SCP-9429

SCP-9429 by Ampyrsand

Store. Catalogue. Preserve.

Though displayed as a valid SCP Object index on the SCiPNet Database, the contents of this file appear to be missing. Reports have tagged it as vacant, or otherwise absent of regular (i.e. substantive, comprehensible) documentation. It could represent a database error, or a file rendered anomalously void of information.

— Maria Jones, Director, RAISA

ITEM: SCP-9429	LEVEL 3/9429
CLASS: safe	confidential

DISRUPTION CLASS: blind

Assigned Facility

Assigned Department

Research Head

Assigned Task Force

Site-41
Dir. Marion Wheeler

Antimemetics Division
Dir. Marion Wheeler

Dir. Marion Wheeler

None

Rocky_Mountain_N.P.%2C_panor%C3%A1micas_%281997%29_03.jpg

SCP-9429. Subject will be ignored without proper mnestic treatment.

Special Containment Procedures: Physical containment of SCP-9429 is impractical due to its size, and unnecessary due to its antimemetic effect. A secure perimeter has been established around the structure by the staff of Site-41, where exploration and study ofthe object can be safely conducted. Additional measures to secure the object from public knowledge have been deemed unnecessary due to the aforementioned self-concealing anomalous property.

To prevent the expiration of memories regarding SCP-9429 impeding research, several miniature outposts and base camps equipped with rudimentary scientific equipment have been established across the structure's major plateaus so as to allow explorers to conduct study on details they observe while traversing it without leaving its premises.

Description: SCP-9429 is a colossal (91-by-91-by-147-meter) basalt cuboid structure, presumably man-made in origin, situated in the forests of Lake County, Colorado, on the outskirts of Antimemetics R&C Site-41. The object is shaped to impressive geometric precision even by the standards of modern tools, indicating a sophisticated and deliberate construction. It superficially resembles a monolith or monument and features a variety of carved grooves, stairways, ramps, alcoves, "checkpoints", and other features across its surface usable to scale the object on-foot, seemingly implying the intention of continued occupation or visitation.

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+ Show Rev. 034 (7/12/1977)

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ITEM: SCP-9429	LEVEL 2/9429
CLASS: safe	restricted

DISRUPTION CLASS: blind

Assigned Facility

Assigned Department

Research Head

Assigned Task Force

Provisional Area-41
Dir. J.C. Abermeier

Antimemetics Division
Dir. Lyn P. Marness

None

SCP-9429. Subject will be ignored without proper mnestic treatment.

Special Containment Procedures: Physical containment of SCP-9429 is impractical due to its size, and unnecessary due to its anomalous perceptive effect. A secure perimeter has been established around the structure by the staff of Provisional Area-41, where exploration and study of the object can be safely conducted. Additional measures to secure the object from public knowledge have been deemed unnecessary due to the aforementioned self-concealing anomalous property.

Research into the nature and origins of SCP-9429 and the significance of the possible records therein is ongoing. The Antimemetics Division has partnered with the Department of Archaeology and Historical Research Team CLIO-2 to assemble a working record of SCP-9429's history and the civilization believed to have constructed it. To prevent the expiration of memories regarding SCP-9429 impeding research, several miniature outposts and base camps equipped with rudimentary scientific equipment have been established across the structure's major plateaus so as to allow explorers to conduct study on details they observe while traversing it without leaving its premises.

Description: SCP-9429 is a colossal (91-by-91-by-147-meter) basalt cuboid structure, presumably man-made in origin, situated in the forests of Lake County, Colorado, on the outskirts of Provisional Area-41. The object is shaped to impressive geometric precision even by the standards of modern tools, indicating a sophisticated and deliberate construction. It superficially resembles a monolith or monument and features a variety of carved grooves, stairways, ramps, alcoves, "checkpoints", and other features across its surface usable to scale the object on-foot, seemingly implying the intention of continued occupation or visitation.

Basic air-exposure and psychometric dating estimates the age of SCP-9429 to be around 120,000 years. The basalt out of which the object is constructed is older still, dating to at least 13 million years ago, and does not occur indigenously in the area¹. The sheer size of SCP-9429 as a single piece of stone would make its transport across large distances impossible by all known mundane means, its estimated weight clocking in excess of 3.6 million tonnes.

SCP-9429 possesses a faint-to-moderate antimemetic effect which prevents it from being noticed by conventional observation in most cases. Those in the vicinity of the object, who would otherwise be able to see it clearly in the distance thanks to its massive size, find themselves unable to consciously witness its physical presence or acknowledge its existence. The object itself is rendered either literally invisible or simply universally ignored without the use of a mnestic regimen, and its environmental impacts² are likewise either not seen or impossible to take conscious note of without the aid of such drugs. SCP-9429 can therefore only be noticed under normal cognitive circumstances by undeniable physical interactions (i.e. inadvertently colliding with the object while walking through the forest) — and even these experiences are usually swiftly forgotten, ignored, or rationalized away and not acknowledged or questioned thanks to the antimemetic concealment surrounding the object. SCP-9429 is therefore generally ignored by the staff of Area-41, who neglect to notice the object except while on their mnestic regimens.

The secondary anomalous property of SCP-9429 is a significantly stronger antimemetic effect which prevents the adhesion of encounters with the object to long-term memory once the observer leaves a certain radius of effect around it³. Most attempts to explore the structure, even under the effect of mnestic drugs, swiftly begin to fade from memory after leaving its premises. Although the general existence of the object is usually remembered, finer details, such as the precise path used to navigate SCP-9429, "leak" precipitously from recall and will become mentally inaccessible. Even those personnel who conduct prolonged and in-depth explorations of SCP-9429 under intense mnestic regimen and make intricate mental observations tend to struggle greatly to remember the details of their visit once they return to a Foundation base outside the proximity of SCP-9429 and the effect of their mnestic dosage expires. Written notes taken during a visit to SCP-9429 can likewise become difficult to comprehend afterward, although the effect is generally less potent on written records about the structure taken while under mnestic effect than memories or photographs of it, making these notes of paramount importance for the deduction of any persistent discoveries about the object to be possible.

Throughout their various explorations of SCP-9429, Antimemetics Division personnel have identified a number of features on the object believed to be inscriptions and other forms of historical and memorial records. For more information, please consult the documentation for Project OBSCURUM.

Discovery: SCP-9429 was one of the first anomalies identified by the Foundation Antimemetics Division, discovered in February of 1977 during the construction of Provisional Area-41 when Dir. Lyn Marness and Dr. Alan Stover, under the influence of mnestic medication to transport an unrelated antimemetic anomaly from Site-167 to the new facility, noted the unknown object on the horizon. The discovery of SCP-9429 sparked the launch of the facility’s inaugural Project OBSCURUM (1977-Present) geared toward researching the structure’s nature and origins.

+ Show Rev. 057 (10/28/1978) (Excerpted)

+ Show excerpted selections from Project OBSCURUM

- Hide excerpted selections from Project OBSCURUM

Journal of Rsr. B. Hughes, 4/8/1977

Arrived at the new Site in Colorado this morning. It's a real work-in-progress: a few mostly-finished wings — mostly still temporary tents, for now — and a ton of construction vehicles and equipment. Only connected to civilization by the dirt road we drove here on. Forest extends for miles in all directions; the place is more or less impenetrable.

Division leadership assigned me to something invisible, so I've got all the mnestics I need in the back of the truck. Rumor among the others on this assignment with me says it was the Director's personal orders.

No clue why I was among his first choices. Christ's sake, I'm still practically brand new here. I guess they were that impressed by my enclosure for the memory-eating termites last quarter…

That said, I am one of the first members of a nascent division. That might mean some status, if our discoveries amount to anything — but it mostly means a lot to prove. Any success any of us deliver is proof to O5, and we better start delivering, because we might be testing their patience if we don't. Boss says they've been eerily generous with grants, beyond anything he could have anticipated. High expectations of us. But expecting what? Letting this brand new discipline take over Site-167 and get to building a secondary HQ here in the woods right away, after just getting lucky discovering a handful of anomalies…

What do they know that we don't?

Journal of Rsr. B. Hughes, 4/10/1977

This is unbelievable.

To clarify: I'm writing from a cubby carved into the side of a ginormous cuboid pillar of basalt, a hundred feet above the ground. A single stone, weighing multiple million tons, somehow transported out into the forest against all the known limits of physics. That, of course, is not the crazy part.

Despite this tower being over a third the height of the Empire State Building, and certainly the toughest hike I've ever been on, it's more or less totally invisible to the naked eye. Not concealed by some magical effect, mind you. Not wearing an invisibility cloak. No — unaided by mnestic drugs, we simply don't bother to notice it. "Antimemetic" is a damned understatement — the largest such anomaly we've ever seen by a mile.

In the event someone ever manages to uncover my journal, some distant day in the future, I think it prudent to mention here that the great Bart Hughes was no rock climber. Rather, I'm taking the treaded path. SCP-9429 is carved, all the way up and down, with grooves, stairs, alcoves, and other features. In other words, it's clearly meant to be climbed. Clearly built. Deliberately, by someone, some time ago. The Division sent me here, with whatever competency I have apparently shown for containment construction, to figure out exactly how this was accomplished: antimemetic architecture. Was it an external anomalous phenomenon? A product of illusory geometries? Of natural materials? Physical or chemical reactions? Unknown technology?

This is my first day, probably of many which will be dedicated to that very question, and I am proud to say that I have no clue.

Research Notes of Rsr. B. Hughes (Excerpts), 4/10/1977

"Surface is uniformly covered in engraved vertical rectangles, each around 12.5 by 5 centimeters in dimension … each is a slight recess into the body of the main monolith, its depth not exceeding one half of a centimeter, rougher in texture and lighter in coloration than the pitch-black, polished, smooth, and almost shiny exterior of the monolith, as if a chisel was used. They are equally sized and spaced, the exaction of shape and placement indicating the use of preicse tools. It is impressive even by modern standards … the sheer commitment of time and industry which would have been required to manually replicate the pattern across the entire surface of the monolith … by SCP-9429's size alone, if they are indeed uniform, there could very well be in excess of a hundred million such engravings."

Journal of Rsr. B. Hughes, 4/11/1977

Spent most of today conducting most of the on-the-spot assessments in the manual. One of Antimemetics' first orders of business was to establish a set of standard tests for the memetic potency or aversity of objects, used to identify common threads based on composition, form, anomalous nature, and so on. We wanted to know which (in some combination) may produce the emergent property of being antimemetic to human senses. I've run some of the basic visual and physical tests; the "rules of thumb". And, in short, there's nothing about the material or architecture of SCP-9429 which would suggest the monolith is inscrutable in itself, by nature of its construction.

There's hardly a combination of antimemetic anomalies we know of that could have deliberately created an effect so massive and so precisely targeted. Could the whole place have been turned averse to perception by a single event? Seems hard to imagine something capable of that…

I've set up camp in an alcove. The architecture hardly accommodates. Turns out this place isn't exactly the most comfortable place for a sleeping bag, if you can believe it. Will resume the climb tomorrow.

Research Notes of Rsr. B. Hughes (Excerpts), 4/12/1977

"Noted, in the ascent of the monolith, a single rectangular space of smooth basalt absent of the smaller rectangular indentations uniformly present across the object's surface otherwise. The unengraved slot is 90 by 35 centimeters. It is, judging by the view, at an estimated height of 50-55 meters from the surface, occupying a plateau at the end of a long upward groove which passes through and around the exterior of the monolith. Have set up basic instruments and examined the blank spot … it bears no obvious anomalous material qualities."

Contd. (4/13/1977)

"Have discovered another 'blind spot' at approximately 80 meters from the ground. Is identical in size to the first such instance, save for the fact that it occupies the wall of the monolith rather than the floor of an inbuilt recess … many such regions were likely deliberately planned for in the construction of SCP-9429."

Document 9429-Clark Excerpt

On 22 April 1977, Antimemetics Division director Lyn Marness requested the consultation of the Department of Archaeology on Project OBSCURUM. Personnel were transferred to the site of SCP-9429 near Provisional Area-41. After studying the object, they were equipped with mnestics and tasked, alongside Historical Research Team and Antimemetics Division assets, to search for similar ruins across the western United States so as to ascertain whether SCP-9429 belonged to an identifiable prehistoric culture to which other artifacts could be attributed.

On 28 June 1977, Foundation archaeologists in Historical Research Team CLIO-2, placed under the guidance of an Antimemetics Division specialist through the purview of Project OBSCURUM, discovered a series of scattered clusters of basalt ruins in White River National Forest whilst under the influence of mnestic drugs. Notable findings included the remains of structures, foundations buried intact several layers of earth beneath the ground, resembling brick towers or apartments.

Ruins in White River National Forest. Subject will be ignored without proper mnestic treatment.

The day after leaving the camp site of their initial discovery, members of the CLIO-2 squad noted that their memories of the experience were murky and non-specific, and that most research notes had become illegible. They returned to the site and confirmed that, without the aid of mnestics, the ruins could not be found.

Journal of Rsr. B. Hughes, 7/1/1977

Yesterday I went up to Eagle County to check out some ruins the CLIOs had been excavating, claiming links to 9429. I'm on the ride back now, in the back of the truck. I can say two things:

My memory of the trip has already gone blurry, and is blurring still.
To my future self, when you read this: if the memory continues to blur, and you recall still less of what I am about to recount than I do now, or find that parts of this entry have become illegible, that is a very positive sign.

The place was all basalt brick. Only the foundations were left, but there were easily enough buildings for a small town. They looked like… little apartment complexes? Blocky; some carved into hills survived better, and we saw they were stacked on each other, I think. They reminded me of the pueblos I saw going down to New Mexico as a kid. Very utilitarian. Except one — I can't remember exactly what it was except that it maybe looked like a temple or a courtyard area. More of an open forum situation. Some columns remained, all basalt, all perfect rectangular and hexagonal prisms.

We saw more. Did more. We walked across the ruined foundations; they showed me inside of the ones up in the hill. They even showed me specific artifacts, I think… but now it's all faded; lost.

Visible on mnestics, vagueified afterwards. Partially forgotten until you visit the site again…

I don't need to tell my future self what those symptoms remind me of. Thank God the antimemetic effect isn't that strong.

Document 9429-Clark Timeline (Abbreviated)

9 August 1977: Settlements carved into cave walls are found in Bridger–Teton National Forest. On subsequent visits by non-mnesticized teams, all apparently man-made modifications to the cave system and all discovered artifacts appear to have vanished.

30 August 1977: Tunnels in canyon walls and stone structures reminiscent of apartment blocks are spotted in the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area. They are confirmed to be antimemetic.

6 October 1977: A basalt obelisk is found in Elko, Nevada. As excavation continues, the foundations of various brick structures are uncovered in the layers of earth below. The site is identified as a ruined town. All ruins are antimemetic.

Journal of Rsr. B. Hughes, 9/8/1977

With little room for reasonable doubt, there are now enough ruins to identify the monument-builders as a discrete culture.

The Division and our friends at Archaeology have found five sites of varying sizes and significances — and counting! — across the frontier, and all of them share the same few characteristics with SCP-9429. They're pretty telling ones, at that. The geometric precision. The use of basalt as a primary material. The same masonry techniques. The brooding, eerily minimal, pseudo-brutalist architecture.

And of course, most importantly, they're all at least slightly antimemetic. Other artifacts are even antimemetic in almost exactly the same way the monolith is — the bigger structures certainly are, at least. It seems the theory that whoever built 9429 didn't deliberately or specifically expunge it from memory was the right call: everything they left behind has the same effect. In the report, Jansen called them Oblitus — "having been forgotten". After all, it looks like the whole essence of whoever they were is buried in the fugue. That, of course, layers on some more evidence… if you buy into the idea that an entire material culture can somehow become uniformly memetically irradiated.

I don't see one way in the world something like that could happen. But there's a lot in the world that we can't see — I would know. That's why, in the field of antimemetics, the following is often more compelling a reason:

I have no reason to believe it absolutely couldn't happen either.

Journal of Rsr. B. Hughes, 10/29/1977

I've been wondering about the monument-builders' language.

We've passively assumed that since the ruins contain no material with writing, the Oblitus didn't have a writing system. But that seems wrong: we're talking about an anomalous culture that could move mountains around. Even if they had some anomalous psychic mode of communication, there's no way they never thought of some way to record things for posterity.

I know a small sample size doesn't mean much. But all the Oblitus remnants we've thusfar found, no matter how large or small, are at least mildly antimemetic. If they wrote anything down, there's no reason to necessarily assume we'd be able to read it. Maybe even on mnestics, since writing is about the most essential and direct form of information there is, next to photography. It would be the most intimately intertwined of anything they could leave behind to the way they understood the world. And if there's something so fundamentally different about that mindset that it passively evades our perception, learning their language would be a hell of a task.

You wouldn't just have to adjust your own brain chemistry. You'd have to physically draw antimemed information out of the material in which it's transcribed for it to be brought to the level where we can read it.

It's known that the Oblitus understood physical and psychical chemistry, at least to some degree. A mortar and pestle uncovered at the second site we found with the Archaeology team (a cave in Bridger–Teton National Forest) shows trace amounts of a mixture of potassium nitrate, smoked salts, and psychoactive spores. This combination is more or less an open alchemical secret. Add heat? Recipe for hallucinogenic fumes.

So I got to thinking. We don't know how the OACG⁴ was contaminated with its antimeme, but we can guess with reasonable certainty that whatever it was, they weren't totally helpless against it. They understood psycho-chemistry; possibly even understood some antimemetics. So why couldn't they have devised a method of keeping records that could be drawn back out of its medium and into the mind, if they knew what was happening to them? It would be like invisible ink. Remember, that's the principle: drawing antimemetic information out of the medium to make it visible again. They understood their writing could fade into the stone; they'd have figured out a way to pull it back to the surface.

Even the inanimate has memory, from a certain perspective. Even the stone in which records are carved can forget, and even it needs to be made to remember.

What part of the monolith looks like it's forgotten? I think the question answers itself.

I think they wrote on the blank spots. And if we can reverse-engineer the right flame, we can read the invisible ink.

Journal of Rsr. B. Hughes, 11/1/1977

It’s known that sea breeze and fermented alcohol produce a mildly mnestic effect when mixed. El’s told me all sorts of tales — both from folklore and, I can only surmise, firsthand experience, though he rarely divulges which stories are which — of sailors, ships famously stocked with rum and laudanum, who saw something they shouldn’t have been able to while out on the high seas. Some times they’d go mad. Perhaps more often, they seemed to simply forget the experience, either due to the mnestic wearing off or because they knew sharing such a story once they returned to land would have them ridiculed as madmen whether or not they actually were. The boss says history is full of stories like that: full as the water’s full of things not meant for our eyes. I don’t really know how he knows.

There's one important lesson, here. As it relates.

I think the invisible ink we're looking for might operate with similar ingredients. You have to ask yourself which of the materials capable of doing the job are the most easily accesible and least distanced from nature.

But it's not perfect. We don't just need to make a mnestic; we already have those. We need something not just effective from within our own heads, but effective on material, physically, on the records themselves. Something we can apply where the information is actually buried to dissolve the casket and see the body. Basically, what we need to make is an acid — so literally corrosive to antimemes that when applied physically to a record, it temporarily forces them back to the forefront of perception. At least enough for those already on mnestics to see, anyway.

There's much work to do.

Research Notes of Rsr. B. Hughes (Excerpts), Various Dates

"Formed a mixture of pure sea salt and aqua regia and applied low heat … no noticeable anomalous effect was diffused into the liquid which took effect when applied to the stone surface. I suspect the salt alone is not sufficient to summon a mnestic property from the memory of the substance, and will introduce one equal part isopropyl alcohol in the next trial."

"…Formed a mixture of pure sea salt and equal parts aqua regia and isopropyl alcohol. Applied low heat, agitating the mixture while sure to remain below the evaporation point of the alcohol … no noticeable anomalous effect, indicating mnestic properties were not recalled in the molecular memory of the alcohol … either the organic chemistry of alcohol is not alone structurally fitted to the recall mnestic properties, indicating a hidden component in the 'Sailor's Law' processes, or sea salt did not properly interact with the molecules."

"…Formed a mixture of pure sea salt and equal parts aqua regia and methyl alcohol. Note the slight solubility of sodium chloride in methanol. Applied heat below the evaporation point of the alcohol … no noticeable retention of mnestic in the material memory of the mixture or the chemical memory of the organic molecules … one possibly anomalous effect was observed: a slight shine on the surface of the basalt slab on application … a possible takeaway being that solubility was not sufficient, since the polarity of the substances prevented the solvent from approaching anywhere near saturation."

"…Formed a mixture of pure silver nitrate salt and equal parts aqua regia and methyl alcohol. Note the appreciable solubility of silver nitrate in methanol. Applied heat below the evaporation point of the alcohol … results identical to the above trial … return to drawing board on reverse-engineering of the process described by the Sailor's Law."

Document 9429-Clark Timeline (Abbreviated)

19 November 1977: The skyline of a ruined city is spotted on the horizon by an Antimemetics task force approaching Lassen Volcanic National Park. Several basalt spires are intact, some extending as high as a hundred meters tall.

Research Notes of Rsr. B. Hughes (Excerpts), 11/24/1977

"Formed a mixture of silver nitrate adultered with traces of sea salt and pure cane sugar in equal parts aqua regia and methyl alcohol … apparent luminescence upon contact with surface, followed by around 120 seconds of anomalous physical reaction consistent with bubbling on the stone. After an emission of smoke at the end of the process, symbols of an unknown language or numeral system were visibly carved into the slab, faintly glowing."

Journal of Rsr. B. Hughes, 11/24/1977

Couldn't believe my eyes.

Apparently it had something to do with the sugar in dark rum; some sort of forgotten mnestic property recalled in fermentation. So we added sugar, and introduced some enzymes — turns out we have anomalous extremophiles that thrive at near-zero pH. Why exactly that's an avenue for material memory is an open question, not the least because it probably exceeds the bounds of physical chemistry, but that isn't really crucial.

What's important is that the activated substance can draw forgotten information out of a material. So, at nine o'clock in the night, I poured my flask on that blank patch on the basalt floor for what seemed like the hundredth round of reconsidering and revising and remeasuring parts acid to parts silver nitrate… and it bubbled and whistled like hot tar, slowly, steadily churning. And this time, the reaction didn't stop — not until the deed was done.

The script itself, if that's actually what it is, can hardly be identified as a relation of any known written language. Columns of vertical, blocky glyphs chained together. Whatever they felt the need to record, it was something that could be done very methodically: the glyphs seem to follow a few basic "templates" — a square, a triangle, a pentagon — but differ in added markers and connections to the next symbol. It reads like a list, for one. But more than just that: the modularity of the symbols on display here makes the script look like some sort of pictographic code.

Codes are ubiquitous in memetics, of course. This is because it's full of ideas which, to borrow a term from Heinlein, we can't quite grok with our feeble minds alone. We use code languages to transcribe memes which are too complex, or encrypt ones too dangerous. Hell, in some parts of Europe — and Canada, of all places — where the memetic tradition grew from slightly different roots than in the States, you'll sometimes hear people call the field by another, more old-fashioned name: cryptomancy. Literally the art and science of making and breaking magical codes which unlock the mind.

These glyphs might not look like any known ancient language, but I'll tell you what: they almost resemble one of our codes. Makes you wonder what sort of ideas the monument-builders were trying to record…

In any event, it's about damn time progress on 9429 starts milling along again. The scope of inquiry sparked by this item now far exceeds my research on the monolith itself, and it isn't just here at 41. Hell, yesterday I heard back from Stover — he says his guys found a whole city out in northern California. And here we were, thinking it was just some alien detritus like in 2001, a one-off anomaly. El's saying he plans to promote me now, for "getting the ball rolling".

I can only hope.

Doctoral Degree Certificate of Dr. Bartholomew Hughes

SCP FOUNDATION
Foundation Informatics Group; Foundation Containment Sciences Group

Certificate of Degree

This certifies that:

DR. BARTHOLOMEW HUGHES

Has fulfilled all relevant academic, research, and field requirements and is hereby awarded the degree(s) below enumerated in recognition of their achievements and scholarly contribution to the Foundation and to the sciences:

DOCTOR OF MEMETIC SCIENCE
And
DOCTOR OF CONTAINMENT ARCHITECTURE

ISSUED: 24th of January, 1978
CERTIFICATE ID: 88230284587210255555

Dir. Lyn Patrick Marness
Chair, SCP Foundation Antimemetics Division

Journal of Dr. B. Hughes, 2/20/1978

Obviously, translating the actual meaning of the Oblitus language word-for-word is a pipe dream. Try piecing together something as personal as somebody's language when everything their whole culture stood for quite literally can't be propagated. It would be like if a species of little green men allergic to the concept of England tried to put on a performance of King Lear.

Something more within our capabilities is cross-referencing all the Oblitus script we can find and seeing if the material they're found on indicates at least what category of information the chickenscratch might be trying to get across. That's why, over the last month or so, Jansen and I have been going through all the catalogued objects from the other Oblitus sites and absolutely drenching them in antimemetic invisible ink.

We're under a high mnestic dose now, so I have to transcribe the following quickly. Either way, once it wears off, I'll probably be unable to understand any of this — it contains my best approximation of the antimemetic script. But, this way, I at least hope to give my future self (one I'm back on the dose) a head-start on piecing the puzzle together.

So, the script. Note to future self: when you reveal them, the blank spots on 9429 have three columns of inscribed glyphs each, and they generally resemble the following. What I'm writing below is from the first blank spot I encountered, but they all follow the same general pattern.

The first column from the left. Since the three are spaced out as such, we assume they read either top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top. Probably top-to-bottom, since that first symbol at the top of the column also appears at the top of several columns of revealed text on a stone tablet in the Lassen Park settlement. There, they were accompanied by pictographs that looked like bushels of grain and ears of corn. What do you need in a record of transaction? Prices and dates. We think that glyph could be either a monetary unit or a measure of time.

Second column. See the first three gylphs from the top, chained together into one? The first two are seen on a variety of other artifacts, though the third varies. We saw them, chained with a decent variety of other unknown gylphs, on a few swords in what looked like an armory at the Elko site and on plaques above the doorframes of residential buildings at Lassen Park. Markers of propety, or something of the like. Family names? Possible, but why would they all begin with the same two glyphs? What's less variable than a personal name? Honorrifics? Titles? Ranks?

Third column. The top glyph is often on road-markers: I saw what looked like a sign post or two at Lassen Park — all basalt, of course, not wood — and Jansen's found what he thinks are "herms" across the whole damned Oregon Trail. We've even seen the top two glyphs chained before; it was on a container, a giant box on wheels. Real case study in brutalism; horse-drawn carriage meets shipping container-looking thing. Units of distance? Maybe. But what else is related to travel? We think a common prefix for place names. This is the only column whose first glyph or two isn't necessarily universal on each of the monolith's blank spots. It changes occasionally — and as Jansen points out to me, geographical names are expected to be less standardized, more diverse. They'd come from different places and neighboring cultures, get translated and bastardized, the works.

There are all the building blocks we've got. It's been a few research sessions, flashing in and out, recalling and then losing and re-deducing the details again. We have as good a basic understanding of the pieces now as ever.

Future Barts, who forget and remember, here's to putting them together.

Journal of Dr. B. Hughes, 4/27/1978

I've been thinking. Ever since, apparently, we deduced some basic constructs of the Oblitus writing system from the blank spots on the monument, I've been deducing the next step only in pieces. Every time I forget the secrets buried in my notes and re-discover them, I've been starting from square one. But across the research sessions, having accumulated more and more stepping stones for our de-mnesticized and re-mnesticized selves to hopefully have the sense to follow, we make it easier and easier to recall not only the discoveries but what we thought the next useful one would be. The end of that road isn't so far, save for the fact you'll never know how many times you've already made it there only to turn around.

I'm pretty sure I remember them, again. I won't for long. I'm pretty sure I've made a breakthrough: I don't know how many past Barts have made it, if any, but I think I have it now. So, before it fades—

To say the least, our discovery has led to some connecting of dots. Since all the Oblitus artifacts are antimemetic, it's unlikely they deliberately made SCP-9429 any moreso in some special way. No — something happened to them. We've assumed this for quite some time; seems like the only reasonable explanation. In order for this to have happened, a massive tragedy befell their civilization.

Something that SCP-9249 proves they knew was happening to them while it was. Because they were mourning.

A date, an honorific akin to rank, and a geographic region. One of the archaeologists told me something interesting, yesterday: it reminded them of a Roman soldier's grave stele. Then, all around, that torrent of ever so slight rectangular engravings…

This isn't a monument. It's a memorial.

And every last chiseled rectangle is a life lost.

Journal of Dr. B. Hughes, 7/17/1978

Last night I dreamt I was an island.

The skies were dark and overcast, and in time harsh winds gave way to a storm. The rain came down with ceaseless persistence, its constant pattering that dreadful roll of distant and ghostly drums which habitually reminds the small and the insignificant of their mortality. I felt it strike my curving stone hills and jagged peaks, wear them down; the erosion of a million papercuts. In that dream I knew, somewhere deep down, that the ocean would outlast me by eons, would swallow the island whole. You get that feeling distinctly when you're out at sea, El tells me. If you know the open sea, you know it outlives all of us. It has nothing but time. Sometimes we are the island, and all we do only drags out or brings forth that erosion, the slow entropy of the rain and the crashing waves on the rocks… But other days you wake up from that dream — and today I was lucky.

At 10:35 AM this morning, Director Marness promoted me to the position of research head for SCP-9429. All current and ongoing inquiry into the object is now my purview.

My first order of business will be to declare Project OBSCURUM finished. We well know what SCP-9429 is now.

My second order will be to start another project.

The lion's share of the evidence points squarely toward the theory that the OACG was destroyed in short order by a single event, or even a single entity. That's the minimum I've retained from piecing together what little remains of my direct memory with my own research notes and those of my colleagues. But the research process for SCP-9429, as it is for so many other antimemetic anomalies, relies upon reconstruction: that is, habitually forgetting at least part of your findings after one mnestic dose wears off, and then attempting to re-learn what you once knew on the next scheduled dose. This means that the vague understanding of the Oblitus antimemetic fugue which we maintain might not be the best once we've ever actually had. There could be more information available on the phenomenon which destroyed the Oblitus which we've simply forgotten.

We cannot allow it to be forgotten. Because if there exists the possibility that more can be learned about this phenomenon, there's the possibility we can determine whether or not it's still a threat to us. Similarly: if the cause was reducible to a meme distinguishable from the OACG itself, with an intense mnestic regimen, we could use certain memetic codes to partially or even wholly decrypt it. It is in this light that I am shifting the focus of research from the nature of SCP-9429 to what it allows us to infer about the fugue event.

Because the Foundation is surrounded by open ocean all around, and we must not be the island.

+ Show Rev. 057 (10/28/1978) (Excerpted)

- Hide Rev. 057 (10/28/1978) (Excerpted)

+ Show excerpted selections from Project OBSIDIAN

- Hide excerpted selections from Project OBSIDIAN

Project OBSIDIAN Charter Statement, Dr. B. Hughes, 8/28/1978

Let us, if you'll humor me, work on the grounds that what the Antimemetics Division has deduced to be the most likely explanation is true. That the annihilation of the monument-builders can be attributed to a single event, and that this event has a discernable cause; reducible, as most anomalies which elude perception are, to a potently antimemetic idea or set of ideas. The antimeme underlying each inscrutable phenomenon is different, but this particular idea would be a special one: we've chosen to call it SCP-9429-A.

The Oblitus Anomalous Culture Group — for look at what they've built — were no neanderthals writhing in the dark of ignorance. They considered themselves a powerful culture. We have cause to believe them.

They were not fools; they knew fully the gravity of whatever SCP-9429-A was. Day after day they perished. In such full understanding of the cataclysm they were, in fact, that they chose to erect a memorial to the massacre. We must assume it was one of their final acts.

Nothing proud or glorious is commemorated on these hallowed grounds. And yet, they saw it fit to give us an invitation: ramps and stairways and alcoves from the base of the monument all the way up. They wanted whoever came after to visit this place, if they could peer beyond the veil of smoke and learn to see it again. Why?

See, if contact with SCP-9429-A was to destroy the OACG, you'd think they would have created the monolith as a warning. Why else would you dare to communicate with those thousands of years in the obscure future; those who would have no way of knowing who the fallen commemorated here were? No less through the immortal language of architecture, since the builders knew all other concepts of communication familiar to them would soon become incomprehensibly obscured.

But it doesn’t appear to be a warning sign. It tells is very little, if anything at all, about the disaster which their civilization faced. Perhaps by design, in fact. And what little writing they left, which our studies have concluded most likely represents a list of the fallen soldiers, not an account of how they were slain, they made no attempt to abstract in a universally comprehensible fashion. Much the opposite: they committed it to stone in a language they knew would very soon be not only forgotten but damned-near biologically unrememberable. That bit, the mass tombstone just barely recalled with the right chemical fix? It was meant for the last of them. Not us.

It's not an admonition. But it isn't telling us to stay away — it's inviting us in. They knew their entire culture would be vaporized from the world of ideas; that anything they left behind which looked or felt like them would be obfuscated beyond recognition. Why bother, then, to build something which so apparently seems to be communicating with future generations? Why make it just non-specific enough to do so through the fugue? We may have forgotten the builders, but with mnestics, the monolith stands.

Well, there's one option left, or so it seems to me. They didn't want us to know about SCP-9429-A. Leaving behind no clue of its existence was, to them, somehow the best advance warning they could give us against it. Because to do so — to describe the idea which destroyed them, which rendered them antimemetic — would have exposed us to it. It could have done the same to us.

SCP-9429-A was so viral that even to be aware of the beast's existence was apparently enough for one to become a host.

Why do we consider 9429-A Neutralized? Its alien nature to our modern minds is one component. But more importantly, I can conceptualize such a meme, I can describe it to you, and both of us live to see another day. So, somehow, their fears were misplaced — or at least the worst of them now are over; we can never truly know which.

Why? It was not a good virus, I think. Its nasty side effect was to annihilate its victims and erase them from memory. And a virus which kills its host cannot survive. They didn't describe it because they wanted to spare us, but they also didn't know it was already on its way out. It died with them.

And now that it's safe to do it, we'll dig up the corpse.

Project Retrospective Commentary, Dir. L.P. Marness, 8/16/1989 (Excerpted)

A personal directive of mine has been that the Division hire prospective personnel straight out of university or grad school. You need to notice talent fast and keep a damned close eye on it, then pick it up as soon as it really manifests. That way, you get the best and brightest not just before private firms, governments, or GoIs can, but before anyone else in the Foundation can. Plus, you get them to work before they find out the real secrets on their own, and maybe even make a stink. It isn't the easiest way — you could hire from the Fed, or Prometheus, or other Foundation divisions, and get people who more or less already know the works — but it's the only way to get the edge for your own people.

Caught that particular tip from an old colleague of mine I met up in Manitoba back in ‘58. It's all bits and pieces, but if my amnesiac memory serves… We rowed up the Red River, looking for things we couldn’t see. Real peculiar guy, even for a Canadian. But he knew his stuff. I digress.

What's relevant here is that, in the course of the OBSIDIAN project, Antimemetics sent feelers out to aspiring codebreakers in universities all across the civilian and anomalous worlds. It was, after all, then our largest and most demanding project next to the Replication Program. We recruited a few, though mostly it was a fact-finding mission — to use a polite euphemism, the Foundation keeps tabs on prospective recruits, sometimes for years, before actually sending the offer. Like I said — you need to wait for their talent to manifest "toward us". One such promising young mind was a grad student for neuroimmunology so forward she had almost trial-and-errored her way into independently reinventing the Abermeier Formula despite never having been told so much as what a mnestic was. Needless to say, the Division kept a close eye on Marion Hutchinson and those like her. Needless to say, it would pay off in time.

I'm not going to say 9429 single-handedly saved the Division. But as I reflect on it now, the fact we set up shop right next to the thing was some damned good luck, and Dr. Hughes' research sure gave us something to prove. I'll probably never know how Antimemetics was able to survive before the monolith. I'll probably never know what O5-8 saw in us.

But after? Even with half the memories no doubt gone or fucked up otherwise, it's easy for me to see how the story went forward the way it did after.

Journal of Dr. B. Hughes, 9/13/1978

Transcribing any idea comprehensively in the proper, formal notation of memetics is arduous. Moreso with one as complex as we expect SCP-9429-A to be — and make it even more, since we only have the vague notional space of what the OACG didn't include off of which to base our diagram of the attacker. We can narrow down the most common combinations of memetic triggers usable against whatever most probably appears in the negative space whether or not it can actually be conceptualized, so that doesn't mean transcription is straightforwardly impossible. There's a margin of error, because the process reduces to guesswork past a certain degree of certainty knowing only the probability of certain memetic motifs coming packaged together. But it's doable.

What our unfortunate arrangement here does mean is that we'll only get 9429-A in pieces. The memetic triggers will seem straightforward to us as individual building-blocks with singular functions, but because we can only view them in isolation, even large portions of the memeplex transcribed won't have the same meaning to us that they probably did to the average monument-builder. We just don't "know their language", in a manner of speaking — we quite literally can't learn enough about their culture for us to be psychically adjacent to them. It will be incredibly difficult, if possible at all, to put those pieces together.

I've got Whitaker copying down the first most probable lineup of these building blocks that we can see. Then we'll try stacking them, to torture out that metaphor. We've got a whole team back in Wing A hammering out semiotic foundations to try and guess where the thing starts and ends so we can narrow down the search. Meanwhile, I'm tracing some pathways for our next try at the form of the memeplex for when the first one inevitably flops, which means digging up a lot more lost Oblitus research we've forgotten from OBSCURUM. We're all hopped up on the first round of mnestics today — of course, we'll need to re-remember what we learn quite a few times so long as our method still relates to the OACG in conceptual space.

Project OBSIDIAN Research Documentation - Identified Memetic Components, 11/13/1978

NOTE: This file employs a modified version of the Langford Index (a system for categorizing memes) for all simple memetic effects, and uses the according system of classification.

The following strains are deduced to be highly plausible:

Bravo-08-J11, associated with the phantom sensation of rapid mandibular swelling.
Bravo-09-B2, a memetic trigger known to cause rapid-onset claustrophobia, and to induce the sensation of the surrounding space closing in on the subject.
Delta-15-D9, associated with the photic distortions produced after undergoing a rapid change in blood pressure.⁸
Golf-20-D6, associated with the sensation of disorientation in space accompanying the vestibular or locomotor aftereffect of being suddenly still after moving in place.⁹
Alfa-16-S16, known to induce lucid dreaming during unconsciousness within a period of exposure to the memetic trigger.

…

Voice Recording of Dr. B. Hughes, 11/18/1978 (Excerpted)

Looks like most of the common paths we're finding are through memeomes with discrete received effects. We have no way of communicating them in their original context, so we can't know for sure… but the fact that we're able to identify and describe them without their taking effect on us is reassuring. Confirms my suspicion that the original effect of 9429-A is inert, at least if your exposure to the idea is limited to a simple explanation of it, or a mechanical understanding of its parts. We're getting closer to that now, in any event. And as expected, I see only the corpse of an idea in those empty spaces. Memetic dead weight. It's…

It's sort of nonsensical, actually. All of these memetic effects are discrete and don't relate to the most pressing accusations we've made about the properties 9429-A itself once had. Goldie Yarrow said to me yesterday, and I wrote it down here in my notebook, so I wouldn't forget by the next mnestic round — here it is. 'All these strains would work well and good if they were encountered individually, but in the same complex we see no way for them to be greater than the sum of their parts.' I think that sums it up; we're digging up interesting ideas, but they don't follow logically one after another. Our current framework just sees no role for them in combination, in the broader machine. Does that… does that make sense?

We're going to keep unearthing the memeome, get a bit more before we reconsider our hypothesis. But we're looking for a missing link in the structure that isn't anywhere near obvious now. Hopefully that part gets more obvious as we get closer to the center.

Project OBSIDIAN Research Documentation - Identified Memetic Components, 1/29/1979

…

Charlie-05-A19, a strain known to alter hearing such that close sounds seem far away.
Bravo-09-H11, associated with the overwhelming desire to avert one’s gaze from something in the field of view.
Bravo-22-G7, associated with trigger of the autosomal photic sneeze reflex.
Charlie-06-D19, known to induce vertigo for as long as the exposed subject is in relative silence.
Echo-14-K21, associated with the temporary arrest of involuntary thoracic diaphragm movements.

…

Journal of Dr. B. Hughes, 3/9/1979

Decoded another block of Langford-Twos from the main body this week. Or what we theorize it is, anyway. We're onto the third or fourth margin of approximation for some of the most well-explored areas of the memeplex, see — but we'll need it, because lots of the most probable central blocks turned out to be junk data.

We've yet to find the "weapon", in that the section of the memeplex which triggers erasure of the target remains elusive. Lots of the subordinate wings have decoded memeomes that look like they could aid in amnestic or antimemetic effects, but lots more are unrelated triggers which seem buried and dormant in the memeplex, almost as if they were there by accident. All the maps of the idea we've tried to make are jumbled webs of incoherence; evidence points to the idea that very little of what's here actually relates to the primary effect.

There's also the issue of "mental proximity", which is a tough one for me to crack. I've gone back and manually profiled all probable first-and-second-order memetic triggers to no avail: they all take action in the most immediate, involuntary, and primal parts of the brain — usually the medulla or the lower-order limbic system — and certainly don't have the hardware to "hop" through the psychic medium from one person's brain to another. We've asked memeticists the Foundation around and they can't come up with any meme which would reliably produce the proximity effect beyond the faintest and most general theoretical foundations.

The boundary isn't just in information package-density, but in ontology; all theoretical models which would allow for proximity effects to take hold in a psychospheric model require for the addition of auxiliary noetic dimensions which aren't believed to exist. The ideas present here simply aren't complex enough to simulate anything like that…

They're actually shockingly simple, if anything. If not through introducing more dimensions of thought than the human mind can handle, I don't see what mechanisms here could be so corrosive as to annihilate not just the spreader or receiver of the meme, but broader memeplexes just by virtue of their vague association with them. That property remains unique. Almost makes me think it belongs to something deeper — something of which we can see the sprouts, but not the roots. I have to assume the root is somewhere in this memeplex, somewhere in 9429-A: where else would it be?¹⁰ In any event, we'll keep looking for it in the Jasmine strings¹¹.

Project OBSIDIAN Research Documentation - Identified Memetic Components, 5/11/1979

…

Echo-19-B24, a complex strain associated with involuntary muscle movement in mammals and which directly stimulates the brain stem in several known memetic geometries.
Alfa-02-H6, known to create violent incompatibility between the subject's explicit and implicit short-term memory.
Delta-12-B8, associated with the dizzying sensation of looking toward the sky in a complex structure.¹²
Delta-12-B16, a dual or triple-threaded strain vaguely associated with repetitive behaviors and religious fervor.
Delta-11-E5, a poorly-understood strain. Believed to be a memetic reflex/unconscious trigger associated with instinctual reversion of the spinal cord to radial symmetry.

…

Journal of Dr. B. Hughes, 5/15/1979 (Excerpted)

There’s something fuzzy in the latest findings, I should also note. In all likelihood it’s just the mnestic regimen starting to wear at my mind, but I swear, there’s a hole at the end of the index where the root of the amygdal strain should be. And I’ve seen one of these Delta Langfords before; I’m confident of that. They’re not new. Something’s gone wrong, and we’re retreading ground we’ve already been on, even with our notes left over from each mnestic cycle.

Another question for my future self: have we ruled out any of these central blocks yet? A all through D, really — they’re all junk data. Why did we start exploring further out if we still consider them part of the memeplex? Makes no sense.

Voice Recording of Dr. B. Hughes, 6/29/1979 (Excerpted)

And these ideas are gibberish! And I have Whitaker tracing lines of ideas through empty space, and I have Yarrow sorting the nonsense and the noise into color-coded piles, indexing each meme, and I have Julie Still in the photo lab, trying to visualize just the fingernail of the hand of the arm of something massive, trying to paint a concept in so small a picture frame. And at the center myself, desperately diving deeper, into neurological paths so obscure no team may ever stumble into them again, meticulously searching for that holy grail that will make the whole thing make sense…

We're decoding the most colossal memeome I've ever seen by guesswork with a fucking notebook and pen. Even forgiving the egregious margin of error, I'm beginning to fear this operation is so far ahead of it's time we won't be able to make any sense of whatever we're coming up with. The technology to do this properly doesn't exist, and probably won't for decades and decades. We make breakthroughs, sure, but all too often in Antimemetics we forget them right after — so we need to weight for the field of memetics at large to catch up, and when it comes to finding the DNA of an idea, they just haven't.

So we're left guessing. That limbo, that tenuous thread of theoretical space, is the dilemma of the Antimemetics Division. We look and we look, down the long spiral, and at best we find just the spur, just something peaking through the surface.

Assorted Findings of Project OBSIDIAN, 7/29/1979

Hexagonal_basalt_columns_at_Svar%C3%B0ifoss.jpg

Supposed SCP-9429-A-proximate imagery, produced by photo approximation. Estimated pictorial accuracy: low.

Journal of Dr. B. Hughes, 7/26/1979

Almost there. Our basic estimate puts us at 65% of the memeplex transcribed. All the core mechanics are lining up, though not quite in sequence, and we've finally got the amygdal and cerebellar strands in some sort of conversation. We're still just copying down what we see; I think some of that dissonance (that makes these discrete memes seem like gibberish mixed together) will always be there. It's the cost of doing business. But as you zoom out more and more, there's something in the whole picture. We can't see it. We're only describing it as the sum of its parts, and it isn't.

I saw something yesterday, or maybe the day before, that made me think I had a grasp of it. I was looking at all the motor reflexes and involuntary motions, and I'd linked them somehow to all the religious responses. I don't remember why. It's hard on the mnestic flush; my notes on the topic are chickenscratch now. It seems like nothing, because there's a hole where the breakthrough was.

It's always going to be this way, because our research method can't outgrow the memetic inferences we make of the Oblitus. It blurs the field. The technology isn't there. I feel as if I've said this a hundred times, I must have, but recollection of writing it down has gone, and — note to myself, on the next cycle: know we are almost there. They look like nonsense separately, so don't look at them separately. Take the all the Echo-eighteens and Echo-nineteens that stimulate the brain stem and run them through comparative analysis again. Look back at the amygdal strand and you'll see the shape of the idea taking form. I saw it for just a moment. I saw

In truth, if there is a breakthrough to be made, I suspect we made it long ago.

Voice Recording of Dr. B. Hughes, 9/1/1979 (Excerpted)

Mnestic regimen taking its toll lately. I don't…

Nothing lines up anymore. At least not in the fugue. For one, insofar as I can remember my life before I came to the Antimemetics Division, it's only in pieces. My file says I was born in 1954; this feels right. But I was almost two-thirds done with a postgraduate degree when the Foundation recruited me. Where did the missing years go? Where did my life…

[Dr. Hughes is heard flicking the tape recorder off.]

[END RECORDING.]

Journal of Dr. B. Hughes, 9/20/1979

Half our key players are out today, because Whitaker took an extra mnestic cycle to go overtime finishing one of the B-strains and got knocked out, and Yarrow's getting screened for contamination. Kept having strange dreams she swore were reducible to one of the Delta Langfords in the perceptive bundle — the last thing we want is to find out any part of this thing can still spread, so after a few days of it we finally let her get checked just to be safe.

Just to be safe… you know, we're mighty hypocrites thinking we're keeping you¹³ safe from this. We tried did all we could to stop the flow of the idea, and we isolate it but now we're alternating sessions decoding the main four or five memeomes and not sharing info until the next mnestic round. I've figured out there needs to be that extra layer of abstraction; we can't be directly communicating the roots to each other as we start to find them. I fear it's already been a close call, I don't know how many times, and We're worried that by this stage in the process there's something else Something that's dead is living at the bottom of the spiral, which is never good news. I'll forget this tomorrow, and you won't be able to read it, and it will be fine.

[Several journal entries and voice recordings are subsequently expunged from the record, most of which are largely incomprehensible.]

Voice Recording of Dr. B. Hughes, 12/10/1979

It’s done. We have all the Jasmine Notation lasered onto a single, huge basalt slab downstairs. Thought it was pretty appropriate. Now that the mnestic regimen is starting to wear off and I'm regaining my senses, I can probably make more coherent a comment on the process. You know, my journal's already making less and less sense each time I look back at the notes, especially in those later entries…

I hope that's a good thing. Because, well, the work we did over the past few months will likely just get more and more obscure to us as time goes on. It'll fade slowly— I feel it already… and eventually? One day, like all the most feverish mnestic revelations, that whole line of research will intersect our sober minds only on the thinnest and most precarious oblique path. Momentary flashes of lucid recollection, maybe. And hardly more.

So, we have what we've deduced is most statistically likely to be the whole memeplex transcribed, or damn close. I had Whitaker cross the final t’s; we’ve been alternating shifts on it, because—

Well, for safety reasons. Now, the memeplex is almost certainly harmless. Of course. Even if it hasn’t gone sterile — seems rather unlikely with nobody to think its substituent ideas in some 120,000 years — it’ll be so culturally alien to modern humans that it almost definitely wouldn’t take effect on us. And even if it did, that cultural factor means whatever effect it would have on us would be so disparate to the one it had on the OACG it’d be totally unrecognizable. Probably benign, maybe even unnoticeable. Plus, there's the whole issue of the culture it built itself for interaction with being antimemetically erased in itself…

But still. SCP-9429-A was, in its original state, so ideatically complex it annihilated the OACG upon the most trivial actual contact with the mind. The fact it seems benign to us in whatever diminished state it still exists should be no universal comfort.

That statement may be surprising. Because, in the early beginnings of this project, I hazarded the guess that SCP-9429-A must be Neutralized since we could articulate the basic idea of a meme which annihilates those aware of its existence without ourselves being annihilated. This was an incorrect assertion. I now realize it was a grave misunderstanding of memetic principles according to one crucial premise. Being aware of a basic description of something in abstract and being capable of communicating it accurately and completely are not at all comparable; not as the chaos of the grand psychic medium is concerned. Conceptualizing a simulacrum of an idea according to its most basic and reductive summary is an entirely different beast from truly, deeply understanding that idea.

Allow me to explain.

The basic methodology of Project OBSIDIAN consisted, fundamentally, of copying down somebody else's homework. Through dogged persistence, we extracted, we transcribed, the entire memeplex from its primeval source. But transcription and organic deduction are not the same. Never did we actually piece together the nature of SCP-9429 on our own, to understand it from the ground-up, by our own, modern frame of reference. By deliberate design, the methodology of this Project has prevented us from fully grasping the character of its existence, no matter how thoroughly we have proved such in the realm of raw mathematics.

We copied down the formula, in other words. But because we lack the cultural frame — the, the necessary background knowledge, I suppose, to "translate" it… we do not understand its significance. Now, to be sure, we understand how the transcribed formulas interact with one another mechanically. That's to say, in theory. But we do not grasp what precisely they create in whole. We have a perfect description of something in a language we can't read. It's hieroglyphic — and that is good. Because we mustn't learn to read it.

We must not attain the frame of mind which they had, even by accident, or else our view of 9429-A will be much less comfortable. We have the blueprints now, and so help us God, we must not learn how to build the structure.

At the end of the day, I am too sure of mine and my companions' curiosity. All too sure that if we continued to look at the memeplex written out in that unknown language for too long, eventually, one of us would begin to learn to read it. The human mind is naturally pattern-seeking, and SCP-9429-A, I fear, could be rife with patterns waiting to be identified. I could not be confident that one of us wouldn't make that horrible breakthrough, even accidentally. So as the project continued, I had us transcribe the idea in shifts: break it up into pieces, so that no one of us would be able to grasp the whole picture.

And so, even though to read the account in itself will almost certainly be harmless, it cannot be allowed. We have already come far too dangerously close simply by writing it down. Because, each time we read it, we risk again the miniscule but catastrophically significant eventuality that our involuntary human curiosity will arrive at some discovery which permits us to actually make sense of it. By this standard, even the merely theoretical breakthrough which we have just achieved is too great a risk.

It is on those grounds that I hereby suspend all further research into SCP-9429-A. We will bury the slab engraved with 9429-A in the basement of Site-41, and let it be. I will not do so much as look at the finished product, nor will I allow any of my fellow researchers to do so.

Voice Recording of Dr. B. Hughes, 12/19/1979

A paradox is what keeps me up when the sun goes down. It can't continue — not this way.

Study 9429-A any further, and you take a leap of faith into plausible annihilation. Don't, and wait unprotected until the day that whatever happened to the monument-builders comes for us.

We've gone too far to end up short. I can barely remember my own damned name through the mnestic fugues. In those brief reprieves between the doses, the off-days, when I lose my research in whole and gaping pieces, I seem to be forgetting myself; I can't—

Our research shall not amount to nothing.

If we remain so stubborn as to refuse to study these sorts of memes, even for the very best of reasons, we'll have devised no avenue of defense for when one of them inevitably rears its head which is impossible to ignore. Obvious as the necessity of self-preservation is, this too would be a catastrophe for the Foundation. But how do we research a countermeasure when we are prohibited from understanding the threat? It's all far too hypothetical.

This is the problem, now, on which we have to remain fixed. And rest assured, I am going to find a way to study 9429-A without my discoveries contaminating the mental pool. I am going find a way to insulate it, in a memetic medium so secure no information shall escape.

I am a containment scientist. I am an architect: of prisons and of ideas and of prisons of ideas. Mark my words, soon I will move that slab of memetic code to another Safely locked box — one of my own devising.

And whatever secrets are divulged in that vault, they will stay there.

+ Show Recovered Project Proposal (5/4/1980)

Footnotes

‡ Licensing / Citation

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SCP Foundation

Secure, Contain, Protect

DR. BARTHOLOMEW HUGHES

Project OBSTRUCTUS

CODE NAME: “VEGAS”

INITIAL PROPOSAL

SCP Foundation

Secure, Contain, Protect

DR. BARTHOLOMEW HUGHES

Addendum 9429.1: History

Addendum 9429.2: SCP-9429-A

Project OBSTRUCTUS

CODE NAME: “VEGAS”

INITIAL PROPOSAL