SCP-192: Flawless X-Ray Machine

SCP-192: Flawless X-Ray Machine Imagine going in for an X-ray and finding out the machine can give you the injury it shows on the screen. If the picture shows a broken bone, you now have that broken bone. If it shows cancer, there's a malignant tumor in the area it examined. And if the picture comes back clear, whatever was wrong there can be gone. That's the problem with SCP-192. The image and the patient always agree, but the machine can change the patient to make that happen. The actual anomaly is a vacuum X-ray tube inside a diagnostic machine. The original machine was designated SCP-192-1. About three seconds after an image is taken, the part of the body being examined changes to match the result. The Foundation has found no consistent pattern in which result it gets. A clear image has completely treated the affected area, with no further complications. You can see why researchers would want to find a way to use it. A piece of equipment that could remove disease or repair an injury in seconds would be an enormous discovery. Unfortunately, the other results make it impossible to treat that as a dependable benefit. When an image shows a displaced fracture, the bone breaks with that same displacement. The injury looks less than twenty-four hours old, even when the subject has been isolated before the examination. None of the recorded fractures have pushed a bone through the skin or into an internal organ, but that doesn't make the fracture itself any less real. The tumors it produces have all been malignant. The file records them as no more advanced than T1N0M0, and biopsies haven't found a difference between these tumors and cancers that develop naturally. How well later treatment works depends on where the cancer appeared. Being created by an anomalous machine doesn't make it any easier to remove. It can also put an object inside somebody. If the X-ray shows a foreign body, surgery confirms that the object is actually there. These are usually surgical tools associated with the part of the body being examined. The Foundation checked for missing equipment and couldn't find any. The article leaves where those objects come from unresolved. Then the researchers tried what seems like the obvious next step. If the machine gives somebody an injury, could another examination produce a clear image and fix it? During that test, it produced a blurry image. The resulting change is expunged from the report, but it killed the subject almost immediately. The people operating the machine were sent for psychiatric evaluation. We aren't told exactly what happened to the body, and there's no need to fill that blank in. The photograph was unclear, and making a living person match it was catastrophic. There's a separate radiation problem, too. The tube continually emits alpha and beta radiation even when it's disconnected from power. Unshielded exposure can exceed the Foundation's recommended annual dose limit within a minute. Researchers suspect the materials in its cathode, although the explanation remains a working theory. The original machine absorbed the emissions well enough for ordinary operation to stay within safety margins. Testing found normal materials in its construction, which made that protection another thing the researchers couldn't fully explain. Later inspections showed the containment wasn't complete. Manufacturing imperfections and the Foundation's early tests had weakened the casing. The Foundation eventually moved the tube out of the British hospital where it was discovered. A covert operative had been present for the machine's initial examinations while investigating another SCP. He reported what he'd seen, three civilian staff members had their memories altered, and the room was quarantined. Today the tube is housed in SCP-192-F, a Foundation-built replica of the original machine, at Site-125A. It's kept in a radiation-rated room with at least four working Geiger counters. The shielding and counters are inspected every two weeks, maintenance is supervised, and a breach of the tube's housing requires evacuation of the North Wing. Radiation exposure during normal operation remains within the stated safety limits. It's classified Safe because the Foundation can contain it under those conditions. That says nothing about whether having your X-ray taken by it is a good idea. What makes this one unsettling is how close it comes to being useful. It has healed people. The possibility is right there in the test results. But there is no reliable way to ask for the image you need, and taking another picture can leave somebody much worse off than before. Once you know what happened with the blurry image, even a routine repeat examination becomes a very different proposition. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-192