SCP: Find Us Alive - 36: Liang Shao

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Liang Shao is liaison to the Ethics Committee. This episode was written by Anna Maguire and features the voice of Jackson McMurray as the Narrator. Original music by Jackson McMurray. CONTENT WARNING: child abuse, forced incarceration, death. Follow us on Twitter @Site107 or visit findusalivepodcast.com for updates, info, art, and more. 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

Hello, everybody. It is patron thanking time, and we have some new patrons. A very special thanks to Moritz Zombie, Mr. Crude, and Alex. Thank you so much for your support. We are very happy to have you here. If you would like to join them, you can head to our Patreon at patreon.com slash Find Us Alive to check out our rewards. Thank you and enjoy the episode. Dr. Carson's office was truly a disaster if Dr. Schau had ever seen one. reset every cycle to the exact state the man himself left it in. Carson's office looked less like the workspace of a moderately high-level director,

and more like Site 19's second break room. Stacks of loose paper on every surface, books and ledgers and binders piled in the corners. It smelled like white vinegar and the curious ozone stench of a decades-old printer. Dr. Klein spent her time sifting through this organizational disaster for months, or the basic equivalent of months. It was Dr. Alves's turn with this now. Maybe she could put together the remaining pieces of the puzzle. Dr. Leon Shao, liaison to the Ethics Committee, was sent to Site 107 as one of the final measures regarding its case.

They were to examine and ultimately judge Dr. Carson's progress running the nearly completed site and devaluate it for future use. Of course, Dr. Shao knew their job here was a waste of time. The powers that be had already decided the fate of extradimensional containment sites. 107. Their presence here was of formality before they shut the place down for good. In the nearly 200 years since its inception, the foundation had made great strides in the ethics of its contained anomalies. Employees and other interested parties often compared the foundation to a prison, but this wasn't entirely accurate. The earliest form of the SCP Foundation was less like a prison and more like a late 19th century zoo, rows upon rows of concrete boxes,

never mind how closely an anomaly resembled a human being. Prisoners, generally, have cots. But the foundation had improved leagues beyond the days of the concrete box. Several incidents involving the steep decline of contained anomalies' mental health had seen to that. They learned the hard way that if you catch a young girl who can start fires with her mind and you leave her in an empty room with nothing but a toilet and the occasional tray of what might pass as food, then eventually she will seek out new things to burn. Anomalies were easier to keep in custody they found when their basic needs were met.

Keep things just happy enough and they were much easier to control. Nowadays, most sapient humanoid anomalies live in furnished rooms. They receive three meals a day of varying ingredients, access to a library of entertainment sources, and depending on the severity of their affliction, limited levels of socialization with site staff. These measures had a cost, but quickly paid for themselves. oftentimes the Foundation's best defense against a reality bender's suicidal depression is a portable video game console. The mental status of the anomalies held by the SCP Foundation was a concern for those in the upper echelon. Poor mental health came at great expense when the subject in question had superhuman abilities.

Sick anomalies could hurt the Foundation, both physically and financially. But the same could not be said of the Foundation's own employees. Perhaps the greatest irony of the SCP Foundation, pinnacle of mankind's safety from the anomalous, was the safety of the mankind inside of itself. Considering the breadth of resources afforded to the foundation through its sheer nigh-omipotent influence, they could afford to treat their people better. But where they once cut expenses from the housing of their anomalies, they now cut it from well-being of their employees.

And the people in charge, the dark and shadowy figures who sat around the figurative table at Site 01, would continue to cut those corners so long as the body of the Foundation, the people holding up its many walls and doors, never complained. None of them were paid an extraordinary amount, or even meaningfully high above average. They, like many of their civilian-American counterparts, received very little in the way of respite from their work. Foundation employees did boast an impressive medical package, which was believed to compensate for the injuries that most of them would eventually receive.

But in reality, the Foundation's health insurance package was a means to lure in those brilliant minds who might be otherwise snatched up by more conservative institutions. The Foundation itself was not progressive, but it needed bodies too much to justify excluding what could otherwise be useful. Things could be better. They could. The Foundation could make them better. But as long as their people bowed to the longstanding workplace culture not to complain, to remain an army of silent martyrs for humanity, nothing would get better. Nothing would need to get better, and the council, the higher-ups, those in charge,

or whatever you wanted to title them, would not have to look directly at the problem. But for the first time since its inception, the highest rung of leadership at the SCP Foundation had encountered a problem. It didn't know how to solve. The foundation was running out of people. People were leaving or dying

at faster rates than what recruitment could replace. Anomalies continued to bore their way, into consensus reality, but the foundation was rapidly reaching a point where they would lack the manpower to deal with it. They had more than enough human test subjects, recycled from the same bodies for decades in the form of short-lived clones, but that method couldn't replace the research staff, not sustainably, at least. There were a few projects underway, a few last resort attempts to save off the impending

shortage. The health insurance was one. A different cloning method was another, but far too early to depend on. But how would it look to the world, to other parties with anomalous interests, if the SCP Foundation admitted its methods were wrong? Buried in a secondary account was a chain of emails from Dr. Carson to a Dr. Hayes. Dr. Schaugh didn't know if Klein had found them. They were easy to overlook, considering most of them didn't have a response, being simply

sent off through the airwaves, like Dr. Harley's ghost communications. But they detailed the last days of Site 107 before the disaster and the frustratingly obvious warning signs of what would soon occur. Site 107 was to be decommissioned as a containment site. The original plan, to expand into the remainder of the mine shaft and use the space as a hub for the study of extra-dimensional anomalies, was scrapped after the powers that B decided they didn't have the personnel to justify it. Dr. Carson fought the decision tooth and nail,

arguing that the Foundation's extra-dimensional safety protocols desperately needed updates. And he wasn't wrong. The last few decades had seen dozens of incidents, some deadly, some worse. The current protocol was set in place during the Foundation's 1980s golden age and had barely been changed since. Not even Dr. Robert Scranton's horrific incident, he was left to dissolve in an empty pocket dimension for years, could spur the council to action. Dr. Schau was visiting the site on this matter to go over the final details with Dr. Carson in the last weeks before site 107 was shrunk to a skeleton crew.

No more passages would be built into the twisting caverns of the mine, no more containment cells dug to hold future dimensional anomalies. It would become just like any other locational containment area attached to an anomaly that could not be moved. And sites like that didn't need 200 people, they barely needed 50. Dr. Carson had spent the better half of ten years staffing 107 with people he figured would be useful to the research. His work was about to be fully undone. As much as Dr. Schaugh had to remain objective in the situation, they did sympathize with the man. They, on behalf of the Ethics Committee, agreed with him.

Safety measures did need updating, but that would have to come at a time when the foundation could better shoulder the cost. That is what they believed at the time. Carson argued that better safety would beget better survival rates. Every mass tragedy, every monumental loss of life, with one more brick taken from the bottom of the pile. It seemed that history was proving Dr. Carson right. Quite a shame he couldn't be here for his vindication. Shao wondered how Site 107's shift had affected the rest of the foundation.

Whether it had any impact, or if those was something to lose from the accident had put more effort into covering it up than they had into preventing it. None of that matter to Dr. Schau. At least it didn't matter yet. What mattered now was what, if anything, Dr. Carson had squirled away before the dismantling of his sight began. Anything useful to their escape.

Dr. Schau waited at the ancient printer for the expected copies of Dr. Carson's last email correspondence. Maybe they thought it would look different on paper. Something new might jump out at them. The printer chung to life, gratingly forcing the papers out of itself, as though in pain, Shao swept them out of the tray, still warm,

and made a quick exit from that hurricane of an office. Their rag-tag entourage of unassigned agents had long since scattered into other duties on site. Not that Shao felt they needed them anyway. The rogue faction, as they had come to be known within Site 107, were more of a humiliation to Shao than a comfort. Frankly, if the time came that they needed protection

from an imminent and deliberate threat, Shao would rather be shot than have one of these young overzealous misfit. diving in front of them. Contrary to the social and professional rituals of their position, Shao's life was not worth any more than anyone else's. They made it to their early 60s in this hellscape of a company. If someone waited until now to assassinate them, they would only succeed in freeing up a slot for a younger, hungrier replacement. Through Site 107's strange metamorphosis, Dr. Shao began to see the foundation in a new light. For most of the staff,

it took much shorter time than they expected to start carving protocol out of the their routines. At certain times, this place had the best morale Shau had ever seen in a foundation site, and it came almost always as a result of something they would never have been allowed to do on the outside. Without the influence of a council of shadowy figures watching their every move, the 107 had reverted from parts in the foundation's grand machine to 91 ordinary human beings in a matter of weeks. And that humanity was everywhere. It was in the wobbling shapes of the code tattoos on the arms of a tight-lipped records archivist. It was on the lower shelf of the media card that served as 107's portable movie theater, which had sat unused in a corner of

AB for the duration of the cycle so far. It was finger-painted in schlocky emotional messages on the walls and dark gray paint before being painted over at the behest of the new acting site director. The foundation was still here, but this time, try as the rulebook might, it couldn't keep the green from breaking up through the concrete. Dr. Schau stepped over and around the last piles of rubbles scattered on the cracked floor of BC2. Some of it was bloody. It was always a little bloody. Many of those trapped in the collapse every cycle were creeping their way toward permanent muscle and nerve damage with every fresh incidence of being crushed by debris.

Several of them would likely never walk the same again. Security personnel rely heavily on their physical ability to do their jobs. In the outside world, they would be reassigned to desk work if they were lucky, or fired altogether if they were not. But this was not the outside world, this was Site 107, and there was something for everyone to do, regardless of how your body moved. They would have it cleaned up soon, until then it would smell like dust and drywall in Dr. Schau's temporary office, located just beyond the collapse. Formerly belonging to one Dr. Gera, another casualty of the shift, the room belonged to Shao for the moment. They felt they had gotten to know Dr. Gera quite well during the process. Her perfectly square handwriting, her immaculately organized array of sticky notes,

stuck onto a designated glassboard, the spiritual opposite of Dr. Carson. Every new cycle, Shau awoke Dr. Gera's computer to her array of still-open tabs and an email half-written. Something about getting the copy machine fixed. Dr. Gera heard and felt the first collapse and ran into the hall just in time to be caught in the second. Shaw wondered if she was trying to escape or trying to rescue her co-workers. Either way, into the incinerator, her body went. The vigil for Casey Lowe was a complete change of pace from the death of Gera. What they found at that silent ceremony was more humanity than they'd seen from the Ethics Committee in years.

They couldn't even remember the last time they saw a committee member make physical contact with another person. those in charge of the humane treatment of individuals in the foundation, fully divorced from the meaning of the word. No one was walking on the sidewalk now. Not enough shoes grinding down the green shoots that poked up towards the sun. Casey's death and the unexplained collapse in the subsequent hospitalization of Agent Love had cracked the panel right through the center. Beatrix Klein had spent months tossing seeds to the earth. It would take Gloria Alves a lot of elbow grease and a lot of of fresh material to pave them back into the ground again if she could do it before the concrete

dried up. Today, Shao took to Dr. Gara's computer to retype the observations of the site's behavior, punching each item further into their muscle memory. There were new behaviors to add to the growing list. Gravett strained to keep a field agent alive, encouraged by a small rotating group of people who hovered nonstop around the door. None of them were acting in a way that violated protocol. Alves couldn't force them to leave.

Dr. Schau weighed the pros and cons of citing with Alves or citing against. As far as the book was concerned, Alves was doing everything right. But from the knowledge left over from Shao's extensive education, Klein's ethics in the treatment of the staff were better. Simply better. Tangible results almost immediately. It didn't really matter who they cited with in the end. In spite of their position as the highest-ranking individual in the site,

Dr. Schau had learned by now that their actions had little to no effect on Site 107's momentum. It was a little like shouting into a monsoon. But that was fine. They preferred to observe anyway. Soon research would begin more invasive testing on a certain alleged dash three instance. The white-coded researchers adhered strictly to their mandated language, denying the psychologist personhood and autonomy in their speech whenever Schaer was around. It was painfully obvious that they almost never acted this way among themselves, reserving the cold scientific vocabulary for Shao's presence and dropping at the moment they were out of ear shot.

Dr. Shao didn't care. They knew everyone on site still considered Dr. Lancaster to be one of their own. Motivating them to conduct tests that might hurt him was clearly a challenge for Dr. Klein. But measures needed to be taken to protect the rest of the site. And the psychologist himself, after being told what the tests might detail, didn't put up a fight at all. Shao closed tabs, cleared documents they knew to be useless, and opened a fresh page on a word processor.

Like in all their bar-notes spaces, and at every department head meeting, Liang Shao would observe. Absorb the information and step in when liberties were being infringed upon, although none would be. They were making notes of their own, as they quietly contributed to the collective escape plan. Notes about the miraculous survival of Site 107, perhaps the most comprehensive study of foundation personnel, and the environment they build for themselves when nothing gets in the way. So they would continue to stay out of the way. Employee well-being fell under the jurisdiction of the Ethics Committee, just as much as anomaly well-being did.

It had been an awfully long time since someone formally proposed a restructuring to the employee handbook, concerning how personnel could and could not behave on site. Every day, Liang Shao was being presented with brilliant new ideas all for free. And all they had to do was watch for where the leaves, breached the sidewalk. Episode 36 was written and produced by Anna McGuire and narrated by Jackson McMurray. Original music by Jackson McMurray.

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.