Dwarfdeaths2

I am proposing this as an addenndum to SCP-001 Jonathan Ball's Proposal. This is separate from the Unseen Satellite SCP item.

Addendum: Attempts at Noninvasive Nondestructive Examination

Excerpt from Dr. ███████’s ████ proposal:

A proposal was put forward by Dr. ████ in ████ to examine the contents of SCP-001 without physically disturbing the pages, on the hypothesis that the physical act of opening the report induces SCP manifestation. His reasoning was that such examination would allow for foreknowledge of SCP items (“descriptive operation,” as was initially hoped during early investigation) without releasing more into the world (“prescriptive operation,” as is feared in more conservative interpretations). At the time of his proposal there was no technology available to do this nondestructively, and considering the extreme risk associated with destruction or deterioration of SCP-001 (the “pandora’s box” hypothesis) the proposal was shelved.

The recent emergence of terahertz imaging technology as a nondestructive method of examination, which utilizes nonionizing radiation in the spectral region between microwaves and infrared, has finally made this proposal feasible. This approach is essentially a more sophisticated conception of holding the paper up to a strong light and reading the words though it. As the technology has already been developed commercially as a means to examine old books that may be too fragile to open — and, given that the reports contained in SCP-001 are typically less than thirty pages in length — it should be relatively easy to modify the technology to our purposes for the modest sum of about ██████████.

After deliberation, this proposal was approved unanimously by O5 officers on ████-██-██.

The terahertz spectral imaging system (TSIS) and accompanying reconstructive software was developed and successfully deployed on test documents estimated to be of similar size, thickness, composition, and typesetting to SCP-001. Full retrieval of contents with satisfactory fidelity was achieved for all documents of less than 50 pages. The first application to SCP-001 was conducted on ████-██-██. It was noted when opening the briefcase for the first time in ██ years that the number of pages in the document had changed from the count taken just before closing the briefcase the last time. This prompted a secondary investigation into possible security violations, but it yielded no results. At any rate, the experiment was conducted and produced the report on SCP-███. The experiment was suspended while agents were dispatched to verify the existence or nonexistence of SCP-███. On ████-██-██ it was confirmed that SCP-███ did exist, though as usual it could not be definitively determined whether the retrieval of the report was causally linked to the manifestation. This fulfilled the scope of the original proposal and nothing further was done at the time.

Based on these results Dr. ███████ theorized as to whether manifestation is associated with the human act of viewing the information, or whether any physical interaction that would bear information away from SCP-001 was sufficient. She proposed a second stage to the experiment in which the TSIS scan would be performed but the contents would not be viewed by personnel. The Foundation would continue normal operations, and O5-██ would later compare the description of newly reported SCP item(s) against the unviewed report for ex post facto agreement. The experiment was approved, resulting in SCP-███. In short, it was tentatively concluded that humans need not have visually read or recognized the contents for the effect to take place. This would imply an enormous risk associated with opening SCP-001 without reading, which would lead to an unrecoverable loss of information.

Dr. ███████ conducted one final experiment WITHOUT PRIOR APPROVAL which involved intentionally running the TSIS with very low doses of THz illumination. This produced results with very poor signal-to-noise ratio and only portions of the transcript could be recovered despite the fact that the document transformed, presumably to display the next report. These fragments are recorded in ████████████████. To date we have not definitively identified an SCP item to which this transcript corresponds, though █████████████████████████████████████. Dr. ███████’s access to SCP-001 was revoked after this incident. However, her recommendations regarding an update to the containment of SCP-001 are being considered.

Dr. ███████ suggested that the reason SCP-001 had a different page count compared to when it was last closed was related to the slow leak of information via minute interactions with the environment, such as ambient x-rays penetrating the briefcase, vibrations transmitted through indirect contact with the ground, and even self-illumination by blackbody radiation as it was stored at room temperature.

Upgrading the containment for this item would bear only moderate expense, involving electrical and magnetic shielding, radiation shielding, high vacuum, vibration damping, and cryogenic storage — similar to the isolation systems used in some modern scientific instruments such as transmission electron microscopes. However, it is not clear how to quantify the rate of information leakage and thus predictions as to the rate of “ambient” release of SCP items is unknown – if this theory is correct at all. The apparent change in the document after ██ years of being closed suggests a baseline rate of at least ██████████████ under current storage conditions, and perhaps more alarmingly this transformation would occur without recovery of information. No concrete steps have been taken towards Dr. ███████’s recommendation as of ████-██-██.