SCP-170: A Tube of Superglue

SCP-170: A Tube of Superglue SCP-170 looks like a tube of superglue. Its actual effect goes a lot further than sticking two surfaces together. For a brief moment after treated materials touch, they can pass into one another. Then that movement stops, leaving them bonded at the molecular level. The Foundation discovers the effect when a laboratory pipette ends up fused with a slide. Testing produces some strange results. A chain attached to a ceiling breaks elsewhere under a heavy load while the attachment holds. Two gold cubes are combined into the space previously occupied by one, giving the result twice the usual density. Melting it doesn't undo that change. The biological test is much less abstract. A person's finger becomes embedded in a desk, with serious consequences for circulation. The fact that the initial contact doesn't hurt doesn't make it safe. The file labels the object Safe because it can be stored without much difficulty. That classification shouldn't be mistaken for permission to treat the contents casually. An object can be easy to keep in a locker and still be dangerous to use. There's a good piece of speculative thinking here: take a familiar tool and change what its ordinary description actually means. We say glue makes things stick together. What if the joining happened much more literally than anyone expected? Once you establish that rule, different materials let you explore different consequences. Something that sounds useful in a workshop becomes worrying in a laboratory and horrifying when it reaches a living body. It also raises the problem of reversibility. A tool can be incredibly effective at doing its job while offering no comfortable way to correct a mistake. The better it works, the worse a careless application can become. For writing, that is often enough to carry an object without adding a secret personality or a complicated origin. Give it a clear behavior, then put it in situations where people assume they already understand that behavior. The story comes from the distance between what they think they're using and what the thing actually does. https://t.co/WLXrASJ10p