Three years ago, I woke up in a strange room with nothing surrounding me but concrete. I laid in the bed, frozen with fear, until desperation hurled out of bed and into the hall. There was a man, a chubby guy a decade or so older than me and his runt of a dog, and a slightly younger woman who pinned him to the wall. After that everything gets…well, fuzzy.

But the dream ends the same way as all my others. Gasping for breath, surrounded by dark water, death closing in around me and squeezing the breath from my lungs. It’s how all my dreams end after an ill-fated fishing trip with my uncle when I was seven. 

Maybe that's why they haven't been able to erase my memories....well, not fully.

At first, I thought the encounter was nothing more than a dream. Like I said, those have been pretty constant throughout my life. Almost drowning left the Grim Reaper hovering over my shoulder. But I’ve been through this before. I know the difference between dream and repressed memory; and I know when they blend together.

It wasn’t easy for my therapist to accept this as true. She thought the encounter was me backsliding again, going back to a point in my life when I was too scared to leave my room. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Something kept repeating itself in the dream, over and over, and it wasn’t until very extensive and expensive hypnotherapy that the fuzz turned into 3 repeating letters.

S.C.P.

The trail at first was a dead end. Nothing but fan-made wikis and a few thousand creepypastas scattered across Youtube, podcasts, and (of course) Reddit. SCPs are something nerds write stories about to pass time; strange it never appeared on my radar before. My therapist tried to convince me that this was all part of my delusions, she begged me not to go through with it.

I fired her and the money saved has continued my research.

I’m not your usual stay-at-home shut in. After almost drowning, I felt trapped in the world, so much so that being online became my only viewpoint to the outside world. Grasping for control, I threw myself into coding, to better fortify the self-made bubble. After high school, with a couple of tough-love parents at their wits end, I had to find some way to make money.

That’s how I became a DIY hacker.

I suppose you could call me a digital mercenary. Some hackers have a creed they live by while they manipulate code, but I never did. All I was interested in was making money; to afford therapy and venture into the outside world again. Hell, nobody wants to die a virgin, but I’d settle for kissing a girl before I die. I might have ruined a few lives, financially, but that was always a by-product, not the end goal. Its easy to know the ends justify the means when that's your livelihood.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Until this fucking dream that’s not really a dream.

Now with a renewed purpose, I dove into the dark web with gusto. Meeting other like-minded inviduals, I was ankle deep in the mire, and sinking deeper with every hour. It took some doing separating the crackpots from the legit (the line between the two is blurrier than most people think) but eventually I found another word to go with the repeating letters.

Foundation. The SCP Foundation.

A secret organization has been spinning the world on their whim for a hundred years. Maybe even longer. After years of deep diving, of hacking and cracking the slimmest of leads, I was able to connect the Foundation to a disgraced missing reporter.

Cody Hale.

I stared in disbelief at the picture before me. He was younger than when I had last seen him. Less heavier too, with a broad smile resting under exhausted eyes that didn’t match his youthful expression. The picture was from before Hale’s big break exposing long-buried secrets of the Murphy crime syndicate in Chicago.

He’s also the man from my dream. There’s no mistake. The SCP Foundation is real. And they abducted me and tossed me aside because…I don’t know why. That's as far back as I can part the fuzz.

But they Foundation has gotten cocky. I smile for the first time in years as I slink past their firewalls. The code provided by Lady_Society6969 proves its worth the epherium that bankrupted me. A tingle of excitement builds in my chest as the text run through my decryption software.

SCP-001.

Oh my god. My eyes widen with terror as I scroll through the secrets buried within. This can’t be…this is how and why the Foundation exists? My God…they have something like this under their control? People need to know, the world needs to know. I try to move the mouse to capture the image, but my hand won’t move.

I stare down at the numb digit as an invisible knife jabs through my chest. My mouth goes dry as I try to call out for help. The pounding in my chest has transformed from a jackhammer to an artillery barrage. The static in my ears builds, repeating into a pattern as my body jerks and spasms, tossing me from my chair.

Wait…I know this feeling. It’s just like my dream. Its the same fuzz from before. My hypnotherapist taught me how to go into a trance and listen for the meaning. Fighting past the pain, I try to clear my mind, but all I can think of is the eratic volume of my heart. The light around me begin to fade, as does the pain, and I can finally focus on the repeating patterns, making words out of the madness.

WARNING:

SCP-001 IS PROTECTED BY ARCHIVIST PROTOCOLS

ANY NON-AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ACCESSING THIS FILE WILL BE IMMEDIATELY TERMINATED THROUGH BERRYMAN-LANGFORD MEMETIC KILL AGENT. SCROLLING DOWN WITHOUT PROPER MEMETIC INOCULATION WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE CARDIAC ARREST FOLLOWED BY DEATH.