree with the giftschreiber on one thing, and one thing only: the value of free will. I was free to make my choice, and so was Dr. Okorie, and I believe I remain so free today.

You, of course, are freer still. I have advised you fairly and honestly in the past, so when I tell you what we should be doing with our freedom, please at least consider it: we should be protecting the people of this Earth, as we have claimed to already be doing, even to the point of protecting them from ourselves. We should not exert our will simply for the sake of doing so.

Should I seem to be moralizing from the moral low ground, please understand: that's where I got my perspective. I have helped you to remove one small, situational freedom from the world, and it's helped me to see the value of what remains. If we're going steal people's memories, dismantle their livelihoods, and alter their very perception — and thanks to the arms race we ourselves set in motion, we absolutely must do these things — we need to do it directly. Not through proxies, not through connivance, not in the mode of the giftschreiber. If we must be inhuman, we need to experience it at a human scale. Nothing less can keep us honest.

When we meddle with their matter from a distance, safely insulated from the reality of what we do, we are not scientists. We are not saviours. We are idealogues without the courage of our own convictions.

I doubt I could make you another Frontispiece without Ilse and Izzy anyway, and I know for a fact there's not another man or woman alive who could match us at what we did together.

Well, that's not entirely true. There is one.

No doubt he's watching.

Dr. Euler's injunction was granted. Though the work he carried out before and since represents the foundation of modern memetics, all experiments conducted subsequent to the Frontispiece — including the BERRYMAN-LANGFORD Project, and the Lillihammer Cognitohazard Register — continue to operate on individual cognition. Periodic votes are, however, held by the O5 Council to overturn Dr. Euler's objections to wide-range noetic tampering. As of this writing, the objections stand by a narrow margin; a slim majority of the Council believes that the inadvertent and inconvenient spread of memetics knowledge is directly attributable to the Frontispiece project, as Crocker suggested in 1980, and that repeating this experience could prove unwise.

Five decades of continuous experimentation has improved the individual memetic effects of all new memetic signage, before taking into account the blanket coverage of the Frontispiece effect; though older instances are therefore less efficient, subjecting them to acroamatic recycling is now a low priority due to the relative ease of modern linguanon production.

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Obsolete SCP-001 instances decomposing.

All SCP-001 media still retain the singular flaw allowing individuals familiar with the anomalous to see through their effects. While occasionally useful in the event the Foundation must coordinate with organizations such as OSAT, the Global Occult Coalition, the FBI's Unusual Incidents Unit, the British Occult Service or Poland's ZM "Witch Slayer" Division, this is more often than not a detriment to efficient clandestine operations. Many theories have been advanced to explain this curious defect, and the discovery of a note from Thilo Zwist in Dr. Euler's effects after his death in 2013 has provided fertile ground for further speculation. It has been dated to 1980, the year of Dr. Okorie's murder.

Arik,

I don't know if you saw me at the funeral, but I was there. You and your fallen friend have borne the weight of your deeds most admirably, these past few years — though I would not have done the things you did, I can understand your reasons. To a certain extent. I myself have acted more rashly on such sympathetic impulses (though not for a few centuries).

You alone now carry the responsibility. You must ensure that what you did can never again be done, ensure that it was worth doing in the first place, and most of all ensure that you — only you — can do it again, should the worst come to pass. You must also remember how seductive a quick and dirty solution can be, and show your successors where the pitfalls lie. It is not enough that your apprentices succeed you; they must also excel you.

The Foundation protects the world. You sometimes like to imagine you do it alone, reciting comfortable, meaningless aphorisms to cover a great deal of violence, cupidity, ruthlessness and cruelty. You will forgive me if I hope you do not find your burdens light.

And you don't, do you? Is the Frontispiece that perfect creation you imagined it would be, as your equations and diagrams assure you it must in fact be, or does the wind keep rushing beneath it, exposing you to the surrounding climate? Again you will forgive me if I consider this outcome ideal. You will never be completely safe, you will never, ever be able to act with total impunity. You will need to keep cultivating allies, cutting deals and making friends — ones you have not only protected, but genuinely supported and loved, who will support and love you back.

If you did not have to do these things, I fear that you would not.

Because you, like me, are only human.

When you are gone, I suppose your responsibilities will fall to me. I played my part in this little drama, after all, and played it well. Too well; you probably think you pulled quite the fast one on me, breaking down all those van panels and poking around in the particles. But your magic umbrella was only borrowed, not mastered or even properly understood. I know nothing of baking bread, I admit, but I am an expert parasolmacher. My handiwork cannot be bent or broken unless I wish it.

Was it a nasty little trick to play? Perhaps, but you need to stop falling for such simple deceits. The world cannot long afford your naiveté. In future, when you wield a tool, be certain that you fully understand it.

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Enclosed photograph.

Finally, a warning. I do not remember the anger I felt all those long years ago, the grief I poured into the words which poisoned a thousand thousand minds. I am still dealing with the fallout, but that great and awful blast… I cannot feel it anymore. Time wears away such things.

If you forget why your consciences balked at the critical hour, Arik, if you begin to lose sight of what separated you from Elizabeth Crocker, or start to become the monsters she accused you of being… if you begin to see the world as a chessboard, and all its people pawns, and grant yourselves the right to fuel extravagant strategies with their lives…

But no, you won't, of course you won't. You don't need this warning at all, because your course was set the moment I baked that lovely little flaw into the Writing which you stole. I robbed you of the opportunity to become the tyrants of all our nightmares. You will have no choice but to be better than that, because evil only flourishes in ease. You will never know ease. You, and those who come after you, will need to keep doing the work.

You will get to decide how well you do it, of course. And on that matter, I have a suggestion:

Do it right.

Stop Compromising Principles.

— Thilo

N.B. Ideas are flame, and flames burn 'til the fuel is spent. You have opened the Writing to mankind; you have made kindling of us all.

Look to your firebreaks.


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