Dr. Christopher Byrnes picked up a bagel and placed it on his paper plate. His eyes swept the chitchatting labcoats milling around the room before he reached towards the uneven plastic folding table and took a second bagel. The plastic knives were the flimsy, useless kind with barely any blade: concessions to dogmas of safety and, less understandably, the environment, among many others that seemed to have taken over the Foundation lately. He labored to coat as much of each toasted annulus with cream cheese from the communal bowl as he could with the provided implement, but he still managed to miss the edges and the divots. He frowned and tried to compensate for this ill-born, insolent tool with another slather of cream cheese when another researcher nearly bumped into him while reaching for the bowl.
"Oh, Dr. Byrnes?"
"Yes?"
The researcher reached out a hand. Dr. Byrnes had long ago mastered the art of holding a hors d'oeuvres plate and a drink in one hand at events, such were his responsibilities, and reciprocated.
"Ah, I'm Dr. Hsiao, I work in Foundation IT with Director Miyamizu. We quite enjoyed your team's research presentation this morning."
Beyond the unpronounceable letter salad of the first name, Dr. Byrnes's interest perked upon the second. Dr. Miyamizu, the director and global head of Foundation IT within RAISA and one of Maria Jones's lieutenants. The CS prodigy who had designed the architecture of the modern SCP database nearly straight out of grad school. One of the youngest personnel to attain Level 4 in recent memory. He had seen his name on many seminal Terminal papers like scipDB and the Foundation Scalable File System. Somehow, though, he had never met him in-person, despite working in sites within the same state.
Dr. Byrnes didn't get to where he was by passing on opportunities.
"Dr. Miyamizu? I didn't realize he was in attendance at today's conference."
"Oh yeah, let me call her over," Dr. Hsiao replied, waving over.
A small woman in a hoodie and jeans and sneakers hopped over and flashed a peace sign she was probably a few years past propriety to make. She didn’t make eye contact, although the rest of her demeanor didn’t convey bashfulness. She wouldn't have looked like a technical employee, as opposed to a lost civilian or maybe a janitor, if it weren't for the Foundation ID card clipped to her dangling hoodie strings. The "LEVEL 4" stared back at Dr. Byrnes.
"Where's your labcoat?" The words tumbled out of his mouth.
Director Miyamizu shrugged. "Site-15 culture."
"Meg, this is Containment Specialist Dr. Byrnes, the one who presented today with his team," Dr. Hsiao facilitated.
That brightened her up. "Ah, the one on uniqueness theorems in $L^p$ spaces? You and Dr. McPharrell did a great job! I didn't think it would be super relevant but Dr. Hsiao made the right call coming here, I'm glad I did."
Dr. Byrnes could tell from her pronunciation that English was not her first language. He smirked, crossed his arms, and leaned over her. "Why thank you, I'm glad you were impressed. I've heard all about your own work, Dr. Miyamizu. Tell me, what interested-"
"I was thinking during your presentation," she barged on ahead, jamming a finger against her lip in contemplation. Dr. Byrnes's smile melted downward. "Forgive me, I work on distributed systems, so I'm not an expert in abstract algebra, so I apologize if this is a silly question."
The smile returned. A battle on home territory. "Sure, go on."
"One of my teams is working on a new way to coordinate time across a massively distributed system and we're representing the different servers and timesteps as an infinite directed graph. Current methods aren't robust enough for SCP database use cases given all the situations we find ourselves in: time and especially retrocausal anomalies, anomalies with relativistic effects, anomalies and sites in space, etcetera. You can encode a graph's vertices and edges as a finite-dimensional distance matrix, which lives in a commutative ring, right? So $L^p$ spaces, being infinite-dimensional function spaces, they can be associated with an infinite directed graph right?"
"Yeah of course, that's a basic conclusion." Dr. Byrnes replied. "Easy-peasy."
"So for my question, you briefly discussed it on one of the later slides, but while I generally got the gist of your construction of a version of a uniqueness theorem for $L^p$ spaces, I was curious if you could elaborate on any additional results from it for ones corresponding to acyclic graphs in particular? My team is trying to prove the acyclicality of the time-space graph, the one representing a datacenter, which is critical for other performance guarantees, so I thought your research might be useful."
Dr. Byrnes first tried to formulate an answer. Then he tried to formulate words for a polite non-answer to buy time, failed, and tripped into an awkward silence. Drs. Miyamizu and Hsiao stared at him.
"Um, we had some general results in that direction, but Dr. McPharrell worked more directly on that part."
"Oh wonderful, I’ll email him!"
"Save yourself the trouble, I can ask him for you and email you an explanation in a higher level of detail later."
"Thank you!"
He glared at Director Miyamizu, but she nodded in seemingly genuine intrigue and continued to smile. This "opportunity" had not panned out as he expected, on multiple levels, and he looked around the room and at the plain, white ceiling to find a way to abort it.
"Etto…one more thing, Dr. Byrnes," she broke the silence. His mind braced for more humiliation. "You supervise the containment of an anomaly that corrupts electronics, right? SCP-…hm, remind me."
"That sounds like most of the anomalies I work with."
"The humanoid you contained several years ago."
"8980?" he blurted out. Of course it came to mind so easily.
"Yes!"
Dr. Byrnes raised an eyebrow. "What interests you about it?"
"Well…it's just so mysterious! I read the special containment procedures document-"
The corner of his mouth curled.
"-and all the tests came back negative or inconclusive! Truly an unusual anomaly! One of my teams is developing a more efficient data integrity protection scheme for the SCP database using Reed-Solomon codes closer to the Hamming bound and I want to test it. You heard about the Netflix chaos monkeys?"
He shook his head.
"Well, sometimes you need to try breaking a system with something really tough to truly see if it works. Look at my calendar and shoot me an email invite to schedule an experiment with 8980."
"Not ‘could you’, or even ‘can you’. Just ‘shoot’."
Dr. Byrnes almost contrived an instinctual protest to this command when he had another thought. He had been so busy with other work and his own projects, that it had slipped his mind that longer than usual had passed since SCP-8980’s last round of tests…
"Sure, Dr. Miyamizu."
"By the way, one more thing," she added, "Maria Jones and I will be speaking at a Women in Foundation CS event sponsored by RAISA. Feel free to invite anyone you know who would be interested."
"Not off the top of my head, but I’ll let you know if I think of anyone."
ID: 8980-BB-1
DURATION: 1 Hour
EXPERIMENT: SCP-8980 was asked to interact with an airgapped miniScpper datacenter emulation cluster and computer terminal loaded with an experimental version of scipDB with changes to better protect data against anomalous interference1, provided by Foundation IT. Purpose of the test is to determine whether Foundation IT Research’s proposed changes are robust to SCP-8980’s anomalous effect.
"You didn’t let me review the computer ahead of the test," Dr. Byrnes protested as Director Miyamizu and her assistant Dr. Vogel stepped into the glass-partitioned room, shoes clanging against the metal floor. Today she had bothered to throw on a labcoat, although beneath it she still had a pink t-shirt with a rubber duck.
"It’s need-to-know basis," she replied, "There are components designed to protect against infohazard-based arbitrary code execution exploits."
"This is inappropriate. Per the Foundation Code of Conduct, as Head Researcher assigned to SCP-8980, I’m required to review all materials provided to it to ensure safety, research integrity, and the wellbeing of -"
Director Miyamizu shrugged, glancing at her tiny watch. More expensive than any he had, he noticed. "Take it to the Ethics Committee, I guess. Can we just start already?"
Dr. Byrnes gritted his teeth and pressed the intercom button with a bit more force than typical. "SCP-8980, enter the testing chamber."
Lillian hung by the doorframe, almost clinging to it. Her eyes drifted towards the metal server box with blinking lights and shrank away from it.
"Please, sir, is this test really necessary? It’s not on the regular schedule," she pleaded.
"Follow instructions or you will be incentivized to comply," he intoned.
"Is the subject okay? We can do this another time if it would yield better-quality data," Director Miyamizu noted, regarding SCP-8980 with a distant stare.
"It’s completely fine," Dr. Byrnes affirmed. Turning back to the testing chamber, he continued, "SCP-8980, approach the computer terminal and enter your credentials. Then access the main database page and await further instructions."
"Yes, sir." Lillian shuffled forward, her head hung. Her fingers trembled as she typed her username and password, making a typo. The terminal beeped and she jumped. Dr. Byrnes jotted down the event on his clipboard.
Dr. Vogel set a thin metal briefcase on the table, clicked it open, and retrieved a few printouts for the test per the anomaly’s Special Containment Procedures. He licked his finger and flicked through the corners to ensure he had all the pages, while Director Miyamizu got out a journal and a pen and pulled up a metal folding chair. As they walked towards the console at the glass partition, Director Miyamizu looked over SCP-8980. Lillian’s hair was wild and frizzy and unmaintained, her eyes slack and unfocused, her fingernails chewed down beyond the edge. Her clothes were wrinkled and she had some sort of faded red scar on her wrist.
Lillian looked back at her and in her eyes beneath the fatigue and the fright, there was something else Director Miyamizu couldn’t quite make out: a slithering flash at the bottom of a deep well at night, subtle enough to almost attribute to imagination. She never liked eye contact but SCP-8980’s was especially acidic, and she quickly returned to her notes.
"SCP-8980 was formerly a researcher specializing in computer science, correct? So I don’t need to explain all the terminology in detail," she double-checked with Dr. Byrnes. He nodded, with a slight smile.
"SCP-8980, this instance of a subsection of the SCP database is airgapped and filled with sanitized, fictional files. Nothing you can do can influence the real one. Please conduct the following tests," she began.
Dr. Vogel intoned, reading from the papers, "Begin by accessing the documentation for SCP-6959 and reading what you see…"
Lillian complied. Drs. Miyamizu and Byrnes jotted down their results and observations.
"Please attempt to edit the documentation for SCP-3141 according to the written note passed through the slot, then ssh into the listed server approximately 15 seconds later, access the file, and report what you see."
These tasks continued for an hour. Lillian often made mistakes in entering data and subsequent profuse apologies to the researchers, Director Miyamizu telling her not to worry about it. The tests passed without incident, and without triggering SCP-8980’s anomaly. She noticed Lillian’s shoulders hunched until finally, on one of the final tasks, she crumpled into a heap and started sobbing into the cold floor.
"Please, sir, I can’t take it anymore! When is it going to blow up?"
Dr. Vogel paused and looked to Director Miyamizu. She froze. She was a pure RAISA researcher, not a containment specialist, and even though she had consulted on the containment of many SCP objects, she didn’t often interact with humanoid anomalies. She glanced towards Dr. Byrnes. He took the microphone from Dr. Vogel and glared at the subject.
"SCP-8980, continue compliance with the test."
She responded to him with more incoherent sobs. Perhaps she didn’t hear him.
"You piece of shit, get up and continue or I’ll make you!" he snapped.
Lillian did hear that and willed herself to rise, staggering towards the terminal. Tears fell on the keyboard.
Dr. Byrnes turned towards Drs. Miyamizu and Vogel and pasted on a smile. "Apologies, but sometimes humanoid anomalies are a bit unwilling given the circumstances and need a little motivation, you know? I mean, I completely understand, I wouldn’t be happy in containment either. It’s a bit unsightly but it’s just something you learn as a containment specialist."
Director Miyamizu said nothing, the edges of the page in her notebook crinkling in her fingers. Dr. Vogel cleared his throat, and proceeded with the last few test cases.
"Huh, we’ll have to review the data in more detail later, but it looks like your anomaly didn’t trigger today," she commented to SCP-8980 at the end. Lillian stared at her, frozen.
"What?" she asked, her mouth gaping.
Director Miyamizu turned to Dr. Byrnes. "Has this happened before?"
He shook his head. "It’s a very uncommon event. But congratulations, Dr. Miyamizu. It looks like your new data protection system might be doing its job properly."
He turned towards SCP-8980. "You are…dismissed for today. Return to your containment unit."
"Y-yes, sir."
Lillian, eyes still wide and with an incredulous look on her face, backed towards the testing chamber door, stumbling in her swaying legs and eyes not leaving Dr. Byrnes until she exited.
"Thanks," Director Miyamizu replied, "the data we gathered today against SCP-8980’s anomaly will be very valuable for making the SCP database better and more reliable, it’ll really help prevent containment breaches and save lives."
"The honor is mine."
She stared out into the empty testing chamber. "It’s quite beautiful, the way polynomial arithmetic in Reed-Solomon-based error correction methods weaves data and redundant parity together into a finite field such that they become one coherent, unbroken whole again, like the gold lacquer in the art of kintsugi. I always love being able to talk about these things with fellow CS researchers capable of appreciating them."
Dr. Byrnes blinked.
Dr. Vogel nodded and chuckled. "Ah, I never quite made that connection before, Meg. I guess you could say the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality doesn't hold for concepts, if you take analogies as an inner product."
"Oh now that's a good one, Sean," she replied.
Dr. Byrnes's shoulders stiffened. He bit his lip. He checked his watch. "Um, yeah, sure," he contributed.
"By the way, is SCP-8980 doing okay? The subject seems a little…" She spun her finger in the air, her expression more severe. "How do you say it in English, not doing too well? A little unstable?"
"It’s perfectly fine. Containment’s just a little hard on it. We have her doing some work with accommodations to keep her mentally occupied and she’s undergoing biweekly parapsychological counseling."
"I see."
She put a finger against her mouth. "Is there a reason it calls you sir?"
"Do you or Dr. Vogel work a lot with humanoid anomalies?"
"No."
"It’s not unusual after prolonged containment."
"I see."
Director Miyamizu took the printouts from Dr. Vogel for one final, brief review, making a few quick annotations. Dr. Byrnes watched as she handed them and her journal back to Dr. Vogel to put into her briefcase. Papers shuffled as he stacked and organized them for her, hunched over the table.
"I’d like to speak to SCP-8980."
"What? Oh, I’m a bit busy, but I’m sure-"
"I’d like to speak to her without you physically present. I can provide a recording or you can watch remotely for audit requirements, if you’d like."
"According to the Foundation Code of Conduct, as the Head Researcher for SCP-8980, I am required to be involved in or supervise any interaction with-"
"I apologize, Dr. Byrnes-"
"Apology accepted."
"-I mean, I apologize for not making myself clear. I report directly to Maria Jones and O5-3. I was not making a request."
Dr. Byrnes gritted his teeth. And as Director Miyamizu closed the door behind her, began to worry.
Lillian curled up against the white wall on her unmade bed, clasping her knees. Hair dangled in front of her eyes, a few errant strands decorating her bedsheet. She had turned off all the lights except for the small desk lamp, and the mandatory red eye that always stared at her from the ceiling. Her desk was a hurricane of papers and books, while a small stuffed animal sat and looked at her from the corner of her bed. Sometimes she would talk to it.
White light flooded the room, prompting her to flinch and cover her eyes and back further into the wall, if it were possible.
"May I come in?" an unfamiliar, high-pitched voice asked. The same woman in a labcoat from the test earlier. What an unusual question. The woman reached into a pocket and clicked something.
Lillian said nothing but noticed the woman was alone. No Dr. Byrnes.
She extended a hand towards SCP-8980. "I’m Dr. Megumi Miyamizu, director and global head of the Foundation Department of Information Technology and an assistant director of the Recordkeeping and Information Security Administration. You can just call me Meg like everyone else though." She rubbed her neck. "Gee, it’s been an awfully long time since I introduced myself so formally, haha."
She stepped forward and stooped to eye-level, causing Lillian to shrink away.
"That means you can answer me honestly. I want you to answer me honestly. Dr. Byrnes isn’t here. I have a few questions for you."
Panic and stress and exhaustion etched into the lines of an older woman’s face, but Lillian’s terror was almost…childlike.
"I couldn’t help but notice your behavior during the test. I wanted to ask, is everything alright?"
Lillian hesitated, eyes darting all over the room. Director Miyamizu waited.
She settled, eventually, on a slow nod.
"Are you unsatisfied with the conditions of your containment?"
This time, a slow shake of her head, a forest of wiry, unkempt, dark sticks swishing before her eyes.
"Is…Dr. Byrnes properly supervising and taking care of you?"
Lillian’s breath caught.
"O-of…course…sir" she stammered out. Now that got a reaction.
"Why do you call people ‘sir’?"
"I don’t know," she replied. So immediate it had to be true. "I’m sorry, si-m-ma’am."
Something about that last word felt so unfamiliar. Lillian looked up at Director Miyamizu and kept her gaze for a quiet while, as if searching for something that could be found. As if sinking her attention into a mirror that could never be a mirror, because the reflection wasn’t her, wasn’t something she could ever recognize as her, as if she were even capable of recognizing such a thing.
Director Miyamizu put her hands in her pockets and bent slightly and sighed.
"I apologize to inconvenience you like so. This isn’t my job and I was never good at this whole social thing," she explained with a wave, looking at the floor. Nobody had ever let her forget that fact growing up in Japan or at Stanford, or even at the Foundation until someone had stamped "LEVEL 4" on her ID card, and even then they just did it behind her back. "I miss a lot of things and get the wrong idea a lot of times and a lot of times it just doesn’t make sense to me, to be honest. I shouldn’t let my imagination run wild."
"Something is really off about 8980, but she’s saying everything is fine and Dr. Byrnes is doing his job properly with her own mouth. What can I say? I shouldn’t be so quick to doubt my colleagues next time."
She continued to frown. Something still didn’t sit right with her. "And yet," she continued to herself, "past a certain point, my own assessment doesn’t even matter anymore. What could I even do? I’m just a visitor to Site-17. Sure, as his nominal peer I could compel Site Director Graham to at least meet with me, but without evidence, without even 8980’s own corroboration, he would just laugh me out. Or worse, get pissed at me for wasting his time and poking into his Site and smearing his subordinate, and then make my life difficult for no real good. Hell, not even the snails at the Ethics Committee would act on such vague, flimsy pretext."
Director Miyamizu shrugged and, about to head out, gave a quick scan of the papers on SCP-8980’s desk when she saw an $L^p$ in a corner. She pulled it out, skimmed it, and handed it to Lillian.
"Oh, this is related to Dr. Byrnes’s recent paper, is it not?"
Lillian nodded.
"Could I ask you a question? Dr. Byrnes never did get back to me. It’s about additional properties of directed acylic graphs in this context."
"C-Can I…write it?". The sound of her own voice had become so foreign to herself, aside from Dr. Byrnes’s periodic visits. Not just in absence but also in unfamiliarity.
"Yeah, yeah, sure, what’s most comfortable."
It took some time, but Lillian sketched the outline of the proof implied by the paper and handed it to Director Miyamizu.
"A-are you satisfied?"
"Ah, I never thought of isometry for that! Fantastic! I think this might be the breakthrough my team needs to finish our time synchronization paper! It's going to be tricky given your SCP status, but I’ll have to ask if I can acknowledge you."
She pointed to a section in the middle. "But can you explain how this part follows? What about $\mathcal O^p(Q)$ makes the corollary applicable?"
Lillian scribbled something in the margins with an arrow to an earlier part.
"Ah, the p-incompressibility, with p from the p-norm. But…"
They went back and forth a few times huddled together at the desk. Eventually Director Miyamizu glanced at her watch. "Huh, I really lost track of time there. I do love it when I find someone as interested in this stuff as I am to talk about it with. I better get going now though, I have a plane to catch to Singapore."
Lillian touched her lips with her fingers. She wasn’t smiling. She probably never would again. But for the first time in a while, she wasn’t frowning.
"Wait," she called after her, one hand on her chest and the other reaching out, "don’t go…please."
Director Miyamizu raised an eyebrow. "Well, I have quite a busy schedule in my position, but you’re quite a talented and curious individual. If circumstances were different I’d love to have you at RAISA. Have Dr. Byrnes shoot me an email if you want to talk. And if we ever neutralize your anomaly, ping me."
"Th-thank you, director."
The door closed and Lillian’s tear ducts opened, again.
"It’s clear containment has been quite hard on SCP-8980," Director Miyamizu confirmed. "It’s such an unfortunate circumstance to affect such a talent. The subject reminds me of myself, in some ways."
"She does indeed," Dr. Byrnes noted.
"I’m really glad to see you and your team taking care of it so well like this. The subject confirmed it itself. It must be so hard to see this befall a colleague of yours."
"Indeed." Dr. Byrnes checked his watch, although tried to avoid making it obvious.
"It’s not abstract, I asked it the acyclic graph question I asked you the other day-"
First, "what?". Second, "shoot, I forgot to reply to her after the conference!". Third, "shoot, she asked Marley about it?".
"-gave a pretty readable sketch of the isometry result. It even seemed to have a better grasp of the material than you!"
Dr. Byrnes coughed.
"If it weren’t a skip, it’d be a wonderful member of your team! I’d love to have it at RAISA as well."
He could only nod, trying to figure out the fastest, polite way to end this conversation.
"I assume you keep its workload at an appropriate reduced level, given its accommodations and special containment procedures and mental state," she began.
"Of course."
"In that case, I have a favor to ask you. Only if it’s appropriate for its workload and mental health, and subject to your approval, and assuming infosec is appropriate, I and potentially Maria and Dr. McKay would like to assign some occasional additional work from Foundation IT and RAISA to SCP-8980. Such a talent is too great to waste and this way we could still leverage it. I’m glad you found a way, by the way."
Dr. Byrnes grinned and rubbed his hands together. "Why, of course. SCP-8980 is always looking for new mental stimulation and would welcome it."
"Maybe this opportunity might pan out after all…"
"Here’s the recording of our conversation, for your audit purposes," she said as she handed the audio recorder.
"Thanks."
"One more thing, I’ve sent an appropriately redacted technical paper and implementation of the Montanucci project on error-correcting codes. Given it wasn’t affected by SCP-8980’s anomaly, it’s a breakthrough for you guys and worth further study. Maybe it’ll be the key to neutralizing or at least better mitigating its anomaly."
Dr. Byrnes nodded and pasted another smile. "Thank you so much, on behalf of the team and SCP-8980 I’d like to express my gratitude. We’ll look at it right away."
Dr. Byrnes listened to the recording once, then crushed it in his fist, bagged it with a "memetic hazard" sticker nobody would ask about, and chucked the remains into a secure data disposal box.
His email calendar pinged him about his regular meeting with SCP-8980. He holstered his usual taser and this time also a collapsible baton. One could never be too careful with violent anomalies.
He thought back to his recent series of conversations with Director Miyamizu, teeth gritting. The tone of SCP-8980’s voice at the end of the recording. How close Director Miyamizu had come.
"This cannot be tolerated," he thought to himself, as he walked to the containment unit.
His fingers tightened around the handle of the baton.