Item #: SCP-988
Object Class: Euclid
Special Containment Procedures:
SCP-988 is to be housed in a locked, unillumintaed cell with no observation windows. It is to be kept in a latched state and secured with a padlock whose key is to be stored at a separate facility.
No experiments of any kind are to be performed on SCP-988.
Description: SCP-988 is an unopenable wooden chest.
SCP-988 is comprised of oak with iron fittings and measures approximately 1.5 m x 0.5 m x 0.75 m. While SCP-988 possesses a latch, it did not possess a lock when discovered. The latch moves freely when not secured, and gentle manipulation of the lid has revealed it to move freely on its hinges.
Despite the lack of any apparent impeding element, SCP-988 cannot be opened. All attempts fail due to the intervention of external circumstances with no clear relation to SCP-988 itself. In the 53 documented attempts at opening SCP-988 directly by hand, persons have been observed to become lost on their way to its current location, suffer injury preventing them from reaching it, and in roughly 20% of cases have died spontaneously of apparently natural causes just before completing the action.
The 7 documented attempts at opening SCP-988 via machine or other indirect mechanism have been stopped respectively by electrical shorts, mechanical jams, and in one case the mislabeling of a bottle of epoxy as lubricant. The "unopenable" property appears to extend to indirect methods of scanning SCP-988's contents. All attempts at sonographic, electomagnetic, and passive imaging of emissions outside of the visual spectrum have failed due to similar circumstances.
When SCP-988 is lifted and tilted an object can be felt to shift within. This object is apparently irregular in shape and is estimated have a mass of approximately 3 kilograms.
Comparison of documents concerning SCP-988 with actuarial tables have demonstrated that the circumstances surrounding the object behave according to normal probability, with the single exception that the outcome of the object being opened has been entirely removed. This has lead to two distinct theories regarding the underlying mechanism of the object:
1. SCP-988 or its contents retroactively erase from history any individual who successfully opens it.
2. The contents of SCP-988 are sufficiently inimical to human life that the inability to open it is can be accounted for by the weak anthropic pinciple. That is to say that nothing prevents SCP-988 from being opened, but as no one survives this event, all observed behavior occurs in universes where this did not occur.
