Author: Intercedent
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FALLOUT: The United States Federal Government and the SCP Foundation go to war.
Item #: SCP-9330
Object Class: Keter
Special Containment Procedures:
Site-███ industrial reservoir, primary drainage channel.
SCP-9330 is currently suspended in Lower Maintenance Subpassage 7X-IVB. A five-hundred meter WHITE zone has been established around the corridor and surrounding passageways. Hallways, ventilation shafts, and pipework connecting to subpassage 7X-IVB have been destroyed and sealed as necessary, with the exception of the Primary Access Route. Portions of Site-███ falling within this zone are considered lost. Retrieval of documentation and personnel missing within the zone at the time of containment is ongoing.
Redundant surveillance systems are to be installed and maintained within subpassage 7X-IVB, monitored on a continuous basis by the attendant containment liaison. Deviations in the structural integrity of subpassage 7X-IVB or in the surveillance system itself are to be reported to the attendant HMCL supervisor. Changes in the flow rate, physical appearance, or composition of SCP-9330 and SCP-9330-1 are to be reported to Site Director Valdez under flag PRIORITY ORPHEON GREEN.
Bimonthly, an authorized maintenance patrol will enter the WHITE zone to conduct necessary mechanical and structural maintenance. Equipment that has come into contact with the interior of the WHITE zone is to be scuttled after exfiltration. All other entry into the WHITE zone is forbidden barring extraordinary authorization per ADMIN-HCV-2029-9330.
HMCL supervisors are encouraged to refer to the appended video file for an overview of conditions inside of the WHITE zone and general hazard mitigation practices.
Loading 9330-MAINPAT47.vid…
The acetylene torch smokes in your hand, spitting hatefully. Sparks sputter and die, drowned by the wet, clawed into splinters by the damp. Your neck itches, throbbing beneath the duct-tape that seals your fume hood flush against your coveralls. Aching breaths hiss fitful and fast through the filter.
It’s always wet here. Always soaking. Rotting plaster and rust. The muck that settles to the bottom of turbid, waist-high tide-locked pools of scum. Oily and soft and sharp with bits of broken stone and shell. The cold, from your balls to your chin, the cold.
At the tips of your fingers when you make the ascent, feeling your gut writhe and boil. Sliding down the back of your neck when you pull off the undersuit in the showers, sticky and slick. Beneath your fingernails, between your toes. It gets in bed with you and wakes you in the morning. Your breath curdles in the morning mist like spoiled milk.
Tomorrow you’ll scrape muddy brown stains in streaking arcs across your dinky steel mirror and wipe your face until it bleeds. You’ve been told it does little for the stench.
The Foundation is to maintain the continued circulation of freshwater in the Danube river basin by any means necessary. In the event of cascading containment failure, the WHITE zone perimeter is to be expanded to ███████, ████████, adjusted for seasonal rainfall.
Foundation-wide recall and destruction of amnestics products has been implemented under FLAG WONDERLAND ZERO. Further action pending.
Description:
SCP-9330 is the corpse of Vladimír Smutný, formerly a practicing amnesthesiologist employed at Site-███. SCP-9330 displays an advanced degree of decomposition consistent with long-term water exposure. Although the nature of SCP-9330 renders precise observation difficult, no measurable progression in its state of decomposition has been observed since 2023-██-██ Samples of SCP-9330 have proven resistant to conventional putrefactive agents and solvents.
SCP-9330 continually extrudes a clear fluid chemically identical to unprocessed █████ from its orifices, extremities, and clothing at a rate of 0.56 L/s, hereafter designated SCP-9330-1. Samples of skin, muscle, cloth, and nylon demonstrate identical anomalous properties; laboratory analysis has evidenced that discrete samples of less than 1.77 * 10^-11 mg in mass continue to produce SCP-9330-1, albeit at a dramatically reduced rate of flow.
Humans contacting or ingesting SCP-9330-1 who subsequently come into significant physical or sensory contact with water have a chance1 of undergoing a ZODIAC EVENT.
A ZODIAC EVENT consists of spontaneous spatial displacement into SCP-9330-2.The mechanism for this displacement is unknown. Attempts to delay or negate this displacement utilizing external mechanisms have proven to be unilaterally unsuccessful.2
SCP-9330-2 is an extradimensional space centered on the Site-███ industrial reservoir. The interior of SCP-9330-2 presents as a large cavern system entirely filled with water. The topology of SCP-9330-2 is variable. To this date, all attempts at comprehensive mapping utilizing navigational data and topographic imagery collected by exploration teams have failed.
While egress from SCP-9330-2 is possible, its total area is unknown and potentially infinite.
Addendum: Compiled SCP-9330 Exploration Task Group After Action Reports
Date: 2030-██-██
ETG personnel manifest: D-349959-9330, attendant research team
Equipment manifest: One (1) standard Hazardous Environment Exclusion suit with attached air supply. One (1) Autonomous Baryometric Probe. One (1) Xyank-Stanford Reality Shunt Harness.
Summary: D-349959-9330 imbibed 1 liter SCP-9330-1 solution at 96% concentration. The subject was subsequently fully immersed in Lake █████. Prior to immersion, D-349959-9330 was fitted with a Xyank-Stanford Reality Shunt, designed to transport the subject back to baseline reality upon either cessation of life functions or 30 minutes of subjective time elapsing. ZODIAC EVENT commenced immediately upon full immersion.
Subject remainfested in baseline reality 10 seconds after conclusion of the ZODIAC EVENT due to postmortem Xyank-Stanford Reality Shunt activation. Autopsy concluded the cause of death was massive deep-tissue trauma due to extreme fluid pressure. Equipment heavily damaged, minimal data salvaged.
ETG-9330-2 AAR
Date: 2030-██-██
ETG personnel manifest: Beta-7 Juliana Valdez, Beta-7 Jayden Rodriguez, Beta-7 Kyle Reese, Beta-7 Victoria Timmons, Beta-7 George Chang, attendant research team
Equipment manifest: Five (5) Deep Ocean Hardened Exploration Chassis. Six (6) Xyank-Stanford Reality Shunt Harness. One (1) Sophont-class autonomous deep-sea navigation vehicle, SCPS Viola.
Summary: The task package consisted of MTF Beta-7 E Company, exploration squad 3, and SCPS Viola. Task force members were tethered to the SCPS Viola, which served as secondary oversight on operation of Xyank-Stanford Reality Shunts as well as general data collection and communications relay. After systems check, the task package fully submerged in Site-███ industrial resevoir. ZODIAC EVENT commenced for all task package members within 4 minutes of full immersion.
Task package remanifested two hours, thirty two minutes, and twenty seconds after the conclusion of the ZODIAC EVENT due to automated Xyank-Stanford Reality Shunt activation.
ETG-9330-2 AAR initial insertion.
Loading 9330-ETG2.vid…
Descend.
Control confirms ready-screen, condition delta green, clear for ignite.
Reactors burn coruscant bubbles into the midnight churn as the spin starts, the almighty cycle, the shuddering thrum that builds and boils and burns in your chest like a laugh. The mask interlock seals over your face. Plastic packets inserted antiseptic beneath your ribcage flow blue with kinetic gel. Hyperoxygenated blood runs cherry-lipstick red.
Dive.
The display floods crystalline. Your face is a wild mass of piping and metal and plastic tubes and your breath is engine fumes scattered across obsidian water. Outside the pressure builds, presses against carbon-fiber and titanium, impossibly heavy. Chambers flush, counterflood. By the time your boots hit the silty ground, you’ve reached equilibrium.
Drown.
The squeeze happens in an instant. The optics flash white, sizzling. Silt gives away to nothing. The gyroscopic compass nestled in your chest ticks in arrhythmic syncopy. Breathe, breathe, soothe your furnace-heart, breathe, breathe as down the rabbit hole you go, spinning like a shot.
Darkness upon darkness returns to the deep.
One two three four five headlamps flash into the abyssal black. Above, Viola shines like an orphan star. Radar sprints into the dim and sonar sings a sad soliloquy, call without response. The gyrocomp spins a gentle lie.
Up, the machine ticks, is behind you. Downwards, lies before.
Egress behind. Ingress below.
One two three four five the lonely lights sink into the night, tethers trailing behind like sundered bowels. One two three four five, ad maiora.
The water, you realize, is not clear. Flakes of milk-white film drift mercurially into the beam of your headlamp, casting shadow on shadow. There’s already a slick layer of slimy deposit forming at the edge of your visor’s exterior wipers. Periodically, Viola’s active sonar thrums through the dim, a bassy tremble that shakes the condensed gunk from top to bottom as it vibrates through your suit and down into your bones.
The depth meter spins in languid circles and the barometer fritzes sublime.
Nothing marks motion except for the steady, gentle sway of the tethers. Nothing marks direction except the gyrocomp’s polite fictions. Nothing marks progress at all. There is only the black, the hiss of static on the ready line, and the gnawing churn in your bowels.
Your body remembers descent. It’s ground into your bones, the turgid pulse of your hyperoxygenated blood, the touch of feathers crawling up from your stomach and into your throat, an interminable itch at the apex of thought.
We come into the world falling, screaming and freezing. Most leave the same way.
You fall for a long time.
Sediment collected from SCP-9330-2 primarily consists of a mixture of calcium carbonate, powdered shale, and decayed organic matter. Genetic evaluation is ongoing.
ETG-9330-3 AAR
Date: 2030-██-██
ETG personnel manifest: Beta-7 Jayden Rodriguez, Beta-7 Kyle Reese, Beta-7 Victoria Timmons, Beta-7 George Chang, attendant research team
Equipment manifest: Four (4) Deep Ocean Hardened Exploration Chassis. Five (5) Xyank-Stanford Reality Shunt Harness. One (1) Sophont-class autonomous deep-sea navigation vehicle, SCPS Viola.
Summary: Task package and entrance sequence proceeded as previous. ZODIAC EVENT commenced for all task package members within 1 minute and thirty seconds of full immersion. Mission aborted three hours, forty two minutes, and six seconds after conclusion of ZODIAC EVENT due to manual activation of Xyank-Scranton Reality Shunts.
Loading 9330-ETG3.vid…
Descend.
Dive.
Drown.
You feel it before Viola chimes warning into the corner of your eye, before Timmons barks a static report into the squadnet on all hands, before your headlamps flicker on one by one as a circle of shivering candles.
The cone of your headlamp fuzzes with marine snow, a blizzard of filth. The murky water swirls as one, pale sediment dancing windwards. The dark writhes and pulls.
There is a current. It wasn’t there before.
You stay silent as the squad confers, assenting or dissenting with spare twitches of the suit’s digitigrade controls. The debate is perfunctory, an idiot dance.
There’s really only one way these things ever go.
The gyrocomp spins another gentle lie.
Up, the machine ticks, is against the current. Downwards is the pull.
Egress behind. Ingress below.
Viola, that orphan star, flickers uneasily. Here, the sediment coalesces into thick strata, filaments like galactic clouds drifting quiet through dead space. Your faceplate fogs the color of cobwebs and curdled milk, visibility gone to nil. The wiper squeaks along in steady futility.
In the fish-bowl refraction of your faceplate you see the haggard guise of a familiar corpse.
Egress behind. Ingress below.
When you were a boy you sat on the hot earth beneath the temple at the center of your parent’s hometown. Dark stunted siheyuan clustered in stolid silence with wet timber stacked against their crumbling walls like the corded baskets bending the backs of the petitioners come all around to pray.
The monks called out the sutra with foreheads pressed seamless against the floor and as they rose with dust clinging to leather-wrapped bones you fancied the movement of carrion beetles wriggling beneath skin, through dead chasms and eyeless caverns. Nothing looked back.
Another vaporous fold elapses beneath your drifting boots and then the debris is gone, your faceplate clear.
You crane your head to follow the trail of your tether, up to where it disappears from the cone of your headlamp, up into the overhead plume, into the cloud of filth as it glimmers, glows, and then blazes with pale light.
Viola descends from the murk, ethereal.
The current is stronger here, purposeful. The squad hangs in place, thrusters straining. Nothing on the net except ragged breathing.
At once, all at once, you look down.
The perfect dark stretches glass-flat beneath your boots. It’s like ink splashed into your eyes, so sudden the dissolution, so absolute again the abyss. Your fingers tighten in their gauntlets.
You feel it before Viola chimes into your earpiece, before the sediment pours as a great river of rot downwards, with incredible force, downwards and downwards into the black, rattling your tethers, subsuming Viola, roaring in a great plume down, down, down, you feel it before your turbines short and the descent turns into a fall, you feel it before Timmons barks panic into the squadnet and one by one the tin men are yanked back into the toybox.
You are standing above a hole.
Image reconstructed from SCPS Viola onboard LIDAR array.
ETG-9330-4 AAR
Date: 2030-██-██
ETG personnel manifest: Beta-7 Jayden Rodriguez, Beta-7 Kyle Reese, Beta-7 Victoria Timmons, attendant research team
Equipment manifest: Three (3) Deep Ocean Hardened Exploration Chassis. Four (4) Xyank-Stanford Reality Shunt Harness. One (1) Sophont-class autonomous deep-sea navigation vehicle, SCPS Viola.
Summary: Task package and entrance sequence proceeded as previous. ZODIAC EVENT commenced for all task package members during secondary systems check, mid-immersion. Beta-7 Reese remanifested in baseline reality thirty-three seconds following conclusion of ZODIAC EVENT due to postmortem Xyank-Scranton reality shunt activation. Forensic analysis ongoing.
SCPS Viola remanifested twenty five hours, thirty three minutes, and forty seven seconds after conclusion of ZODIAC EVENT due to automated activation of Xyank-Scranton reality shunt. Beta-7 Rodriguez and Beta-7 Timmons MIA. Analysis of Viola onboard records ongoing.
You are standing at the edge of a hole.
Rodriguez is beside you, Viola above.
Reese is dead.
The squeeze came while he was standing half-submerged in the gray water off the dockside ramp, still going through the pre-mission checklist in that anal, droning way of his, calibrating hydraulics and triple-checking reactor readings, all buttoned up but for his helmet and gorget. Red mist in the water, now.
Slime oozes above your knees, the same rancid muck drifting above like invisible nebulae, a spreading undersky the color of running pus. Periodically, great plumes of the stuff spiral down, caught in the same currents that bore your descent, swirling into the pit in a cloud a hundred stories high. Exhalation, inhalation, breathe in time.
And around, all around the edges, the dead come to pray.
You thumb the emergency release. The tether drops away, red light blinking on your HUD. Rodriguez does the same. You move closer, closer, at the very precipice of the drop. Small rivulets of silt continuously erode, flowing into the deepest dark like waterfalls.
There’s really only one way these things ever go.
One after the other, you step off the edge.
You drift downwards, gaze held up to Viola's dimming embers. Your tether trails above, a severed umbilical.
Rodriguez faces you, silhouette haloed. His legs are crossed as he descends. His breathing on the squadnet is steady, even.
You watch him raise his hands to his helmet interlock. You watch him twist.
His headlamp vanishes. The squadnet is silent.
You fall for a long time.
Image reconstructed from SCPS Viola onboard LIDAR array. █████ ██ ██ ████████ ███.
Corpses carpet the bottom of the world so thick their entangled limbs hang over quiet waters like mangrove roots. From their eyes and mouths dissolution seeps, the Karanodaka, the primordial undersea from which all rivers flow.
They, the unnumbered. They, the transcendent. They, the sacrosanct dead.
Hollow yourself, penitent. Digest well. Mouth the sutra from throats long empty. Reach gauntleted hands for the seal at the back of your helmet. Unclasp it.
It is a black worm wriggling primeval beneath the skin of thought. Recalcitrance.
It is a dream of falling. Remittance.
It is a light in the hole at the floor of eternity.
██ ██ ██ ███.
Image reconstructed from SCPS Viola onboard LIDAR array. Cognitohazardous context removed.
Addendum: Strategic Containment Concerns
Long-term observation demonstrates that the range of actions potentially causative of ZODIAC EVENTS increases over time according to an as-of-yet undefined model of semantic decay. See attachment for aggregate observational timeline.
Timeline
Day 1-30: Full ingress into bodies of natural water.
Day 30-66: Full bodily immersion in water, regardless of origin. Partial ingress into bodies of natural water.
Day 66-155: Partial immersion in water, regardless of origin. Close physical proximity with river currents.
Day 155-██: Partial immersion in water, regardless of origin. Physical proximity with bodies of natural water. Auditory and visual contact with bodies of natural water.
Day ██-███: Partial immersion in water, regardless of origin. Auditory proximity to running water, regardless of origin. Exposure to rainfall.
Day ███-███: Oral consumption of water. Proximity to stagnant water, regardless of origin. Remembering snowfall. Dreaming a dream of spring.
Day ███-████: Unknown. Presumably irrelevant.
Dilution of SCP-9330-1 has proven successful at reducing the probability of ZODIAC EVENTS occurring post-contact, although not the true range of sensory triggers. Based on current estimates, minimum necessary dilution is █ liters SCP-9330-1 per ███████ liters water to reduce ZODIAC EVENT occurrence to tolerable rates3 within the general population.
Strategic containment initiatives are primarily focused on damage mitigation.
Bratislava, Slovakia, 0745 UTC, 2033-██-██.
