SCP-264

SCP-264 SCP-264 starts with a preserved woman sitting cross-legged, hovering slightly above the ground inside a religious structure in the Tian Shan mountains. Her body is about twelve thousand years old. There are sacred objects from several different faiths arranged around her, and the Foundation initially approaches her as an unusual corpse to study. Then she opens her eyes and says hello while the researchers are talking. The explanation gets considerably stranger than a corpse coming back to life. A community of beings from other dimensions has built an inhabited structure inside her body. They're operating it as a vessel. They can use its eyes to observe the outside world and its voice to communicate, and they've been listening long enough to prepare the language they need. One researcher gets brought inside and describes something like a submarine. The eye sockets are enormous observation windows from his perspective, with hundreds of people around them. They let him use the voice controls to speak through the body, then return him to the room. After that, the Foundation adds a proximity restriction to keep staff from being taken inside unexpectedly. The inhabitants describe themselves as pilgrims. They come from different worlds and faiths, but they believe they're all traveling toward a true Heaven that exists beyond the heavens promised by the gods of individual realities. The woman’s body functions as a stop along that journey. Equipment inside connects this world to other worlds, and the vessel protects its occupants from differences between realities. The people maintaining it rotate out so they can continue their own pilgrimage. According to them, millions travel through this network every day, with an enormous number of worlds above and below this one. They say the woman first made contact with them while she was alive and agreed to serve as an anchor. They connected to her mind before converting her body after she died of intestinal cancer. They also say she eventually continued on her own pilgrimage. Whether she ever reached the destination is something they don't know. That uncertainty matters more as the interview goes on. The researchers keep asking what evidence exists for this final Heaven. The pilgrims have philosophical arguments, accounts of people experiencing a realm of light, medical observations, and records of supposed spontaneous transitions between worlds. They are absolutely convinced these things demonstrate that the destination exists. There's also a very practical warning. This vessel supports connections used by countless other worlds. Breaking it would provoke those worlds, so the Foundation needs to understand that destroying one small body could have consequences far beyond the room containing it. The last addendum changes how I read the entire conversation. The Foundation examines the medical records supplied as evidence of people reaching Heaven. Those records are consistent with fatalities associated with another anomaly, SCP-3966. The Foundation doesn't establish that the whole transport network is part of that anomaly, and it considers further overlap unlikely. But the specific evidence offered for arriving at the final destination has a much darker explanation. They decide not to tell the pilgrims. So the working network, the enormous journey, and the conviction are all still there. The Foundation has reason to doubt the evidence behind the destination and chooses to keep that to itself while the pilgrims continue traveling. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-264