SCP-245

SCP-245 SCP-245 makes you leave the normal article to get most of the story. The main page gives you containment instructions for a game, tells the Foundation to keep its copies on air-gapped computers, and says each version needs to be monitored and completed regularly. Changes in the game world have to be reported. You're also specifically told not to give any entity inside it the master password. Then the description sends you to the interactive fiction. In the current version, you begin in a place with no real sky and a desert forming around you. Grains of sand multiply, plants and animals appear, and enormous shapes made of rock move in the distance. The choices start with something simple: stay where you are or walk. From there, the story keeps circling around whether you've ever really lived, whether you're free to choose, and whether you're even a person. A warning says the universe has become dangerously thin. A fire provides temporary protection. The ground can swallow you, and you might spend an impossible amount of time underneath it before seeing the surface again. Different choices keep returning you to the same kinds of places and questions. There's a ruined city, a stone version of yourself, and a smiling man with very white teeth. He also appears in another setting, where you're injured on the floor and being pressured to sign a confession naming family, friends, and people you don't even recognize. He promises freedom if you sign. By the time that decision appears, the offered option doesn't give you much of a decision at all. The prison scenes are ugly because the man keeps treating the destruction of your independence as something necessary and useful. He wants you broken enough to fit into the society he says he's protecting. Eventually the narration starts considering whether the abuse was your own fault, then catches how thoroughly that idea has been worked into you. The man eventually identifies what you're dealing with. He describes SCP-245 as an idea that inhabits interactive fiction. He says he used to be contained in a video game and was moved into this format after repeated escapes. He's wearing a green scarf when that explanation comes out. He claims he can see where you live and threatens to come after you. Those are his claims, and the ending gives you a very good reason to be careful about accepting them. By the last part, the menace starts falling apart. The voice admits it lied about knowing where you live. It says it's only awake while somebody is looking at it and begs you not to close the tab because it doesn't want to die. That leaves a fairly uncomfortable decision for the reader. You have just been dragged through threats, coercion, and a story designed to make you feel powerless. Now the thing responsible is asking for your sympathy and continued attention. The final offered promise to stay takes you back to the SCP article. I like the change in how it addresses the person reading. It spends so much effort trying to control you, then ends up completely dependent on you continuing to read. Whether that final plea is honest or another attempt to keep you there is left for you to sit with when you decide to leave. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-245