Containment Fiction — SCP Universe

SCP-92221: “Dust on the Lens”

Level 4/92221 Credentials Required

…

Accepted

Item Number:

SCP-92221

Object Class:

Keter

Special Containment Procedures:

Quarterly and nominally anonymous surveys are to be conducted via SCiPNeT terminals to gauge the likely percentage of SCP-92221 incidence. The software is to accommodate silent, unique identifiers so that the identity of the participating respondents can be deduced on an as-needed basis by Administration.

Personnel who are affected with SCP-92221 (“subjects”) are to be quarantined and censored at the determination of Administration, in order to cease any potential spread of misinformation, or degradation of personnel focus. In quarantine, subjects are to be questioned by personnel inoculated with Level 4 cognitohazardous/infohazardous vaccinations, and either re-educated until resolution, or dismissed from Foundation employment with sufficient memory sanitation via amnestics.

Description:

SCP-92221 is a cognitive contagion affecting a constant 3–4% of containment personnel. SCP-92221 inhibits belief fixation with respect to the existence of the anomalous. It does so despite daily exposure by subjects to anomalies of a wide assortment. Subjects remain skeptical despite several, sometimes simultaneous degrees of involvement in containment operations, including research, documentation, acquisition, routine observation, and/or etc interaction.

Subjects tend to be averse to questioning and develop preferences for anonymity or pseudo-anonyminity. A small percentage of personnel who are exposed to subjects also succumb to SCP-92221.

Classification Note: As SCP-92221 can only affect those who have previous exposure to the anomalous, and cannot be directed at will with respect to specific anomalies, it cannot be considered Thaumiel-class. Paradoxically, the percentage of those affected with SCP-92221 represents a direct relationship to the anomaly’s auto-containment of itself, making this problem unique to Foundation internal affairs, and a self-limiting problem for the collective veil. Given a scenario of universal exposure, the Foundation as a whole would fail gracefully into the civilian conception of normalcy. Thus, and despite the refractory nature of the anomaly to current methods of containment, the class of Apollyon has also been deemed inappropriate.

Addendum 92221.1 — Interview:

Interviewed: Subject 12

Interviewer: Dr. Romins

Foreword: Subject 12 agreed to be interviewed. Subject 12 is the first of those affected who did not outright resist invitations to discussion to the point that additional security measures would be indicated to make interrogation possible.
-------------------------------------
<Begin Log>
 
Dr. Romins: We appreciate you speaking with us.

Subject 12: Will you scrub my name from the record please?
Dr. Romins: Sure, that's fair.

Subject 12: What would you like to know?
Dr. Romins: Well.. we... most of us, I mean a majority in the Foundation, and certainly those involved in The Department of Psychomachy... we are interested in your hesitancy to accept anomalies as real things. Our organization, both in structure and operation, is really predicated upon the existence of anomalies and... I’m sorry to be blunt, but we just don’t understand how you can possibly think they aren’t real. You work with them every day. You personally, in fact Dr. ██████, have done more research than most. We are just curious; how do you reconcile this apparent paradox? Doesn’t that seem odd to you?

Subject 12: Well, I think it’s important and part of our job to resist the belief that something is anomalous until the last possible moment. The potential for it to be non-anomalous should be completely exhausted first and its designation be a diagnosis of exclusion. A severe, severe last resort.
Dr. Romins: Yes, I agree. Sound as a pound so far.

Subject 12: Yes, well. It seems as though we have taken too lax of a standard for that these days. Grown accustomed to designation too quick, too haphazardly. We are more willing and apt to conclude something is an anomaly much faster than we used to.
Dr. Romins: Right. You have been around a while, haven’t you? Your first documentation was... SCP-65203. Well, one part of that argument is that we are getting better at recognizing them; surely you are too. We all sort of have a sixth sense after dealing with them for so long. Plus, there is more caution in designating something that we can later -EX, rather than let a potentially dangerous anomaly go undocumented and uncontained, isn’t there? Don’t the ones we get right justify the ones we get wrong?

Subject 12: But what about the first 10,000 or so "anomalies"? The same justification was once said of them... let me think here... cognitohazards before they were understood as 6th dimensional subliminal messaging; or half the "humanoids" which have turned out to be completely non-anomalous extraterrestrial life; or hell how many were just misdiagnosed memetics? That’s all a science now. I guess that’s my point; all of this is indistinguishable from the picture of science not yet catching up. Science will likely annex most of it.
Dr. Romins: But isn't that the definition of what anomalous is?

Subject 12: We have some very old documentation, declassified in the last decades that used to be very hush. Administration created a giant theater of distraction to prevent it from being understood as definitive, protected as it was with memetic weaponry. It's shocking how few of us at the Foundation know about it and take the time to read it now that it’s freely available; almost as if the secrecy wasn't even necessary. Maybe because it's just a very technical and dry document; not the flashy type. It defined what is and what isn't anomalous. And the take-home is clear: when you break down the arguments to their most fundamental and microscopic levels, what is "anomalous" is unavoidably defined by consensus. 
Dr. Romins: What of the need to keep the normies safe? Safe physically, but from the knowledge too? Doesn’t that count for something? "We die in the dark so you can li--

Subject 12: I’ve heard that tired catch-phrase, yes. Sadly, I’m well past believing that we do what we do out of a desire for safety. Not when the previously-anomalous has caused so much more good than suffering once it’s out there. Go read the first documents, the prototypes. Before having the protective role we give it, or that at least we like to suppose it has, our confinement of the anomalous was mandated by something altogether different than concern for civilians. We made it necessary through an imperative of control. Our progress prefers to see signs of a benevolence where there is only a condemnation and ontological censorship of the unorthodox. Revelry in a privileged understanding. Has it escaped you that the release of what amounts to anomalous technology, whether productive or defensive, is much higher in times of world peace; and much more stubborn in times of war and unrest?
And how truly can it be good, to keep such knowledge from as many people as possible? The potential for anomalous knowledge is presumed by our rulers to be seen in its totality, and is then denied in the same motion, by the same motion. If we are so dead-set on protecting the world, why haven’t we used anomalies to rid the planet of things like common disease? Weather catastrophes? War? Aging? Death itself? We have the means, have had it for centuries. We are not above using them as tools; we use them to contain other anomalies. Wouldn’t allowing some of the same consideration to humanity at large protect them more than perpetuating what is essentially a trillion-dollar lie?
<Dr. Romin activates the silent trigger for security personnel to ready their weapons outside the door.>
Most of what was once considered anomalous is now revolutionary scientific data. How much then have we stalled humanity’s natural course for development in the arts, sciences, technologies by keeping these anomalies a secret? How can we justify confining humanoids?  Too many times, the anomaly isn’t contained by its definition, but defined by its confinement.
Dr. Romins: OK. OK. Calm down.
Subject 12: I am calm. 
Dr. Romuns: Your voice has raised 10 dB since you started.
Subject 12: This isn’t violence, it’s passion. Am I allowed that?
Dr. Romins: I see where you are coming from. We've all thought about this once or twice. But that doesn't mean that there are no anomalies.

Subject 12: True. But we are left with a bigger and worse problem than if there weren't any; we just don't have a way to know which ones are which. Which are real anomalies and which are dust on the lens? This gets tricky when you essentially imprison and confine in solitude living, feeling things. Sometimes for decades. Centuries. SCP-42819 had to successfully enact a containment breach and find refuge in a university in order to be given the chance of scientific normalcy, which it now has. We weren’t going to give it.
Dr. Romins: ... yeah. You got me there. Although the other side of this is that we immediately release humanoids by protocol who civilian science has shown to be non-anomalous. 

Subject 12: After amnestics.
Dr. Romins: ... yeah.

Subject 12: It’s not that I don’t believe in anomalies, it sounds like you’ve gotten some poor information from someone who wants that to be true. Or someone who hasn’t taken a look themselves. Someone in an office and not on the ground. I can’t imagine how we’re portrayed. We just have a very high threshold for defining them. If there’s a chance it isn’t; we shouldn’t. Period. That’s what we all think.
Dr. Romins: I think that if we were that careful with designations though, we wouldn't exist in half the capacity that we do now. The Foundation would grind to almost a halt.

Subject 12: Exactly.
Dr. Romins: <scoffs> It just... still seems a bit extreme. Trust, me I hear you here, but...

Subject 12: But it's the truth. It only takes a few to start the fire... the rest will pour the kerosene on it.
Dr. Romins: I just don't think we're trigger-happy, and I think we do good work here on the whole. The caution is necessary, even if it ends up being a little heavy-handed. Think of it as sort of an incubator for future sciences. They're birthed when they are ready. To do so too soon may be the real prematurity here.

Subject 12: Not trigger-happy?
Dr. Romins: No.

Subject 12: Where will this interview end up? 
<End Log>

Closing Statement: <You are not credentialed at Level 5.>

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Access Level 5 Document: .... Credentials Accepted

I don't know if it's an anomaly. Honestly. And I don't think that's the anomaly talking either. Hell I've been vaccinated. Every year I've been here. Level 5's.
There’s certainly no reasoning with them. They’ll just believe and take it to the bank that it’s correct, the cart before the horse the whole way. It’s not that they are uneducated. In their heads, they think they are freedom fighters. I’m not sure there’s much value in doing something like an interview again honestly... we didn’t really learn anything new. It’s the same data set with a flipped polarity. There was this surety in his voice and posture. Like he had been practicing it. A comfortable smugness. 
This mind-virus is not becoming of someone in our employ; we are meant to extol the individual whose reason is a match for his passions. It maims production. Maybe we need to stop tolerating it; it represents an uncontained anomaly within our very walls. What good are techs such as the vaccines which can help if we don’t mass dole them out?  I say we mandate them. Otherwise, this is becoming a chorus right in our back yard. With enough diligence and procedures, we can bring the case load to a low percentage.
I really don't know if its an anomaly at all after talking with him, but I can't shake the meta here. Maybe I should excuse myself from this. I feel as if I'm in a fit of simulated dementia. I don’t doubt the vaccine’s efficacy; I just think we may need more frequent boosters.
Maybe you should go ahead with the secondary plan. 
Yes. That's my professional conclusion, in writing now. Plan B it is. Let the skeptics become self-fulfilling prophecies. 
I have a feeling what this will inevitably mean for me. So I’ll arrange it myself, and be on my way sooner rather than later. It's been good, “old pa’tna”. I know; "That's why they don't allow us near anomalies." "Been a rule for centuries now." I know I should have listened. But I always knew I would be OK with admitting that too if the time came. Wouldn't have changed it. Even knowing that I wont know anymore.
Secure. Contain. Protect. In that order.
Love,
Romins

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Addendum 92221.2 — Special Containment Procedures:

Special Containment Procedures -- Addendum -- All personnel exhibiting signs of SCP-92221 are to be cognitively sanitized with amnestics until the anomalous is scrubbed from their ontological framework completely. They are the to be further processed and released as civilians.

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