SCP: Find Us Alive - 14: The Foundation

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

How did they get into all this, anyway? This episode was written by Anna Maguire and features the voices of Logan Laidlaw (Harley), Jackson McMurray (Lancaster), Tabi Bardall (Agent Love), Taschia Ritter (Klein) and Anna Maguire (Raddagher). Original music by Jackson McMurray. Follow us on Twitter @Site107 or visit findusalivepodcast.com for updates, info, art, and more. CONTENT WARNINGS: Death mention, military, mental illness, homelessness mention, violence mention. Join us on Patreon for exclusive behind-the-scenes content! Word of mouth is the best advertising, so be sure to share with your friends if you like the show! This podcast and all content relating to the SCP Foundation are released under a Creative Commons Sharealike 3.0 license. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hey, everybody. We'd like to take a moment to acknowledge our new supporters on Patreon, Volpixilohlin, Smekski-Eyes, Justin Tillman, and Quartz 563. Thank you so much for your support. We're so glad you like the show. Starting in February, our Patreon is going to start offering physical rewards from our merch store. So if you'd like to join or you'd like to find out more, check out the link at www.5.com. Thank you and enjoy the episode. I majored in communications. I majored in communications because I did didn't know what I wanted. But that was undergrad. No one ever knows what they're doing in undergrad. I did linguistics and cryptography for my master's. But, uh, it turns out it's kind of difficult

to get a job writing codes. Not terribly, I demand. So I wound up in the military as a translator while I was working on my doctorate. I didn't really go anywhere, at least not while I was translating. but after I got my PhD, they offered me a radio operator position, and I couldn't say no to the pay raise. They were going to send me to Afghanistan. Well, they were. But barely a day after we got there, this poor 19-year-old kid who didn't put his safety on accidentally shot me right in the shin. I think the word the doctor used to describe what happened to my bone was powdered. So I was discharged and I went home.

And now my shin lights up in metal detectors. Anyway, I hung out in the hospital for a week, crutches for eight months, and then I applied for a new job here in the States. The application was vague. Private company looked like something paramilitaristic, a tech company making weapons or vehicles or something. They kind of scared the shit out of me. But hey, I was bored.

I needed a job. and I wasn't planning on going back to the military any time soon. And they needed a radio operator. The interview was in a hotel conference room, actually. It wasn't really different from other interviews I'd had. The SCP Foundation. Developers of prison security technology, they told me. Shady is all hell.

They said what I would be dealing with was highly classified information, and nothing they said could leave. the room. I was fine with that. I even Googled them and I couldn't find anything. And I mean anything. But I just thought that was because they worked with the U.S. prison institution and it didn't surprise me they would keep their business on lock. That was wrong, of course. Upon accepting the position, they had me flown out to this big military base looking place in some location. They didn't tell me where. Barbed wire fences, armed guards, the whole thing. I thought it was a prison.

Or, I thought it was a prison for normal humans. Site 17. One of the big ones I know now. They use it to contain anomalous people. I barely saw any of the place. They took me to a conference room on the first floor, and they told me all about how they didn't work with the U.S. government or any private human prisons.

They were a top secret shadow organization that contains and studies anomalous. phenomena, creatures, places, and people. They didn't think it was funny when I asked if I would get a neuralizer. I stand by it, though. I still want one. My job was to be stationed at one of the smaller sites. I would communicate with other sites around the world,

especially site 19 and site 01. All real-time communication, messages, relays, and information that would go directly from me to my site director. A good gig, as far as I was concerned. So I packed up, and I moved to a desert in the middle of nowhere. I like to blame the foundation for my issues. Everybody else does. But honestly, I've worked at 107 my whole career here,

and before the shift, this place was very tame. By foundation standards, I never had to deal with any of the really nasty stuff before. I haven't even witnessed any deaths firsthand. It's just been a job to me. Even beyond all the insanity of working with anomalies, which says more about me than about the foundation, I suppose. I had a pretty rough go of it in college.

I paid my way through undergrad, actually. I worked two jobs on top of my classes. I had to give up a lot of things that I liked doing. I didn't really have the support of... Like, I was kind of on my own in a lot of ways. I ended up living on various friends' couches for pretty much the entirety of my early 20s. I would not have been able to go to grad school if I hadn't spent months applying... like, applying to literally hundreds of scholarships.

I did make it, though. I made it through, you know, a few different things, actually. And I think I'm always going to be proud of myself for that. Eventually, I started working at a crisis center. We worked a lot with homeless folks, people that didn't have anywhere to go, that kind of thing. And I could kind of relate to that. They helped me make it through my doctorate, but it was hard work, though. We dealt mostly with substance abuse and people who were sort of, you know, off of their meds.

I got attacked a couple of times by clients. I got bitten a few times, a lot of times. But, you know, we had to stay calm in situations like that because that's what they need, right? They need somebody to be stable. So I'm not sure when they started keeping an eye on me. But just after I got my doctorate, somebody called me on the phone and offered me an in-house counseling position. And you know, you see where this is going, right? Apparently, the foundation had been watching me for a while.

They said they were looking for somebody who could help in really intense situation. Somebody who could keep their head even when confronted by, confronted with unpredictable and violent patients. And obviously I had experience with unpredictable patients. It felt perfect. It takes a really long time

before they clear you to work with actual anomalies. As a psychologist, I mean. You've got to have a pretty strong nerve built up before they'll let you treat anomalous people. And sometimes it sucks to have to acknowledge it, but the reality is that some of these guys can kill you really quickly.

But I don't even think that's the biggest reason. I think it's probably just difficult to treat people who aren't allowed to see their families or friends and who have to live in a studio apartment underground because they melt every human being they touch. They sent me up at this little site in Nevada somewhere, and it only had one SCP, and it wasn't even a, sapient one. I was just going to be working on, you know, just people with depression and alcoholism, trust issues, you know, any of the things you'd find at a foundation site.

And it hasn't been too bad. Not at all. It would be a lot worse if we were somewhere bigger. And the work's going to be harder once I start to work with contained anomalous humans. And, you know, I don't know. I don't know if I'm ever really going to get the hang of calling people it so often. But yeah, you know, that's how I got here. I just sort of fell into my lap.

And, you know, maybe that's how it happens to everybody. I, you know, I just want to help, that's all. I don't know. It was probably like how everybody else got here, right? My dad was a Marie. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. I don't think we ever stayed in one point. place for longer than a couple years? It sucked, but I dealt with it okay. I had my brothers,

even though they were all jerks. Tuffing me up, though. My mom trained war dogs, mainly the ones that stave out bodies and landmines. Sometimes she'd trained bomb dogs for the cops, too. Not at any of our houses, but sometimes I would get to see them at whatever school she was working at. We couldn't have our own dog because my dad was allergic. And two of my brothers were allergic to cats, so I couldn't ever have one of those either. I didn't really try in high school. I passed most of my stuff. I just didn't really care about any of it.

It's high school, though. Nobody cares. But I did ROTC in college. It was fine. It was something to do. I didn't hate the training as much as the other people did. We had to do this thing, where you climb over this big wooden. wall and I could always do it faster than anybody else.

I joined the army, but I wasn't even there for very long before I found the application for foundation security. That's what I originally applied for. Security. I did my exam, and I totally didn't think they were going to hire me because I bombed my tests for emotional aptitude and marksmanship. But the weird thing was they did hire me. I was really surprised because I thought I did really fucking bad, but they called me in and they started me on training. I eventually I got promoted to field agent. It was a whole thing. It's not that interesting.

And then they said I was going to be guarding some ethics committee person to some tiny little site that nobody cared about. And then there was a big earthquake and bang, we're stuck in the void. And that's about it. I don't know what I'm going to do from here, but I heard it's really hard to leave the foundation, so I don't know. I'm stuck here like everything else, I guess. It was just me and my mom until I was 17. And that she died. After high school, I worked at the only 24-hour pawn shop in the city.

It was called Seventh Corner Pond, who was a foundation French company. I didn't know that. I worked graveyard on security cameras, 11. p.m. to 6 a.m. I didn't know why they had cameras all day. Nothing ever happened. I did that for a couple years until my manager said someone from corporate wanted my help covering shifts at a different location. When I got to site, they said I would only be covering for a few weeks, and then I'd get my memory erased when they'd put me back in my old shift like nothing had happened. I had to cover because they had a breach at Site 19, and they were short-staffed because a lot

of people were dead. Six days in, the person who hired me got arrested for a embezzling money into a private bank account for Marshall Carter and Dark LTD. And then nobody talked to me for a couple months, but I kept showing up and doing my job. And then I got investigated because management forgot I was there for the whole time and thought I might be working with MCD also. But I didn't know who MCD was, so they let me stay because they were still short-staffed. And then I got transferred here. I don't think I'll ever leave. I don't think that I could fit anywhere else.

It's fine. Here. I used to work at a much bigger site. actually. All right, wait, I'm going to start over. When I was in undergrad, I was majoring in geology. I'm not, I mean,

I'm not one of those people who collects rocks and shit. I just got curious about how the world worked. In my hometown had a big earthquake when I was little. It wasn't bad or anything. Nobody got hurt, but it made me really curious about stuff like that. Sorry, I was talking about undergrad. Geology major, STEM research minor.

And one day, I was working on a project for a class, digging up some samples, and I found this rock. I thought it was a meteor or something. Come to think of it, I never actually found out what it was, but it did this thing where if you got it warm or heated it up, it would make this ringing noise, and the hotter it got, the louder the ringing was. I made the mistake of putting it in the microwave in my dorm to test it out. It was like setting off a stun grenade.

I couldn't hear for like three minutes after. Anyway, I had this bizarre rock and I thought, hey, I should study this, write a paper and shit like real grown-up researchers do. So that's what I started doing. I wasn't trying to keep it a secret, but it was going to be a surprise, you know? I had this one professor I really liked and I wanted to impress her. So I worked on that paper on the down though for my entire sophomore year and the whole summer after. I was proud of myself, too. I was being so legit with the whole thing.

I wasn't always safe, strictly speaking, but my scientific method was sound. Finish the paper, the winter of my junior year. I was 21, and I was so excited. I felt like I had something that could give me into grad school even. I showed that professor, and needless to say, she was kind of shocked, actually, about what I found, I mean. And then things started getting weird. I talked to my professor a couple times about what to do next,

but then one day I came into her office and she just didn't remember, like any of it. We'd been talking for weeks, but she swore up and down that she'd never heard of it. I went home crying. I was so angry. I was convinced she was going to steal my research or something, but then there was this woman in my apartment. She told me her organization was offering to hire me in exchange for me not talking about my research anymore. She said they were a scientific institution. They were always on the lookout for bright young minds like mine.

So, yeah, apparently my paper was pretty good. I was super suspicious, though. I'd kind of kept my head down for most of school, and I didn't entirely believe them. The details of the job they offered me were, pretty enticing. Lab assistant work, not as great a pay as I'd seen other places, but they had a tuition reimbursement program

and even said they could help me through my doctorate to an extent. The trade-off, though, was that my paper and my weird rock would never see the light of day. And I probably would never be able to publish anything at all outside of the organization. And as far as my family knew,

I was just a regular lab tech who would never have any accomplishments in my life. I thought about that for, a long time. I asked them questions. I got as many details about the places I could. It was the health care that did it. Pretty expensive. Took a chunk out of your paycheck, but I couldn't believe some of the stuff they covered. Stuff that was just listed right there on the front page. I think they knew what they were doing with that too. I worked really hard and finally, Finally, I landed myself a level four position as a research administrator at site.

Worked on a bunch of skips, but I spent the most time working on SCP. And I loved it. The danger, the secrecy was exciting. Felt like I was contributing something to humanity. Something good and important. I believed in what we were doing. I still do. And I was good at my job.

Then, uh... Events and bureaucracy, red tape, me ignoring the red tape, and boom, demoted. They said I was transferred to 107 because of my geology specialty, but honestly, I think they did it as a punishment. It's open, come on in. Yo. Yo. We're doing some testing with D-837-9834. Research wants you there in person. invited to the party finally nice also which one is d83 something something the guy who drew all the dash ones in his cell right what are you doing to him

we're not doing anything to him at least not yet we're doing interviews mental evaluations stuff like that lang wants to see if he can parse anything out for his theory about the memetic effect how long has that guy been strapped down by now like two and a half days i want to let him back up but he keeps drawing dash one He won't stop. Yikes. Poor guy. I mean, guy did some pretty unspeakable things to his family. Got a good human test subjects from somewhere, I guess.

God bless the foundation. I'll meet you down there then. I've got to get my equipment ready. All right. What are you working on, by the way? What is all that? This? Oh, maybe something.

Maybe nothing. Note stuff. I'm working on an idea. I don't know if it'll work, though. All right, yeah, well, tell me if it does. I'm curious about all those diamonds or squares you got going on. Yeah. Yeah, we'll do.

Uh, meet you down there. Got to go give some nutrient paste to an unruly prisoner. Is he, is he that dangerous? Well, we're about to find out. T-minus one hour to start. I'll be ready when you are. Will you? Of course I will.

How bad could it be? Episode 14 was written and produced by Anna McGuire. The voice of Harley is Logan Laidlaw. The voice of Lancaster is Jackson McMurray. The voice of Klein is Tasha Ritter. The voice of Agent Love is Tabby Bardol. The voice of Radiger is Anna McGuire. If you like our show and want to support us,

follow us on Twitter at Site 107 or visit Find Usalivepodcast.com. This podcast, along with all content relating to the SCP Foundation, is released under a Creative Commons share-a-like 3.0 license. Thank you for listening.