SCP-030

SCP-030 Workers excavating in London break open a small stone coffin. Sunlight reaches the figure inside, and a few seconds later it wakes up and politely greets them. That's how the Foundation finds SCP-030, a little clay-bodied person who calls itself Ariel. Ariel stays conscious in sufficient light and becomes inert in darkness. It doesn't need food or sleep, and it would prefer the lights stayed on. Its scientific knowledge resembles a seventeenth-century scholar's, except some of its ideas follow paths missing from recorded history. It also speaks two languages the researchers initially can't identify. Ask who made it, and Ariel says it was asked to forget. The Foundation keeps modern scientific material away from it to preserve that unusual knowledge. Then a researcher accidentally mentions photovoltaic technology. Later, Ariel builds an ultraviolet-emitting device from potting soil, ginger, quartz, and copper wire. The researchers confiscate it and suspend its work. There's something uncomfortable about that arrangement. Ariel cooperates, teaches the staff, and even reports its own broken tracker. But when it starts investigating an idea of its own, the people studying it decide whether it gets to continue. https://t.co/vJKNufPCgZ