SCP-194: Thank You For Your Cooperation

SCP-194: Thank You For Your Cooperation SCP-194 begins as a red rowboat with room for two people. Follow the link to the next section and it's an artist's easel with four paintbrushes. Continue through the article and it becomes a volleyball, then a document covered in mathematical equations and symbols. The file keeps changing what SCP-194 is supposed to be. While you're trying to make sense of that, the records underneath it tell you about a man who won't leave a coworker alone. The part that stays mostly consistent is the documentation for SCP-194-Z. That's the phenomenon affecting the designation itself. Different objects are assigned to the same SCP number at different times, and the file changes to describe whichever one currently occupies it. Reality undergoes small retroactive changes to account for the Foundation having that object in custody. Only one thing can hold the designation at a time. Most of those things aren't otherwise anomalous. A rowboat or an easel can be perfectly ordinary while the records, history and circumstances around it are being rewritten. To keep track of the actual problem, the Foundation has put its documentation into lettered addenda and assigned the phenomenon the suffix Z. The procedures say those first three addenda will preserve the underlying information despite changes to the main entry. They also describe containment in a concrete mausoleum in a New Orleans cemetery, with monthly inspections and instructions to report any reality changes spreading outside. That creates an immediate mismatch. The main file describes a Safe object in an appropriate storage unit. The addenda describe a Euclid phenomenon being contained somewhere else. The contradictions are part of what you're supposed to notice as you read. The first personal record is an audio recording from Site-139, dated April 23, 2019. A man named Garth is talking to Laura about seeing each other outside work. She tries to explain that she's busy, then becomes more direct when he keeps pushing. They're coworkers. She thought they were going to have a friendly conversation after work, and his texts have made things uncomfortable. Garth tries to brush it off as playing around. Another person interrupts and gives Laura an opportunity to leave. On the next page, the rowboat has become the easel, and the recording has been replaced by emails addressed to Garth Richard. Human Resources tells him a complaint has been filed about his behavior and orders him to arrange a meeting. Site security contacts him about the use of his credentials to access SCP-194. A third message tells him he's being transferred to Site-402 that Friday and needs to settle his outstanding matters before he leaves. The messages end with variations on thanking him for his cooperation. At that point it sounds like routine administrative language. He has been told to stop, people are investigating, and the institution is processing the problem through complaints, access checks and a transfer. Then the object becomes a volleyball. The records now describe a period of rapid changes in the SCP-194 file on April 23. A document inserted into it contains a note from Garth to Laura. He says he still likes her and wants something to happen between them. He plans to make her a collage of the things he thinks are wonderful about her, as proof that he cares. Laura's response is unambiguous. Nothing is going to happen between them. She wants him to take his things and leave her alone, and she warns him that she may have to take more serious action. There is also an older police report from August 2016. Garth was stopped after running out of a Sears while carrying jewelry, art supplies and a volleyball. He couldn't provide proof of purchase. He was given a court summons rather than taken into custody because he cooperated with the officers. Some of those items fit the changing objects in the file and his proposed gifts. The connection is there for the reader to consider, but the article doesn't give a complete account of how he was using the anomaly or where every version came from. The final page changes SCP-194 into the mathematical document. It also adds that the associated objects have high dimensional instability, while claiming no known connection between them and no explanation for how they entered Foundation custody. By now we've seen connections the current documentation no longer seems able to make. Agents follow a radio signal to the cemetery and find the mausoleum open. Inside are the mummified remains of a man in contemporary clothing. His identification says Garth Richard, but they can't find any records of him. His wallet contains contact details for Foundation researcher Laura Kane. When she's questioned, she says she doesn't remember him. A recording from the mausoleum preserves their confrontation. Laura tells Garth he isn't authorized to be there, then realizes he has stolen her authorization code. She tells him to get away from her. He keeps trying to make her listen. She tells him to stop, a thump is heard, and then she realizes what has happened. In a later interview, Laura recognizes her own voice on that recording. She says the woman in it was cornered and defended herself. When the interviewer asks what she used, Laura identifies SCP-194, the only available means at the time. She has difficulty referring to that woman as herself. The event is preserved in a recording, but she doesn't have the corresponding memory of Garth. The file describes a change to baseline reality, and the anomaly has resumed its usual behavior. It never supplies a precise explanation for how the confrontation produced the world the researchers are now living in. Laura does understand what the interviewer is getting at. They want her to say the woman on the recording made the wrong decision. She doesn't agree. Whatever reality Garth came from no longer has him in it, and neither does theirs. The interview ends with another thank-you for her cooperation. That familiar phrase makes her pause, although she doesn't explain why. The changing format works because it makes you do the same work the investigators are doing. You're comparing records that no longer quite belong together. A man exists in one set of documents and has no history in another. A woman can recognize her own voice describing an encounter she doesn't remember. Through all those changes, the clearest part of the story is what Laura kept telling Garth. She wanted him to leave her alone. He kept finding ways around that answer until he cornered her beside something capable of rewriting reality. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-194