The SCP Foundation’s Mobile Task Forces
are the best of the best. Their members are the elite: handpicked from
the world’s militaries, intelligence agencies, security contractors, and navies, to create
the Foundation’s own security force. They ensure that the other personnel are able
to do their jobs without having to worry about their own safety, whether it be during an
assault on the site from the Chaos Insurgency or a containment breach from one of the countless
dangerous anomalies that the Foundation contains. Of course, not every Mobile Task Force can
do everything. That’s why each one is specialized. Highly trained and equipped with bleeding-edge
technology and equipment, every Mobile Task Force has one specialty - one thing they do
better than anyone else in the world. And with the hundreds of Mobile Task Forces
on the Foundation’s roster, that’s quite a few specialties. There’s the famous MTF Epsilon-11, the Nine-tailed
Foxes. Handling internal Foundation security, this
military task force is made up of former Special Operations soldiers and are deployed into
Foundation sites - usually where something has gone terribly wrong - to clean up the
mess and restore order. Wherever a containment breach or communication
blackout happens, Epsilon-11 won’t be far behind. Or you can take the grizzled MTF Zeta-9, the
Mole Rats. Specially trained to explore, map, contain,
and if necessary, fight in enclosed subterranean spaces and anomalous topographies. Zeta-9 has a high casualty rate, but if they
can’t dive into the darkness to get the job done, nobody can. And who can forget the infamous MTF Omega-7,
Pandora’s Box? A secret task force organized in the 90s to
train and utilize humanoid SCP objects in field operations for the Foundation. Some of the most famous humanoid anomalies,
like SCP-076, were members of Omega-7 until it was forcibly disbanded by O5 Command. But that’s a story for another day. But above all of these Task Forces, one MTF
operates on another level. The O5 Council, the group of thirteen mysterious
individuals that control the Foundation, retain one Mobile Task Force for their personal use. Mobile Task Force Alpha-1, the Red Right Hand. Named for the Biblical symbol of vengeance,
Alpha-1 serves, appropriately, as the right hand of the Overseers, executing their edicts
throughout the Foundation. Their operations are classified so intensely
one could be mistaken for thinking they don’t even really exist, but Alpha-1 embody the
will of the Overseers, and are empowered to enforce that will by any means necessary. Most Foundation personnel will never even
encounter Alpha-1 through their entire career - and if they do, it generally means that
something has gone very, very awry. And for the select few personnel that get
the opportunity to join MTF Alpha-1, they’ll be put through rigorous physical, psychological,
and anomalous screening before even being considered to have their identity and existence
redacted from society, and being pressed into service. But what exactly does MTF Alpha-1 do? How are their members selected? Today we’re going to look at the story of
one such recruit to join the Foundation’s most elite task force. D-0912, formerly known as one Andrew Carter,
was unceremoniously forced out of his cell one morning and grabbed around the arms by
the tall, imposing armored guards of the Foundation. The test subject was then made to walk down
to the hall of the site, down an elevator, through several wings, until they reached
a door. Then, from inside, he heard a voice: “Step
forward, D-0912.” So he stepped through the threshold of the
door, into the sterile white testing chamber. Aside from a single metal chair in the middle
of the room under one harsh white light, it was completely empty. The shadows made it hard to see the corners
of the room. Behind him, a doctor who followed him into
the room with a clipboard and labcoat wrote something down while speaking in a low, monotone
voice: “You will be vaccinated against an anomalous pathogen. Later, we will conduct tests of the vaccine’s
effectiveness. Sit in the chair.” Before he even thought of running, the two
guards flanked the door. Their faces were covered by black visors,
and he could see his own reflection in them. Daydreaming to himself, he slowly moved toward
the chair. He thought about gods and beasts and blood. How the Foundation seemed to suck up test
subjects for its own purposes the way an old god sucked up sacrifices and left empty corpses
behind. He heard footsteps. “Sit in the chair, D-0912.” He was barely sat for a few seconds when the
guards stepped forward and used the leather straps to tie his hands to the arms of the
chair. Then he tried to think - why was he here? Why was he in this jumpsuit? He couldn’t remember. He had a faint memory of a crime being committed
- maybe murder, but who knew? Why did the Foundation care? He kept wondering about more and more. He had no idea who was in his family or what
his life had once been, just that he’d committed a crime once. But if he was guilty of something, how had
the Foundation gotten its hands on him? There aren’t many death row prisoners in
the world, and society keeps a close eye on them to make sure justice is served. Why would the Foundation pick the most closely
monitored prisoners for their sacrifices? It doesn’t make sense. What made even less sense was the Foundation
entrusting the job to prisoners with little education and few specialized skills. Experiments require precision and finesse,
and manual labor could be handled using machines or drones for explanation. It seemed idiotic to have thugs and criminals
do the work of unravelling the mysteries of the world. Just when D-0912 started to wonder about how
he had even learned to think like this while in jail, someone interrupted his reverie. “D-0912” The doctor in the labcoat said. He responded from the chair: “You’re giving
me a vaccination?” “That’s right,” the man said, not looking
at D-0912. “Good day to give somebody a vaccination,
isn’t it?” D-0912 knew what happened to D-class on a
monthly basis. He knew he wasn’t being vaccinated for anything. “Are you sure you can’t make more use
of me? Why would you throw away a tool for the greater
good so easily?” D-0912 asked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,”
the man in the lab coat replied. But between the guards at the door, the restraints
on the chair in the middle of the room and the doctor’s impassive face - D-0912 knew
he was being put to death. He wiggled his arms, pointing out that the
straps were loose, but the doctor ignored him. D-0912 couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t
scared of his impending death, or why he was so nonchalant about it. Pieces of his mind seemed to be missing. His past had been ripped away from him, and
his future turned in on itself. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember anything
about his life before his tenure in the Foundation’s D-Class program. He decided that he might never have even been
alive, and that was why he couldn’t remember anything. Surprisingly, he also didn’t hate the Foundation
for killing him. The Foundation was a massive organization
- it didn’t hate him, it just needed him for a little while and didn’t anymore. But the little people like the doctors and
researchers and guards who made his life a living hell by poking and prodding and shoving
and threatening him bothered him. These people were his only connection to other
humans, and they were wasting his potential. D-0912 started daydreaming again as the doctor
in the lab coat worked. He imagined men chopping wood and carving
stone to build a tower to reach the sky. Were the wood and stone being destroyed as
they were stacked on one another, or were they always destined to be part of the tower? When finery and silk clothing was presented
to an emperor, had the silkworms known their products would one day wind up on the most
powerful man in the world? He was broken out of the reverie again by
the doctor lifting up his sleeve, carrying a syringe in his other hand. The tip was long, thin, imperceptible and
impossibly sharp. Then it pricked into D-0912’s skin and he
began to shudder. It felt warm and hot and shook him inside,
and flowed up into his brain. Everything turned white and the room seemed
to disintegrate into particles around him. But he noticed a presence overhead, draped
in white clothes, and sensed the two guards looking at each other, exchanging a glance,
and nodding. He managed to get a few words out: “S-stop
this. Oh God—” Then he fell back into his mind, navigating
out of the confusing messy dark maze inside his head. He couldn’t see the light to the path, only
smoking chemical fire until he was totally lost and heard screaming and roaring. As the beasts began to roar inside his head,
D-0912 remembered. He remembered his name, Andrew Carter. He remembered being told by a man in a lab
coat that he had a unique opportunity to redeem himself. “By participating in the SCP Foundation’s
D-Class personnel program for one month, you earn your freedom.” For a second, he almost agreed to it, until
his mind remembered: “You’re lying. I’m not a criminal.” “No,” the man said. “You’re not. But I wasn’t lying. You need redemption.” D-0912 responded: “I won’t be told that
I need redemption from people who detain, experiment on, and torture the innocent. You violated me. You made my own brain lie to itself. You had me pretend to be a criminal.” The man laughed at him and pointed out the
obvious: He had believed the lie. How can you say who you are when you can’t
even remember your own past? How does he know his mind is his own? Why is it bad for the Foundation to mess with
something Andrew Carter doesn’t own? They argued for a few more minutes. Andrew insisted he was himself, and the man
in the lab coat expected him to know his function: being a sacrifice for the Foundation’s greater
good. Then D-0912 asked who the man in the lab coat
was, and the labcoat suddenly dissolved away. He realized he was hallucinating again, and
had been hallucinating this entire time - the man’s eyes turned into bright orange lanterns,
and his chest cracked and peeled and writhed. This wasn’t a man, this was a beast. The beast told him that if he did not know
who he was, his sacrifice would be meaningless. That he would have to realize what he was
before he could be redeemed. “I will not be a sacrifice,” D-0912 said. The beast laughed in his face, and a thousand
voices laughed right alongside it. Then the scene changed, and he was somewhere
else. Some kind of dirt road with a long metal chain
link fence stretching across the horizon. Every so often, there was a guard tower by
the fence. He was standing in front of a gate, with the
two guards from the room standing behind him. The electric fence’s gate swung open to
him, and the guards behind him spoke. The guard on the left commanded him to enter
the gate, and he took a step and stopped. “No, I’ve been here before. You made me do this, and then made me forget
I did this already.” The guard on the right just raised his gun
to Andrew Carter’s head. “If you do not comply, we will shoot.” “Then shoot me already,” D-0912 said. He knew that he had been here before already
countless times, and the Foundation had amnesticized him over and over and over again. But this time he remembered that his name
was Andrew Carter, and they had spent too much time in the hallucination. Something was different this time around. As the echoes of a gunshot rang through the
air, D-0912 collapsed to the ground. He saw through the gate to the village beyond. Numbers flew through the air and wrapped themselves
around the villagers. They were marching, row by row, just as he
had seen them do, time after time again. He remembered feeling the numbers slide into
his own brain. They had formed expressions and equations
that blossomed into a billion different right and wrong evaluations, as truth and falsehood
were demoted to special cases of general chaos. He had said the words, then: My name is Andrew
Carter. The words made a sign, and in all signs there
was power. But the numbers and equations that proliferated
in the air had power of their own. They formed rows and columns, and if D-0912
looked at them from far enough away there was a sign written in the pattern of the numbers. He had seen this sign again and again, and
the Foundation had made his mind forget it again and again, so his mind went chasing
after the sign and the source of the sign’s power until he eventually found it, wrapped
up in the branches of a wild apple tree, hidden where no human eyes had wandered. The hallucination was getting more intense,
and he could feel his brain falling apart with the pressure. The guards walked over and knelt down by his
sides. “What do you see?” one of them asked. As he laid on the ground, he tried to remember
what he saw, but couldn’t describe it. It was like a power tool without someone holding
it. It didn’t know what it was or who made it,
but it still knew its purpose. The other guard spoke, “But if you have
no maker, how do you know what your purpose is?” Then something clicked in D-0912’s tortured
brain, where he was still navigating the forest maze in his mind. All the dark, confusing paths slowly merged
together at the center of the maze, and he knew that the answer to the riddle was there,
in the center of his head between the beasts and the forests: it was his name, Andrew Carter. As he got closer to the answer, some things
began to make sense to his mind. There were two worlds. There was one world in which roads and buildings
ran straight, and clouds drifted across the sky in set paths, and the earth rotated peacefully
around a tranquil sun. There was another world where singularities
and vacuums shattered the underpinnings of the universe, where fractal patterns spread
out across the ground and radiated like halos from the unthinkable minds of human beings,
and the roads diverged from one another in angles and spirals. It was the first world where the Foundation
thought only about costs and benefits and how to best maximize utility for seven billion
people, and where, no matter what, the Foundation was the greater good. He had lived his old life in the first world,
and was only now seeing the second world for what it really was: the truth. The Foundation had long since abandoned trying
to describe itself to others - so there was no “truth” to what the Foundation was. It just was, and always would be. As he came to this conclusion, D-0912 looked
into himself in his hallucinatory state. He could see the chemical light substance
that the doctor had injected into his bloodstream. The chemical reactions weren’t what he was
expecting - this chemical couldn’t possibly kill him. In fact, it was a little similar to the chemical
structure of the molecules of the amnestics he had been pumped with a dozen times before,
but slightly different. He knew he was going to live. Outside of Andrew Carter’s mind, the doctor
was looking over his perfectly-still body when one of the guards spoke again. “Doctor Wainwright?” said the guard on the right. “Yes, Sir?” the doctor responded. “Leave us now.” the guard said. “Yes, sir.” the doctor lowered his eyes to look at the
floor as he quickly shuffled out of the room. The guard on the left adjusted his visor to
make direct eye contact with the guard on the right. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Look.” He took out a syringe of red liquid from behind
his back. The guard on the right responded: “Do not
implicate me in your misdemeanors, Adam.” The guard with the syringe in-hand snapped
back: “Don’t blame me for trying to share.” The guard on the right looked at him upset
and said: “You are to find the Site Director and return that to him immediately. Petty theft from Foundation employees who
know no better is rather distasteful. Furthermore, HALMAS is a Level 5 controlled
substance. Its unregulated distribution is punishable—”
“It’s fine,” Adam said, slipping the syringe into his pocket. “I’ll let the go-between know, and he’ll
tell the O5s. Jesus, Basam, do you really think that I’d
let the O5s lose track of some of their HALMAS?” In the chair in front of them, D-0912’s
body convulsed. A low groan escaped his frothy lips. Immediately, the two guards moved forwards
and removed his restraints. “Andrew Carter?” Basam asked. Slowly, D-0912 opened his eyes. “You didn’t kill me.” “We were not planning on doing so,” Basam
said. D-0912 continued: “You took me from the
real world in order to make me into something. Direct, uncontrolled exposure to the Foundation’s
anomalies—repeated amnesticization—leading me to believe that I would eventually be killed—all
so that my mind would be in the perfect position for the Foundation to change it with whatever
is in that man’s pocket.” D-0912 extended a finger at Adam, who offered
a faint smile back. “Already knowing things that you shouldn’t
know. Aren’t you precocious?” Adam said. “You have been altered,” Basam said, “to
meet the specifications of a top-secret project. Over the course of your future, you will learn
more about the Foundation than any of your previous jailors ever knew or could have hoped
to guess at. You will join a group that is at the very
head of the Foundation. For your entire life, this has been your purpose.” D-0912 felt the rotting flesh of the now-dead
disguise that had hidden Andrew Carter fall away. Basam continued: “Welcome to Mobile Task
Force Alpha-1.” Now go watch “SCP Elite Mobile Task Force
Explained” and “MTF Tau-5 Samsara Tale - Avatara” for more SCP Foundation Mobile
Task Force Madness from SCP Explained!
I meant to say “who we rally are in alpha 1