SCP-018

SCP-018 SCP-018 looks like a red Wham-O Super Ball from 1969. It's six centimeters across, and it was discovered during a warehouse cleanout among actual Wham-O merchandise. Someone finding it could reasonably assume it was just an old toy. The first indication otherwise was how high it bounced. The entry describes a bounce efficiency above two hundred percent. Its example starts with a one-meter drop, followed by rebounds of two meters, four meters, eight meters, and sixteen meters. Each bounce adds to the problem. During its initial discovery, the ball became a projectile traveling at an estimated speed above 100 kilometers per hour, damaging property and injuring five people. It finally came to rest in a nearby lake several days later. Its Euclid-class containment is built around stopping that escalation before it starts. The ball is secured in a metal restraint inside a heavily padded box. That box sits within a much larger tank filled with a polyethylene-based substance intended to slow it down if the inner restraint fails. Personnel entering the tank need protective plating and breathing equipment. If it escapes outside the tank, the advice is to isolate it and wait for the containment team. Then the paperwork takes a different direction. A researcher proposes putting SCP-018 into the bottom of an armored boot. With a mechanical control system, the wearer could jump over buildings or deliver an exceptionally powerful kick. The Foundation hasn't reverse-engineered the anomaly, but someone is already finding ways to build equipment around it. They actually test the modified armor on a retrieval mission. The agent catches up with the target and restrains it, but a malfunction launches him almost a mile into the air. He hits a lake on the way down and suffers extensive injuries, including multiple fractures and a missing arm. The response is to demand a repair before approving the armor for wider use. The researcher replies that it's fixed and asks for access to additional anomalies, including water from SCP-006, to improve the design further. So the file develops into a story about the people handling the object as well as the object itself. An inexplicable source of motion becomes a containment hazard, then a proposed tool, then a disastrous field test. Even after that, the next proposal is already being written. The correspondence makes the Foundation's appetite for useful anomalies part of the danger. Original entry: https://t.co/ffvmBARml6 Based on SCP-018 by Epic Phail Spy, SCP Wiki. Original and this adaptation: CC BY-SA 3.0 — https://t.co/TI86Yhe2FC