To anyone reading this. Either you're doing a hardware review and stumbled upon this note, or the hardware has failed and you're trying to recover data. If you're the former I'd appreciate if you stopped reading now. This is not for you.
The date is 02/05/99. My name is ███████ ██, I am a senior containment officer at Site-06.
Sometime last month there was a hardware problem reported at The Prison (official designation being Advanced Containment Block Alpha, sometimes colloquially referred to as "the freezer aisle"). This led to the complete audit of its contents. Due to the nature of The Prison, all record of this audit would be lost, so I am including this file in an unused sector of The Prison's hardware system as an informal courtesy for future personnel.
For those unfamiliar: It may sound spooky, but The Prison at Site-06 is no mystery. It was designed to house memory-altering or memory-dependent SCPs. Things that can escape containment when they're thought about, or things that can affect people who remember them. Those sorts of SCPs. Apparently there are a lot of them.
Physically, The Prison is a collection of eighty 10x10x10m cubes that each open like a refrigerator. When they're closed, time on the inside completely stops. Before you ask, it uses the effect of some safe class SCP that I don't remember the number of. You could put a burger in there, close it, wait 10 years and you'd still have a warm meal when you open it back up. I've heard rumors that the Site-19 canteen has a freezer that secretly uses the same tech.
There is also a computer system built alongside it that keeps track of the prisoners. When you put an SCP inside, you log their number, date of entry and your personnel ID. Then, against all judgment, you administer a C-class amnestic to yourself and forget about the whole charade. Every so often the computer would ping you to check up on your SCP, reminding you about what you forgot. The O5s call this Protocol-HRU7, or "Controlled Forgetfulness."
Apparently it's been working very well. They installed the thing in the 70s, and you can ask any veteran researcher for verification. They remember The Prison being built. In fact, the person who designed it is still alive and working off site (you can look him up, and if you're really persistent you can probably arrange a meeting.) This isn't some mysterious thing we discovered in our basement. We know what it is, what it does, why we use it. The only thing we don't know, and this is by design, is what's inside.
Thats why it was such a problem when the computer system had a catastrophic hardware fault and forgot everything it was supposed to remember.
So we did what any sane person would do and started opening them up. Note my tone. You may think to yourself, it can't be all bad, because whatever we find in there would already have an entire document describing its properties. They were our SCPs after all. But in actuality, it is that bad, because the SCP database has no search functionality. You can get an SCP report from its number, but not from its description. We couldn't even get a list of SCPs whose security procedures indicate containment in Site-06's prison.
We were caught with our pants down, essentially. We called up to our superiors and they sent down a few level 4s to help recognize the SCPs we'd uncover. But, in the end they turned out useless.
Imagine this: twelve people standing near the edge of a huge white box, wearing tinfoil helmets, dressed like soldiers, wielding guns and a flamethrower. One of them (the leader) counts down. Everyone is at the ready. They don't know if what's inside will maim, kill or completely obliterate them from existence. Everyone was hoping for the last one. They say its better to have never lived than to die.
Now imagine this, the door swings open, the group of twelve accordion to cover the entrance of the box, guns drawn, pointed at the cell's lone occupant:
A bewildered 18 year old boy in a metallica shirt.
We took him down, contained him like he was the goddamn second coming of lucifer. None of the level 4s recognized him. None of the personnel at Site-06 recognized him. Sure it was dangerous to introduce a possible memory altering SCP to [QUANTITY EXPUNGED] of people, but we were really pulling at straws. Nobody knew who's SCP this was. Nobody knew if he even was an SCP. Thats when someone had the bright idea of running his prints.
Their name was ██████ ███ █████, reported missing since 19██. And, according to the auxiliary SCP incident database (SCPiD, which is surprisingly searchable), the guy was listed as a victim of SCP-███. In the relevant incident log was something along the lines of "on the outset they appear unaffected, but the risk is too great if they are. For this reason they are being contained by the Foundation indefinitely." Nowhere does it mention where they were contained, but it looks like we found it.
It seemed to us that we'd stumbled upon an outlier on our first try. We kept the kid comfortable and moved onto the next box. This time we got middle aged Korean guy.
We ran his prints. Once again they appeared inside the SCPiD. A victim of a different SCP, but the incident log used the same language as the one for metallica kid. "They are to be contained by the foundation indefinitely, because the risk is too great."
This pattern continued. Every box we opened, a civilian popped out. We ended up doing a search for "indefinitely" against the SCPiD and using the results as a checklist. In the end we hit every name.
When it was all said and done we had 73 civilians hanging out in lockup. None of us knew what to make of it. Eventually we started putting the pieces together. All the site personnel were assuming The Prison was used for SCPs, when in reality it was designed for containment of innocents. The memory-affecting SCP stuff is just a cover story, a cover story that nearly all Foundation personnel believe, including the designers of The Prison.
This is how it really works: When a poor soul who got caught in the crossfire of weirdness ends up on the Foundation's doorstep they get put in The Prison. To keep morale up, personnel involved are chemically induced to forget about the whole thing. Nobody dies, nobody remembers to worry about the ethics, the prisoners don't feel time passing. Logically, everyone is happy.
Thats why it didn't take us long to accept the order that came from O5. They said it bluntly: "put them back in." It took only a day to get it all done. The prisoners didn't express any reluctance to get back in their boxes (to them, containment is a split second of darkness.) The hardware was patched up and all the civilians names were reentered.
I don't claim to know if any of this is right. Even if we wanted to help 73 civilians escape their confinement, where would we put them? Where would they go where the Foundation could never find them? Nowhere. Nowhere that I know of, at least.
And its not like these civilians pose no risk. All of them have been touched by an SCP in one way or another. Say 5% of them are actually afflicted with something bad. Thats 4 people. If we let them all out, we cause a containment breach of 4 separate SCPs. I don't want to think about the possibility that they're all carrying something.
All I know is, in an hour, myself and my peers will sit together in a room with aerosolized amnestic while a Foundation psychologist kneads our memories away. Finding all this out the way we did was a real kick to the chest. That's why I'm writing this, to ease my future self, or my future successors, into this knowledge. To tell them that its ok. We've thought long and hard about the ethics behind this, and we decided it's best not to think about it. Its best to forget.
Bye Bye.