A000578

Link to article: A000578.

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blockquote
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[[/module]]

[[>]]
[[module Rate]]
[[/>]]

[[include :scp-wiki:component:author-label-source start=--
|name=Dino--Draws]]
[[=]]
**Written by [[*user Dino--Draws]], 2.5k words, ~10 minute read**

**[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/dinodraws-author-page View my other works here!]**

[[/=]]
[[include :scp-wiki:component:author-label-source end=--]]

=====
[[include component:preview
text=
Abstract M’Doctorat does not want it here. ]]
=====
[[=]]
+ A000578
[[/=]]
[[f>image A000578.jpg width="400px"]]

There is something wrong. There has been something wrong for a long time.

It had crawled out of **##green|those nameless woods##** and into her chest. It had peeled her open, //nestled in her skin// and now it leaks out of her like an open wound. Weeping into the world, it stole away all it touched, all that spoke of it, just as it had stolen her.

And one of those semiohazardous bloodstains sits on her desk in her workshop. Six faces of sixteen squares. It stands stark amongst cluttered paperwork and empty mugs, whiteboard markers and beakers.

The **##green|CUBE##** sits on her desk.

Abstract M’Doctorat does not want it here. Frankly, she’d rather it be anywhere but here. Yet ever since Elliot left Project 6416/Prime and never looked back, nothing stood between her and the **##green|FOURTH ORDER PUZZLE OBJECT. ##**

“I do wish you’d return my calls,” she murmurs to herself, crouching down and opening a toolbox.

“I— I just wonder how you’re doing!” Abbie throws a hand in the air. “If you’re okay, what you’re up to now. What you’re doing.” Nowadays she finds she talks to herself more than usual, in the absence of anything else. Anyone else.

She shoots a glare at the **##green|CUBE##**, “Not you. Not you,” she hisses at it as though it can hear. She then shakes her head, walks over to the hulking machinery that rests in the room. It was a maintenance day. She liked those days.

“…what did you even see, Elliot? They rushed you out so quick, all you did was scream.” Her forehead rests against cold metal. The Enigmaverse Engine hums.

“I wish you weren’t so afraid.” She wishes she wasn’t so afraid, as she loops the wrench around a bolt to re-tighten it, pops off a panel to check interior wiring. //Busywork.// Her mind chides.

//You’re ignoring the multi-colored elephant in the room. As always.//

Abbie glances over her shoulder. It sits there, same as before. Unmoving. It’s a toy. It is a toy. Technocolor burns against her gaze, and it makes her wince. She is afraid of a toy. That ebb and flow against her mind.

“I need to work,” she murmurs, as though by way of explanation to an audience that doesn’t exist, “leave me alone.” Nobody is there.

Despite her quiet insistence, despite her desire for distraction against that still gnawing feeling in her gut, she keeps glancing back at it. She knows that she shouldn't, she'll get nothing done this way. She should just go over there, grab the damned **##green|THING##**, run her tests and be done with i--

No. No she can't. She //can't// touch it. She doesn't want to. Abstract shakes out her head and curses, quietly. In a desperate attempt to silence her own buzzing mind, she shoves her head underneath a section of the Engine so that she can check a series of connecting wires. Red, green, blue. They're all plugged where they need to be. She twists them, to make sure they're still connected properly. Her eyes flick over to another set. Red, green, blue.

Orange, yellow, white.

She yanks herself out from under the machine.

//"Nom de Dieu!"// Abbie hisses, and again she puts her forehead against the humming machine. God dammit. //God dammit.//

She looks back at it again.

[[div class="blockquote"]]
//SCP-6416's chronological restructurings adhere to the Path-of-Least-Resistance property, enacting the least drastic possible alterations to justify the state of **##green|SCP-6416-CUBE##**.//
[[/div]]

Path of least resistance. Does that path spear through her?

Abbie’s hand trembles. She puts down the wrench and sits down against the Engine, squeezing her eyes shut.

Whenever she has touched it, the surface is warm, as though it was just taken from the palm of someone’s hand. It sickened her, in that way. Knowing it //was// in the grasp of an unknowable amount of people. All //her.// In holding that CUBE she was brushing against the lifeblood of thousands, and she would feel their warmth pulse against her hand just as they'd feel hers. A terrible, //terrible// pulsing. It tricked her mind into thinking the **##green|OBJECT##** was alive, sometimes. Like a heart, bloodily severed from the chest of **##blue|SOMETHING##** beyond, still beating against all natural odds.

In truth, she hasn’t touched it in days. The thought has occurred to her each of those days. A nudge at her mind, a persistent thought that never leaves. It never leaves. Always there, always lingering.

Where is the line drawn between her own paranoia, and mental influence?

Path of least resistance.

No. No, that’s ridiculous. She //knows// that’s ridiculous. It doesn’t work that way. The **##green|OBJECT##** is not capable of such a thing, merely masquerading as a toy she once enjoyed. A temptation.

Right?

It sits on the desk, still. A multi-colored mockery to her internal plight. Abbie groans loudly; the back of her head clangs against the metal of the Engine. She barely processes the dull pain that causes, against the headache starting to bloom behind her eyes.

She's restless. Agitated. At herself, mainly. Abbie fidgets with the wrench in her hand, having nothing better to toy with. Even though there's something a few meters a way that would be far more apt at letting her get out that manic sort of energy building in her.

But she can't. She doesn't want to touch that **##green|THING##**. Abbie puts the wrench down, simply wrings her wrist with her other hand. It is a toy and cannot hurt her. It cannot //influence// her. But she sits and she obsesses and she thinks that it does amidst a mind crushing stress because she lacks all other outlets.

The urge to go pick up the **##green|OBJECT##** doesn't leave, even as she watches the clock tick minutes by on the far wall. She wonders why -- well, not //why// exactly, she knows it needs her to change its state -- but the woman faintly wonders what emotions the universe is trying to twist out of her to make her cave. Boredom? Curiosity? Madness? Will she keep mentally running herself in ragged circles, like she is now, until eventually she caves? The acknowledgement of the inevitable, yet still she holds some spite in her heart to ignore the **##green|THING##** for as long as she can manage. The closest thing she can muster to rebellion in the face of an multiuniversal pressure that does not exist.

Minutes still tick by, and she lets out a shaky breath. She's since abandoned the prospect of continuing maintenance. She can't get herself to pick up her tools or return to work.  

She doesn’t want to touch it. She has to. It's stupid to fear a //toy//. A few more minutes tick by, and the sigh she heaves rattles her chest. Abstract groans, cracks her eyes open, stumbles up to her feet, and walks away from the Enigmaverse Engine.

When she closes the gap, the scientist braces her hands against the desk and stares down at its scrambled sides. She squeezes her eyes shut, opens and closes her hands a few times.

Hesitates.

And it burns against her palms. A thousand-hundred hands death-grip the hard plastic just as she does — ten thousand-hundred white knuckled fingers. Abstract barely processes that she's begun to shift its sides, against that burning. The //click-click-clicking// sounds like crunching bone, against frightened ears.

Her thumb catches a corner between rows as she quickly turns them, and the plastic of the **##green|OBJECT##** shears part of her flesh. Skin ripped open by the pinch between unbreakable joints, and a pained noise slips past her lips. Yet she doesn't let go.

A red corner is now dotted by droplets of darker red. The **##green|CUBE##** burns like boiling blood. Her hand hurts. It won't stain the **##green|THING##**. It could be bathed in gore and the white squares would remain pristine.

Nothing she could do to it would matter. She can't let go. For she is just one set of hands against a thousand-hundred that too all now hold it.

//I really am sorry.// It had been a heart stopping moment, when those words left the Oracle's mouth. The look upon the woman's face, that look of //defeat//, as Abbie's own face twisted into something caught between distress and despair. No way out. There is no way out.

Nothing. Not even omniscience can save her -- save //all of them//. She's expected to just play along. Play along, let whatever this **##green|THING##** is lead her towards something terrible. There's no getting out. No getting rid of it. It burns against her palms and she wonders if its a mockery. Do the other hers view as she does? Do they take a twisted joy in this game?

She doesn't. She wants it to end. But it will never end. It is a constant. A constant enforced by a sprawling multiverse.

She is powerless in the face of the machination in her hands -- that //click-click-click// of its sides as her hands move without thinking. She is powerless against a god damn toy. Maybe she's the toy, held in the hand of something cruel. Abstract finds herself sat on the floor, back pressed to the wall, legs shaking, and hands trembling against the **##green|OBJECT##**.

It's sticky heat clings to her skin and she almost wonders if she'd have to tear off her own flesh to wrench it from her grasp. She still grips it tight, despite her mind's wailing, knees curled up to her chest.

Maybe she is going mad. Her coworkers must certainly think so. Elliot must certainly think so. Her being "eccentric" can only handwave so much. Surely, she must be mad, to be so scared of a toy. To throw herself at this Project alone. To have the eventual role of Overseer hanging above as her own personal Damocles.

Only madmen hold that kind of power. And even the power of an Overseer will not save her. Nothing will. Again and again and again her mind loops back to that.

//Nothing is going to save you.//

She could hold all the world's power in her palm, and it would pale against what she holds in her //other// palm.

Abstract stares down at the **##green|CUBE##**. The scrambled sides. She wonders what it means, wonders who is talking. She was never shown what Elliot saw -- but she knows his mind brushed against something terrible. She remembers the blood. She can smell it still.

How do the others out there receive and decode whatever was encrypted behind those squares, if the information was cognitohazarous?  

Was it for //her// eyes only?

The thought sickened her because she knew it to be true. Abstract lets out a shaky huff, as she flicks one of the **##green|CUBE's##** sides.

"What do you want?" she murmurs, "what do //we// want?" What was discussed, behind the shifting plastic? There's a smear of blood on it.

She wonders if //she// could send a message. The phrases that she, alone, had pried from the communications were word salads of nonsense, like the rhyming prattles of a madman -- but there was a //pattern.// A code. The rhyme, without the reason. The sides and the colors, their configurations, it all meant something. Nothing she could pick up on at a glance, but her compiled notes were another story. If she could find a way to collapse the **##green|CUBE##** into a state she wanted, then maybe--

This was asinine. This train of thought was asinine.

Whatever was talking, whatever this amalgam of minds across spacetime wanted, they were dangerous. The **##green|OBJECT##** she clutched was dangerous. A wrong step could mean erasure, could doom an entire timeline worth of people. How do you fight something like that? What words could you speak to something like that? How was the erasure even possible?

//Nothing is going to save you.//

Elliot had screamed of some **##red|paradox##**. How it was what 'killed' timelines. But where would a **##red|paradox##** even come from? Would the mere act of going against 6416 spawn one? She hoped not. She hoped, still desperately, that //something// could be done. If not a way out, than a way to help others beyond her own gulf.

If nothing is going to save her, maybe she can save others. Maybe she can send a //message.// The thought makes her grip the **##green|CUBE##** tightly. She's paused in altering its sides. Her hands ache.

Perhaps she can warn others of what is coming. Pass on the research she has gathered, and let another Abstract learn and try from what she found. Like a cruel game of telephone across timelines. It's just a matter of finding a variant of herself still //sane.// Maybe she can tell those other power hungry bastards to fuck themselves.

//O5-9 would never allow this.//

Maybe what is allowed doesn't matter. No one else is making an effort.

She has to try.

Abstract can still feel the **##green|CUBE's##** awful warmth against her palms, as she jolts up to her feet. She stares up at the Enigmaverse Engine.

"...you'd need modification," she mutters to herself, "a lot of it. One-way capabilities to two-way." Abstract begins to pace -- tapping a finger against the **##green|OBJECT##** in her hand. "And it cannot be here. I cannot do any modifications here. My own home could be a possibility -- but how the hell would I get the needed tech off-Site without looking--"

The Overseer promotion.

That thirteen sided Sword of Damocles was set to slice mere weeks from now.

It is that realization that makes her pause. She can hear her heart pounding in her ears. The attention will be on Site-01 in preparation for a changing of the guard.

Perhaps that is enough time.

Abstract grips the **##green|CUBE##** and harshly turns the top row. The clicks still seem more like a crunch of bone than plastic. She needs to modify her blueprints, gather a list, gather supplies.

She doesn't realize how hard she's shaking -- how she's wheezing in and out desperate breaths within the disheveled workshop. Abstract stumbles to her desk, shoves the **##green|CUBE##** into her lab coat pocket and begins to frantically shift through her notes. Her still bleeding finger smears blood across the paper.

Maybe it's asinine. Maybe she's gone mad. Maybe there's a chance. She doesn't know. //She doesn't know, but she needs to try.//

That accursed **##green|OBJECT##** burns against her hip.

She //needs// to try.

It can't all be for [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6416 nothing].

@@ @@

[[=]]
[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]]

> This article contains an excerpt from [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6416 SCP-6416] by [[*user Placeholder McD]] (CC BY-SA 3.0).

> **Filename:** A000578.jpg
> **Author:** [[*user Dino--Draws]]
> **License:** CC BY-SA 3.0

[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]
[[/=]]

A000578

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