SCP-240

SCP-240 SCP-240 is a flying machine built out of a wrecked P-38 Lightning, and the thing runs on someone's breath. You sit in front of its rotor, blow into a pipe lined with parachute fabric, and the air goes into a bag inside the mechanism. That gets the propellers moving hard enough to lift the entire machine off the ground. Obviously, a person blowing into a pipe should not be able to power a vehicle like that, but it works. There's no rudder. You can't properly steer it. As long as you keep supplying breath, it keeps climbing. When you stop, it glides back down instead of dropping out of the sky. So it has this built-in protection against crashing, while doing absolutely nothing about what happens if you keep going higher than a human being can survive. The person who built it is the part that gives this one a different feel. Within the story, it's Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince. The Foundation finds him dead inside the machine in the Sahara after his disappearance during World War II. The autopsy places his death from asphyxiation outside Earth's atmosphere. He kept going up until there was nothing left for him to breathe, and then his machine slowly brought him back down. They also recover an epilogue he wrote for The Little Prince. It describes another crash, the wreckage of his plane, and his attempt to bring that plane back to life. He starts by breathing into it like he's trying to resuscitate a person. Then he rebuilds it, mixing what he knows about aircraft with the imagination he still has left. He's exhausted with war and wants to leave that world behind. His destination is the Little Prince. The Foundation treats the document as evidence of reality bending. Its working explanation is that the Prince may have been an anomaly, and meeting him may have given the aviator these abilities. That's still a theory inside the file. We aren't given a complete explanation of the Prince or a set of rules for how any of that happened. Then the final addendum complicates the ending. Decades later, a Foundation satellite gets an image of what looks like a copy of the machine on an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. Some researchers think there are two figures beside it, one tall and one short. Others think they're looking at defects in the image. They never manage to photograph it again. I like that the ending leaves some room there. The Foundation has a body and a fairly clear account of how he died. It also has one photograph that might mean he got where he wanted to go. The machine is sitting in storage with tape over its air pipe while people argue over whether that final picture shows anything at all. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-240