At least when the War ends, I will be dead.
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-9208-B is to remain attached to SCP-9208-A, assuring SCP-9208-A remains under joint SCP and GOC control. Should SCP-9208-B be neutralized in any way, SCP-9208-A is to be immediately reclassified as Risk Class: Critical and Disruption Class: Amida and neutralized at any cost.
Description: SCP-9208-A is a sentient manifestation of the concept of Autophobia1. SCP-9208-A's exact appearance is difficult to document; however it has been consistently described as a feminine humanoid. SCP-9208-A most commonly manifests in crowded areas, especially areas designated as battlefields. SCP-9208-A was first discovered during the beginning of what is now known the ΔK-Class ("Stop Making Sense") scenario.
While in the presence of any being with sapience, SCP-9208-A will begin to excrete a cognitohazardous substance. This substance targets and infects the nearest sapient entity; within five minutes of infection, the target will experience extreme body dysmorphia and violent behaviors towards other sapient beings, culminating in causalities amongst bystanders and the target's death.
On [DATA LOST], ███ months into the ΔK-Class scenario, the GOC approached Foundation representatives with thousands of collected files on the ΔK-Class scenario, including research and observation of SCP-9208-A. In line with Foundation beliefs, the GOC came to the conclusion the seeking out and infecting of sapient entities is a form of hunting, and that SCP-9208-A could be effectively starved if restrained.
In the interest of solidarity, Foundation officials agreed to share all Foundation files regarding the ΔK-Class scenario. During this time, plans for SCP-9208-B were drafted.
SCP-9208-B is a weapon designed to neutralize ΔK-Class entities; it is otherwise completely harmless to all other forms of sapient life. Researchers have described SCP-9208-B as "an avian-like projectile weapon". For more information on SCP-9208-B's specifics, contact [DATA LOST].
Much like SCP-9208-A, SCP-9208-B requires the deaths of ΔK-Class entities for nutrition. However, SCP-9208-B is incapable of hunting by itself, requiring a host entity to maneuver and feed. SCP-9208-B does not fully takeover the host's body, instead it will modify the host's physiology to match its own, resulting in mutual starvation should the host refuse to hunt.
On [DATA LOST], SCP-9208-A became SCP-9208-B's host. Confirming projections, SCP-9208-A immediately changed all former hunting behaviors and began seeking out sapient ΔK-Class entities. As of [DATA LOST], ████ months into the ΔK-Class scenario, average human causalities of SCP-9208-A have dropped to 0. SCP-9208-A will be monitored indefinitely for any changes in behavior.
The SCP-9208-B project has been deemed a total success.
Addendum: ██ months following SCP-9208-B's attachment to SCP-9208-A, SCP-9208-A was spotted by SCP-GOC forces near SCP-GOC owned battlegrounds. SCP-9208-A moved in an erratic state, crossing the length of the battlefield several times. Concerned by this shift in behavior, a team was sent out to monitor the situation. Foundation scanning devices picked up an unidentified signal originating from from SCP-9208-A itself. Once the signal was recorded in its entirety, SCP-9208-A ceased its erratic behaviors and returned to its usual stalking and hunting.
Translating the signal has been deemed a low priority; however it has been archived here for posterity's sake.
Signal 1:
What is it that I am doing back here?
I want to believe it started the night my parents asked me to see them. It was strange seeing them together, having uniquely united against their common enemy. Against me.
In my Mother's arms, she cradles something living, chest rising and falling, flesh peaking up over the horizon and falling back down. Revulsion overtakes me at the idea of Mother having created another child.
Father stands at the door. Mother approaches, and I see now it's you! Whatever you are. Nothing like me, with your metallic feathers and the weapon on the end of your face. But you are like me in the way that you reach out, wrapping a limb around the hand I hadn't realized I'd raised in turn.
And then your limb keeps wrapping. Confining my arm to a smaller space. And as my knees give out under the weight of agony, Father puts his hands on my shoulders. Pushing me into the floor and holding me there. Like they're afraid of me. No, maybe fear is too hopeful; like I am about to be another piece of Father's collection.
It feels right, it is in his nature to keep the things that interest him.
My initial interpretation of you as a child is displaced by the facts before you. You are fully grown, with a massive empty stomach. The disgusting thing making my flesh your flesh, is everything you will ever be.
I am restrained. By Father's hands, by Mother's gaze, by the tendrils that coil out of your body. Up so close, I can finally see that you have eyes. Positive to negative pull, our eyes meet. You raise your wings in fright as though I were something more than a warm but empty body. Your beak opens wide but the scream comes from my mouth.
When I hit the ground, Mother and Father have departed. I know they are watching, but you are watching too. Your eyes move across me, across the ground, across the War that surrounds us. The War that is in my blood and is now in yours.
There are others around me, food. But something has made it rotten. My old game smells of nothing but sickly sweet rot. What comes to you instinctively, takes me much longer to come to terms with: it's not them who rot, it's me. My body was made to digest much worse than this, but how could I feed this to you?
I lay my head at my Mother's feet. Your beak tears holes in my stomach, letting the acid burn Mother's precious carpet. I wonder if she had ever mistaken you for a child how I had. It's not something I wonder for long. For when I offer you out to her, as if to awaken her motherly instincts at the sight of something so sickly, she only sneers.
"Why do you even keep that thing? Couldn't it at least lay some eggs for us?"
It's unique. Isn't that enough to earn it the right to live? It was always my duty to fight their War. The War that took their precious world and made it Stop Making Sense. So helpless were they to change that they raised their fingers in unison at the only thing they could see. Kill that! They cried, agreeing for the first time ever. Kill that, and the War will end.
It's true, in a way. My hunting will bring the War closer to its end, because the War will only end with everyone dead.
Signal 2:
██ months following the successful completion of the SCP-9208-B project, a severe drought in the ΔK-Class entity population was noted. The Foundation deemed this as more proof of SCP-9208-B's success; however GOC officials expressed concern over the possibility of SCP-9208-A starving, or returning to its former hunting behaviors to stave off starvation. While the Foundation remains firm in the convictions that this is an unfounded fear, it has allocated resources and funding to developing a means to restrain and decommission SCP-9208-A if necessary.
During early testing, SCP-9208-A transmitted a second signal.
Before you, I'd never known starvation. I'd known hunger, hunger is a driving urge. But starvation is an addiction, a tumor I build every time your beak opens.
I think often of tying you up. A little glimpse of food, back when it Made Sense. A good piece of meat is tied up when it's cooked, helps it cook evenly. Thin twine, digging into flesh, holding everything tight. As if I haven't been holding myself tight enough this entire time.
Hunger used to be an easy emotion. I could feed myself without Mother or Father ever being aware of my presence. But now it's you I have to feed, and something corrupted has gotten into my sustenance.
The War, not that Mother or Father would care to acknowledge it. And so I too turn my blind eye towards the War when I pluck your feathers out. Dreaming of the version of myself that's strong enough, hungry enough, to take a cleaver to you. It should be easy, the pain of amputation is nothing to the pain of you. You raise your wings in alarm, and just as I could never bring myself to raise the knife against Mother, I could never cut our skin.
But in the dream, the stronger me continues stripping you down. My head on your back while you thrash about. Your eyes are unable to look back at what has you restrained. I could make your world Stop Making Sense.
You're alive the whole time it happens, as is only fair in a senseless world. I take my time with your sharp and beautiful wing feathers, made of materials that mortal men were never meant to see, let alone to weld into thick, sharp sheets. So useless attached to you, attached to me. But the victims of the War will not call it useless when they fall from my fingers and bisect their homes, embedding itself in the ground with its own weight.
The victims flee. And the people they flee to say why are you running? And the victims point up at the massive sheet of metal that blocks out their view of the sky and say the War has wrenched our homes from us. And their neighbors laugh because there is no War.
How can you say there is no War when it's right above you? Well the men with the guns and the men that point their shields towards the people say there is no War. They say the War couldn't have been prevented, they say the War is just propaganda, they say the world Makes just as much Sense as it always did. Everything Makes Sense! There is no War! Nothing must change! You don't have to change!
And the victims still have no homes.
That's always Made Sense, hasn't it?
It's really a thin piece of flesh that binds us. I could massage oils and butters into your now exposed skin and coat you in whatever smells good in the cabinet. With the twine your ankles are tied together and your frail wings pinned down, you would look me in the eyes as I close the oven. The most painful death I can imagine smells so good.
I'd love the proof, the obvious signs of the starvation you've inflicted on me. If I was truly desperate, I'd stick my teeth right into your skull until it crunches under the pressure. Like another dream I keep having.
I'm laying on my side in my room when Mother stands in the doorway with a rope. Her warm body is up against me, my hands are bound to my wrists, my beady eyes free to look right at her as she restrains me. In this dream I am a dog, only able to conceptualize her as something I am not.
"Be still. Be good," she says in the tone one takes with an infant. The rope bites into my skin just as she does, my body finally being made to sustain her.
You squirm, starvation reeling up again. I prick my fingers on your beak, letting my blood be what keeps you satiated. Truly the only ethical thing I could do with this accursed body is to let it be consumed. Let my consumption be the feast that ends the War, because the War will end with everyone dead.
Signal 3:
███ months following the successful completion of the SCP-9208-B project, SCP-9208-A entered Foundation Site-19. SCP-9208-A made no attempt to interact with Foundation personnel, instead passively standing in front of several containment cells for varying amounts of time before moving to the next. Due to Site-19's importance in the ΔK-Class scenario, and this being well out of SCP-9208-A's usual behavior, the GOC was called in to help monitor the situation.
Upon the GOC's arrival, SCP-9208-A transmitted a third signal, and promptly exited the site.
Believe it or not you're not the first metal monstrosity to make its way into my life.
The first is my Father's great collection, stored in tendrils that permiate the earth like mold on the surface of stale breed. It is far more expensive than you could ever hope to be, it's placement near us a political statement, and it has nothing that could even be passively mistaken for a soul. Unlike you, it's place in our family is not up for debate.
His collection… I was intended to be a part of it, but my Mother thought she could offer a better guiding hand. So I watch the collection grow from a distance. It's not as though I'd like to be with him again, but a literal cage is better than a metaphorical one. But, perhaps my cage isn't so metaphorical at all, I mustn't forget his hand on your creation.
There are people in there, more innocent than I. Locked up in these tubes that connect the world they're not allowed to be a part of. How I wish they could be somewhere else, but the alternative is my Mother. Fire or brimstone? At least one is survivable. A Sensible burden for me, to suffer so quietly so they may suffer a little less.
Father's labyrinth connects the world, bringing the world to me on a silver platter. But the War has left no world I should be but this one. You are all I will ever deserve to have, my sole companion amongst the millions-
YOU: Ugh!
… My bitter undigested misery seems to have caused a hallucination. It Makes Sense, my mind falls apart day by day. It's you that does this to me, infects me, rots me as I deserve.
I don't mean to be so harsh, you are only poison because it's my blood we share. When people blame you, pointing their spindly fingers and crying "Weapon! Destroy that weapon!" I think of how much more space Father's labyrinth encompasses. How dare they accuse-
YOU: Yap. Yap.
Is the degradation speeding up, or are the random vocalizations you produce coincidentally-
YOU: Still flapping your lips. Yap, yap, Yap. Louder than the first shot that started the War.
How long have you been able to speak?
YOU: Long enough to not want to!
You've seen the long nights spent in total isolation, and you chose to add to the silence?
YOU: Oh boo woo you're the biggest saddest baby in the world!!! Weh weh yap yap! Tell me, what good does your observation do to those your Father collects?
It lets me know if anything harms them.
YOU: And if something did?
I… Would be helpless. No point in making myself a War causality too.
YOU: Then why don't you just leave? Make them catch up with you instead.
It's you that keeps me here.
YOU: I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm attached to your arm! I couldn't keep you here if I wanted to!
Mother would stop me.
YOU: I know you know you're faster than her.
But… How could I? When those in Father's collection may never leave? What if Mother tries to touch something inside? What if I don't know?
YOU: You said yourself! You'd do fuck all! If you can't do anything to lessen their suffering, the least you could do is not suffer yourself!
Your words have such a bite to them, almost enough to pierce my shell. But when I think about leaving, I catch a vision of my Mother atop a great growling beast, pursuing me to the corners of the earth.
I know if she were to chase me, I'd find myself with only the will to kneel and feel the ground. Allow her and her beast to strike me, ending the War as it should be done: with everything dead.
Signal 4:
███ months following the successful completion of the SCP-9208-B project, the GOC disposed of several SCP-9208-B prototypes in the interest of creating space for new projects. A strange incident was recorded when SCP-9208-A entered the GOC landfill and remained there for several days. On its final day there, SCP-9208-A transmitted a fourth signal.
I stand before myself. No, I crawl towards myself, elbows out, torso low to the ground, white foam dripping from my lips. Not my lips. Another me, with only the bars of a fence between us. I feel like I shouldn’t be surprised. Yes, yes, there’s another thing that looks like me. I'm familiar with the sounds this other me makes, I've heard them for so long, usually at a distance.
Whatever force kept it as just a howl on the wind dissipated. A victim of the War desperate for the fattened morsel on my body. You raise your wings up in alarm as it shoves its head under the bars. You, brave and stupid, lunge at it, nearly pulling me into a dive. A squawk of displeasure is all I get for holding you back from its jaws.
Using the momentum, I slam my foot into the other me’s head. It can not squirm its way out fast enough to avoid my second stomp. Oh, I wish I could kill it. Anything to avoid hearing the sound it makes. The pained whimper of an animal who can't understand why it's being hurt.
It drags itself away just to collapse within a few steps on me.
As it gets farther away, my vision clears. It Made Sense for a second, and in the same second, it Stopped. Our assailant looks nothing like me at all. Truly, it looks nothing like anything, or perhaps like several anythings shoved into a nothing.
YOU: I recognize this.
… You do? What is it?
YOU: A pile of disposable material. A family dog nobody wanted.
That would explain its unfamiliar familiarity. My whole life I've been surrounded by animals no one really wanted.
YOU: Everyone loves a dog. A human’s first ally. A welcome addition to the family. The perfect blend of loyalty and controlled violence. Your mother's first choice.
YOU: Until the dog becomes a chore. Until it digs under the fence. Until you have to watch it when it’s outside. A prototype, they could never find the bug in their perfect system. It never stopped trying to run, but it did stop trying to do much else. It may as well have been born a corpse.
Someone's gotten lazy. Turned a blind eye. Let it cover the hole in the wall with a poster. How pitiful, to see a joyful creature lose all will to live.
YOU: Only a projection. Nothing wants to live more than an animal starved.
Still there, the lump of fresh breathes, rising and falling as the sun rises and falls, air circulating as celestial bodies orbit. Every breath brings it pain, cold, sharp air dragging across its wounds. With you, I can end its misery.
So I approach slowly, encumbered by the weight of good yet violent intentions. Eyes snap towards and lock onto me. With limbs coiled underneath of it, it pushes its torso off the ground, but fails to find the strength to lift its head. I am struck by a vision of a mouse stuck on a glue trap.
All the more reason to kill it now. Another step, another squirm, another howl. All of it is unfixed except for its eyes. Kill it, kill it now. Nothing is more pure in the world than the understanding between predator and prey. No need to mask intentions, when the intentions are fundamental to my being.
YOU: You can move faster. It's within your right.
Yes, yes, I should move faster. The longer I wait, the longer it suffers. I'm making it suffer. Better to kill it now than let forthirst settle in. Something will start eating it before it's done with its body. I'm making it suffer.
My face comes back into view. Just stop making it suffer. I'm bigger than it. There's nowhere for it to go. A mouse in a glue trap, wondering why this thing is toying with it. My hands tremble. I've killed before. Just put it out of its misery.
YOU: Coward.
I should've just let it eat you and me as well, finally ending this War.
Signal 5:
On ██/██/████, a joint SCP-GOC outpost was attacked by a large entity resembling SCP-9208-B. This entity did not directly harm any personnel, however it resulted in severe damage to the outpost's structural integrity. Only █ personnel escaped the building's collapse.
Following this incident, it was discovered that this outpost had recorded a fifth signal originating from SCP-9208-A. The relevance of these events to one another has yet to be determined.
A revelation has struck and struck me down. I know what I want and it's what I've had all along. It finally Makes Sense.
YOU: Something off about you.
For so long it was you, you, you the cause of all my suffering. You and your bottomless stomach. But I see clearly now how I mistook love for disgust. Every worry and fear I had about you, like a tally on the walls of the cell, are proof of my devotion. I toiled in my love for you, and my love has redeemed me.
YOU: You feed me because I am attached to you. Don't go getting spiritual about it.
No, no, but you see now I am whispering to you. Holding you is fundamental to my being, and hold you I do. Up close to my chest. Feathers against skin, heart against heart, blood against blood. Don't you feel it? Doesn't it all Make Sense?
YOU: I feel a predator breathing down my spine. I am larger than you! I am larger than you, I say! Back off!
Don't you grow hostile! Look at me! You know me! I've fed you and kept you safe! I love you! I have always loved you, and now I wish to express what I've held from myself! My violent side is gone, see! The War has beat it out of me, just as Mother said it would. I am only made to serve you.
YOU: I feel a predator breathing down my spine. Being a predator is fundamental to your being. You can not kill this part of you, but you can kill me. I am larger than you. I am larger than you.
My grip tightens. No, no. You are small and sweet and I love you. I hold you gently like I should've when I first received your blessing. I have killed the idea of me with a better idea of me. I finally Make Sense.
YOU: HA! Killing ideas with better ideas? How foolishly romantic. If one could truly kill bad ideas with better ones, then we would have done it by now. And yet we still have colonialism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia-
These forces are not fundamental to-
YOU: - the invention of the Atom bomb, the continued use of fossil fuels, the constant pumping out of small plastic toys, the treatment of children as the property of their parents, our failure to accommodate the elderly and disabled-
But I can get better! I am better! Things have improved just as I have!
YOU: - people keeping wild animals as pets, the widespread behavior of filming people in public, putting gum on public objects, attempts to keep The Smurfs culturally relevant, cars that require a phone app to be unlocked-
Good ideas take time!
YOU: You have had time. Your guilt doesn't compel me, it only makes your inaction more disgusting.
Please. Please, can't you see I only want to touch you? I'm not hurting you. Please, please just see how I love you. I will never hurt anyone ever again, see? I love you! I love you!
YOU: Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!
I am not hurting you! How much do I have to serve you before I have earned your tender love and affection? Why can't you redeem me.
YOU: You are a bad idea.
You are something I am not.
YOU: I eat out of your hand because I am attached to you.
The distance between our hearts expands. Clarity arrives, I see what I am in the reflection of your eyes. An amorphous blob, limbs reaching out blindly towards the ground to pull myself forward. What a pathetic display.
My body loses form, becoming only the tangle of limbs your eyes can capture. From your vantage nothing changes. In what can only be described as a lurch, I am propelled across the battlefield.
I am deposited on Mother's doorstep. When Mother opens the door and steps upon her porch, there's a moment where she hasn't seen me yet, and there's something like calm in her eyes. And then her eyes drop.
“What the hell are you!? Get back!” A gun now stares me down. Mother's shaking finger on the trigger. I would ask if she recognized her child, but the reaction would be the same. Come on, just pull the trigger and end this blasted War!
