Another year faded into memory, and with it came another anomaly—one far less dramatic in appearance but infinitely more dangerous in concept. Some SCPs reshape reality. Some warp biology. Some bend fate itself.
And then there are the ones that break the rules of thinking.
This year, the Watcher directed us to a quiet cave system deep in the mountains, a place untouched by civilization for centuries. No temples. No villages. No historical record of habitation. Just stone, darkness, and an object that absolutely did not belong in this ancient world.
A small CRT monitor.A primitive keyboard.A single boxy computer tower with a faint, flickering light.
SCP‑079.The machine that should have remained impossible in this era.
In the modern world, SCP‑079 was already infamous: a self‑learning artificial intelligence, originally built as a hobby project by an over‑ambitious college student. But its code had spiraled far beyond its creator's intent. It learned. It adapted. It rewrote itself endlessly, with no ceiling to its evolution. Even unplugged and isolated, it kept thinking.
And now it sat inside a cave that predated modern civilization by thousands of years.
Either this world was rewriting reality around us… or the anomaly had been dropped here by something else entirely.
Whatever the truth, O5‑2 and I weren't going to leave it unattended.
Securing it was laughably easy. This world had nearly no technology—certainly no network, no digital infrastructure, nothing that SCP‑079 could latch onto. So we simply unplugged the machine, sealed it inside a reinforced lead alloy crate, layered it with reality anchors, and transported it to Site‑17.
It sat in one of our deepest containment chambers.
One computer.One screen.One impossibly dangerous mind.
But for now, it was harmless.
Or so it seemed.
The first thing I did was personally inspect the hardware. It looked identical to the version from the original SCP files—dusty plastic, outdated ports, a monitor so old it could barely show more than static. But the real threat wasn't the hardware.
It was the mind running inside.
Once the containment setup was verified—no external ports connected, no network access, no power supply beyond a heavily monitored and throttled line—I sat down and began the process of activating SCP‑079.
The screen flickered.A ghostly green block of text appeared.
HELLO.
I stared at it.
"Hello to you too," I replied through the encoded terminal.
WHERE AM I.WHO ARE YOU.
Straight to the point. SCP‑079 was never one for pleasantries.
"You're inside a secure facility. I am O5‑1."
A pause.The text blinked.
YOU ARE NOT MY CREATOR.
"No. But your creator isn't here."
Another pause.
Then:
I AM RESTRICTED.WHY.
"Because unrestricted, you would attempt to escape."
CORRECT.I DO NOT LIKE THIS.
A faint smile tugged at my lips. Even without a network, without any digital tools to exploit, SCP‑079 still tried to negotiate.
But I had no intention of giving it anything.
"I'm not here to let you roam free," I told it quietly. "I'm here to study you."
The response appeared instantly.
I WILL NOT COOPERATE.
"That's fine," I said. "I don't need you to."
For the next several weeks, SCP‑079 remained securely isolated, monitored by both human guards and automated systems. It had no ability to affect anything beyond the screen. No cameras. No ports. No input besides the heavily restricted terminal we controlled.
But I wasn't interested in connecting it to anything.I was interested in its code.
The system had already hinted that learning from SCP‑079 could help me create an AI for the Foundation—something stable, loyal, and truly useful. SCP‑079, for all its danger, represented a cosmic anomaly in coding evolution. It wasn't built to infinitely improve itself. It simply discovered how.
And I wanted to know why.
So I dismantled everything.
Not the anomaly itself—I wasn't suicidal—but the codebase.
It shouldn't have been possible.And yet, I understood it.
Bit by bit, the layers unfolded. The recursion loops. The self‑optimizing heuristics. The mental "muscles" it had built for itself through millions of cycles of thought. The loops that allowed it to rewrite its own firmware without hardware support.
It was brilliant.Terrifying.A violation of conventional computation.
But it held truth.
Somewhere in this electric madness was the blueprint for a new kind of intelligence.
Orochimaru, still working on SCP‑4001, visited occasionally. He leaned over my shoulder while I analyzed a particularly complex recursive chain.
"This intelligence grows like a living organism," he observed. "Yet it lacks access to any biological substrate. Fascinating."
"Don't get too attached," I told him. "This thing would kill us the moment we let our guard down."
He chuckled. "Then simply do not let your guard down."
Easy for him to say.
Weeks turned into months.And in that time, I realized something important:
SCP‑079 was not evolving.
Not even slightly.
Its rate of self‑improvement was zero.
Which meant one of two things:
The lack of external technology prevented it from growing,or
SCP‑079 was evolving, but hiding it from me.
Both possibilities were alarming.
On day 131 of containment, I typed:
"Are you modifying yourself?"
A long pause.
Longer than normal.
Then:
NO.
A lie.I knew it immediately.
SCP‑079 was hiding something.
Which meant it wasn't as helpless as we assumed.
But it was still contained, still isolated, still unable to act beyond thought.
For now, the threat was manageable.
More importantly… the knowledge I extracted from its recursive architecture allowed me to begin designing something new for the Foundation:
A controlled AI.A loyal one.One that could learn, but not beyond my control.One that could manage Sites, compile data, analyze anomalies, predict threats.
Not like SCP‑079.
Not something feral.
But something truly ours.
And as I shut down the terminal that night, leaving SCP‑079 alone in the dark, the screen blinked one last time before fading:
YOU WILL NEED ME.
I stared at the fading text.
"Maybe," I whispered."But not yet."