SCP-212: The Improver

SCP-212: The Improver SCP-212 is a medical machine with three robotic arms and more than five hundred documented attachments. It is made from familiar materials, including plastic and steel, but researchers have never located a power source or a place where all those tools are stored. Whatever it needs slides out of an arm when the procedure calls for it. Living tissue within its reach gets grabbed and restrained. The machine then begins making what the file calls improvements. It works extremely quickly, uses no anesthetic, and does nothing to replace the blood the subject loses. The documented death rate is 47 percent. Its work can involve replacing organs with artificial versions, reinforcing bones with metal plates, lining joints with graphite, adding duplicate organs, or replacing teeth with serrated steel. It can reorganize a body much more extensively than any normal surgical machine. One photograph in the file describes an eye connected to the brain through added fiber optics. The problem is that nobody can predict what it will decide to change. It does not provide a list of options or explain how a modification is supposed to help. Some alterations are harmful, and some are fatal. In one case, it removes a subject's bone marrow and replaces it with an unidentified gel. That makes the word improvement difficult to accept at face value. Extra organs or stronger bones might sound useful in isolation. A living body also depends on the relationships between its parts. Replacing something because a machine has decided on a different design does not establish that the person can survive with it. Examining the equipment is dangerous too. Mechanical attempts to investigate its internal workings provoke a violent response. Attempts involving living tissue tend to end with that tissue being operated on. The Foundation is trying to understand a machine that treats biological contact as an opportunity to begin another procedure. Staff are supposed to remain at least a meter and a half away when it is idle. Deliberate use requires the site's chief medical officer to approve it, and subjects undergo physical and psychological testing before and afterward. Accidental exposure brings quarantine and further review once the machine releases the person. The file still allows people to volunteer, provided they are warned that the process is invasive and the results cannot be predicted. That leaves a particularly grim possibility: someone could approach it hoping to repair a damaged body and survive only to discover what the machine thinks that body should become. Survival is one outcome. Getting the help they wanted is another question the entry never promises to answer. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-212