SCP-2935 - O, Death

There are some things human beings aren't meant to know, and it's the sworn duty of The SCP Foundation to discover and contain such information. But sometimes, knowledge is discovered that shakes even the Foundation itself to its very core.

One such discovery occurred on April 28th, 2016 – the night that SCP – 2935 made itself known to Foundation personnel.

To this day, the exact nature of SCP – 2935 is a mystery that even the Foundation's brightest minds can't completely understand. Everything we know about SCP – 2935 today comes from three doomed missions into the anomalous zone's interior.

This is the story of those infamous expeditions. The nightmare began around 5:00 AM, when SCP Foundation Site 81 in Bloomingdale, Indiana, intercepted a distorted radio signal.

Communications personnel at the site traced this strange signal back to the unincorporated area of Joppa, Indiana, near US Interstate 70. As is Foundation policy, a team of Field Agents were dispatched to the location in order to determine what they were dealing with.

However, rather than finding anything that could logically produce such a signal, they instead discovered a long abandoned cemetery. The most recent death on any of the tombstones was recorded as being over a hundred years ago, all the way back in 1908.

On further investigation, the Foundation discovered an unmapped limestone cave opening beneath the cemetery and when they sent a drone into the depths of the cave, it appeared to quickly exit out the other side of the cave. But something wasn't right. The area that the drone was observing appeared consistent with the landscape from which it'd entered, but now it looked somehow…greyer.

It lacked the color and life of the place it'd just come from. The grass was dead. There were no trees, no shrubs, no animals or birds in the sky. They weren't looking at our world. They were looking at a strange reflection of our world on the other side of the cave. In fact, it wasn't a cave at all – it was a passageway between two dimensions.

It was SCP – 2935. Just then they were able to unscramble the distorted transmission they'd been receiving. It went as follows: "This is an automated emergency broadcast from the SCP Foundation and your national government. One or more of our sites is experiencing a communication breakdown, likely due to a containment breach of unknown magnitude.

All citizens are ordered to stay in their homes as containment teams work to secure the breach. This message will broadcast from April 20th, 2016 until—" At that point, the message would cut and repeat, as it had been for eight straight days. The message's source? Site 81. But not this Site 81.

The SCP Foundation was receiving an emergency distress signal from themselves in another dimension – a bizarre event that even the Foundation had never experienced before. The Field Agents were terrified by the implications of what they'd just heard and contacted Site 81 Command to request additional units.

The Foundation wished to fully understand this anomaly as quickly as possible, due to the potential threat it could pose towards the Foundation, so they dispatched Mobile Task Force Epsilon-13, codenamed "Manifest Destiny", to perform the first of three manned missions into the heart of the anomalous zone. The first exploratory mission into SCP – 2935 was codenamed "Gauntlet", and consisted of a four-man team fitted with full hazmat suits and direct video and audio links to mission command.

The team was led by a Field Operative known only as Agent Juno. His subordinates were Agents Kael, Devon, and Underwood. Their directive was to gather samples and survey the area positioned directly around the insertion point, meaning the other cave mouth of SCP – 2935.

The mission only lasted about an hour, but what they saw in there would stay with these men for the rest of their lives. After a fifteen-minute trek through the cave, Manifest Destiny arrived in the mirror dimension where they were struck by the eerie silence of a place that seemed identical and yet so different from their home dimension.

The first observation they made was the total absence of all living vegetation. Trees, grass, weeds, everything – it was all dead. On orders from their superiors back in the original dimension – that we'll refer to from here on as Dimension Prime – Manifest Destiny headed deeper into the mirror dimension of SCP – 2935.

They travelled two kilometers without detecting a single sign of plant or animal life. Not even insects. Eventually, they came upon a farm house with two cars parked outside. With authorization from Command, Manifest Destiny breached the house and headed inside.

Agent Kael confirmed that there was still power flowing to the building, as the lighting appeared to work just fine, but they came upon a horrifying discovery in the house's dining room: Three adult corpses, two female and one male, were seated at the table.

A fourth corpse, that of a male child, was sprawled out on the ground nearby. If the death of what looked to be an entire family wasn't awful enough, the Manifest Destiny team noticed a number of other alarming details.

There were no signs of decomposition on the bodies, nor did there appear to be any obvious cause of death. The family's last meal was still on the table – Chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans. While the food looked cold and stale, there was no evidence of rot or spoiling.

The team found an opened newspaper dated April 19th, 2016, illustrating that the family may have died a full eight days before the discovery. In Dimension Prime, decay would already be well underway by that point, yet here, there wasn't even a smell. Instead, everything was just covered in a thin layer of dust.

Command requested that Manifest Destiny collect samples of the food as well as hair, skin, and fluids from the corpses for further study. Small electronics like smart phones were also taken from the bodies.

Agent Devon turned on the television in the living room, and found that, while most stations were now running test signals, the shopping channel was still live.

Well the feed was live at least. Both hosts sat in front of the cameras, dead, but perfectly preserved. The date on the screen read April 28th, 2016, suggesting that the times of Dimension Prime and the Mirror Dimension were exactly the same.

In fact everything seemed the same, the only difference between the two dimensions being that some kind of mysterious apocalyptic event had occurred in the last eight days in SCP – 2935's Mirror Dimension, but exactly what had happened, or how, remained a mystery. When Manifest Destiny exited the farm house, they once again remarked on the lack of all signs of life around them.

At this point, the team returned to the insertion point of SCP – 2935, but were instructed to remain in the Mirror Dimension while additional units joined them inside. Manifest Destiny swelled to sixteen members, with the notable addition of Agent Roy as the new commanding field officer.

The team split into two groups of eight, and Agent Roy and his men infiltrated the Mirror Dimension's Site 81 while Agent Juno's detachment attempted to access the base's off-site deep storage servers. This second expedition was codenamed "Overland", and led the Foundation's Field Agents even deeper into the terrifying mystery of SCP – 2935.

Accessing the site was easy for Roy's detachment. It seemed there were relatively few cars on the road at the time of the mysterious Extinction Event. In the distance, fires still smoldered in the wreckage of planes that looked to have just dropped out of the sky.

Agent Roy and his team, like all SCP Foundation personnel, were fitted with vitals trackers, and they assumed that the distress signal that started this whole thing could have been triggered by the deaths of every member of the Foundation at once in the Mirror Universe.

Once inside Site 81, they realized that assumption was probably right. Going door to door in the administrative wing, they found the perfectly preserved corpses of everyone they knew to be stationed there in Dimension Prime. People without a doubt were still alive in their universe.

Samples from the corpses that the Foundation would later study even confirmed the reason that the bodies were perfectly preserved: The corpses had experienced complete and sudden death on a cellular level, and even the bacteria that would typically take part in the decomposition process had died with it.

In SCP – 2935, death was total and absolute across all types of life forms. As Agent Roy's team ventured further into the bowels of Site 81, they made another unsettling discovery - their own corpses, in roughly the spots they had been inside Dimension Prime's Site 81 eight days prior.

Some of the Foundation's top scientists, including the esteemed Dr. Bright, were also found dead inside the facility. In an attempt to see just how far this unexplained phenomenon stretched, Agent Roy's team decided to inspect the containment cells – where they found that all the Mirror Universe SCPs, including SCP – 2996, were dead.

In his desperation to find some kind of exception to the Extinction Event, Agent Roy revealed a terrifying secret to the rest of his team: SCP – 682, the immortal, misanthropic lizard, and one of the deadliest creatures known to the SCP Foundation, was contained at this very facility, right below them.

Could it have something to do with what was going on here? They descended into its containment facility to discover an even more unsettling truth. SCP – 682, the unkillable anomaly, floated dead in its tank Death truly made no exceptions within SCP – 2935.

Agent Roy's team left the site and rendezvoused with Agent Juno's team to send their research and back to Dimension Prime using automated drones. Both teams remained in the Mirror Dimension for another manned operation, codenamed "Nineteen," they had no idea it would be their final mission.

As they descended deeper into the facility, passing more dead SCPs they discovered one final clue. Based on the last activity of the Foundation servers, the event occurred at roughly 3:00 AM.

While underground in SCP – 2935's Site 81, the team accidentally activated the base's on-site nuclear weapon – a failsafe meant to be detonated in the case of an emergency containment breach.

Due to the base's failsafe protocols, every member of the Manifest Destiny team was locked and sealed inside Site 81. They, along with everything else, were incinerated in the nuclear blast. Once again, the Mirror Universe inside of SCP – 2935 was lifeless. But that isn't where this ends.

When the automated drones returned out of the SCP – 2935 cave to the Field Operatives in Dimension Prime, they were in for their own horrifying discovery. None of the footage or information gathered from SCP – 2935 illuminated how or why the Extinction Event occurred.

Everyone and everything simply dropped dead at the exact same moment. Nobody was aware, nobody was prepared. Death came suddenly and silently, and none were spared. All the Foundation on Dimension Prime were left with was a message from one of the agents from Manifest Destiny, Agent Keller.

His final message was: "I don't have any answers. I don't think there are any. I'll do this one thing, and hope that fixes it. Seal it shut. You've got to lock it in here with us. I'm sorry." The Foundation were at first confused by this, until they discovered a final encrypted audio log buried in the files recovered from the Mirror Universe's Site 81.

It was a message from Keller himself, but not the Keller from Universe Prime. In this message, Keller described the Foundation in the Mirror Universe receiving the exact same distorted transmission that they did a few days earlier from a cave in Joppa.

When he and the others were dispatched inside, they discovered the same lifeless, post-Extinction Event world that was now so familiar to Foundation Command. But there was a key difference: This wasn't the Mirror Dimension they'd just been studying, but a third, entirely different dimension.

In his haunting final words, Mirror Dimension Keller admits that whatever caused the event in that third dimension – an entity that Mirror Dimension Keller believed was the spectre of Death itself – had followed him back into his world, and history had repeated itself. SCP – 2935 was the passageway through which absolute death could pass from dimension to dimension, and our dimension was the next in line.

The deaths of Manifest Destiny may have saved our entire universe, as anyone passing back through the cave had the potential to bring Death itself back with them. The Foundation decided, in the end, to follow Keller's advice. They sealed the entrance to SCP – 2935 with concrete, and now keep it under constant watch, since what waits behind the barrier is an entity even they have no power to stop if it ever got through.

After all, it had killed them all before, or at least another version of them. What's one more dimension on the pile? While it may now just seem like a simple slab of concrete under an abandoned cemetery, this is why SCP – 2935 might just be the most dangerous SCP of all.