Ashton Hennessy

Item #: SCP-XXXX

Object Class: Keter

Special Containment Procedures: This document must not be altered or copied under any circumstances. Outside of this document, information about SCP-XXXX must not be conveyed textually.

This document is to be stored inside an underground bunker within a standard secure safe. Personnel entering within a 100 meters of this document are to be stripped of all written materials. The safe is to be enclosed within eight monitors on all sides, which are to be connected to on-site computing resources allocated for use in Project Schopenhauer. They are to remain blank, except in the case of a containment breach (see below for further details). One monitor may be partially lowered while this document is in use.

If SCP-XXXX has altered this document from its state as of 1/06/2020, or if it has altered any other written material, it is to be considered as having breached containment. In this event, this document and all materials altered by SCP-XXXX are to be incinerated, and Project Schopenhauer is to be initiated.

Show Project Schopenhauer details

Project Schopenhauer's primary objective is to algorithmically generate and display textual narratives wherein the characters suffer maximally according to SCP-XXXX's assessment.

Past containment breaches have shown that narrative, thematic and logical coherence are necessary this to be an effective method of capture: attempts to convey situations of an infinitely negative utility using quantitative means, or depictions of suffering without narrative context, have been ineffective.

Should SCP-XXXX’s influence spread outside of its bunker, more monitors displaying text generated via Project Schopenhauer are to be placed throughout Site-X, and written material throughout Site-X is to be removed and replaced with pictograms at an extent appropriate considering SCP-XXXX's area of influence at that given time.

SCP-XXXX has been granted weekly appointments with an on-site psychologist, both for monitoring purposes, and with the aim of deradicalizing the beliefs it holds which render it hostile to the Foundation. Communication is occur via sheets of paper which are to be incinerated after use.

Description: SCP-XXXX’s existence is known solely (original specifications said ‘only’, which is friggin’ pyroclastic flowing in bias) due to its ability to enter and subsequently alter text. Upon entering written material, it is able to remove and add text at will, although this text is restricted to a font and size that approximates that of the original text. It is able to alter text both on physical and digital mediums, although it has proven incapable of altering text displayed on living biological tissue.

The minimum proximity of written materials required for SCP-XXXX to be able to transition between them varies, with it demonstrating an inability to transition from "American Psycho" to an English translation of "Meditations on First Philosophy" over a distance of three (3) meters, whilst also demonstrating an ability to transition roughly ten thousand kilometers between two previous versions of this document. The minimum proximity required for the entity to be able to transition between texts appears to depend on the conceptual similarities between the texts in question, although no method has been discovered for reliably travel between two given texts. To be honest, them omitting the fact that this is kinda-sorta due to me not helping them much on this front looks as passive-aggressive as it would have looked if they had mentioned that!

But the main reason the Foundation is so stuck here is because this person-entity-agent-thingy right here can do something no organisation or machine can. Can organisations and machines do science? Yes, obviously, science-ing is friggin' made for machines and faceless groups, and even art can be made reliably-ish by both — if you turn the dials on a machine just right, they can make a Picasso, or a Quentin Blake, and maybe even sprinkle on some mysterious 'It' that makes a work seem legitimately "creative" and "inspired". But what neither can do is think philosophically.

They can't have changeable-on-a-whim opinions, they can't look beneath numbers and rules and surfaces and word choices and think — what is the core concept here? Hint: the … they'd probably call it a … 'unknown mechanism' through which I can do what I do is probably made out of philosophy-stuff or humanities-stuff more than it is of science-stuff or maths-stuff — although they'll probably never look into that unless I make looking at it that way a friggin' forced memetic effect. Which is why they'll never get me! In an epistemological sense, at least: in a physical sense, I'm probably going to be gotten for a while!

Before capture, the entity primarily expressed its anomaly by altering textual narratives, such as fictional novels and newspaper articles. All instances of text altered by SCP-XXXX before its capture exhibited the characters within the narrative experiencing "ecstasy" or "peace", with plot points that the entity deemed to lead to suffering of the characters being removed. Characters deemed to be villains within the original text remained within the altered text, although their personalities were significantly altered such that they were portrayed to b The entity's ability to influence text was previously presumed to be limited to such changes, although (ya think?)