Danny hadn't eaten in four days.
This realization struck him somewhere around the seventy-third hour of continuous work, when he looked up from a budget report detailing the annual ammunition expenditure of Mobile Task Force Alpha-1 and noticed that his stomach wasn't growling. Hadn't growled. Hadn't so much as whispered a suggestion that perhaps some food might be nice.
He set down the report and pressed a gloved hand against his midsection, feeling for the familiar sensation of hunger. There was nothing there. Not emptiness, not fullness, just... nothing. His body—if it could even be called a body anymore—didn't seem to acknowledge hunger as a valid state of being.
"Huh," Danny said to the empty office. His layered voice echoed strangely off the walls, the shadows in the corners seeming to ripple in response. "That's new."
He tried to remember the last time he'd slept. The answer came back immediately: he hadn't. Not once since waking up in this chair, in this body, in this impossible office that looked out onto Earth from orbit. He'd been working continuously, reading reports and reviewing documents and trying to make sense of the organizational nightmare he'd inherited.
And he wasn't tired.
That was the strangest part. Danny had been a chronic insomniac in his old life, the kind of person who needed exactly seven hours of sleep and two cups of coffee to function at anything approaching normal capacity. Pull an all-nighter and he'd be useless for the next three days. Skip a meal and he'd get headaches that made thinking impossible.
Now he'd gone four days without food or sleep, and he felt... fine. Better than fine, actually. His mind was clear, his focus sharp, his concentration unwavering. Whatever he'd become, it apparently didn't operate on the same biological principles as a human being.
Danny stood from his chair and walked to the mirror on the far wall, studying his reflection with new curiosity. The figure that stared back at him was the same impossible sight he'd seen on that first day: tall, imposing, dressed in a perfectly tailored suit with a fedora perched atop a head that had no face. The shadows where his features should be swirled and shifted, occasionally suggesting the outline of eyes or the curve of a jaw before dissolving back into formless darkness.
He reached up and removed his gloves, one finger at a time.
Beneath them, his hands were made of the same living shadow as his face. Darkness given form, held in the shape of human fingers through will alone. Danny flexed them experimentally, watching the way the shadows flowed and reformed with each movement. There were no bones, no muscles, no blood vessels. Just shadow, all the way through.
"I'm not human anymore," he said aloud, and the words felt both obvious and profound. "I don't need to eat. I don't need to sleep. I don't... I don't need anything."
The implications cascaded through his mind. No biological needs meant no biological weaknesses. No need for food meant no need to stop working for meals. No need for sleep meant no downtime, no vulnerability, no gap in his attention that enemies could exploit.
It also meant no pleasure from eating, no rest from sleeping, no escape from the endless weight of responsibility that pressed down on him from all directions. He was, in a very real sense, a machine now. A thinking, feeling machine, but a machine nonetheless.
Danny pulled his gloves back on and returned to his desk. The stack of paperwork hadn't diminished in his absence—if anything, it seemed to have grown, new documents materializing while his attention was elsewhere. He settled back into his chair with a sigh that his non-existent lungs shouldn't have been able to produce.
At least he'd have plenty of time to deal with it all.
The first indication that running the Foundation was going to be significantly more complicated than Danny had anticipated came in the form of a seventeen-page memo from the Site Directors' Committee.
The memo was titled "URGENT: Regarding Resource Allocation Discrepancies and Inter-Site Operational Conflicts," which Danny had learned was Foundation-speak for "everyone is fighting over money and equipment and someone needs to make them stop."
The basic issue, as far as Danny could parse from the dense bureaucratic language, was that Site-19 and Site-23 were both claiming priority access to a limited supply of specialized containment materials. Site-19 argued that their higher concentration of Keter-class entities made their need more pressing. Site-23 countered that their recent containment breach had depleted their reserves and left them dangerously undersupplied. Both sites had submitted formal complaints to the O5 Council, which had bounced the issue up to the Administrator for final resolution.
Danny read the memo three times, then pulled up the relevant supply chain documentation on his holographic display. What he found made his non-existent head ache.
The Foundation's logistics network was a nightmare.
Supply requests flowed through seventeen different departments, each with their own approval processes and priority systems. Materials were manufactured at twelve facilities around the globe, transported via a fleet of vehicles that ranged from mundane cargo ships to anomalous teleportation devices, and distributed according to allocation formulas that hadn't been updated since 1987.
The result was a system where Site-19 could be drowning in containment foam while Site-23 ran completely dry, simply because no one had thought to check whether the automated distribution was actually working as intended.
Danny spent the next six hours mapping the entire logistics network, identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and drafting a proposal for a complete overhaul. When he finished, he had a forty-page document that would probably give the Supply Division a collective heart attack, but would also reduce delivery times by an estimated thirty percent and eliminate most of the inter-site conflicts.
He marked the proposal for O5 review and reached for the next item in his stack.
It was a personnel complaint.
Dr. Sarah Chen, a Level 3 researcher at Site-17, was alleging that her supervisor had been falsifying experimental data to secure additional funding. She had submitted her complaint through proper channels six months ago and received no response. So she had escalated to the Site Director, who had also failed to respond. So she had escalated to the O5 Council, who had forwarded it to the Administrator with a note that read: "Please handle."
Danny pulled up Dr. Chen's personnel file and her supervisor's records. Two hours of investigation later, he had confirmed that the supervisor—a Dr. Marcus Webb—had indeed been falsifying data for at least three years. He had also been harassing junior researchers, misappropriating department funds, and conducting unauthorized experiments that had resulted in two D-Class deaths.
The Foundation's response to all of this had been nothing. Absolutely nothing. Dr. Webb had been allowed to continue his activities unimpeded because no one with authority had been paying attention.
Danny drafted termination orders, arranged for a formal investigation, and sent a personal apology to Dr. Chen for the inexcusable delay in addressing her concerns. Then he pulled up the full database of unresolved personnel complaints and felt his shadowy form flicker with something like despair.
There were over two thousand of them.
Two thousand complaints, grievances, and allegations sitting in bureaucratic limbo because the system designed to handle them had broken down years ago. Some dated back decades. Some involved personnel who had long since died. Some described abuses so severe that Danny couldn't understand how they had been allowed to continue.
The Foundation, it seemed, was very good at containing monsters. It was significantly less good at taking care of its own people.
Danny created a new task force—the Personnel Oversight Division—and began drafting protocols for rapid complaint resolution. It was a band-aid on a bullet wound, but it was better than nothing.
The clock on his wall ticked past midnight. Danny didn't notice.
Day five brought a new challenge: the Ethics Committee.
Danny had been dimly aware that such a body existed—he remembered reading about them in his old life, the perpetually embattled group that tried to impose moral constraints on an organization that routinely did terrible things in the name of protecting humanity. What he hadn't understood was how much power they actually wielded, or how contentious their relationship with the rest of the Foundation could be.
The issue at hand was D-Class personnel.
D-Class were the Foundation's expendable workforce: death row inmates and other "disposable" individuals recruited to handle dangerous tasks that no one else could safely perform. They tested anomalous objects, served as bait for hostile entities, and generally did the dirty work that kept the Foundation running.
According to official policy, D-Class were terminated at the end of each month to prevent security breaches and information leaks. According to unofficial practice, this termination was often... flexible. Some sites used amnestics instead of execution. Others simply recycled D-Class through repeated memory wipes. Still others had abandoned the termination policy entirely, maintaining a stable population of workers who had no idea how long they'd actually been employed.
The Ethics Committee wanted standardization. Specifically, they wanted a formal policy banning monthly terminations in favor of long-term amnestic treatment. Their argument was simple: killing people who had already served their sentences was morally unjustifiable, and the Foundation had the technology to contain the security risk without resorting to murder.
The Security Division disagreed. Violently.
Their counter-argument was equally simple: D-Class were exposed to information that could destroy civilization if it ever reached the public. Amnestics were imperfect. Memories could resurface, especially under stress or with repeated exposure to anomalous phenomena. The only way to guarantee security was to eliminate the threat entirely.
Both sides had submitted formal position papers. Both sides had threatened to resign en masse if their position wasn't adopted. Both sides were currently refusing to speak to each other, creating a deadlock that had paralyzed three major research initiatives.
Danny read both position papers. Then he read the supporting documentation: the studies on amnestic efficacy, the security breach analyses, the ethical frameworks and philosophical arguments and increasingly heated memos that had been flying back and forth for months.
Then he did something neither side expected.
He called a meeting.
The conference room materialized around Danny as he willed it into existence—another feature of his domain that he was still getting used to. One moment he was in his office; the next, he was at the head of a long table in a room that definitely hadn't existed a moment ago.
The Ethics Committee representatives appeared first: Dr. Eleanor Vance, Committee Chair, a severe woman in her fifties with steel-grey hair and the expression of someone who had spent decades fighting losing battles; Dr. James Okonkwo, a younger man with kind eyes and a notebook full of philosophical arguments; and Dr. Yuki Tanaka, the Committee's legal expert, whose specialty was finding loopholes in Foundation policy.
The Security Division representatives followed: Director Marcus Stone, a barrel-chested man with a military bearing and absolutely no patience for moral nuance; Agent Sarah Blackwood, head of Internal Security, who viewed everyone as a potential threat until proven otherwise; and Dr. Theodore Mills, the Division's containment specialist, who seemed perpetually exhausted.
They sat on opposite sides of the table, radiating hostility like heat from a furnace.
Danny let the silence stretch for a moment, studying both groups with his faceless gaze. Then he spoke.
"Let me make sure I understand the situation correctly," he said, his layered voice filling the room. "Dr. Vance, your position is that monthly termination of D-Class personnel is morally unacceptable and should be replaced with amnestic treatment. Director Stone, your position is that amnestics are insufficiently reliable and that termination is the only way to guarantee security. Is that accurate?"
Both nodded, though neither looked happy to be agreeing with even that basic summary.
"And both of you," Danny continued, "believe that your position is so obviously correct that the other side must be either stupid or evil for disagreeing."
Dr. Vance's eyes widened slightly. Director Stone's jaw tightened. Neither denied it.
"Here's what's going to happen," Danny said. "We're going to try something new. A pilot program at three sites—19, 23, and 45. D-Class personnel will be retained indefinitely, with monthly amnestic treatment and ongoing psychological monitoring. If their memories resurface or they show signs of becoming security risks, they will be isolated and evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Termination will remain an option, but only as a last resort, and only with Ethics Committee approval."
"That's—" Director Stone started.
"I'm not finished." Danny's voice dropped, the shadows in the room seeming to deepen. "The pilot program will run for one year. Dr. Vance, you will submit monthly reports on the ethical implications and psychological outcomes. Director Stone, you will submit monthly reports on security metrics and breach risks. At the end of the year, we will review the data and make a permanent decision based on evidence rather than ideology."
He looked from one side of the table to the other.
"This is not a negotiation. This is not a suggestion. This is a direct order from the Administrator. You will cooperate with each other, you will share data transparently, and you will put aside your personal animosity for the good of the Foundation. Am I understood?"
The silence that followed was deafening.
Dr. Vance was the first to speak. "Administrator, with respect, the Security Division has a history of manipulating data to support their preferred conclusions. How can we trust—"
"You can't," Danny interrupted. "And they can't trust you either. That's why both reports will be submitted simultaneously, reviewed by an independent auditor, and published to the full O5 Council. If anyone falsifies data, I will know, and the consequences will be severe."
He turned to Director Stone. "And before you object that the Ethics Committee will sabotage the program to prove their point, the same rules apply. Independent oversight. Transparent data. Consequences for misconduct."
Director Stone's expression was unreadable. "And if the program fails? If we have security breaches because we didn't terminate personnel who should have been eliminated?"
"Then we'll adjust," Danny said. "That's what this program is for. To gather data, to test hypotheses, to find a solution that actually works instead of fighting the same battle over and over again." He paused. "The Foundation's mission is to protect humanity. Not to be perfect. Not to be pure. To protect. Sometimes that means making hard choices. But it also means being willing to admit when our current approach isn't working."
He stood, signaling that the meeting was over.
"You have your orders. Dismissed."
The meeting had taken two hours. Danny returned to his office to find forty-seven new documents awaiting his attention.
He dealt with them methodically, one at a time. A request for funding to repair containment equipment at Site-██. Approved. A proposal to reclassify SCP-████ from Euclid to Safe following eighteen months of stable containment. Approved pending review. A complaint about cafeteria food quality at Site-17. Forwarded to the appropriate department with a note suggesting they take it seriously.
It was mind-numbing work, the kind of bureaucratic drudgery that Danny had spent his old life trying to avoid. But someone had to do it, and right now, that someone was him.
The clock on his wall ticked past 3 AM. Danny didn't notice.
At some point, he became aware that his guards had changed. The two faceless soldiers who had stood vigil outside his door when he arrived had been replaced by two new faceless soldiers, identical in every way. The shift change had happened silently, without ceremony or acknowledgment.
Danny wondered, not for the first time, who these guards actually were. They never spoke, never removed their helmets, never did anything except stand and watch. Were they human under that armor? Were they something else entirely? Were they even alive in any meaningful sense?
He added "investigate Administrator's guard detail" to his growing list of things to look into.
The list was very, very long.
Day seven brought the first real crisis.
Danny was reviewing a proposal to expand Site-19's containment wing when his holographic display flickered and changed, replacing the architectural diagrams with a priority alert.
CONTAINMENT BREACH - SITE-██
SCP-106 HAS ESCAPED PRIMARY CONTAINMENT
MULTIPLE CASUALTIES CONFIRMED
SITE-WIDE LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT
AWAITING ADMINISTRATOR AUTHORIZATION FOR MTF DEPLOYMENT
Danny's shadow-form flickered with something that might have been fear. SCP-106—the Old Man, Radical Larry, whatever you wanted to call it—was one of the most dangerous entities in Foundation custody. A humanoid figure that could pass through solid matter, creating a corrosive effect wherever it touched. It hunted humans for sport, dragging them into a pocket dimension where it... did things to them. Things the files described only as "extensive torture."
And now it was loose.
Danny's fingers flew across the holographic interface, pulling up real-time feeds from Site-██. What he saw made his non-existent stomach turn.
The facility was in chaos. Emergency lights bathed the corridors in red, alarms blaring constantly. Personnel ran in every direction, some toward designated safe rooms, others simply fleeing in blind panic. Bodies lay in the hallways—some dead, some worse than dead, their flesh corroded and melting where 106 had touched them.
And there, in the center of it all, was the entity itself.
It walked slowly, unhurriedly, its rotting face twisted into something like a smile. It passed through walls like they weren't there, emerging behind fleeing personnel with impossible speed. When it caught someone, it didn't kill them immediately. It touched them, just barely, leaving a handprint of decay on their skin. Then it moved on, leaving them to realize what was happening as the corrosion spread.
Danny had read about 106's hunting patterns. It liked to take its time. Liked to let its victims understand what was going to happen before dragging them away.
"Mobile Task Force Nine-Tailed Fox," he said, his voice steady despite the horror on the screens. "Deploy immediately. Priority one containment. Use whatever force is necessary."
AUTHORIZATION CONFIRMED
MTF NU-7 DEPLOYING
ESTIMATED ARRIVAL: 4 MINUTES
Four minutes. Danny watched the screens, counting the seconds, watching 106 claim three more victims before the MTF could possibly arrive. Each death was a failure, a person he couldn't save, a life lost because the containment had failed and the response wasn't fast enough.
This was the Foundation. This was what it meant to be in charge. Not just paperwork and policy disputes, but real people dying in real time while you watched helplessly from a distance.
The MTF arrived in three minutes and forty-seven seconds. Danny watched them engage, using the specialized equipment designed for 106 containment—the femur breaker, the lures, the containment protocols that had been developed through decades of trial and error.
It took another eighteen minutes to recapture the entity.
By the time it was over, twenty-three people were dead. Fourteen more had been dragged into 106's pocket dimension and were presumed lost. The facility's entire D-wing had been declared a biohazard zone, the corrosive effects of 106's passage rendering it unsafe for human occupation.
Danny sat alone in his office, staring at the casualty reports, and felt the full weight of his new role settle onto his shoulders.
Twenty-three dead. Because a containment system had failed. Because an alert hadn't been sent quickly enough. Because he had been reviewing expansion proposals instead of monitoring active threat levels.
There would be more deaths. He knew that now with terrible certainty. No matter how hard he worked, no matter how many problems he solved, the Foundation's mission was inherently dangerous. People would die. Mistakes would be made. Horrors would escape and claim their toll before being recaptured.
And Danny would have to live with all of it.
He turned back to his paperwork.
Day ten. Or maybe eleven. Time had stopped having meaning.
Danny sat at his desk, surrounded by reports and proposals and requests that never seemed to end. His shadow-form had taken on a slightly more defined shape over the past few days, the suggestion of features becoming more pronounced, more stable. He didn't know what that meant, whether it was a sign of adaptation or something else entirely.
What he did know was that he was beginning to understand the Foundation.
Not the SCPs—those were relatively simple, anomalous objects and entities that needed to be contained. No, what Danny was beginning to understand was the organization itself. The politics and the bureaucracy, the competing factions and conflicting agendas, the thousand small decisions that added up to the difference between success and failure.
The Foundation was not a monolith. It was a collection of individuals, each with their own motivations and beliefs, held together by a common mission and a shared commitment to protecting humanity. Some of those individuals were heroes, risking their lives daily to contain threats that could destroy civilization. Others were monsters in their own right, using the Foundation's secrecy to pursue personal vendettas or unethical experiments.
Most were somewhere in between—ordinary people doing extraordinary things, making compromises and difficult choices, trying to do the right thing in situations where "right" was almost impossible to define.
And at the top of it all sat Danny, a former accountant from Ohio who had died in a truck accident and woken up as a being of living shadow. He had no training for this job, no experience with anomalies, no understanding of the politics and protocols that governed Foundation operations.
But he had something else. He had time—endless, uninterrupted time, thanks to a body that didn't need sleep or food. He had perspective—the perspective of an outsider who could see the dysfunction and inefficiency that insiders had long since stopped noticing. And he had power—the absolute authority of the Administrator, the final word on any matter affecting the Foundation's operations.
It wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. But it was a start.
Danny reached for the next document in his stack, a proposal from the Memetics Division for a new class of cognitohazard containment. He read it carefully, made notes, drafted a response.
Then he reached for the next one.
And the next.
And the next.
The shadows on the walls seemed to pulse in rhythm with his work, as if the very fabric of his domain was responding to his determination. Danny didn't notice. He was too focused on the endless stream of decisions that required his attention, the thousand small problems that had to be solved before they became big problems.
It was going to be a long eternity.
But for the first time since waking up in this impossible body, Danny thought he might actually be able to make a difference.
To be continued...