SCP-7518

Link to article: SCP-7518.

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= //You fool.//

------

= A third.
= [[[thatauthorpagethattime|More by ThatGuy]]]
⚠️ **Content warning:** This article contains significant mention of suicide.
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[[include :scp-wiki:component:anomaly-class-bar-source
|item-number= 7518
|clearance= 4
|container-class= esoteric
|secondary-class= drygioni
|secondary-icon= http://smlt.wdfiles.com/local--files/shineshadowd%3Agyd4/Drygioni.svg
|disruption-class= dark
|risk-class= caution
]]

**SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES:** N/A. Further investigation into the event and the potential for a repeat is ongoing.

**DESCRIPTION:** SCP-7518 was an anomalous event that took place on June 4th, 2021, in which Site-18 Facility Director Iovanius Neer was instantaneously vaporized. Moments prior to the event, a vertical beam of light measuring 1 meter in diameter, extending from the ceiling from the floor, manifested around Neer in his office. The event resulted in a 5-meter crater around the area where Neer was seated. Investigation of the crater afterward revealed a fluctuating but high level of Akiva radiation.

**ADDENDUM 7518-1: NOTE**

The following paper note was discovered in the center of the resulting crater. Its significance is unknown.

[[div class="paper"]]
Unforgiven, you fool. They were failed by you more times than I could ever be merciful for.
[[/div]]

Memorial services will be held on Friday at lunch. All Site-18 personnel are invited to attend.

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[[collapsible show="To those left." hide="May this be the end."]]

My name is Iovanius Neer.

I’ve been a Site Director for 15 years. Before me, my father held the same title at a different facility for 30. These walls, despite the bitterness of the stories they may tell, are my home. They always have been.

I was only 10 when my father learned I had immunity to amnestics. I was, as a 10-year-old does, ruffling through my father’s baggage as he packed for an “overnight business trip”; a trip not uncommon for him to take. I found, in the deepest pockets of his briefcase, a file on an anomaly. My reading comprehension was poor, but I understood the words “danger” and, from my father’s own obviously-engrained manners of speaking, “anomaly”. I’ll never understand how he got away with that being a common word in his lexicon around my mother without raising an eye.

He tried every kind of eraser he had on him. I don’t think the system of classification back then was even the same as today, with the simple letters per tier. He quickly realized they had no effect when I kept complaining about the needles and asking to read the file again. He was panicked. He also knew what he has on his hands, and it scared him further. He didn’t bother saying a word to me before we got in a car and drove to Site-893. On the way there, he talked to himself about what this could’ve been. An overexposure on his part, probable. A strange gift from a god my father still believed in, even more probable. In his eyes.

Ironically, I can’t remember the conversation he had with his coworkers about what to do. I think one suggested he give me up for adoption. Most of the others shot that down as a security risk. My father didn’t happen to comment on it. It seems as though he considered it.

A natural immunity to amnestics is a surefire way to be hired by the Foundation. It’s a little uncanny how many of our employees end up here just because we’d prefer more workers over killing the immune. HR has both a field day and a pang to the heart, usually, the latter only depending on skill.

However, as my father explained to me that day, I told nobody of this ability. All 3 of the coworkers he talked to that day have either resigned or been terminated; the extent of my father's involvement in which, I have no clue.

Because of this, I can remember everything. Any confidential project that the O5s have exposed me to, I can remember just as well as anything else. I could tear this place down if I was disloyal.

I write this letter because I, in recent times, have been struck by a heavy guilty conscience. In the past few years, 3 employees under my purview have… disappeared. 1 deceased, as her own choice. 1 presumably deceased, launched into the depths of the universe. The last one… the last one is where memory comes into play.

A few years ago, I was drafted secretly to participate as the facility director of a new, highly important facility. Me and a small group of employees were snatched up from our homes and taken to this… remote location. We were told this was a highly important assignment, and that everyone was here for a reason.

It was all a lie. As we’d soon discover, we’d been placed in a death match against one another to free ourselves from a facility-turned-cage. They told us it was the Insurgency. It was not.

I was the first to die. Maimed by another participant, greedy and trying to get ahead. After suffering what felt like an infinite amount of pain, I perished. It was then I learned it was a simulation, created by the O5 Council. I became a simulated spirit, floating through lines of code. After a moment, all I could see was inside the facility, but from above. I became a spectator. Forced to watch.

They wouldn’t unplug the dead until the simulation had ended. So, I saw everything. I watched person after person, death after death in an increasingly cruel fashion. There was no way to turn away.

At the center of this was a man named Anton Radu. He worked at Site-18 under me. He was quiet, calm, soft-spoken. Yet he managed to win. He was not the final survivor, but the final person to pass the trial. It was a test to find the next O5; I had just witnessed the entire thing, his identity known to me the entire time.

When we were unplugged, they filled us with every amnestic available. This was not knowledge that could leave their ring, and they had too late realized we had been forced to watch it transpire. My immunity, however, remained the same. They didn’t know; I walked with full memory in tow.

Anton had a best friend at Site-18, a man named Richard. When Anton went “missing”, Richard was furious. He spent night after night watching the nearby area, watching every security footage available, interrogating every member of staff, from janitor to myself.

I wanted to tell him. It hurt to see this man, who had already lost his father and who had ended his last conversation with Anton poorly, cry in the cafeteria, hoping his friend would arrive. But the punishment for revealing an O5’s identity is death. And they would have amnesticized Richard anyway. I couldn’t help him. My heart dies every day I think of how the memory of Anton will fade into unknowability. I’m the only person who will ever know he’s O5-12.

Then there was Katherine. She was Site-18’s most gifted chemist, being the only graduate of an Ivy League in our facility. There was a brilliant mind behind every action she took, yet she lacked the absence of empathy characteristic of her field.

She was found dead a year after Anton disappeared. Self-induced poisoning. An ungraphic and hopefully unpainful death. It was a shock to all of us, at 18. Richard, the man who was her husband, of course, hurt more. But it was shocking because none of us had seen it coming.

I feel worse by the day for what happened to Katherine. Not that it’s truly my pain to feel — she is the one who paid the price for our ignorance — but simply because I don’t understand why it happened. I’ve always assumed, to some degree, that I’m in tune with my employees. That I can tell when something has affected them when they need someone to talk to. My own ignorance was too much, and I’m left unsure about what to have thought.

She sought therapy before. Once, during a particularly grueling year with containment breach after chemical spill, over and over. But we were short-staffed, and it was a time of crisis. We needed her to be the only competent chemist in the room, and, well, I can’t say what would have happened without her. I needed her to save us, was it not the correct decision?

The loss of Katherine destroyed Richard. For some time, at least, he was inconsolable. There was no helping him, and despite Therapy’s attempts, his behavior seemed permanently changed.

Until a project came along, years later. A pilot was needed, for an investigation into deep space. Richard, to all of our surprise, he volunteered. I questioned it, questioned him, but he seemed dead set on being the man. There was no convincing him otherwise.

It was a one-way trip. The HR Department here at Site-18, they ran diagnostics on Richard, and he came through valid. I doubted the legitimacy of their results, but I’ve been taught by years in the system that our bureaucracy was refined to be correct for a reason. I didn’t want to let my feelings overcome what seemed to rule in the objective. So I signed on.

His story ended quickly. There was an issue with the launch sequence; an inexplicable issue, one that seemed to defy what the launch was capable of. A launch sequence, one where a key entered by my hand was necessary, malfunctioned. He was sent… to the beginning of the universe. Gone without a trace, his best and truly only friend ascended, and his most loved one dead. I had turned the key on the final of this trio.

These 3 and their lives, it has led me to rethink so much of my career. I’ve been blind to so much that goes on around me, focused only on the objective. What I thought was objective. There are now, however, 3 instances of blood on my hands to show the mistakes I’ve made.

Most employees of the Foundation would themselves just erase this. It’s easier to handle the burden of life’s challenges when you cannot acknowledge the burden at all. But I can’t. Maybe this immunity was a punishment instead of a blessing, one that was meant to eventually show me exactly what I’d done, forever. Unable to forget any of this, that inability to forget pulling down 3 valuable people in a series of terrible events.

I’ve contemplated where I’ll go when I join Richard and Katherine; and inevitably, Anton. Though I myself dissociated from faith — as many in the Foundation do after exposure to the plurality of “god” — I was still raised to believe in a heaven, a hell, and a stern yet benevolent god.

Which is why I stand before you today. I ask, if there remains a god out there, for forgiveness. I have bore witness to things that I will never lose sight of, and I understand some of this may be of my failings; but if you are benevolent like we are lead to believe, I hope you will see it in your heart as reasonable to let me see a light upon my passing. It was not something I had every hand in controlling. 

The weight of their souls burdens me every day, Lord. I hope you could understand.

Thank you.

[[/collapsible]]
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[[size 120%]] {{« [[[/ever-turning|LIFE IS EVER TURNING]]] »}} [[/size]]
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<< [[[SCP-7517]]] | SCP-7518 | [[[SCP-7519]]] >>
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SCP-7518

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