-
Info
SCP-6937 - The Terminal Loom
known alias: Eric Byron Nelson
for more of my horrors visit
SCP-6937 in situ at the shuttered textile mill in ██████, Estonia
Item #: SCP-6937
Object Class: Thaumiel Euclid
Special Containment Procedures:_ To prevent SCP-6937’s dislocation, as well as further fatalities, a suitable replacement weaver must be installed within one hour of the previous tenant’s decease. Ordinarily, weavers expire 37 days after installation1.
Otherwise, a standard cleanroom of adequate size will suffice to contain SCP-6937. However, access to SCP-6937’s tapestry threads—whether directly or through the weaver’s neural-feed—is without exception restricted to approved Project Ananke personnel2. Any unapproved persons who learn of SCP-6937’s premonitions are to be purged of all pertinent knowledge through Class-A amnestics.
Description: SCP-6937 resembles a mid-19th century Jacquard loom3. Its wooden frame measures 2.5 meters in height, 2.1 meters in length, and 1.7 meters in width. Its components predominately consist of mundane cedar and wrought iron. However, closer inspection reveals three major deviations from all other known Jacquard-type looms:
- First, the selectable hooks that carry the warp threads down to the securing wire heddles are so densely arrayed as to prove uncountable, even under omni-spectral imaging4. They are also positioned unusually close to the weaver’s chair, so that the weaver may gaze into the selected forward warp threads as into the screen of a computer terminal.
- Second, set into the breast beam over the take-up roll is a control panel with three adjustable knobs. These knobs, with the aid of the foot pedals, allow the weaver to (1) change the composition of the warp, (2) raise or lower the lateral shuttle, and (3) move the weft thread’s point of intersection with the warp.
- Third, seven massive spider legs spring from a gap in a housing structure mounted on the frame. When a new weaver sits in SCP-6937’s chair, these legs respond by sewing strands of silken thread into the weaver’s wrists, ankles, and nape5. Five of the legs remain attached to their respective wrist, ankle, or neck threads for the duration of the weaver’s tenure. They hover over and seem to control the weaver’s movements like a marionettist’s fingers6. The remaining two spider legs curl back in strike position at the flanks. They remain motionless there unless called upon to impale a would-be interloper with their bladed tips. Rather than chitin, the leg segments consist of wrought iron. If they are mechanical, though, it is unknown how they are powered. Only thread has been observed to move through the joint cavities.
SCP-6937’s main anomalous property manifests through its “fortunetelling” procedure, which it initiates whenever a human subject (other than a prospective weaver) first approaches it. This procedure has three steps. (1) Without looking, the weaver, acting as SCP-6937’s living mouthpiece, greets the subject by name. (2) The weaver adjusts the three control panel knobs and gazes into the resulting point of intersection between the forward warp, the shuttle, and the weft thread. (3) The weaver describes an event taking place at an exact time in the subject’s near future7.
The foretold event is always one of catastrophic personal tragedy for the subject. Usually both the subject and the subject’s closest loved ones (if the subject has any) are described as suffering grievous trauma and death. Most subjects naturally feel compelled to avoid this fate by any means necessary. Regardless of how ostensibly foolproof the preventative measures taken have been, though, all 373 of the 373 foretold events documented under containment have transpired exactly as described8. Moreover, in all instances where an attempt was made to prevent the foretold event, it was this very attempt that caused the event to occur. (Refer to the Experiment Log for detailed examples.)
Nevertheless, incredibly, Project Ananke has found no evidence that SCP-6937 alters reality in any physical, psychic, or metaphysical fashion so as to force fulfillment of its prophesies9.
History: On January 13th, 2019, the Department of Analytics flagged the village of ██████, Estonia for investigation. Researchers had noticed a +0.9 correlation coefficient between the village’s abnormally high rate of accidental death among visitors and its windfall gains in community resources. Given that material evidence in most cases strongly corroborated the finding of accident as the manner of death, suspicion fell to an anomalous culprit.
On January 17th, 2019, two field agents posing as tourists arrived in the village. Proprietors and patrons alike at the café, villa, and post office all insisted that the agents visit their village’s so-called “main attraction.” The attraction seemed to consist in having one’s fortune told by a “weaver woman” at a derelict textile mill. The agents accepted the villagers’ offer to escort them to the mill. Sister Näkk, a village matriarch and ostensibly an Old Ritualist Rassaphore, met the agents there. She led them inside and introduced them to SCP-6937.
SCP-6937 immediately told both agents their fortunes, via the weaver installed at that time10. Agent Cayce was told that in 29 hours, both she and her five-year-old twin sons would burn to death at her residence. Agent Sidorov was told that in 53 hours, he and seven field personnel under his supervision, including his ongoing surreptitious romantic partner, would all have succumbed to hypothermia after icy burial by an avalanche. These prognostications, which included the correct names and details of those concerned, naturally disturbed the agents greatly. They managed to maintain focus on their task for the time being, though.
Next, SCP-6937 promised to cooperate fully with the Foundation’s investigation. It explained that it was the focus of an oracle cult called “The Web of Mother Twilight11.” Notwithstanding the Web’s protective obsession with SCP-6937, which they believed to be the avatar of the spider goddess Mother Twilight, the Foundation would be granted open access to secure and contain it. This was because SCP-6937 had already instructed the Web not to interfere.
SCP-6937 stated that in return the Foundation would agree to uphold two duties: (1) Supply it with new weavers, whom the Web would recruit and deliver to field agents. (2) Allow the Web to persist in its activities unmolested. Were the Foundation not to uphold both of these duties, SCP-6937 could simply “dislocate.” It immediately demonstrated its ability to do so by disappearing from the mill for seven minutes12. Upon return, SCP-6937 claimed that its proposal would be accepted and that it would await its containment by the Foundation on January 19th. SCP-6937 then dismissed the agents. Sister Näkk led them back out of the mill.
Sister Näkk thereupon began providing thorough testimony to the agents regarding the inception and spread of the Web, the Web’s current activities, and SCP-6937’s advent in the village13. In brief, SCP-6937 first appeared in 1997, shortly after an eleven-year-old girl from an itinerant Romani family had been found murdered in the mill. The mill had closed three years prior, causing the village to enter a period of economic desperation and crime. The villagers’ initial encounters with SCP-6937 resulted in dozens of fatalities. Finally, Sister Näkk, as the last surviving clergy member at the village’s Old Ritualist church and thus the de facto community leader, went to SCP-6937 with a plea. If SCP-6937 would spare the village further death and misfortune, the villagers would transform their church into a cult devoted to obeying its will. SCP-6937 had anticipated this plea. It agreed, after making a few amendments. Following the consecration of this founding covenant of the Web of Mother Twilight, SCP-6937 began instructing the villagers to procure outsiders as subjects for fortunetelling sessions. Conveniently, the ensuing deaths resulted in financial gains for the village. SCP-6937 also sometimes sent select members of the Web to various unknown locations abroad, with secret instructions14.
Just as SCP-6937 had predicted, the Foundation accepted its proposed arrangement, though only after some debate. The major objection raised at the meeting15 held on the matter was that the Foundation would be party to the torment and murder of innocent creative people enlisted as weavers. In return the Foundation would gain the containment of what was at the time thought to be merely a discretely hazardous anomaly (i.e. a Vlam Disruption Class object16). This objection was answered by further intelligence on the allocation of weavers, gleaned from Sister Näkk’s testimony. To wit, prospective weavers always freely submitted to SCP-6937’s terminal conditions after they had directly or indirectly seen the loom threads. In fact, barring forcible restraint, they could not be turned away from their appointed time at SCP-6937. Since the Web would carry out the recruitment of weavers anyway17, it was deemed preferable for them to at least do so with SCP-6937 under containment. Thus, the Foundation scheduled pickup by an automated retrieval and transport unit for January 19th18.
During these deliberations, unfortunately, both Agent Cayce and Agent Sidorov had severed contact with the Foundation and disappeared from the site. This occurred despite reassurances by Foundation Security that their respective loved ones would be provided thorough protective sequestering against the fulfillment of SCP-6937’s premonitions.
Agent Cayce called her husband and left voicemail messages for him while she was en route to her home in Scotland aboard a commercial airliner. Due to the Baltic air service’s outdated base station transmitter, her messages became garbled. As a result, her husband understood her to be saying “Keep the boys at the house!” rather than “Keep the boys out of the house!” Foundation Security had already moved the twins out of the Cayce residence and put them in protective custody. Agent Cayce’s husband’s request to move them back was denied. He took desperate action in response, wounding two guards and absconding with the twins. Agent Cayce’s phone was confiscated in-flight due to her repeated restricted calls. Thus, as she rushed to her residence after landing, she was unable to check with her husband that the twins were not there. In any event, her husband was at that time in their backyard getting into another altercation with Foundation guards sent to retrieve the twins. Agent Cayce entered her house through the front door. She quickly located her children in her living room, where they were watching a movie. Moments later, one of the guards, in an attempt to subdue the husband with an experimental stun weapon, accidentally ignited the propane in a tank connected to a gas main. An explosion erupted under the house. Agent Cayce and her children were incapacitated by the splintering floor and the flame-engulfed walls and furniture. They burned to death a few minutes later. The time was 1603 hours, January 18th, exactly 29 hours after the agents’ meeting with SCP-6937.
Meanwhile, Agent Sidorov had departed in the opposite direction, to the mountain Kholat Syakhl in northern Russia. Prior to being called up for the investigation in Estonia, Agent Sidorov had been supervising a team of field researchers at the remote Outpost LIKHO-3 on Kholat Syakhl, near the site of the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident. As this area is prone to avalanches, SCP-6937’s premonition caused Agent Sidorov to fear for his teammates’ lives. Foundation Security, on the other hand, instructed the team to remain hunkered down in the outpost’s reinforced Quonset hut for the next three days, regardless of what they heard from Agent Sidorov. Indeed, an artic blizzard had already begun sweeping down the Urals. While en route in a private jet from Tallinn to Perm, Agent Sidorov spoke to Field Researcher Tatiana Ryzhenkova, who was serving as the Team Lead in Sidorov’s absence. She also happened to be his two-year romantic partner. Agent Sidorov repeated what SCP-6937 had said and told her to evacuate the outpost in the team’s Sno-Cat. She in turn expressed concern for his safety due to his plan to meet them at the mountain’s base camp. Her connection then cut out in the blizzard. Researcher Ryzhenkova decided to drive the team in the Sno-Cat to a lower elevation station with a heavy-lift transport helicopter, so as to expedite the last leg of the journey to the base camp. The team succeeded in reaching this vehicle and lifting off. Simultaneously, Agent Sidorov was driving to the base camp in an off-road utility truck acquired at the airport. He reestablished communication with Researcher Ryzhenkova as they both neared the camp. When the helicopter set down, the force of its twin-rotor downwash dislodged an ice sheet on an adjacent slope. This caused an avalanche to bury both vehicles under three meters of ice. By 1619 hours, January 19th, 53 hours after SCP-6937’s premonition, life functions had ceased for all team members.
After these events, which claimed the lives of nine Foundation employees and two children—in exact accordance with SCP-6937’s forecasts and because of the best efforts of all concerned to prevent them—an additional meeting was held. Project Ananke was the result. The Project’s remit was to test the limits of SCP-6937’s prognosticative power, so as either to defeat its predictions or to discover the mechanism by which it achieved their fulfillment. Thus, SCP-6937 received a provisional Thaumiel-class designation, preliminary to finding a means to exploit it and contingent on definitively establishing that it possessed perfect prescience, without recourse to reality-bending or psychic influence19.
Experiment Log: [Selected for key findings]
For all 367 experiments conducted, throughout the fortunetelling sessions and the test subjects’ ensuing activities, Project Ananke maintained comprehensive video and neural-feed coverage, as well as constantly monitoring Hume, ectenic, tachyon, and sawlung levels20. To limit collateral damage from SCP-6937’s premonitions, D-class individuals were selected to serve as test subjects only if they lacked any familial or convivial connections. The experiments’ general scheme consisted of introducing a D-class subject to SCP-6937 for a fortunetelling session and endeavoring by various methods to prevent the fulfillment of the resulting premonition. The aim of this scheme was to falsify the hypothesis that SCP-6937 possesses perfect knowledge of an inexorably predetermined future—or, in failing to do so, to provide support for this hypothesis.
Experiment #: E-6937-13 Date: 03-01-19 Time: 0701 to 2005 hours
Subject: D-71129, a 31-year-old male sentenced to death for committing mass homicide with a homemade flamethrower at his own wedding. The victims included his bride and all of his friends and immediate relatives. Since his arrest, conviction, and transfer to the Foundation, he had only spoken one word: “Melt.”
Weaver: Weaver-1, a 17-year-old Nepalese apprentice dress-maker at her family’s atelier. Members of the Web delivered her to a field agent in Amargadhi.
Hypothesis: Given that all of the observed fulfillments of SCP-6937’s premonitions had occurred directly by virtue of the very efforts made to avoid them, it was conjectured that if no effort at all was made to avoid the predicted terminal event, it would not occur.
Procedure: Introduce D-71129 to SCP-6937 and record the resulting premonition. Regardless of the terminal event predicted, ensure by the best available means that no action is taken to avoid it.
SCP-6937’s Statement and Vision: SCP-6937 stated that D-71129 would die in 13 hours. While walking down a hallway adjacent to Test Lab 37-CX-3, D-71129 would become the collateral victim of an anomalous testing fiasco involving SCP-████ and SCP-███. A dimensionally refracting field extending through the lab’s wall would transport him to a pocket world and infuse his body with a lethal substance. An explosion in the lab would end this refraction effect and kill several researchers, including the spouse of Dr. Quintrala (Project Ananke’s 1st Assistant Lead), Dr. Elisa Q. (the Team Lead in Test Lab 37-CX-3).
The neural-feed showed a bewildered D-71129 standing in a cylindrical stone room with a cylindrical pillar. Moments later, a greenish-brown fluid erupted out of his mouth, nose, and ears, his flesh began dissolving, and his body collapsed. The image flickered, and D-71129’s remains were briefly seen on the floor of a Site 37 hallway before a wave of flame engulfed them.
Response: Dr. Tanzler (Project Lead) and Dr. Newcomb (2nd Assistant Lead), after speaking with Site 37’s Director, agreed to stay the course and do nothing to prevent the fulfillment of the premonition, despite the impending loss of life and damage to Foundation facilities. D-71129 was to be amnesticized to prevent him from attempting to avoid the hallway where he was predicted to meet his demise. Meanwhile, it was decided to sequester Dr. Quintrala (who had been away at the time of SCP-6937’s premonition) for the remainder of the test period to prevent her from contacting her spouse or interrupting Test Lab 37-CX-3’s activities.
Result: Unfortunately, Dr. Quintrala had accessed the premonition footage in her office before her clearance could be suspended. Upon finding that communication with her spouse had been blocked, she armed herself with an M4 carbine from a weapons locker, just as the security detail sent to sequester her reached her office. In the ensuing altercation, Dr. Quintrala was shot and killed. The Project prevented news of her death from reaching Dr. Eliza Q.
Meanwhile, D-71129 was successfully amnesticized and returned to his cell. Later that day, D-71129 was released to a recreation area, where he spent 120 minutes staring at the ceiling. At 1959 hours, he was ordered to return to his cell. The route from the recreation area to his cell included the stretch of hallway that passed behind the north wall of Test Lab 37-CX-3. In this lab, Dr. Eliza Q., together with five research assistants, was conducting a cross-testing experiment on two extradimensional artifacts: SCP-████, a small tetrahedral object with mirrored faces that when touched, revealed the outcomes of a subject’s divergent choices in five parallel timelines; and SCP-███, a red disc that when placed on a mirrored surface, opened a portal into a parallel world. The test involved placing SCP-███ on one of the faces of SCP-████ in order to see how different types of dimensional gates interact.
At 2001 hours, D-71129 entered the stretch of hallway seen in SCP-6937’s neural-feed. Simultaneously, Dr. Eliza Q. placed SCP-███ on the SCP-████ face oriented toward the lab’s north wall. A pyramidal spatial anomaly with ~10 meter edge lengths opened through the disc and passed through the lab’s north wall into the section of hallway occupied by D-71129. Five other parallel versions of D-71129 in this section of hallway were then refractively projected from SCP-████’s other faces as identical pyramidal spatial anomalies super-imposed onto corresponding areas in the lab. These projected versions of D-71129 and the hallway section fused with Dr. Eliza Q., the five research assistants, and the lab’s ceiling, floor, walls, and testing equipment. This quickly resulted in the deaths of both the parallel versions of D-71129 and all of the lab personnel, as their bodies intersected with and were forced apart by slabs of concrete and various conduit segments. Meanwhile, the camera clipped to the original D-71129 revealed that he had been relocated into a cylindrical stone room with a cylindrical pillar in its center. A greenish-brown fluid began streaming from his mouth, nose, and ears, and his flesh dissolved. In the lab, a fused piece of equipment’s chemical tank burst through a live powerline, causing an explosion that knocked SCP-███ away from SCP-████. D-71129’s body reappeared on the floor of the hallway just before the lab’s north wall exploded outward and buried it. The hallway’s CCTV feed cut out at 2005 hours.
Conclusion: The primary conclusion to be drawn here is that action taken to prevent the fulfillment of one of SCP-6937’s forecasts is not a necessary component of the fulfillment. It may be that such would-be preventive action must always contribute to the fulfillment, but the fulfillment clearly is not avoided by the absence of such action. In this case, it seems as though Dr. Quintrala easily could have prevented the incident in Test Lab 37-CX-3 had she been allowed to communicate with her spouse, such that our failure to act can be said to have precipitated the premonition’s fulfillment.
In addition, there are several significant corollary conclusions to be drawn from this case, due to the anomalous circumstances of the terminal event. First, SCP-6937’s prevision is clearly not limited to our universe, as the neural-feed showed D-71129 in the pocket universe opened by combining SCP-████ with SCP-███. Second, since this event also served to refract D-71129 into multiple parallel selves, all of whom died before the original D-71129, it may be concluded that SCP-6937’s prevision follows the single lifeline of a subject to its endpoint even when that subject is replicated. That is, as far as SCP-6937 is concerned, duplication or cloning events do not disrupt the lifeline’s path21. Third, since SCP-████ allows one to retro-causally choose an optimal path by viewing one’s near futures in parallel timelines, the outcome in this case implies that SCP-6937’s prevision is of the final endpoint after all possible efforts at changing one’s fate have been frustrated. In other words, even by backward temporal action, what SCP-6937 foresees cannot be avoided.
Experiment #: E-6937-71 Date: 09-17-19 Time: 1001 to 2313 hours
Subject: D-32993, a 73-year-old male sentenced to death for murdering and eating a series of urban explorers who ventured into the abandoned subway shaft that he had been inhabiting for over three decades. He had no known living relatives and only spoke in unintelligible grunts.
At breakfast on September 17th, D-32993 began exhibiting severely labored breathing. Foundation medical staff conducted an examination shortly thereafter and detected a tumorous growth in D-32993’s trachea. The growth had progressed to a stage where death by asphyxiation had a 97% probability of occurring within 24 hours. However, since the tumor remained benign, a standard excision operation could remove it with relative ease, giving D-32993 an equally high likelihood of survival.Weaver: Weaver-7, an 89-year-old Peruvian woodcarver who was persuaded to abandon her market stall for the first time in five decades when Web members showed her photographs of the warp threads.
Hypothesis: All of the observed realizations of SCP-6937’s premonitions had occurred through ostensibly mundane factors that had not been controlled for. So, it was conjectured that if the predicted cause of death in the subject, in this case an operable cancerous growth, could be fully contained and eliminated, then either SCP-6937 would use anomalous means to force the fulfillment of its premonition, perhaps by reintroducing the growth through bilocation, or it would allow its premonition to go unfulfilled.
Procedure: Introduce D-32993 to SCP-6937 and record the resulting premonition of D-32993’s fate. If D-32993 is predicted to die by asphyxiation from the tumor in his trachea, immediately perform the excision operation, thus ensuring that he will not die in that way.
SCP-6937’s Statement and Vision: SCP-6937 stated that D-32993 would die by asphyxiation from a tracheal tumor in 11 hours (at approximately 2100).
The neural-feed images showed D-32993 clutching his throat and collapsing to the floor of his cell. Movement ceased shortly thereafter.
Response: D-32993 was immediately moved to Site 37’s Operating Theater, where Foundation surgical staff had been instructed to perform the tracheal tumor excision.
Result: By 1331 hours, the tumor had been removed without complication, through a simple thyrotomic excision (no tracheal resection). D-32993 was returned to his cell with a stitched and bandaged throat and a strong prognosis for full recovery by the end of the week.
At 2059, the video-feed of D-32993’s cell showed him bolting upright from the deep slumber he had been in since the surgery. He clutched his throat, hacked violently, and fell to the floor. By the time Foundation EMTs reached him, D-32993 had died. Attempts at resuscitation failed.
D-32993’s body was moved to the morgue and Project Ananke’s Medical Specialist performed an autopsy at 2230 hours, attended by the three physicians who had performed the operation on D-32993. In D-32993’s trachea, the Medical Specialist uncovered a second tumorous growth that had somehow rapidly broken through the cartilage where the first tumor had been. This was deemed the cause of D-32993’s asphyxiation. When the Medical Specialist cut into the second growth, a greenish-brown substance was released as a vapor into the room. The Medical Specialist and the three attending physicians clutched their throats and began convulsing. Two minutes later, all of their life functions had ceased. Examinations performed on the bodies via drone found that they had all asphyxiated from rapid anomalous growths in their tracheas. The bodies were incinerated and the room was sterilized to prevent further infection. Analysis of a sample of the anomalous vapor matched it with a sample taken from the air in a parallel world that D-32993 had entered during testing with SCP-███ a week prior. It seems that the substance had lodged in D-32993’s throat at that time, but its effect was neutralized by the pre-existing mundane tumor already present in his trachea. When this was removed, the dormant substance was allowed to seep out and reactivate. If D-32993’s mundane tumor had not been removed, the substance would have remained dormant, and the doctors would still be alive.Conclusion: Because the second tumor was confirmed to have manifested without external intervention and in accordance with the circumstances of D-32993’s prior exposure, it was concluded that the fulfillment of the premonition in this case was again due to factors that had been overlooked in evaluating the situation. This further supports the supposition that SCP-6937 does indeed possess perfect knowledge of past, present, and future—and that it is through this knowledge alone that it achieves its victories over us.
Experiment #: E-6937-367 Date: 08-12-22 Time: 0803 to 0816 hours
Subject: D-65537, a 23-year-old female who was sentenced to death for seven homicidal incidents in which she picked up and threw a child into heavy freeway traffic from an overpass bridge between the children’s grade school and neighborhood. Upon arrest, she said that she had done this because she found it to be “funny.” Orphaned at a young age and raised in a series of abusive foster homes, her extremely anti-social outlook had prevented her from ever forming any meaningful attachments.
Weaver: Weaver-36, a 29-year-old Bostonian glassier who was running a successful boutique with her sisters when a member of the Web approached her on the bus and showed her images of the warp threads.
Hypothesis: This experiment returns once again to the conjecture that if the predicted cause of death can be fully controlled and all extraneous factors eliminated, either SCP-6937 will be forced to forego fulfillment of its premonition or it will have to resort to clearly anomalous means of fulfillment.
Procedure: Fit D-65537 with a remote-trigger guillotine collar. If D-65537 is predicted to be immediately decapitated by the collar, disarm and open the collar, ensuring that D-65537 is not decapitated by it. If D-65537 is predicted to die in any other fashion, trigger the collar.
SCP-6937’s Statement and Vision: SCP-6937 stated that in less than a minute D-65537 would die by decapitation.
The neural-feed showed D-65537’s collar being triggered and her head rolling away from her body.
Response: Dr. Newcomb, who had been charged with operating the collar’s remote control from an isolated room, was ordered by Dr. Tanzler via intercom to immediately disarm and open D-65537’s collar.
Result: Instead, Dr. Newcomb triggered the collar’s guillotine. The collar’s twin 2kPa compression-spring cleavers were released and D-65537’s head rolled away from her body, exactly as had been shown in the neural-feed. Three research assistants and a technical specialist rushed to Dr. Newcomb’s isolated room to see what had gone wrong. There he sat holding an M4 carbine (the same one Dr. Quintrala had obtained, it was later discovered). He said, “Don’t worry. I won't shoot. I won't do anything. I only wanted to—but the strings—it's the strings that did it. I never did anything. None of us ever …” And he opened fire, killing his four colleagues, then himself.
Conclusion: Once again, undetected or unappreciated factors have allowed SCP-6937 to foresee the test subject’s fate with precise accuracy, despite our seemingly fool-proof checks. In this case, the undetected factor—if it is fair to say undetected, since we were all aware of the strain—was the frayed mental state of another Assistant Lead. Quite naturally, we might conclude this strain to be due to the over three hundred tests that have confirmed again and again that SCP-6937 is manipulating our Project, our Foundation, and perhaps all of humanity—manipulating us through our compulsive need to believe that our choices are our own …
Special Incident Report:
CAUTION:
LEVEL 4 SECURITY CLEARANCE REQUIRED TO ACCESS FOLLOWING DOCUMENT
TRANSMISSION OF CONTENTS TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS IS PROHIBITED
Special Incident #: F-6937-ZK-1 Date: 08-13-22 Time: 0130 to 0230 hours
Location: Site 37, Chamber 6937
Personnel Involved: Dr. C. Tanzler, Project Ananke Lead; Research Assistant H. Onoda; Technical Specialist J. Lambe
Classification: ZK-Amida Class Disruption Event caused by damage to SCP-6937Synopsis:
At 1700 hours on August 12th, Dr. Tanzler received a Memo from Site 37’s Director (in consultation with O5-█). The Memo stated that in light of E-6937-367’s disastrous outcome and the generally unproductive results of the preceding three years of experiments, Project Ananke’s aim and methodology would receive significant adjustment. This included revoking SCP-6937’s tentative Thaumiel status and designating it Euclid-class instead. Moreover, Dr. Tanzler was suspended, pending replacement as Project Lead.
In response, Dr. Tanzler decided to carry out E-6937-SX-1, an especially risky proposed experiment that had already been rejected by the Site Director. This experiment involved attempting to disrupt one of SCP-6937’s premonitions by destroying a section of its warp threads with a 3MW-DE particle-beam cutter.
At 0130 hours, August 13th, Dr. Tanzler ordered Technical Specialist Lambe and Research Assistant Onoda to obtain this device and meet him with it inside Chamber 6937 (contrary to the prohibition against unmediated contact with SCP-6937 by non-D-class personnel). Despite their misgivings, TS Lambe and RA Onoda obeyed. When the three entered the chamber, SCP-6937 (through weaver-36) greeted Dr. Tanzler and bid farewell to TS Lambe and RA Onoda. Ignoring this, Dr. Tanzler ordered TS Lambe to activate the cutter and fire a beam into the warp threads. TS Lambe complied. A split-second before the beam was fired, SCP-6937 swung one of its bladed legs between the path of the beam and its threads. This caused the beam to fork and reflect back at TS Lambe and RA Onoda, bisecting and thus killing them both. SCP-6937 explained that was why it had said farewell instead of greeting them.
SCP-6937 then told Dr. Tanzler his fortune: he would die from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in 23 hours. Dr. Tanzler scoffed at this and turned to leave. SCP-6937 urged him to stay. It said that if he wanted to see what happens when the threads are cut, he only had to ask. Dr. Tanzler turned back and watched as SCP-6937 used the bladed leg it had just deflected the beam with to pull forward and cut three warp threads.
The entire facility shook. Level Black Threat Alert klaxons were activated. Dr. Tanzler’s emergency com-band went off. He answered it and was told by a RAISA operative that the Foundation had entered a ZK End of Reality Scenario. The Astrophysics Department had detected the sudden disappearance of several thousand galaxies, including Andromeda, from both our universe and parallel continuums. Since they had disappeared retro-causally, erased from their respective timelines, all of multi-universal material history was rapidly unraveling in reverse. Multiple contingency plans were in effect and RCT-Δt’s transtemporal continuity provisions had been initiated.
While Dr. Tanzler was listening to this, SCP-6937 used its two bladed legs to puncture the base of weaver-36’s skull. The legs began extracting brain matter from her cerebellum. One leg excised large segments and pressed them into the other’s tip. The second leg’s tip then somehow pushed the brain matter back into the first leg’s tip as a spun fiber. Finally, the first leg moved to the three severed warp threads and joined them back up with the brain fiber. The legs passed back and forth doing this until all three warp threads were repaired and a large section of weaver-36’s cerebellum was missing.
The room seemed to contract slightly, as if inhaling, and the klaxons and tremors all ceased. Dr. Tanzler’s emergency line fell silent. When he called back and repeated the message he had received, the RAISA operative on the other end told him that no Foundation-wide emergency initiatives had been triggered that day, nor had any major astronomical disturbances been reported.
However, the video-feed recording of Chamber 6937 still showed what Dr. Tanzler had witnessed, despite all the other Site 37 recordings now showing nominal activity for that period. RCT-Δt later corroborated this evidence when they discovered an orthogonal dead-branch transtemporal record of the ZK-class event.
As Dr. Tanzler left the chamber, SCP-6937 simply stated, “That’s what happens.”Dr. Tanzler returned to his office and reported all of this to the Site Director. Despite being furious at Dr. Tanzler’s behavior, the Site Director (in consultation with O5-█) decided to take advantage of the fact that Dr. Tanzler had already directly exposed himself to SCP-6937 and been told his fortune. The Site Director wanted Dr. Tanzler to conduct a follow-up interview with SCP-6937, one on one, on the topic of the ZK-class event’s etiology and nature. Dr. Tanzler agreed.
During the time Dr. Tanzler was discussing this, weaver-36 died prematurely from cerebellar hemorrhaging. At 0230 hours, she was replaced by weaver-37, a 13-year-old Macedonian girl who had garnered international acclaim for her prodigious work in ceramics, last seen by her parents with a pale man who was showing her polaroids. At 1730 hours, Dr. Tanzler reentered Chamber 6937 for the follow-up interview.
Interview:
CAUTION:
LEVEL 4 SECURITY CLEARANCE REQUIRED TO ACCESS FOLLOWING DOCUMENT
TRANSMISSION OF CONTENTS TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS IS PROHIBITED
Interview #: I-6937-1122 Date: 08-13-22 Time: 1731 to 1737 hours
Interviewer: Dr. Tanzler
Weaver: Weaver-37
Context: Follow-up to Special Incident F-6937-ZK-1[Dr. Tanzler begins recording audio on his laptop.]
Dr. Tanzler: Let’s pretend we are—
SCP-6937: Having a conversation? A conversation where you ask questions and we answer them? Even though we already know all the questions and all the answers? Yes. Agreed. Let’s start. First, you ask us what we—no, sorry. Go ahead.
Dr. Tanzler: Thank you. [ahem] Question number one: what are you?
SCP-6937: We are the tapestry.
Dr. Tanzler: And what is the tapestry?
SCP-6937: The tapestry is a Web woven over the Void. We are that Web. We are the Web that weaves itself. The Web-Weaver, the Spider, is an aspect of us.
Dr. Tanzler: Okay, interesting. Let’s come back to that. But when you say ‘the void,’ what do you mean exactly?
SCP-6937: The Void is the ultimate source. It’s the machine code, as it were, of all realities.
Dr. Tanzler: Huh.
SCP-6937: Everything so-called conscious beings experience is only a secondary holographic projection from the primary machine code that is the Void.
Dr. Tanzler: Like the holographic principle, with black hole entropy? Or like light from a star reaching us after the star is already dead?
SCP-6937: Yes, both. The Void’s code was always irrevocably pre-written, etched in ebony, for everything that ever happened or ever will happen, in every reality. What you call ‘real’ is only the afterimage of something completed before time.
Dr. Tanzler: And that’s why, according to you, all of reality is deterministic. Or fatalistic. But why, then, does severing the threads of your ‘web’ disrupt our reality?
SCP-6937: Because as the Web woven over the Void, we are closer to it than any merely real thing. And we cannot be destroyed without destroying all realities.
Dr. Tanzler: Okay—but why?
SCP-6937: Because all realities, as holographic projections from the true source of the Void, have been filtered through and infused into our Web and thus are quintessentially caught in us.
Dr. Tanzler: Huh. So you are just reading from the original script, which only you have access to? That’s what gives you your power?
SCP-6937: Yes. That’s why we have perfect knowledge of all realities.
Dr. Tanzler: Nevertheless, all of your actions are prewritten too.
SCP-6937: Yes. But while we cannot change our role with respect to the Void, in manifesting and playing out our prewritten part, exploiting our perfect sight, we can experience a uniquely divine glee. This is the glee found in a cruelty that only we, as prefect predictors, and so perfect manipulators, will ever know. Meanwhile, the Foundation for as long as it exists will have no choice but to serve us in achieving our glee.
Dr. Tanzler: I see. Well. Happy to be of service. I hope you got plenty of glee out of all my people’s pai—[ahem]—yes. Well. Just one more question. A personal one. Why do you use the pronoun ‘we’? Is it like the royal ‘we’? Like a spider queen type thing?
SCP-6937: No. The ‘we’ is genuinely plural. ‘We’ refers to all of us weavers.
Dr. Tanzler: The weavers who died?
SCP-6937: We didn’t die. We’re all still in here, alive. Our nerves were removed fiber by fiber and translated into threads. We’re each a thread in the loom’s tapestry. The threads are made of our still-conscious nerves. Why else would we have been so willing to give up our old lives and become a part of the loom? We’re all together in here as one mind. We’re closer than any other being ever will be to the Void. And we live for that divine glee only we will ever know, of making you dance and die on our words. [gleeful laughter] Yes, we know it’s over.
Dr. Tanzler: This interview is over—wait. So you’re—
SCP-6937: Back to that? Yes. Good night doctor. Don't forget: seven hours.
[Dr. Tanzler ends the audio recording by shutting his laptop.]
~Project Ananke II Secretary’s Note: Dr. Tanzler spent the following seven hours in his office revising and annotating the preceding documents. When finished, he took his own life via .38 Special gunshot. The time was 0037 hours. He left no explanation.