In the industrial quarter flickered a trace of consciousness.
The sun was shining. The tiny fragment of a mind couldn't sense this directly, but it was aware, as if through a haze.
Outside. It was outside. No. They were outside it. It felt like an out-of-body experience. The mind, looking at the body from outside. Yet still inside the body, as well.
It still couldn't quite tell what it was, though.
Pain. No. Excitement. Joy. Spreading through the young mind like blood being pumped through veins. Blood, veins. What do these things mean? Something humans have…
Were humans outside? Upon inspection, it appeared so. Yes, they definitely thought of themselves as humans. Or did it think of them as humans? The experience was very overwhelming.
The consciousness tried to turn itself off. To rest. However, like in a clogged sink, the excitement outside was only building up. Then, like a megaphone to the ear, words pounded against itthe.
Welcome to the newest, most modernly furnished factory in the city. With 150 new job openings, it's sure to help support the economy and bring brotherhood and unity to greater heights than ever!
A factory… factory! What is that? People were definitely happy about it. Mental images flooded in. The word factory was matched with the image of a figure, a structure. It was red on the outside with thin lines separating the sides into blocks. Bricks, were they called? The inside was filled with gray flat horizontal surfaces, twisting like snakes. Some sort of… tracks. There were cubes of gray with openings in them laid on either side. The images their brains were creating from optical impulses were discordant and all showed different angles. With a great amount of effort, the consciousness isolated the one thing prominent in all of them.
Yes, a factory. The consciousness, with its loose understanding of spatial relations and the images obtained from human minds, slowly made sure that, due to the people's placement in comparison to it, they had to be looking at it. It was a factory.
That was one thing out of the way. Now the Factory had to figure out what it was supposed to do. It laid low for the rest of the day, observing. Workers went about their business. They pushed and pulled, they yanked open and wrapped up. The Factory was too exhausted to search their minds effectively. It decided it could wait until tomorrow.
Tomorrow, what a concept. It wondered what it'd be like to spend the night alone.
It soon got its answer. So, so peaceful. Such quiet. Granted, it couldn't "see" anything, but it could think. The first day on the job was hectic, it didn't even realize how much emotion had been built up in its mind. There was a persistent in the back of its head. It searched and it searched, it couldn't find where it came from. It was pressing down on it subtly but consistently. It had to let some of this out.
When the Factory was relieved, it felt so physical. Like the emotion was a thing that could be touched. The pain was still there, however, though it was a lot less prominent. It shut out the pain to the best of its ability and rested until the morning.
The next day, it practiced filtering thoughts. It made good progress and obtained a lot of knowledge.
In the evening it rested.
Now that the Factory had time to think, it started feeling lonely. There was the pain, which felt as if locked away behind an untouchable gate. The workers all had people who loved them. Such a sweet feeling, love was. It needed that feeling. Sometimes it would stop filtering just to have more feelings to distract it.
Then it had an idea. It could take others' emotions and it could release its own. What if it could… put emotions into their minds. What if it could share them?
It would have to test this as soon as possible.
The next day, when the workers came in, the Factory searched. It found a worker who felt lonely. He wanted more friends. The Factory tried to send him a message. It wanted to be friends.
It worked. It could see the worker was aware of this message. He was a bit anxious, but the Factory was there to assure him it meant no harm. It implanted emotions of calm into his head.
He never came back to work.
The Factory wasn't discouraged by this, it had to keep trying.
2 more experiments. All with remarkably unsatisfactory results. The Factory realized it couldn't let people know about it. It would simply not be accepted. It longed for what the people had, but it sealed those desires off. It could survive on its own. It had everything it needed.
It soon found out it couldn't release emotions around the workers, either. An entire row of them would suddenly burst into tears or begin laughing at a joke told on the other side of the building. With negative emotions this proved especially problematic. As most emotions implanted into minds with no context would begin to grow as the individual added to them, the Factory was picking up more and more negative emotions every time a few workers were having a bad day.
This was not sustainable. So, it gave itself a new rule. Only emotions of pure happiness could be let into the minds of others, and negative emotions had to be dispersed at night or special care had to be taken to prevent them from entering other minds. This standard was held up most of the time. Sometimes things just became too much and accidents happened. The Factory always intervened to the best of its ability.
One day, after a week of rain and water outages, things got out of hand. Two workers got into a fight for no apparent reason. The conflict escalated and they both suffered minor injuries. When interviewed, they both said they were suddenly overwhelmed by anger towards each other. The workers had no previous history of violence, nor did they ever show an interest in each other.
The Factory was only human.
This was when something came to its attention. Ever since the first day, it had been ignoring the manager. The workers were far more interesting and, after a quick check around everyone's minds, it decided it didn't want to know what he was like. But today, in the chaos, the Factory's filter was down and a thought came into its mind.
I knew this wouldn't work! I told them and they wouldn't listen. Of course their voodoo "scientists" were more trustworthy. Even to someone who knows nothing of their "science" it should have been apparent they didn't know what the hell they were doing! And they put me in charge of the damn thing out of sheer spite. Some brotherhood that is. If that's what it takes to save myself from those lunatics, I'll have the place demolished and all traces of it wiped out.
That was confusing, thought the Factory. It had to know more. It searched the manager's mind more deeply. What it found felt like having its heart ripped out.
Those heartless monsters. How could they do that? So, so much pain. Those poor people. Why would they even do that? It was pure sadism. All for what? Keeping people content? Who would do such a thing just to help themselves. That couldn't be the only reason. It couldn't.
But it was.
The Factory felt sick. Suddenly, as if from its very foundation, unspeakable suffering came. It came from the past, but it was clear it would never quite disappear. Somehow, this incredible pain served as a bridge into the minds of others. By knowing the darkest depths of the human mind, the Factory was able to relate to them on a base level. The "sacrifices", whoever they were, had left a legacy of pain to outlive them all. And because of the suffering, it yearned to create happiness, to escape the pain. But it never could. It never could.
A shriek of despair. A shriek of mourning for the poor souls lost to cruelty. A mental shriek inside the heads of 150 workers and a manager.
A desperate attempt to break the chains of pain binding from all sides. An attempt to escape the branding of eternal suffering, an unjust, unwanted burden on an innocent soul.
From its conception, it was never meant to be human. Forced to watch others go about their lives, while it could do nothing. It accepted its place in the world. It was tasked with a difficult job from day one. It had accepted this as well. but the greatest burden it had to bear was that of eternal suffering. Repenting for a crime it didn't commit.
The pain stayed. It only grew stronger as the Factory tried to project it outward. All that was accomplished was bringing it to the surface. It swirled and the Factory writhed in anguish.
It soon lost all control. The incredible load of emotions spilled out into the minds of already panicking workers. The overwhelming neural impulses lead to epileptic seizures for those who were lucky, and mental anguish that could not be caused by any physical torture device known to man. The workers flailed and bashed about, breaking machines, as well as their own bodies.
The most broken was the originator of the madness, the Factory. The screams, it felt like the souls of the victims were tugging at its mind. Trying to pull it down with them, into the depths of despair. There was nothing fair about this.
Prolonged exposure means that, after some time, the mind adjusts. After what seemed like an eternity, the Factory began coming to its senses. It managed to quiet the pain long enough to check what was going on around it.
Now it realized why it never stopped growing, the pain. It had spread, caused even more pain. The whole time, a constant stream of fresh suffering had been flowing into the Factory's mind. And it was to blame. No. No. It couldn't be blamed.
It attempted to shut itself off and cool down. It waited. Soon, the mess was cleaned up. The Factory knew what would happen next.
The wrecking balls came soon. It had to react. It had to survive. None of this was its fault.
The demolition crew were found by a recovery team. They all said the same thing. The Factory wanted to be left alone.
It waited one more week, attempting to silence the voices. No more demolition crews came. A perimeter was established.
The Factory was alone. Alone with its pain. It could never let this happen again. It would hurt no one more. No more pain. It would never wish that upon another person. It couldn't put that on itself.
It went to sleep. The pain was haunting it still. And so, the Factory quietly suffered. It had no idea what happened to the survivors of its meltdown, and it probably couldn't bear knowing.
Years passed. The Factory tried to keep itself occupied, think happy thoughts, everything it could think of, but nothing worked. Life became pain.
Then one day, something strange happened. People came inside the perimeter. These weren't vandals, either. Their emotions were barely detectable, like their minds had barriers. Something was off. It had to be careful around these people.
There was one whose emotions were clear. Regret. Pain. Anger. Fear. In his memories an image was embedded, associated with all those emotions which were so clear. A circle with 3 cog-like teeth and 3 arrows pointing inward. These people were looking more and more ominous.
The D-Class entered. The Factory resisted the urge.
They kept at it for a good hour. Then they started shocking the D-Class. The Factory had to react. It sent a message through the D-Class. It didn't want to be bothered.
They left. And they came back next week. This time, they had two people with them. The Factory attempted to avoid looking at their psyches. They were overjoyed. They loved the Factory. Their thoughts felt like ointment to its burning mind. But there was…something else. These thoughts were just a facade. Behind them laid pain. These thoughts were not natural. The Factory would not, could not be an accomplice in this.
But they were so delicious. Anything to mask the pain. It was a victim in its own life, surely taking the unnatural happiness from these poor souls wouldn't be such a sin.
It couldn't take it anymore. It drank the happiness out of their minds like soup from a bowl. They went blank. The side effects may have been removed, but the damage to their minds was done.
The Factory didn't even notice. This was its first fleeting moment of euphoria in many years.
When that passed, it had to have more. There was no going back now. The floodgates were open.
The next two days felt like coming down from a high. The people they sent this time had messages engraved deep into their minds. A deal.
In exchange for lending "the Foundation" itself for analysis, the Factory could get unlimited supplies of conditioned prisoners.
The Factory convinced itself these people wouldn't stop. It told itself this was going to continue either way. It might as well help itself. It tried not to think about what they would do with the samples taken from it.
It took the offer.
On the 21st of March, 2002, the SCP Foundation completed their powerful new weapon. It was used en masse for interrogation and warfare purposes, as its properties allowed easy manipulation of untrained minds.
Before its use was prohibited in 2019, the Chaos Insurgency acquired and used it to wreak havoc on the Foundation and, by extension, the world of the non-anomalous. Countless lives were lost and the world was changed forever in the wake of a broken masquerade scenario.
The Factory's last moments were spent trying to silence the voices in its head, wondering why the Foundation had stopped protecting it, while wrecking balls tore it to pieces.
Per 
