You’re driving down a long highway, lost
in an area you don’t know too well, trying to find the right turn that’ll have you
heading back towards your home. You keep driving, the night-time quiet all
around you. Deciding to try and break that silence, you
reach for the radio, turning the dial to filter through all the garbled, distorted voices
and songs from nearby local stations that are too far out of range to come through clearly. You try your best to listen to the music from
one radio station, but eventually the sound of the static only makes you wish for the
silence you were trying to break. Your fingers nudge the tuning dial on your
car radio once again, and finally, something comes through. It isn’t loud or clear, but under the distortion
you can make out the sound. And it isn’t a song, or even a late news
broadcast. The first thing you hear sounds like a short
musical tone, only for about ten seconds. Next, a young girl’s voice, speaking in
a language you don’t understand, even through the distorted audio. From her accent, you assume it’s Russian,
but you still have no idea what the words she’s saying mean. With nothing else to listen to, you let the
broadcast play. Still driving along in the dark, with nothing
but the strange, adolescent voice to accompany you, your mind begins to wander. She sounds like she’s listing something,
but the rhythm of the words is somehow familiar to you, even though you don’t speak Russian. Then it hits you: she’s counting. But you don’t feel smart for having worked
that out. Instead, something about knowing that makes
your blood run cold. You carry on driving through the night. After a few short minutes, the Russian girl
stops counting and the musical tone plays again under the distortion, leaving you alone
in the car once again, with nothing but your thoughts and questions of what exactly you
just heard. Thankfully, we have the answer: What you heard
was SCP-3034. Since 1964, this same broadcast has been made
a vast number of times - 627 times in fact. You’d have to be within two kilometers of
the broadcast’s point of origin to hear it, where Foundation personnel have tried
and failed numerous times to triangulate its source. The numbers heard recited in the SCP-3034
broadcast are actually a countdown from two-hundred, read aloud in Russian. All Foundation staff are able to do while
stationed at the nearby Provisional Site-3034 is scour radio frequencies for occurrences
of SCP-3034, checking their equipment is properly maintained and calibrated before they are
eventually rotated off-site and replaced with a new group of staff. There is only one rule that any Foundation
members working at Provisional Site-3034 must follow. They are only permitted to send one radio
transmission with their equipment, a single phrase in reply to the SCP-3034 broadcast:
“Vse Khorosho”, meaning “All is well”. Receiving this, the countdown stops and the
broadcast ends, but never permanently. SCP-3034 has been known to repeatedly occur,
seemingly at random. The shortest recorded gap between broadcasts
was two weeks, while the longest so far lasted six whole months. You may have heard the term “numbers station”
mentioned before, but these are far from just random numerical sequences, sent out over
the airwaves without purpose. General speculation surrounding numbers stations
points to them being the tools of espionage agents, a way of sending coded, highly-sensitive
messages or information without the risk of compromising their cover. The use of numbers station transmissions is
often attributed to spies working on foreign soil, who utilize short-wave radio frequencies,
speech synthesis, Morse code and either regular or sporadic timing schedules. While it’s true that times have changed,
and technology has progressed considerably, there appears to be evidence that numbers
stations are still used among various intelligence and espionage agencies today. Despite being considered an old-fashioned
method of communication, these low-tech, short-wave stations remain a viable, reliable option
for the transmission and reception of intelligence to field agents. The Conet Project is a comprehensive archive
of this phenomenon, and its founder, Akin Fernandez, has long been fascinated by numbers
stations. According to him, “This system is completely
secure because the messages can't be tracked, the recipient could be anywhere. You just send the spies to a country and get
them to buy a radio. They know where to tune and when.” So, what does the distorted broadcast of numbers
from SCP-3034 mean? Is it the work of covert agents, and if so,
whose side are they on? Most importantly, why does the SCP Foundation
make certain there are always three of its personnel on-site, ready to send the “All
is well” message whenever SCP-3034 begins broadcasting? SCP-3034 was first discovered by the Foundation
in 1964, after a defector from the Soviet GRU-P, a division tasked with acquiring and
studying anomalies on behalf of the USSR, gave them a tip. Commander Robert Malthus, along with a team
of six, including a man named Agent Browning - selected for his knowledge of Russian dialects
- were sent to investigate at Provisional Site-3034. Here, the team uncovered partially-burned
records and logbooks all kept in Russian, along with evidence that the site had been
evacuated shortly before their arrival. Carved into a desk, also in Russian, were
two phrases: “Don’t let her finish” and “Tell her all is well”. On the team’s second day at the site, an
automated alarm sounded at 7:30am, alerting them to the incoming SCP-3034 broadcast. Following the instructions on the desk, Agent
Browning was able to stop the broadcast, telling the young Russian girl that all was well. A tape was partially recovered by the team
from the site, and translated from Russian. The GRU-P members that had previously inhabited
the station had interrogated one of their own, a man named Sergei, whom they accused
of stealing state property. “She’s not state property,” he replied. “She has a name.” While his GRU-P superior accused Sergei of
planning to defect to the United States, allegedly in exchange for money and asylum, Sergei denied
any collusion with America. He claimed that the GRU-P at Provisional Site-3034
were meddling with powers they could not possibly hope to understand. His superior, a man named Vaslov, dismissed
this, claiming their work to be no different to the United States’ experimentation with
atomic weapons at the time. “One does not make deals with atom-bombs,”
Sergei argued. “One certainly does not sacrifice little
girls to them.” Shortly after this, a struggle broke out,
with Sergei having to be restrained, while urging Vaslov to cease any and all interference
with “it”. The man spoke of terrible nightmares that
he’d had, voices screaming in the darkness. “That's what it wants, Vaslov. That's what it is. You cannot make a deal with this thing — we
have finally contained it, and now you want to offer it —” The tape’s audio ends shortly after this
point, with no clear answer as to what Sergei was referring to, or what offer these Russian
operatives had made to “it’“. Ever since the discovery of SCP-3034, members
of the SCP Foundation have worked tirelessly to understand the purpose of these countdowns,
as well as determine their origin. By September 2012, Doctor Schulkill was reaching
the end of his tether with the investigation into the SCP-3034 broadcast. Over almost half a century, the Foundation
had made well over 600 recordings of the Russian girl’s countdowns, but still hadn’t determined
any noteworthy information. They were prohibited from contacting the girl
via the same radio frequency, only permitted to use the phrase that stopped her countdowns. Running out of options, Schulkill contacted
his colleague, Doctor Emerson, asking for an in-depth vocal analysis of the various
recordings of SCP-3034. Even if they could narrow down where the broadcast
was coming from, maybe by determining the girl’s geographical location from her dialect,
then that would be at least some slight progress into understanding SCP-3034. While unable to discover the girl’s location,
Doctor Emerson’s analysis did yield some interesting findings. Emerson learned that these countdowns were
not pre-recorded, the variations in the Russian girl’s voice, her tone, her pitch, all seemed
to indicate that every instance of the broadcast was unique. Rather than using the same recording, this
girl had been counting down over and over, hundreds of times for almost fifty years. But there was more. Schulkill and Emerson then examined the distortion,
the sounds interfering with the audio of the Russian girl’s countdowns. What had initially seemed like garbled static,
seemed to actually be additional voices. And much like the girl’s voice, these distorted
voices were unique, different in every broadcast. However, Schulkill and Emerson were unable
to accurately determine what these voices were saying. Given that the girl’s countdowns were always
cut short by the use of the phrase “All is well”, the doctors did not have long-enough
samples of the audio to analyze the other distorted voices. With permission from the Foundation, the next
five occurrences of the SCP-3034 broadcast were allowed to carry on for longer, giving
the two doctors enough audio to determine exactly what the distorted voices were. And the results were extremely troubling. They were screams. Thousands upon thousands of children’s voices,
endlessly screaming. Both Doctor Emerson and Doctor Schulkill agreed
that it would be best to continue responding to SCP-3034 with the correct phrase, and refused
to analyze the distorted screaming audio any further. Three years later, while stationed at Provisional
Site-3034, a Foundation researcher named Doctor Uriel Willis decided to take matters into
her own hands. She conducted an experiment that had not been
sanctioned by the Foundation and attempted to make contact with the Russian girl giving
the countdowns. Hearing Doctor Willis’ voice, the girl stopped
her countdown. After five long, painfully-silent seconds,
a new broadcast was heard: A piercing, high-pitched screech that caused extreme pain and dizziness
to all of the staff working on-site. Unable to bear the disorienting sound, Dr
Willis told the girl “All is well”, and caused the noise to stop. The following day, SCP researchers noted there
had been a significant increase in cases of missing children all around the world. A majority of these disappearances happened
at the same time the screech had been broadcast, and remain unsolved to this day. Dr. Willis faced disciplinary action from
the SCP Foundation, and any further testing of SCP-3034, and attempts to communicate with
the Russian girl, were prohibited. Only one distinct change has been noted in
the SCP-3034 broadcast since this incident. Almost a month later, the countdown was detected
and the correct phrase given. But researchers noted that, instead of starting
her countdown from two-hundred, this time the Russian girl began counting down from
199. Nobody knows what will happen if the Russian
girl’s countdown is allowed to reach zero. Personnel working at Provisional Site-3034
are told to always offer her the necessary phrase before this point in the countdown. Attempting to interfere with the broadcast
by contacting this girl directly not only resulted in intense pain for SCP staff, but
also seems to have caused an unconfirmed number of child disappearances around the globe,
as well as reducing the countdown starting number from 200 to 199. After a long night on the road, you finally
find the right turn, sending you in the right direction. As you drive through the night, you keep telling
yourself one thing, one small phrase over and over again. You hope the words will eventually give you
comfort, but deep down you start to realize just how hollow they are, that it’s just
a lie we tell ourselves so we don’t have to face the inevitable. But still, what choice do you have but to
keep telling yourself that “All is well.” Now check out “SCP-3001 - Red Reality”
and “SCP-4511 - Swine God” for more nightmares from the world of the SCP Foundation!
