SCP-1007 - Mr. Life and Mr. Death

A man is sitting in a chair inside a containment cell at the SCP Foundation. The man is dressed normally and he isn't trying to escape or attack the researchers who are observing him. The only thing that makes this man different from you or I is that he ages right in front of us, going from a teenager to an old man in a matter of minutes.

At first glance, SCP-1007 looks very normal, just a corpse lying in a standard coffin. Well, the corpse of an old man in a coffin being kept locked up in a containment chamber is normal when compared to some of the other strange anomalies that are found in the SCP Foundation's archives.

Inside the coffin with SCP-1007 is a small metal key, and this is quite literally the key to seeing what makes this anomaly so special. On SCP-1007's back between his shoulder blades is a small keyhole. X-ray scans of 1007 have shown that the keyhole is just an empty socket. It's unconnected to anything, there's no internal clockwork mechanisms or other machinery that should be able to be activated by a key.

When the metal key that is kept in SCP-1007's coffin, classified as SCP-1007-1, is inserted into the keyhole on 1007's back and turned, something truly incredible happens. As the key is turned, SCP-1007 undergoes a change unlike anything the SCP Foundation has seen before.

With each turn of the key, the subject's physical age is reversed by one full year. Foundation researchers are able to watch 1007 age in reverse in real time. Even any decay that had set in on the corpse is completely reversed and disappears as the key is wound and 1007 gets younger and younger.

As the key is turned, 1007 will continue to de-age, physically compacting and shrinking down until it appears to have the form of a newborn human child. It's unknown where the physical mass of 1007's body goes to, since this should defy the laws of physics, but those laws we assume to be a bedrock of our universe's reality are often more of a suggestion when it comes to anomalies the SCP Foundation deals with.

Once SCP-1007 reaches the newborn baby stage, it will suddenly reactivate, coming to life immediately regardless of how long it has been dead and lying in its coffin.

Once 1007 is brought back to life, he will go through the entire human life cycle within a seventy-five minute period, experiencing what looks to be approximately one year of normal human growth and development for every minute that passes. That means that in the course of about sixteen minutes, researchers will see SCP-1007 change from a crying infant to a fully grown teenager.

As you can imagine, the subject has reported feeling excruciating pain during these first few minutes as his bones rapidly lengthen and expand, and his muscles develop and change shape dramatically. SCP-1007 is able to watch with his young eyes as his bones move and set themselves into place, lengthening and widening in seconds during growth spurts that normally take months or years. After about five minutes, provided his legs have grown to the same length at the same time, he's usually able to prop himself up and stand. At around ten minutes, the pain really starts.

The bones crack and ache as they grow at their fastest for the whole cycle. Hair will also grow on his face and body, and he can't help but feel some amount of shame and embarrassment at what's happening to him in front of the Foundation researchers, who are taking copious notes. By twenty minutes, he can hardly think due to the pain. At this point, he usually lies down and curls into a ball, whispering to himself that it will all be over soon, that the pain won't last forever. After another ten minutes, he's right.

The pain has almost stopped completely by the thirty minute mark, but now as wrinkles and stretch marks start to set in, a different kind of pain reveals itself as SCP-1007 realizes that he must watch himself die. Forty minutes in and he starts to reflect on his past, the life he was forced to lead as a kind of sideshow freak, more on that later though. The physical decay happens faster now, warts and moles and other marks of age appearing on his skin.

After fifty minutes he is aware that over half of his "life" has passed and he is reaching the end. His hair starts to fall out as do his teeth, which he's never actually been able to use as he has never tasted food. As the sixty minute mark comes and goes, he begins to feel grateful for the coming end, with the escape from pain and the rest it would bring.

His body has become very wrinkled by this point and is covered with age spots. His eyes begin to cloud severely limiting his ability to see and his hearing gets weaker and weaker until he can't comprehend anything the researchers say. At seventy five minutes it's all over. SCP-1007's body expires and he dies once again. He will remain as a corpse until the metal key is inserted into his back and the whole process starts once again.

Just as there appears to be no explanation for where the mass of SCP-1007's body goes as the key is wound during the reversal process, so too is there no explanation for where the energy needed for his rapid growth comes from. This process should violate the First Law of Thermodynamics, and Foundation researchers are very curious about the underlying process.

The one constant that remains on SCP-1007's body is a small tattoo on his right calf, where the words "Mr. Life and Mr. Death, from Little Misters ® by Dr. Wondertainment" appear. This matches up with entry number eleven on document SCP-909-a which lists a total of 20 "Little Misters." SCP-1007 was recovered by Task Force Tau-6 during a raid on a mansion in California along with several other anomalous creatures and objects.

The owner of the mansion claimed that he had acquired SCP-1007 at an auction hosted by Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd. Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd. is a "club" based in London, England that is famed for collecting and selling what it would describe as "rare and obscure" objects. Unfortunately, this often includes various anomalies that should be under the care of the SCP Foundation, and the club's mission to provide its members with exclusive, expensive, and rare experiences means that they're often in conflict with the Foundation, and they have even been responsible for several containment breaches.

Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd. continues to be a very secretive organization, and the name of the director and a list of its members have so far been very difficult to obtain. At the auction they hosted where SCP-1007 was offered for sale, there were apparently, along with Mr. Life and Death, at least four other "Misters" for sale though the identity of the other buyers and which Little Misters they may have purchased is still under investigation.

The fact that SCP-1007 has the name Mr. Life AND Mr. Death seems to imply that he may have originally been part of a set, though this counterpart Little Mister has yet to be recovered or even identified. In interviews with SCP-1007, he has given his own personal theory that he embodies both names, and the designation is a reference to the way he alternates between life and death. However, the possibility still remains though that he may have a twin of sorts, and the Foundation continues to investigate its possible identity and location.

SCP-1007's brief seventy five minute life followed by a death that lasts until he is rewound by his special key means that he is easily contained and has been classified as "safe." He is only to be activated during routine testing and after experiencing death, he is to be placed back into his coffin along with the key. In keeping with current regulations for all anomalies that have been designated as "Misters", SCP-1007 is to be contained in Hall 8 of Site 13 for additional observation and study.