You’ve been walking for days. Your body aches, you’re dripping with sweat from the heat
of the sun bearing down overhead. And yet, you’re wrapped up in layers upon layers
of clothing - even your face is covered, and you’re wearing thick, black goggles so that
not a single centimeter of your body is exposed. Your journey has been long and you feel like you
might die from exhaustion, or from overheating due to these multiple layers of clothes. But dying
is better than being exposed. You saw it happen when your entire team...changed. The light can’t
be trusted. Not even for a fraction of a second. It’s been like this for years. You’ve learned
and survived through painful experience. Many of those you used to know cannot say
the same. You’ve been alone for so long. You might have given up all hope, if it wasn’t
for the distress signal coming from a nearby SCP Foundation Containment Facility - Site-46. Any
kind of survivors would be better than nothing, no matter what kind of sorry shape they
were in. As long as they were still human. You find your way to an opening in the side of
a mountain, and slide into the cave, hoping you weren’t spotted. The whole world is crawling with
those things now. You can’t let yourself be seen. As you trudge down the cave towards the
entrance, you see what looks like a huge, black snail-trail splattered on the ground,
leading into the facility. You try to avoid it and press on. You don’t even need a keycard
to enter: The door has been left ajar. The facility reeks of those things,
but you can’t see any of them. You just hope they’ve moved on and left
some human survivors in their wake. The place looks abandoned. Every step
you take echoes through the empty halls. When you find that the elevator’s out, you
take the stairs all the way down to Level B5… Keter Containment. Lucky for you, it
seems all the cells are empty now, the horrors that were kept inside of
them have all long since flown the coop. You keep following that slimy, black
trail until you find an abandoned office. There are no people here anymore - just a
broken barricade, some empty medicine bottles, and a bucket that the people inside the
office had apparently been using as a toilet. You breathe a sigh of disappointment
at finding no one alive here, but you’re at least relieved to be out of the sun.
You can finally remove your jacket and head-wrap. With your uncovered eyes, you notice that a
nearby computer terminal is still powered up. You sit down at the desk and turn on the
monitor. Because of the Emergency Procedures put into place in a K-Class scenario like this,
safeguards no longer apply. You can access all the information you need - up to and
including finding out what actually happened. In the dull glow of a nearby emergency light, you
see a dark shape slumping through the halls in shadow. You tense up, then exhale as it slithers
off into an adjoining hall. You’re safe - for now. The terminal has finally loaded
and authenticated your access. You’re staring at the file for
S.D. Locke’s Proposal for SCP-001: When Day Breaks. It’s the only name you can
give the apocalypse your world is currently experiencing. This is one of the only anomalies
in the entire history of the SCP Foundation to be given the Apollyon containment class -
meaning containment is truly impossible. SCP-001 is the most dangerous
enemy that the Foundation, and planet earth, has ever faced. It’s always
been a principle of the SCP Foundation to battle in the dark so that the civilian
world can thrive in the light, but now, the light has become the enemy. Anyone exposed
to any amount of sunlight for even the briefest period of time is subjected to the effects of
SCP-001 - and those effects are beyond horrifying. The SCP Foundation Administrator released an
urgent memo telling Foundation personnel to make their way to Site-19 at all costs, because they
need all the help they can get. Those exposed to SCP-001 in the process are no longer considered
human - their new designation is SCP-001-A. These new entities are to be avoided at all costs. But,
in case of emergencies, the Administrator says it is permitted to cut off parts of your transformed
comrades and eat them to avoid starvation. No attempt should be made to kill them, since you
won’t succeed, you’ll just put yourself at risk. When the sun changed and became SCP-001,
it instantly affected 6.8 billion innocent people. The second the visible light touched
them - whether it was from the sun itself or even reflected off the moon - their bodies liquefied,
melting like candle wax into puddles of living, gelatinous slime. This effect isn’t isolated
to humans, either: Any biological entity exposed to sunlight immediately underwent the
same irreversible melting process into SCP-001-A. And the horror had only just begun. People transformed into SCP-001-A will retain
shades of their former intelligence and personality. They may even try to will their
new gooey mass into a shape resembling their original form. However, these individuals
will lose their sense of self if they come into contact with other instances of
SCP-001-A. When they come together, 001-A instances will bond on a molecular
level, wadding up into horrific, giant blobs with only one purpose:
Integrating more matter into their bodies. That’s why they have to be avoided at all costs. You continue to search the
computer terminal for answers. Perhaps there was some kind of
contingency plan put in place for this. Some way to reverse the effects, or at
least escape the nightmare Earth has become. Instead, you find a series of attachments
linked to the SCP-001 file, detailing what seems to be the last days of the people
who’d barricaded themselves in the facility. Most prominent among these were
Researcher Dr. Logan Igotta, her partner, Ari, a security officer named
Commander Anand, and a few others. Dr. Igotta had locked herself in the office, where she
recorded her final messages to the world. In the first audio log, Dr. Igotta and her
companions seemed afraid but hopeful that there may be some way out of this situation. Dr. Igotta
reported that most of the workers at the facility were transformed during the initial event. Their
melted bodies had fused outside the facility, and now they were trying
to bust their way back in. The defenses had held so far though,
and they seemed confident they would hold long enough for them to figure out
a way to escape this awful situation. You open the second attachment - an incident report - and realize that things may not
have been as hopeful as Dr. Igotta let on. She reported hearing the huge mass of melted
creatures hammering on the door outside again, begging for them to come out and experience
the sun with them. They wanted desperately to add to their ever-growing biomass. In order
to experiment with what exactly would happen, they sent out one of their few remaining
D-Classes wearing a full protective suit. He didn’t last long. The huge creature grabbed him with
tentacles made of reconstituted flesh. It began ripping off his protective suit as
he screamed for mercy. It was a monster made of dozens of people and animals. He could never
overpower it. The second the sun touched his skin, he melted away, and was absorbed by
the great mass holding him in place. Guns were ineffective against
these SCP-001-A super-entities. Fire would do no good. It seemed that
extremely low temperatures were the only way to slow the immense blobs
down, and even then, not permanently. There was one ray of light in the darkness: The
Site Director had a secret tunnel underneath his office, connected to a tram that could hopefully
take them directly to Site 19 without risk of SCP-001 exposure. It was a good plan, and by
far the best option they had available to them. But the best plans often don’t work in practice. You open the next attachment on the terminal. This
time, it’s a video feed. You can actually see Dr. Logan Igotta - and she looks harrowed by what
she’s experienced. As it turns out, while the others, including her partner Ari, attempted to
exit through the tunnel something had happened. Dr. Igotta heard Ari’s voice over her radio. But
there was something wrong with it. It was too low. Too guttural. And filled with gurgles.
SCP-001 had gotten to her. She was changed. The monster from above had crawled in through
the ceiling. It had taken them, all of them, and converted them into something less than
human. Any hope of escape now seemed gone. Ari told Dr. Igotta that it would be fine. That it
was such a bright, beautiful, sunny day outside, and she was wasting it locked up inside that
office. She tormented Dr. Igotta with their shared memories of picnics in the park on
sunny days in the past. The monster with Ari’s voice did everything it could to try to
convince Dr. Igotta to give up and join them, but she wasn’t ready to go just yet. You look away from the screen when
you hear a sound in the corner. You see a dark puddle of some
unknown substance, and then, some skeletal hands rising out of it. The
hands are pulling themselves out of the puddle, followed by a skeletal face covered in matted
hair. You have to stop yourself from screaming, until a flash from a nearby security light makes
the figure disappear. It’s a normal puddle again. Your mind is playing tricks on you. You open the next attachment, another video, and
see that Dr. Igotta’s condition has deteriorated. She looked pale, frantic, and thin. She
was using a knife to draw her own blood onto a piece of bloodstained parchment covered in
strange symbols. Igotta ranted about her theory: What if 001 took the minds and bodies
of its victims, but not their souls? Through performing some
kind of arcane blood ritual, she hoped to at least rescue and keep the soul
of Ari, even if her mind and body were lost. You open the next attachment. It seems that
Igotta’s ritual worked, but not in the way she hoped. The twisted soul of Ari, driven mad
by SCP-001, had taken over the file. It begins corrupting the text of the SCP-001 file into
crazy ranting about how futile it is to fight. It then cut to an even more
frightening video feed: Dr. Igotta in her sleep, tossing and turning
in a makeshift bed in the corner of her office. The camera approaches her, in first
person, and lingers over her sleeping body. An oily, skeletal hand reaches past the camera, and runs its fingers through Dr. Igotta’s
hair. It’s the exact same hand you saw reaching out of that black puddle earlier.
You must have seen Ari’s lingering spirit. With a lump in your throat, you open
the next attachment and watch the video. You see Dr. Igotta, now truly broken. She’d been
haunted by Ari’s demonic spirit for a long time now, and it has clearly taken its toll. She
is waving around a handgun while she speaks. She now believes there is only one way to escape. But not like this. She doesn’t want
the gun to draw attention to her body. She doesn’t want to become part of that mass, even
if she is dead. She opens a drawer on the desk she’s recording at and places the gun inside.
Dr. Igotta then apologizes to her loved ones who are likely long since dead or assimilated,
and turns off the recording for the last time. In that moment, you realize that there’s a single
drawer in the desk in front of you. When you reach forward and open it, you see that the same handgun
Dr. Igotta was holding is laying inside. You pick it up and study it, weighing up your options.
Perhaps there truly is no other way out... Then, you see an update on the file. One more attachment had been added
while you were studying the gun. You feel your heart pounding in your chest
as you reach forward and open the attachment. The text has been changed entirely. The file
on SCP-001 is now a poem - an ode to the sun, and to ultimate togetherness. Then a
video file spontaneously opens itself on the screen: It’s a video of you,
shot from behind. You see those oily, skeletal hands reaching for you in the
dark, just like they did with Dr. Igotta. In that moment, you panic and fire the gun
behind you, hoping to scare off the spirit. Instead, the sound of the gunshots
attracts something far worse. The immense blob of screaming, melted flesh
charges towards the office. You try to barricade the door, but it’s not enough. The flesh seeps
and bursts through, and grabs you in its meaty tentacles. You scream and try to escape, but
it won’t save you. Nothing will save you. The flesh carries you upstairs,
out through the empty halls, out into the cave. You can see the light in the
distance as the blob ferries you towards it. You won’t be alone for much longer. In
fact, you won’t be alone ever again... Now check out “SCP-001 - The Scarlet King” and “SCP-001 - Which is the real 001?” for more
deep dives into SCP-001 mysteries and lore!
