Link to article: Dig U Better Dead.
component:preview
:scp-wiki:theme:3law
:scp-wiki:component:license-box
:scp-wiki:component:license-box-end
[[include component:preview text=An "orphan source" is a radiation source no longer under regulatory control, usually because it has been lost, stolen or abandoned.]] [[include :scp-wiki:theme:3law]] [[>]] [[module Rate]] [[/>]] Thanatotherapy was developed in the 1960s by Prometheus Medical, one of the many subsidiaries of Prometheus Labs. A novel treatment for certain cancers, thanatotherapeutic techniques involve the targeted application of thanatic energy (also marketed as "omega radiation") to cancerous tissues. Unlike ionizing radiation, thanatic energy can be modified by a skilled thanaturge or necromancer to only damage cancer cells, leaving healthy tissues unharmed; Prometheus Medical cured dozens of previously-terminal patients in clinical trials, and in '72 they were getting ready for a full commercial roll-out. Then the first patient died. And then they came back. Thanatotherapy was shelved shortly after that. Spontaneous reanimation is bad optics, and mundane radiation oncology was catching up pretty quickly. The labs were mothballed, and the equipment put into storage. And there it would have sat, safely locked away, if not for the paratech crash and the subsequent breakup of Prometheus Labs. ----- An "orphan source" is a radiation source no longer under regulatory control, usually because it has been lost, stolen or abandoned. The most serious orphan source incident in mundane history was the Goiânia accident, which occurred when a cesium-137 radiation source was stolen from an abandoned radiotherapy clinic in Brazil; four people died, and two hundred and fifty were exposed to significant levels of radiation. The Chanhassen Catastrophe claimed more lives in the first thirty seconds. ----- Ionizing radiation sources are all, broadly speaking, the same. You need a radioactive isotope; you need a container to hold it; you need shielding around that container. Every source of thanatic energy is different. They are born from tragedies, hundreds or thousands of deaths at the same place or time; the only attempts to systematize their creation have been prosecuted as crimes against humanity. They are not as rare as one would hope. Nearly every battle of the Second World War created a thanatic source, the death-energy concentrating around a particular totem: an officer's ancestral katana, a tank crew's lucky charm, or a particularly bloodthirsty general's corn-cob pipe. The same goes for the First: a blasted tree in no-man's-land, or the perforated skull of the first casualty. Before those were the Opium Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Wars of the Reformation; and after, Korea, Vietnam, the Congo. Humans are good at killing each other. ----- The most powerful thanatic source known to modern thaumatologists (excluding Mythic Age creations like the Atlantean Dead Mind) is the Volga Core, a roughly skull-shaped piece of furnace slag recovered from the ruins of the Red October steel plant after the Battle of Stalingrad. Exposure to the Volga Core can turn a healthy living human into a walking corpse in less than fifteen seconds. It was originally kept as part of the Soviet Union's paraweapon stockpile by the KGB Division of Special Circumstances; its current whereabouts are unknown, and it may be in the hands of the criminal organization known as "Scarlet Hammer". The thanatic source that caused the Chanhassen Catastrophe was not nearly that powerful. Originally recovered from the site of the Civil War Battle of Stones River, the Chanhassen source was a human femur from the body of Union Army Lieutenant Jeremiah Hackwell. It was engraved with an array of focusing sigils by the 19th-century scientist and necromancer Archibald Gravestone, one of the founders of Prometheus Labs, and further modified with inset silver circuitry by Prometheus Medical thanaturges. It was, as these things go, safe to be around; if undamaged, the Chanhassen source would take over a week of passive exposure to kill a healthy adult. You will note that there are four variables in that sentence: "undamaged", "passive", "healthy" and "adult". We will come back to them later. ----- Chanhassen is an outer suburb on the southern edge of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area. It has a population of approximately twenty-five thousand, and is home to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum; the Temple of Eck, headquarters of the new-age religious movement Eckankar; and Paisley Park, the former estate of the late musician Prince, now a recording studio and museum. It was also home to Athanasia Radiology, the Prometheus Medical subsidiary which conducted thanatotherapy trials in the 1970s. Athanasia Radiology did not make it through the paratech crash, and shuttered its doors in 1997. All the mundane radiation sources were removed during the company's liquidation; Lieutenant Hackwell's femur was not. It remained untouched in a basement storage room for a quarter of a century, slightly lowering the life expectancy of the abandoned laboratory's rodent population and occasionally reanimating an insect. And there it would have stayed, if not for the intervention of a group of local teens. ----- On October 31st, 2023, around 10:30 PM, a group of six Chanhassen High School seniors broke in to the Athanasia Radiology facility on a dare. All the teenagers were mildly intoxicated, and two of them had smoked a small amount of cannabis. One of those two, Keith Dahl, had also consumed a dose of psilocybin mushrooms; unbeknownst to him, this psychedelic experience had awakened his latent thaumaturgic talent. The ringleader, Mike Nelson, led the group into the basement, intending to hold a seance. The storage room containing the Chanhassen source was chosen, as it had the "spookiest vibes", and the teenagers soon found the source, deciding to use it as a prop for their seance. They lit candles, attempted to invoke the spirits of the dead, and passed around the femur. When Keith Dahl was given the femur, and called out to the spirit of its former owner, the Chanhassen Catastrophe began. ----- In the framework of Universal Thaumatology, there are three components to any thaumatological working (or, in layman's terms, a spell): energy, action, and will. Energy is given purpose by the caster's will and form by their action. Purpose guides form, leading to change. In the case of Keith Dahl's accidental working, the energy was the thanatic power of the Chanhassen source; the action was his invocation of Lieutenant Hackwell's spirit; and the will was his own desire to, in his own words, "see some spooky Halloween shit". The result of this malformed spell was predictably disastrous. First: the summoning succeeded. Jeremiah Hackwell's shade was conjured up from Hell, the Tartarean realm where it had resided for the past 160 years. He was disoriented and only semi-sapient. This working had an approximate ARAD reading of 2.5 Kilocaspers, Sapphire, Sharp, Loose -- moderate power, relatively blatant, constructive, and poorly formed. From these data, we can extrapolate the spell's backlash. Lower intensity, opposite hue, opposite pitch, same weave. With a Loose weave, we expect backlash of around 75% the original intensity, or approximately 1.8 Kilocaspers. Hue goes from Sapphire to Lemon, reducing the blatancy of the effect; pitch goes from Sharp to Flat, resulting in a destructive effect. The Chanhassen source's inlaid circuitry was partially destroyed by a burst of heat, and as a result, the source began actively and uncontrollably emitting thanatic energy, killing and reanimating all six teenagers. Secondary backlash occured with an intensity of about 1.25 Kilocaspers, and the same hue and pitch as the original spell. This bound the ghost of Jeremiah Hackwell into the Chanhassen source, and the ghost of Keith Dahl into his own reanimated corpse, allowing him to regain control of his body; the ghosts of the remaining teenagers were too weak to survive the binding, and dissipated. ----- Post-mortem sapience is possible for most thaumaturges, given sufficient study of the necromantic arts, but rarely desireable. Even the most powerful ghosts are limited by their existence as energy constructs, unable to work magic without destabilizing their animating essence and damaging their own memories. Revenants, like the unfortunate Mr. Dahl, are slightly hardier, and can safely cast spells using external EVE sources, but they require expensive chemical treatments and regular embalming sessions to stave off decay. Most mages simply prefer to die, and leave their legacy to their heirs. Keith Dahl was luckier than most revenants, in that his body was in near-perfect condition; thanatic energy kills by interrupting metabolic processes, much like cyanide, leading to cell death without gross tissue damage. He had yet to realize that he was dead. His first reaction, upon regaining consciousness and seeing the corpses of his friends, was to call 911. The tertiary backlash (subtle, destructive) of his accidental spell had damaged his cell phone, but his friend Mary Anderson's was still functional, and he made the call. An ambulance was sent to the abandoned laboratory, followed by a Carver County sheriff's deputy. ----- Mr. Dahl made his way out of the basement to wait for emergency services, still holding the Chanhassen source. The ambulance arrived first, and the EMTs, Carlos Gutierrez and Julie Vang, quickly identified Mr. Dahl's lack of any vital signs. Given his continued animation, the human bone still clutched in his left hand, and the date, they decided to "get the fuck out before [they] got zombified too." They gave him a space blanket and a hand warmer, and fled the scene. This saved their lives. Deputy Eli Johanssen was not so lucky. He had been warned about Mr. Dahl's undead nature by the paramedics, and came out of his squad car with his pistol drawn. Unfortunately, Carver County sheriff's uniforms are grey, and Jeremiah Hackwell's bound spirit was startled. Believing Deputy Johanssen to be a member of the Confederate Army, Hackwell used his nascent control over the Chanhassen source to shoot a focused beam of thanatic energy at Deputy Johanssen's heart, killing him instantly. At this point, Mr. Dahl fled back into the abandoned laboratory with the Chanhassen source. His decision to hide, rather than to make his way into town in search of medical attention or an authority figure, likely saved many lives. Within two hours, alerted by keywords in local law enforcement radio transmissions, Moblie Task Force Psi-8 ("The Silencers") had arrived on the scene, and quickly contained Mr. Dahl and the Chanhassen source. At his request, Mr. Dahl's spirit was banished after a brief interview; his body and the bodies of his friends were deanimated and returned to their families for burial. Standard cover story CO-3, "Carbon Monoxide Inhalation," was disseminated to the press. The EMTs, Mr. Gutierrez and Ms. Vang, were amnesticized and implanted with false memories of discovering the bodies of the children and the sheriff's deputy in the laboratory basement. The Chanhassen source is classified as SCP-█████, and is contained in a lead-lined containment locker at Storage Site-23. ----- There are three primary lessons to be learned from the Chanhassen Catastrophe. First, that paratechnology must be contained. If the Athanasia Radiology clinic had been located in a paranormal enclave such as Three Portlands, it is likely that the Chanhassen Source would not have been abandoned in the first place; and if it had, anyone who encountered it would have been better equipped to recognize it as a dangerous occult artifact. The spread of paratechnology into unveiled society is dangerous, and preventing that spread is one of the primary purposes of the Foundation; nexuses and freeports are the lesser of two evils. Second, that thaumatology is inherently dangerous. Even operatives of the Global Occult Coalition sometimes fail to sufficiently account for backlash; if the best-trained occultists in the world can be killed by an unmanaged spell, self-trained civilian thaumaturges stand no chance. The Coalition's near-monopoly on thaumatological education probably causes more good than harm, at least for now, but the Foundation, in the interest of public safety and the continuity of humanity, has a duty to contain or eliminate any thaumaturges not affiliated with the GOC. And finally, that civilian cowardice saves lives. The EMTs immediately left the scene when they realized that Mr. Dahl's condition was anomalous; after the death of Deputy Johanssen, Mr. Dahl himself hid from further human contact. Both these actions prevented deaths, and more could have been prevented if Mr. Dahl and his friends had been too scared to enter the abandoned laboratory in the first place. Foundation social engineering programs since the end of the Cold War have done an admirable job at maintaining high levels of fear and anxiety in the American populace, and consistently prove their worth; if adolescent male bravado can be further tempered, it is estimated that civilian contact with the anomalous could be reduced by up to 15%. A scared populace is a quiet populace. [[>]] [[module Rate]] [[/>]] [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]] [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]