Item #: 8044
Object Class: Neutralized
Special Containment Procedures: Revised containment procedures shall be devised once SCP-8044 has been recaptured.
06/26/2015
Description: SCP-8044 refers to a European starling born in Foundation custody under the Near-Human Project, June 26, 2005.
It is widely considered the thus-far supreme accomplishment of the Foundation’s Department of Genetics’ Experimental Division, having achieved or succeeded all milestones of mental development equivalent to human children in its youth. Further information is available upon request.
SCP-8044 succumbed to injuries sustained January 14, 2024.
On August 10, 2015, SCP-8044 emancipated itself from Foundation custody. It was presumed lost and granted Pending-Neutralized status.
On January 13, 2024, Sebastian Smith, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, surrendered himself to Foundation custody bearing information on possible interactions with SCP-8044. Pertinent sections of his debrief are attached, edited for clarity of tone.
It was around finals, a year and a few months ago;—I recall this time so well as I do every indelible stain of misery concomitant with school semesters. Pff. But specifically, here, I’m referring to the awful limbo I often encounter on their tail ends. And quite then—lachrymose and dreaming of static, putting aside a few other colorful melodramatics,—is where we first met.
The exact scene was set in the evening of a rainy warmer winter, where I might imagine myself slouched over the windowsill in a weary mood—the soft, homely glow of oil light flickering in reflection across my glazed eyes, but in truth, I held a menial absence that resisted any romanticism. I was just alone, gazing out at darkness bereft of anything… That was then until—and appearing to me only beside a break in my thoughts, so that an inordinary thing might be noticed at all,—nuzzled against the brickwork, there was a little starling, shivering and wet.
So I mused, How rare, on that a bird should stray so close… You’d rather be inside, I’m sure, but I’m in your way; is that why you’ve come?
And two quick chirps followed: “In-deed!”
Ascribe it to the mood, or that parrots have been renowned for as much, but I didn’t react insofar as one without any experience with the preternatural might, and I invited him in—should he understand me further. Then, he did, and it was quite the night. To be quite honest about it, I amounted everything to a dream until I came to my senses beside him in the morn.—Because who would have guessed that he—with the entire world on the edge of his wingtips—could be as lonely as I?
At first, the arrangement was simple: his nearby nest’d been blown apart, and he wished for a brief respite from life, so I kept my window cracked open during the day, and he’d stay with me over the night; however, soon enough, he’d tend to stay the day, too. Where I’d been rotting through the last weeks of the semester, I found myself putting on a brave and endearing front when Anomaly (as he’d refer himself) would come around, and in another week, that façade became truth, and I was happy to have found a friend.
***
Come winter break, we struck a deal that I might prop my window open a smidge and against regulation, but for who he was to me already, it was no matter, and then I was again lonely for that time whereby I was away and home. I met with old friends for whom I didn’t anymore care, and there persisted a painful awareness of whom I’d like to talk to just then instead. Alas, I’d to wait a month.—So I did, and I came back with a new smile, for he’d waited just there for me—him being to me as I was to him. And there was our beginning: love not quite at first sight, but it came around quickly enough… unspoken, anyway.
A month and a half into there, he was perched up in a nest atop a shelf I’d helped him to establish some weeks prior, and I was on my bed below, both of us focused on the TV.—It was some movie I can’t remember, but I’m sure I recommended it, but my eyes were tearing any focus I struggled to keep into blurry obscurity. Behind which, my mind only filled with what I’d needed to say.
‘Nom,
“Yea-h?” He twitched over to meet my gaze, “Some’s the ma-tter?”
And I committed with a gesture… Would you like to rest here, instead?
“Heh. If you-dtch like me to—sure.” And he fluttered down to the crevice of my arm and elbow.
***
It was after that movie that I didn’t see him for some time, actually,—perhaps a week… six-and-a-half days… There were a few speeches I toyed with in that timeframe, and it was a week of fantastic daydreaming till I would once again see him, so when upon my sill he dropped, I had a great many things to say, and yet—post greetings—only the crudest things came out of me.
Would you mind if I would like to touch you?
…which he thought was a tad silly when we’ve been in contact plenty, so I stuttered out the latter half again until he understood, and when he did, he said he’d never considered such a thing! Er. Ultimately, he wanted to take things slower than I, and I obliged him, of course. Henceforth, however, days would come and go where I’d not hear a single word as he’d speak—too transfixed on his supple frame, perched-perched atop those delicate legs… I’d catch myself salivating and try to salvage without him being any the wiser. But this was strange; why do I like him so much? Men like women;—that’s how it works,—so why on Earth am I in musth over a bird? It’s driving me almost as crazy as he’s…
I took up birdwatching over it, actually—er, birdvoyeurism;—at any rate, I take no interest in other avians—just him. Perhaps to do with his sapience, then, but no matter… my answer was quite simple: I’m not some kind of fetishist, and no depth of inquiry will counteract anything I already know—what my feelings speak as truth. So about what I said last week… I know we haven’t talked about it as much as maybe either of us would have liked. Uhh, this isn’t about desire so much as it is that I… I’ve never wanted to be closer to someone before, but I want to be closer to you, and I think I didn’t quite know how to express that, and I just had to say something, and it just got away from me in the moment. I’m sorry.
***
Come summer, then, I stayed in Philly. So I said to everybody back home that work was available, but it was truly in large part to do with him—to not part with him. It was around that time we both relaxed into each other’s presence a little more, and he began to open up to where I’d jumped ahead.—Wherein, we did start canoodling a little more… I’d kiss him on the head and he’d peck me back, which is a lot more soft and affectionate than it sounds. And he began to talk to me of his past, of you, of disdain. Well.
At any rate, the gears of academia spun again in the fall, and it spawned a new group of anecdotes that might give semblance to the niceties of our daily lives together in that time, but I’ll refrain to only say: it truly, moreso than even before, felt like we’d begun to merge into a coexistence, and I began working up the courage to tell him something I’d been feeling for a long time.
So when a night upon which the rain fell terribly hard against darkness bereft of—on like that which we met, is all—that I did lay myself in the same mist, same cherubic dew of the tip of my lips, that I spoke thenceforth unsaid things to him.
Anomaly… you’ve brought a kindly kind of light back to my life this past while, and I hope I’ve managed similarly with yours. And in that time of us together, I’ve felt us growing similarly—perhaps toward a future where we might stay together, and I’d like it to be so. I want to be with you, Anomaly, and I think I love you. And I bit my cheek to hold from quivering, and rain masked stray tears running across them.
We exchanged no more words, but he walked up my arm and pressed his head in the path of my waterworks. That night, we remained unmoving till the rain ceased to fall.
***
However.
For weeks after, he strayed toward leaving something unspoken, and he shied from my usual provocations. The most I could coax out was how he didn’t yet have the words to explain his thoughts. But why? You need only reiterate what I’ve already said. I know you, Anomaly. Just say it. But he’d stay up in his nest, reticent while here and unreachable when not, and no word nor action I could make could avail me of him. Then, my folks called me home over the winter break, so I closed an anxious door and would spend every second spinning for how his thoughts would finally unfurl.
It started when I lost nails on the long drive home, and once there, racking my head turned to days of infrequent fits and bruises. I evinced nothing, and I felt no less alone than when I was with him. Don’t I know him anymore? What might he be refusing to say to me?—See that he drove me so easily to contempt in his wake. And in another week of break, I might stub my toe and lash embarrassingly. But he’s been unfair to me!—How can I bleed to him and leave so unrequited?
hhuh.
…
After the New Year, I’m back on campus, and there’s not a recent trace of him left—just evidence of our last night together and nothing thereafter. My heel taps actual divots into the floorboard over the hours of the week I returned and sit alone before the window, but I won’t bawl until something tells me he’s never coming back. I tap, I tap, I tap, and I tap, and I tap, and I ache… Do I feel love?
My eyes trace clouds against a grey sky—soon then pierced by sunrise,—and I squint through tears and dazzling day, gold through my eyes, but turned within, I only see starless and bible black.
That’s, uhh, Richard Palmer-James, which just felt— God! Did he ever love me? I mean, to do this, what kind of man?—Well, heh. And I did see him again, through just twenty more minutes of simmering melancholy, when a speck of black began growing in eclipse against my sun. Its shadow fell across my eyes, and I sighed when the very last visible rays blazed only through the display of his wingspan, beating soft gyrations into the winter air. But he alighted with grace and brushed against my cheek and spoke.
“Seba, you al-right?”
And to entertain anything in that sequence but the utmost affection would have been absurd, so here he is, my imperfect angel. He hops from the sill to my desk and carefully strides across to its edge before turning his head back on me. To sit and watch these avian motions always stirs me of him—the way his feathers ruffle when he’s nervous.
“Well, there’s been somethin’ I need to talk about you with.”
Lo the creak that overcomes his voice on the verge of tears. He speaks so softly now, words as whispers. I could listen for hours.—Hearing him transition to a statement of infidelity cuts my train of thought.
Excuse me?
And he reiterates his unfaithfulness. And I don’t have the words.
But he wants to be with me, so he then says, and I hear again every wintertide thought with a new justification.—What is flaking for months, disappearing from my reach for days at a time, and this? Just a lie. I utter back and speak in finality something to now I cannot recall, and he steps aback, turns, and takes off in silent flight—flitting between the branches of a nearby tree and gone.
I’m not sure What just happened? And guilt—more dread—envelops me. I crash well down the stairs and tear across the lawn and up the tree and spoke but for the sharpest beckonings I might muster after him, but my body shudders so that I slip feet down to the grass to lie and let crying overtake me awhile, and all that happened before I settled on driving out and finding my way here with a certain incivility to the scene that’s beginning to sting and set hard in my gut like I’m frothing to remediate when I’m more prepared to articulate myself against him… huhhh …how he’s played with my feelings like I was never anything to him—to teach him just how much I care. And I can’t say this has helped any one bit, but can you help me find him?
UPDATE 01/15/2024: MTF-529 was dispatched to The University of Pennsylvania in attempt to locate and recover SCP-8044.
Sebastian Smith was interrogated again within the interim. Transcript below.
I think I might’ve come hot off the rails the other day in my vehemence of the moments and reliving them so vividly, but things aren’t so serious—I don’t think—to have warranted such a panic. We just broke down a little, or I broke down on him, and it was a bit ugly, but we can surely recover…
I just want to take it all back and sit down with him the other day. In these last two, my time’s consumed in your housing mulling and coming up only that I’m just as much a culpability.—I mean, roiling in contempt over anything is a childish display aside his experiences. I don’t deserve to retain and continue any grievance so fleeting, and so many words of his spoke that he wouldn’t have done anything else than what he did… Maybe I’m the sole fault for misreading it at the time.
I still want his apology, but I think mine to him may be foremost owed.
And on the topic, even, if you still struggle to see… you only believe whatever I decided to speak on my behalf the other day—my disparagement of his name; what did I denote other than only that I don’t care for him as I do myself? I think I want you to know that and that I seek to set things straight and speak henceforth only in a less self-serving state of mind.
What I’m sure of is that he does love me, but I’m not sure that stretches into monogamy or romance in his mind. Maybe we were only ever friends, and maybe I’m nothing more to him, and maybe he can’t conceive of more; in which case, I think I implicated him in a crime of my own fantasy. I don’t want to think anymore;—I wish someone could tell me who to blame and why without such a headache.
I get so up in my own emotions so tiringly easily, and I hate it—how hard it becomes to think straight for myself. And yet, the pressure that stirs me is shouldered threefold by him, and it’s so unfair that I lament anything he hasn’t… I need to grow up at some point; I was so rude, and I was so inconsiderate of his feelings that I just…
I don’t know his thoughts, and I certainly didn’t let him fully speak his there and then, but maybe I shouldn’t have ascribed anything to anything without actually listening to him. I just shot off at the hip like I always manage to do-and I interrupted and screwed us-and I should’ve just kept my fucking mouth shut. I’m always ruining everything for myself-and I don’t understand how I can change when at every opportunity do so I just lose it all over again. I need Anomaly in my life; I can’t lose him. I don’t know what I would be without him. But I don’t know how to have him, and I don’t know what to do. And turning this into some pity party… that’s not my intention; I just want to get out my complacency and guilt in the matter at hand and in the relationship or whatever it was. And I’m sorry to cry and shriek like this isn’t professional… this isn’t who I’m supposed to be.—Oh for Christ, Anomaly, I’m so sorry.
I just have that to say to him, anymore. That’s all I need to say.
UPDATE 01/16/2024: MTF-529 tracked feathers matching that of a European starling to the den of a local feral cat, where they then recovered SCP-8044’s microchip ID implant from within the cat’s stomach contents.
SCP-8044 reclassified as Neutralized.