SCP-5000 - The Epic Story Explained

Hold up! Before we go any further, make sure you've read our previous three chapters on the epic saga of Pietro Wilson and SCP - 5000 - The Suit. What we're talking about here probably won't make much sense if you don't. Go ahead, we'll wait… Okay? Good.

Last time we left Pietro Wilson, he was dead...and also, somehow, alive. It seemed that, in the last moments of his life, Wilson left a kind of nightmare dimension where the SCP Foundation had become evil, and was transported back to our world as a corpse in the broken SCP - 5000.

But is that really the case? The fact is, the tale of Pietro Wilson and SCP - 5000 is one of the most complex and mysterious events in the SCP universe.

You've got questions, and we've got answers - Why Pietro? What was in the briefcase? What exactly happened at the end of the story? And perhaps most importantly of all, why did the SCP Foundation abandon their mission, and make destroying all of humanity their new primary directive? Whenever you're dealing with splintered realities and mind-melting nightmares, there's bound to be a number of interpretations.

And we're eager to explain one of the more popular ones right here.

Soon, you'll know it all - but to find out, we need to start at the beginning.

Our hero, Foundation employee Pietro Wilson, was going about his day at Exclusionary Site-06.

However, normal operations were interrupted when a Mobile Task Force turned Foundation Hit Squad stormed in and began executing employees left and right as part of their wider plan to wipe out humanity.

Pietro got lucky though, and managed to find SCP - 5000, making him undetectable to the invading MTF squad. This brings us to our first questions: Why Pietro? And how does killing Foundation staff help advance the O5 council's goal of overthrowing humanity? The answer to both questions has everything to do with the site that Pietro and his coworkers were at when the attack went down - Exclusionary Site-06.

Exclusionary Sites are a very special kind of Foundation site that utilizes the same technology as the Scranton Box - a container used to protect important items from reality warpers - but on a far more ambitious scale.

Because of the use of this technology, these Exclusionary Sites are essentially resistant to CK-Class Restructuring Scenarios and Temporal Anomalies, those are where reality and or history itself are changed by a powerful entity.

This makes them a perfect location for, say, staff wanting to stage a revolt when their leaders have decided to wipe out humanity.

The Foundation wished to eliminate the personnel stationed at these protected sites as a precautionary measure, before moving onto the main phase of their plan.

But this attack was just one part of the Foundation's wider scheme to purge their ranks of dissenters before putting their final mission into place.

In order to make sure there were no internal threats left who could pose a threat to the new main directive, the Foundation murdered all the staff at Exclusionary Sites, hunted down and assassinated any resigned employees, and killed off any humanoid or human-sympathetic SCPs, leaving no one who could stop them.

Or at least they thought there was no one left… While all of this was happening, Pietro suited up and exited the site. So, why Pietro? Because he got lucky, and he happened to stumble upon SCP - 5000.

He wasn't the Chosen One, nor was he in any way exceptional, beyond his willingness to see his quest for answers through to the bitter end. Pietro really could have been any of us if we were in his situation. When Pietro escaped, he found the world in disarray. SCPs had been released on a global scale - destroying infrastructure, massacring civilians, and assassinating key political figures.

The Foundation had even gone public, for the first time ever, with their new intentions: Destroy all humans. Pietro decided to head to Site-19 and get to the bottom of their madness.

On his way there, he saw a group of Mobile Task Force members, performing a bizarre stabbing ritual to see who among them could feel pain. Remember this, it'll be important later.

Like a lot of small moments in the story of SCP - 5000, these are puzzle pieces that can be fit together to create the true picture of what's happening out of the chaos. At Site-19, among the dead-eyed Foundation workers plotting mass killings, Pietro found a treasure trove of vital information.

There he learned about the existence of Project PNEUMA, an O5 Council-approved initiative to map out the human psychosphere - otherwise known as the collective unconscious.

He also found a redacted unanimous vote from the O5 Council and Ethics Committee, as well as a redacted series of directives sent out to Senior Staff and Site Directors, which caused a wave of suicides and resignations.

During his search, Pietro also discovered a second series of directives sent out to the remaining Site Directors and Senior Staff, including the phrase "Harden your heart." These directives are known to some as "The Cure." While Pietro didn't have the context to put all this together yet, these are more vital clues to what happened.

The PNEUMA Project is what incited the Foundation's motivation to destroy humanity - killing off humans is actually secondary to eliminating something hiding else that's hiding within the human psychosphere - again that's the collective unconsciousness of all humans.

The O5 Council and the Ethics Committee were unanimous in their approval of this project, which was like deciding to burn down a house to kill the inhabitant inside, except in this scenario, humanity is the house.

So who or what exactly is the inhabitant? You'll find that out soon.

The next thing Pietro knew, he was sitting half way across the country, with no memory of the previous three months. He was also carrying a briefcase with no knowledge of what was inside except that it was"not round."

He also had a strange compulsion to deliver the briefcase to SCP - 579, for reasons he didn't fully understand, but he hoped that doing so would lead him to some answers.

Pietro may not have known what he was holding, but we do. The clue here is "not round" - which is the only confirmed fact about SCP - 055, otherwise known as The Anti-Meme.

This is an SCP with the primary anomalous property of literally being unknowable. People who observe it forget what they observed, and have no memory of even looking at 055 in the first place.

This is why the briefcase was able to act as Pietro's personal "Skip" button.

Pietro was physically covering the distance he traveled, but every time he opened the briefcase and looked at SCP-055, he forgot that period of time, making it seem as though he simply skipped forwards.

The thing he was skipping towards, SCP - 579, is an equally mysterious and highly dangerous SCP contained within Site-62C.

Nobody even really knows what 579 is, only that it's an anomaly so dangerous that the entirety of Site-62C was built to contain it.

So what's so important about bringing these two together? That, and the vital importance of Pietro's final mission, will become clear very soon.

Pietro continued his journey with the briefcase, encountering more horrors and countless deaths upon the way.

He finally found some solace in coming across a group of Global Occult Coalition soldiers discussing the interrogation of a captured member of Foundation staff named Samuel Ross.

Two quotes from Ross' enigmatic speech are of particular interest here.

The first, in response to the threat of torture, was "Do what you want.

Once you realize you're not supposed to feel pain, there's nothing to be afraid of anymore." The second, after witnessing the death of his captors, was "Look what you've done to yourselves.

I told you you wouldn't like it, didn't you? That's why you hear your voice. But you wanted to know so badly.

I really liked you guys, so I was trying to be nice. We're so kind to you, you know.

We fight in the light so you can die in the dark...disgusting." Do these quotes sound a little familiar? The first because, as Pietro himself recalled, the MTF members getting stabbed earlier also didn't seem to feel pain.

The second, because describing people as "disgusting" is an adjective favoured by another infamous SCP... SCP-682.

This brings us back to "The Cure" - the document disseminated by the O5 Council, instructing people to "Harden Their Hearts." Whatever the Foundation discovered in the human psychosphere, it's apparently the cause of all pain, and hence, when the Foundation discovered it, they were able to train themselves out of pain.

And as for the SCP - 682 reference - This is a being that despises life, and it's believed by some that the reason 682 holds this belief is that it's always known about whatever the Foundation recently discovered through Project PNEUMA.

Decrypted text logs in the Foundation files confirm this in a documented exchange between O5-1 and Tejani, the head of the Foundation Ethics Committee.

In their conversation they confirm the existence of The Cure - which deprived the personnel of everything from pain to empathy - being disseminated among staff prior to the massacre, and of the Foundation's sudden ideological alignment with SCP - 682.

And they had found something else too, referred to simply as IT .

Whatever IT was, it was the reason Foundation Command decided to wipe out humanity. But what is IT? What could possibly be so bad it was worth killing all of humanity? Perhaps most surprising of all is that Pietro ran into the creature's physical manifestation, and he barely even considered it - due to being occupied by avoiding the attacks of the statue like, mantis-armed "Blinkers."

Pietro made an entry in his log though, describing the strange entity and described it like "a person stretched out… like the space around them was stretched out, and they were being stretched along with it… Their body went from the ground up to the clouds, and their jaw swung at right angles.

There were these gaps, as well, black gaps in space around its body, like wings." Foundation staff were fighting it, shooting at this strange entity but their weapons had no effect.

This creature, this IT, is a being that inhabits the human psychosphere - meaning it exists within the minds of all humans on some level, driving and manipulating them to mysterious ends.

What can it do? What does it want? It seems that the only people who know are the O5 Council and the Foundation Ethics Committee who were privy to the PNEUMA report.

But whatever it was they saw, they believed it was worth killing off all of humanity just to stop it.

As indicated by the unanimous vote from the Ethics Committee, omnicide was a more ethical choice compared to the alternative.

The influence of IT was also likely what gave Pietro the strong, subconscious desire to unite the briefcase containing SCP - 055 with SCP - 579 - even at the cost of his own life.

This brings us to our final questions: Why was it so important to unite SCP - 055 and SCP- 579, and what did this act serve to achieve? As Pietro, wounded by the Blinkers and lingering on the edge of death, finally delivered the briefcase into 579's containment chamber, he acknowledged the fact that he was no hero. But that's where Pietro was wrong.

After the destruction of SCP - 2000, Pietro was in control of one of the only remaining ways to save the world.

The combination of the anomalous effects of 055 and 579, as laid out in Roget's Proposal and the article for SCP - 2998, is the Foundation's ultimate trump card for preventing an XK-Class end of the world scenario. If the two are united during said scenario, the universe resets to a time before the XK Class scenario began, and prevents it from happening.

In this case, Pietro uniting the two created a new reality where the PNEUMA Project was never launched, and IT was never discovered - thereby averting the apocalypse.

The corpse of poor dead Pietro and the highly damaged SCP - 5000 suit he wore were the only evidence that this alternate reality ever existed.

This means that the collaboration between Pietro Wilson and the suit he just happened to stumble upon quite literally saved the universe as we know it from a Foundation that had gone rogue.

In this regard, he's one of the greatest heroes the universe has ever known, even if his actions weren't entirely his own.

After all, he got a helping hand from the suit, and another from IT - who still lurks in all our minds, mercifully undiscovered, to this day.

What was IT's grand plan or purpose that triggered all the madness? Anyone who ever knew for sure resides in a universe that no longer exists, and we can only hope that a history that never happened is somehow unable to repeat itself in ours.