The Ending Is There Is No Ending

I've forgotten.

That is possibly the most dangerous phrase you can hear working in amnestics. The SCP Foundation makes a thousand people forget a thousand things a year, and not once does it strike the victims to notice. Knowing what you don't know is a crack in the system. So whenever we heard it we worked to find the cause.

Eventually we built this place, and a dozen more like it across the world. Villages for people who've forgotten their lives, their friends, their families. A place to live when you barely remember being alive. At first we tried to keep the patients from leaving. That was a losing game from the start, and we learned our lessons from the non-anomalous world.

We built places like this bus stop. Easy enough. Someone wants to leave? Send them to the bus stop, they'll sit, they'll wait, they'll forget why they're sitting there, and then they'll wander back to their home. No violence. No fear. No arguments. Just a wait for an escape that's never ever coming.

I don't want you to get the idea that what we've done here is altruistic. This is wholly our fault. Neurodegenerative disorders affect almost 50% of Foundation employees who reach the age of 60. It's well above the background statistics for the rest of the world. And it's because of something I invented in my better days.

In 1981 we classified our first cognitohazardous anomaly. Part of that was just the proliferation of worldwide media. It's easier to spread a dangerous meme if everyone's watching television. Cognitohazards certainly existed before that, but were rare enough that we didn't have a specific standard to apply to them. Then the 90's hit. The internet made it so much worse. We started seeing full-on cognitive epidemics.

So we started work in 1996 on some sort of solution. The first tests were crude, but given the danger to the patients we'd selected, any solutions were preferable. At first we tried cutting the neocortex of the brain out completely. We reasoned that if a man couldn't remember what was making him sick, then he wouldn't be sick anymore.

It did work, but obviously the quality of life for someone incapable of forming long-term memories isn't very high. We knew it wasn't the best way to solve the problem, but we also knew it was a good first step.

It was myself who first came upon the idea of targeted amnestics. There's an anomaly we used for the early trials, can't recall the number, but it was capable of identifying exactly what part of the brain held a specific memory. We used that to directly target our surgeries.

It wasn't perfect, again, but a man could function mostly well with only a tiny bit of brain missing. We knew it wouldn't work on a widespread scale and we knew it'd have long term consequences we didn't understand, but that didn't stop the trials. People were dying from their memories, so anything we did to save them was good, right?

The first targeted amnestic drugs came out in 2004. They mixed a bit of magic and science to directly find and kill the parts of the brain carrying a specific memory. No more surgery needed. By then the O5's had started paying attention. If we could kill any memory, and we could do it non-invasively, then surely the secrecy of the anomalous world could be preserved through the use of these drugs, right?

It was so easy. We started with our own staff. Compartmentalizing data was so much simpler after that. You could bring in an expert in a field to consult on an anomaly they didn't have permanent clearance on, and then afterwards wipe their memories entirely of the project. Then we started using it on civilians. Man on some backroad spots bigfoot? Take his camera and wipe his memory.

I know one guy in my department who wiped the memory of the original Star Wars trilogy from his mind just so he could rewatch it. And you know the funniest part? As an adult he just thought it was ok. I don't think we're ever going to fully understand how memory works, but that guy was our first real problem. See, the further back a memory goes, the more it shapes the memories that come after.

Worse yet, what about the times you remember the memory? Gone. Now say you wanna wipe out all memory of an ex-girlfriend. Ok, so you can erase the relationship. But what about the time you spent pining afterwards? Or the lessons you learned from it about what not to do, and how to avoid the same mistakes in your current relationship? What about how your experience in the past led you to function now? The drug doesn't care. If we tell it to cut out the girlfriend, it's going to cut her out entirely.

That guy was our first experience with amnestic-influenced neurodegeneration. He'd been popping amnestics, against policy mind you, for 2 years straight by that point. I watched him die while still walking around and laughing. His wife cried after every visit. Eventually she stopped coming at all.

Near the end he experienced something we call terminal lucidity. Quite often with patients, we observe a huge jump in cognitive capability and memory recall in their last few days. It can last for minutes or even a couple days.

But it almost always happens just before they die. He looked at me dead in the eyes and told me "We've fucked this up. We fucked the whole thing up." And I want you to know this wasn't some idle thought. This was a man I'd known for years finally alive again and telling me what he thought about our life's work.

Most of us in the department had been using the amnestics for years too. Not as much as him, but enough. We stopped after he first got sick. But by then most of the damage was done, I suspect.

Then the director of Project Phoenix told us to make an aerosolized version for worldwide deployment, and we followed orders. I was sure a single application wouldn't be a problem. All the while some of our resources were trying to determine what the safe dosage was. After Project Phoenix came Project Basilisk. Then it was Griffon. And Kraken. And on and on. I legitimately can't recall how many worldwide amnestic doses we deployed.

We eventually determined there is no such thing as a safe dosage of amnestics. Short term side-effects are minimal, but memory and behavioral issues will follow you for the rest of your life. Nearly every Foundation employee has been dosed at least once, and worse yet, because of how it works some people don't even know they've been dosed at all.

They keep much better records now, for uh… obvious reasons, but some people have no idea how damaged they are.

Sorry. I'm a bit tired. I'm going to collect my thoughts while we wait.