SCP-196: Time Paradox

SCP-196: Time Paradox The Foundation has a man in custody who, by every physical test they've performed, is an ordinary human being. He doesn't have unusual strength, hidden weapons or some ability waiting to activate. One of the doctors has gone through the full battery of tests and concluded that the man is normal. They still classify him Euclid/Keter, and keeping him alive may be necessary to keep the timeline intact. The reason is that the Foundation has already killed him. SCP-196 appears to be a middle-aged African-American man. He says he's forty-seven. His appearance, intelligence and physical needs fall within normal human ranges. The psychological report describes institutionalization and an attachment to the security staff that it calls Stockholm Syndrome, but it doesn't identify an anomalous mental ability either. He's housed in a two-room cell at Site-17. Staff can provide things he asks for as long as they don't have an obvious lethal use or interfere with containment procedures. At least one Level Two security officer has to live with him, carrying only nonlethal weapons. He can walk around the installation with a security escort. He's also agreed to wear a satellite-tracking anklet because the Foundation told him removing it would kill him. That is a lie. The device doesn't have that effect. Most of the people working around him don't know the real situation. Staff below Level Three have been told he's a Safe-class object. SCP-196 himself must remain completely ignorant of why he's being contained. The restricted document explains why the Foundation is so concerned about a man who otherwise needs no unusual physical restraint. He appeared inside a Foundation site during the 2000s. He said he had been recruited as D-class personnel during the 2010s for an experiment involving another SCP. From his perspective, that recruitment had already happened. From the perspective of the people receiving him, it was still in the future. He also said his younger self was alive somewhere else at that same time. Then genetic checks matched him to a much older man the Foundation had encountered in the 1960s. That man had attempted to break into Site-17 while carrying another SCP and several ordinary weapons. Security personnel killed him. They had no idea he was anything more than a lone attacker. The Foundation is now holding the younger version of somebody whose death is already part of its history. That is the sequence you have to keep in mind. There is a younger man living outside containment. There is the forty-seven-year-old who arrived after apparently taking part in an experiment years in the future. And there is the older version who died decades in the past. His personal lifetime runs through those events in a different order from the calendar. According to the file, the Foundation would ordinarily consider terminating somebody involved in this sort of temporal event to prevent a paradox. In this case, that could create the very problem they're trying to avoid. If he dies in custody, he can't grow older, escape, travel into the past and become the man they already killed. The report treats that contradiction as a potential threat to the entire continuity. It says the result could damage or destroy it. We aren't shown that happening, and the article doesn't prove which theory of time travel is correct. This is the danger the Foundation believes it has to manage. Their instructions are to keep him alive until he decides to escape, successfully does so on his own, and somehow travels back to the moment of his death while carrying the relevant SCP. They don't know the complete route that gets him there. That makes his containment unusually awkward. At the beginning of the file, his lack of extraordinary abilities makes escape seem unlikely. By the end, a successful escape is one of the events the Foundation believes must eventually occur. They have to preserve his life without preventing the future that has already left evidence in their past. The younger version outside the facility also has to be protected. A covert team watches him permanently and keeps him alive, but otherwise isn't supposed to interfere. The contained man must be kept away from him. The Foundation's position is that altering the sequence too much could be just as dangerous as letting one of them die early. The story leaves the older man's motives unresolved. We don't know why he tried to break into Site-17, why he brought the other SCP, or what finally caused him to leave the people he has become dependent on. It would be easy to invent an explanation from the way he's being treated, but the file never gives us one. What we do know is that he isn't being protected for the sake of giving him a normal life. The Foundation needs him to survive long enough to reach a particular death. He has a room, a security escort, some freedom to move around and a false threat attached to his ankle, while the people in charge try to preserve a sequence he isn't allowed to understand. Somewhere ahead of him is a break-in the Foundation already stopped years ago. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-196