SCP-167: Infinite Labyrinth

SCP-167: Infinite Labyrinth SCP-167 looks manageable from the outside. It's a white cube about ten meters across, with a metal door. Walk inside, and the size of that cube stops being a useful measure of what you've entered. The first room leads to more rooms. Those rooms lead to more of the same. The layout keeps branching, and routes that should bring two people to the same place can leave them unable to see or hear one another. Nobody has established the full extent of it. The title calls it an infinite labyrinth, but the actual exploration only proves that the researchers haven't found the end. There are signs of earlier visitors, including markings by exits and objects from different periods. One researcher enters without the required means of tracking his route and doesn't return. The people searching for him find no answer. After that, the safety instructions become particularly blunt about bringing a ball of twine. It's such a simple precaution, and that's part of why the disappearance works. A person doesn't need to encounter an aggressive creature to get into trouble. They only need to overestimate how well they understand the place they're walking through. There is also something unsettling about repeated rooms. Landmarks normally help us build a mental map. When everything looks familiar, recognition stops helping. You can feel certain you've been somewhere before without having any reliable way to prove it. For a story, the older objects offer possibilities without requiring a complete history lesson. Someone else came here. Someone else tried to navigate it. Maybe their markings are useful, but you still have to decide whether you trust them and whether you understand what they meant. The temptation to use the space is another natural complication. An apparently endless interior sounds useful until you have to retrieve what you put in it. Storage, exploration, curiosity, and carelessness can all lead through the same door. A maze doesn't have to change behind you to become frightening. Sometimes it's enough that your assumptions about distance and direction were never right in the first place. https://t.co/ZcRkYrBQQw