by Ethagon
Instances of SCP-9909-A.
Item #: SCP-9909
Object Class: Cernunnos
Special Containment Procedures: Due to SCP-9909's partially self-concealing nature and the high cost of counteracting SCP-9909's spread, containment outside the veil has been abandoned.
Inspecting and removing instances of SCP-9909 is a Foundation operative's self-responsibility. Organisations showing signs of SCP-9909 feedback loops are to be automatically flagged by Foundation webcrawlers and inspected.
To further reduce containment cost, positions in a subordinate role or not involved in important decision-making processes will no longer be vetted for SCP-9909. These include:
- Janitors
- Security Guards
- Secretaries
- Regional Directors
- Factotums
All found SCP-9909-A instances are to be stored in a deactivated state and approved for use in SCP-9909-related testing.
Description: SCP-9909 instances are moments of projected human actions. Individual instances will congregate together to give the illusion of a human fitting into the current environment and situation. No instance has been observed more than 30 meters away from its corresponding SCP-9909-A instance.
An individual instance might be a human arm grabbing a can of coffee, while a congregation of instances might look like a human performing an office job, occasionally drinking coffee and engaging in idle conversation.
A single instance is only real for the purpose of its performed action. For example, inserting a knife into an instance performing a coffee-grabbing action will result in the knife passing through the instance. A congregation of instances might instead also include an instance able to bleed based on knife contact and an instance vocalising disapproval. In this scenario, the knife acts as it would on a real human.
SCP-9909-A instances have universally taken the form of projectors, created by an SCP-9909 congregation performing the act of successfully purchasing a projector.
In their activated state, SCP-9909-A instances appear identical to normal activated projectors, but do not project any images, only SCP-9909, and do not consume any electricity. Deactivating SCP-9909-A instances causes all corresponding SCP-9909 instances vanish.
SCP-9909-A is able to recognise any suspicion towards SCP-9909 and will modify or create new SCP-9909 instances based on its surroundings in order to minimise suspicion.
As SCP-9909 appears real for all intents and purposes, instances can carry SCP-9909-A to new locations. SCP-9909-A will occasionally enter the radius of other SCP-9909-A instances to exchange information in the form of rapidly projecting SCP-9909 congregations or let an SCP-9909 instance create a new SCP-9909-A instance through purchase.
SCP-9909-A will otherwise solely focus on integrating as many SCP-9909 instances into its environment as possible while keeping suspicion low.
History: SCP-9909 has been a known anomaly since the 1970s. Originally, SCP-9909 was trivial to counteract due to consisting of human actions without any cohesion or association with a central human body. Additionally, most SCP-9909-A instances took the form of overhead projectors, making them easy to identify.
In the following decades, the anomaly's suspicion-minimisation behaviour has since made SCP-9909 indistinguishable from real humans for observers unaware of SCP-9909-distinctive mannerisms. Region-independent mannerisms in the past have included:
- Consistent mild politeness
- Routine actions being exact replications of the first action
- A tendency to default to questions when faced with complex scenarios
- The presence of eggshells, despite eggs not being a human body part
- An avoidance to talk about, deactivate, or move larger projectors into undisturbed rooms
- The instance vanishes after completing a scenario, like a bus ride or a work day
- Partial breakdown of congregation into random instances upon entering their "home" due to insufficient knowledge of SCP-9909-A of human life at home
In recent years, a decline in SCP-9909 instances performing these specific mannerisms has been noticed. SCP-9909 congregations have, in select cases, been observed to successfully fool a human into a long-lasting marriage. Few universal mannerisms remain.
Modern SCP-9909-A instances often take the form of projectors fitting into a pocket. Despite this, the mannerisms concerning larger projectors have, on occasion, still been observed in newer instances.
Analysis: While SCP-9909 may appear to be sapient, it is completely incapable of independent thought that cannot be assembled from SCP-9909-A's surroundings. Its illusion of sapience makes SCP-9909 capable of performing many tasks without issue in an environment otherwise filled with humans.
In an environment entirely filled with SCP-9909, instances will be trapped in a feedback loop of copying other SCP-9909 mannerisms, causing it to rapidly slide away from behaviour resembling humanity.
It is to note that SCP-9909-A does not copy the most realistic human mannerisms, but the ones perceived as the most typical. Perpetuating existing stereotypes and biases is therefore one of the most consistent SCP-9909-distinctive mannerisms.
A full list of SCP-9909-distinctive mannerisms and likely hiding places of SCP-9909-A is available in Supplementary-Report-9909-3. As SCP-9909-A continues to minimise suspicion, cooperation with veiled communities who independently arrived at ways to counteract SCP-9909-A might prove necessary.
It is assumed that its focus on fooling humans in specific scenarios, where very distinctive behaviour is expected, has given it an edge over other replacement-category threats, normally having to convincingly fake a full personality in all aspects of life simultaneously.
Its spread can further be attributed to malicious actions by the Chaos Insurgency, inserting SCP-9909-A into positions related to transactions with a large number of projectors. SCP-9909-A also takes mass casualty events as an opportunity to create more instances, filling the number of survivors with new creations.
SCP-9909 would be deemed the most likely anomalous threat to cause an SK-class "Dominance Shift" Scenario were it not for its complete lack of hostility.
Incident-9909-5: The sole exception to SCP-9909-A's typical patterns of behaviour occurred in December 2017 during a containment breach initiated by a Chaos Insurgent. The Security contingent following the Insurgent consisted in large parts of SCP-9909 instances. The Insurgent was reported to scream the phrase "████ ████ ████ ████ ████" across the room. All instances abruptly ceased their expected behaviour, and started performing the following actions:
- Hunting down other instances and humans. Temporarily manifested knives and additional arms to aid in the capture of targets.1
- Running away from other humans and targets. Instances occasionally teleported or glided forward to avoid contact.
- Impossible bodily reconfiguration to resemble a spider.
Given SCP-9909's prioritisation of suspicion minimisation, it is unknown how this behaviour was induced. One hypothesis sees the behaviour as a result of a feedback loop of only copying other SCP-9909 instances before the SCP-9909-A instance was reintroduced into regular society, remembering the behaviour. While explaining the anomalous actions performed by instances, this hypothesis cannot explain the aggression atypical of other feedback loops.
The full report of Incident-9909-5 is only available to read with W-mnestics due to slight antimemetic properties.
Following Incident-9909-5, a full SCP-9909-excluded census of baseline humanity proved necessary. Secluded instances of SCP-9909-A were tested for reactions to memetic tests, with a strong divergence from human reactions being able to regularly identify SCP-9909 instances. Confirmed humans conducted the census in all major population centres simultaneously, spreading the test with a memetic compulsion for self-reporting. The census was halted after three days, which was determined to be the minimum safe cut-off point before the first instances could adapt to the test methods. While the nature of this census gives it an unknown amount for the hidden figure, it was able to confirm the existence of 3 billion humans on Earth.
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