Dr. Gears has performed a post incident interview with SCP-7700-1. The log of that interaction is below.
Date of Interview: July 24th, 2022.
Subject: SCP-7700-1
Interviewer: Dr. Gears
Begin Log
Dr. Gears: I wanted to talk about the incident at the safe house.
SCP-7700-1: Yeah. The roof tried to kill me.
Dr. Gears: What happened? Was it a tree?
SCP-7700-1: From the looks of it a tree split in the next yard over. But then it fell into another tree that split off and crashed into the house.
Dr. Gears: How much damage was there?
SCP-7700-1: Catastrophic. Honestly if the Hand already knows about the place we oughta just put it down as a loss anyway.
Dr. Gears: You are probably right. Are you feeling alright?
SCP-7700-1: Shaken up a bit. I mean, I was 5 feet from certain death. I don't think it's fully hit me yet.
Dr. Gears: I can imagine. But this is not the first time something like this has happened, yes?
SCP-7700-1: You talking about the plane thing?
Dr. Gears: That and a few other things. The bombing in Russia comes to mind.
There is a delay of several seconds before the interview continues
SCP-7700-1: You wanna know how I got scarred?
Dr. Gears: No. I just want to parse an incongruity.
SCP-7700-1: Gears, you'd tell me if they were considering a designation for me, right?
Dr. Gears: Do you feel as though you need one?
SCP-7700-1: I've survived some things other people didn't. Statistically that's bound to happen from time to time.
Dr. Gears: It does seem to happen more often to you than others though, does it not?
SCP-7700-1: We work for the Foundation. We're put into life and death situations regularly. If we didn't survive we wouldn't be here to ask how we survived.
Dr. Gears: Are you familiar with the De Moirve sensors?
SCP-7700-1: I am.
Dr. Gears: And?
SCP-7700-1: And I think it's more interesting when the character survives.
Dr. Gears: What is more interesting?
SCP-7700-1: The story. If your characters died every time something bad happened there wouldn't be much of a reason to keep reading.
Dr. Gears: Cimmerian, I don't understand.
SCP-7700-1: That's because I'm not talking to you.
SCP-7700-1 looks directly at the hidden camera recording this interaction.
SCP-7700-1: I don't want to die. There. I said it. It's not something I'm proud of, but it is certainly something that's true. I think it's true of a lot of people, actually. It's just such a primal fear that it's hard to put it into words.
Actually, let's break out of the box, it's a bit more confining than I'd like.
I've always known I don't want to die, on some level, but it wasn't until I started writing on the SCP Wiki that it came into sharp focus. I first found the wiki in 2012, so 10 years ago next month. I was browsing around TV tropes and kept coming across tropes from the wiki on other pages. Eventually I clicked through. It wasn't quite as big at the time, but it was still pretty popular.
Then I tried to write something. It was very bad. Hit on all the cliches. It used a copyrighted image. It was on some level embarrassing to me, I think. So I left. I came back in 2014 and tried again. The wiki's attitude at the time wasn't necessarily always positive to new writers, but I persevered and made something that stuck. It also wasn't very good, but it was certainly good enough.
And then I bounced around for a while. Finding writers I liked, learning from them, then bouncing off when they disappeared. And on and on and on. Now I'm one of the site's most recognizable authors. Right or wrong, it's certainly true.
But what does any of this have to do with my fear of death?
I create in order to be unforgettable. To be undeniable. I want to make worlds and stories that will be told long after I'm gone.
My immortality is in my work. My work is how I breathe. I create a character that hates himself and people love him. I create continents and forests and mountains and nations with long storied histories and then I shatter them in a moment. It's all there. And it's all a part of me.
So always. For all time: Writing is how I know myself.
I've always held that to be the truest purpose to creating anything. To know oneself.
I started to find patterns in my writing too. I write about immortal white guys. What does that say about me? The white guy part is probably negotiable (though probably speaks to a certain amount of self-projection), but the immortality comes up again and again. It's like I said earlier, I believe it's just that I don't want to die.
Then two days ago the roof really did cave in on me and I was left sitting amongst rubble, looking over at the heavy wooden rafters that landed edgewise on where my bed used to be. Rain started pouring in and I had to act to save some stuff but about 2 hours later I finally had a moment to reflect.
And I just kinda sat there and stared off into the middle distance, reflecting on the events of the day. Worrying about the future, certainly, but also knowing that I'd come mightily close to the one thing I most fear.
Then I finally grabbed the laptop I'd salvaged from the dust and chaos and opened it up. I sat on the floor of my living room, loaded discord and started talking about it. And hours after one of the most horrific things in my life happened to me, my main thought was "I'm gonna write this into my 7k entry. Cause why the fuck not."
And here we are. Hope you like it. Cause this just proves what I've always known deep down.
One way or another, I'm gonna live forever.
Thanks for reading it. And, genuinely, good luck to everyone else.
Dr. Gears: So you are saying that you are immortal because your author wants you to live on after he dies?
SCP-7700-1 returns his attention to Dr. Gears.
SCP-7700-1: I guess?
Dr. Gears: We will take that into consideration then.
End Log
