SCP-243

SCP-243 SCP-243 is a bunch of little batteries fused together at their negative ends. The whole mass is about thirty centimeters long, and the batteries can shift around if you push them. It's a strange-looking object on its own, but the real problem starts when you bring a group of matching objects near it. Five or more identical, or almost identical, objects can become animated. They don't have to match in color. The rule is basically whether a casual observer could easily tell them apart for some other reason. Once they enter the active area, they gain movement, flexibility, and the ability to levitate. They start acting like a group of living creatures. The field isn't a nice, fixed circle you can mark on the floor. Its shape and reach change from minute to minute, extending somewhere between 2.5 and 7.3 meters from the center. That's why the containment room is a sixteen-meter cube with the batteries in the middle. They also search people for unauthorized multiples of things before they go in. Carrying five copies of an ordinary item becomes a containment issue. What the objects do depends partly on the objects themselves. Umbrellas assemble into larger areas of shade. Chairs offer themselves as seats. Knives look for things to cut. They also develop self-preservation and flocking behavior, which can be as simple as birds moving together or involve specialized roles and smaller groups within the flock. That combination is where this gets interesting. There is no instruction to make a flock of knives attack a person, and the file doesn't say every animated object becomes hostile. But you've given knives movement, something like an instinct to survive, and a tendency to cut things. You don't need to add much more for that room to become unsafe. After an incident, weapons, easily weaponized objects, and dry-cell batteries are specifically banned from entering in eligible groups. The incident itself isn't explained in this entry, so I'm not going to fill in what happened there. Separating an object from its flock gives the researchers a way to shut it down. It initially wanders or tries to find the others. After about four hours alone, it becomes dormant. There's then a roughly twenty-five-minute window where putting it back with the group can revive it. After that, it returns permanently to being an ordinary object. Even an intact flock eventually stops, usually around twenty-four hours after exposure. Some of the more organized groups fuse together as that happens, leaving a physical arrangement that reflects what they were doing. So the activity can leave you with a different object configuration after the animation is gone. The Foundation discovers it through incidents at an animation studio. The studio's unusually natural cartoon movement initially wouldn't have been enough to attract attention. Something involving every desk lamp in the building changes that. Most of that incident is redacted, but the animation lasts the usual amount of time, and the employees and their families receive amnestics. It starts with an object that could make a room full of everyday things genuinely fun to watch. Then you get into the practical issue of having to inspect every pocket, tool kit, and supply box so nobody accidentally gives the contents a life of their own. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-243