SCP-206: The Voyager

SCP-206: The Voyager Invictus was built to explore Mars. Somewhere along the way, it seems to have stopped being limited to the planet it was sent to study. In the SCP-206 file, the rover belongs to a joint Russian Space Research Institute and European Space Agency mission. Its launch aboard a Soyuz-FG succeeds, but telemetry disappears roughly halfway to Mars. Attempts to restore contact fail, and the spacecraft is declared lost. Then pictures start arriving on its assigned frequency. The first batch looks like a normal descent and landing near Victoria Crater. Three days later, another batch shows a completely different part of Mars, thousands of kilometers away. Invictus was designed to travel at a maximum of ninety meters per hour on flat ground. It couldn't have driven that far in the available time. The next major problem is harder to explain away. A set of photographs appears to show Mars from Deimos, one of its moons. Now the supposedly lost rover has apparently left the surface altogether. The images keep coming. Some show recognizable locations on Earth. Others show celestial bodies researchers haven't identified. Around thirty-eight percent appear to come from Earth or worlds resembling it. The transmissions use the rover's identifying information, but the pictures don't always match the capabilities of the cameras originally installed on it. One lunar photograph has the characteristics of a Hasselblad camera that Invictus never carried. At first, the Foundation considers whether something else has taken over the frequency and is pretending to be the rover. Later observations give them something more concrete. After a photograph of an Apollo 15 reflector arrives, an orbital search finds tracks consistent with Invictus nearby. The Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE eventually photographs the vehicle itself near Copernicus Crater. Other satellites go on to capture it in additional locations. That doesn't explain how it gets there. It also never appears in its own transmitted photographs, even when a reflective surface should make that possible. Some viewpoints seem physically inaccessible to a vehicle of its size and shape. One image comes from inside a nuclear reactor's primary cooling circuit. Another appears to have been taken from the bridge of the Great Sphinx's nose. The archive gradually moves beyond unusual travel. A photograph of Mount Rushmore shows Jefferson Davis where Abraham Lincoln should be. An image of a football field contains people and objects with no shadows. A familiar Czech ossuary contains some skulls with three eye sockets. A building in Kharkov appears at least ten stories taller than its real counterpart. The Foundation is receiving pictures of places it recognizes, with details that don't belong to the world it knows. There are also photographs of a Roman site that appears intact, accompanied by an electronic display using an unfamiliar Chinese dialect. Another shows a man believed to be a known actor lying dead in a coffin, although that actor was alive when the picture arrived. The file never resolves whether every discrepancy represents another world, a different time, or something else. One visit feels much closer to home. Invictus sends photographs of the funeral and burial of its chief structural engineer. The next day, it sends a photograph of his gravestone. Investigators later find tracks near the grave. The article gives no explanation for the visit, but a machine wandering through places its builders could never reach has apparently come back for the funeral of somebody who helped make it. SCP-206 is classified Euclid, and the Foundation hasn't physically secured it. Containment means monitoring its transmissions, collecting the images, and removing them from outside systems. Agents watch astronomy and technology publications for people discussing the rover or receiving its pictures. Later procedures also cover satellite photographs that accidentally capture it. We never get an explanation for what happened during the lost portion of the journey. We don't know whether Invictus chooses these destinations or even understands what it's sending back. Its mission was to give people a better look at Mars. The Foundation is now trying to hide a much larger collection of places that a small rover keeps finding its way into. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-206