It watches him placidly while the cutting continues and somehow gets worse and worse. Knowing he's weak, ashamed, on his knees, Yes, he says, yes, he throws the door open, anything to stop it, just be me, take over from this, drive this shell for me so that I can go somewhere else, where this isn't happening to me.Īnd it stands there, in the night outside, and doesn't move. The pain overrides everything else in his existence, it obliterates his resistance.

He wants to think of himself as a trooper but the pain of the metal jaws biting away at his flesh, just that first bite, is so far beyond anything he's experienced that it demolishes any will he has.

It wants to drown him in it and he knows it'll replace everything he is with swarming wasps and ants and ill-fitting excess metaphor and he knows it's taken the rest of the world already and all of the people around him and he holds out, and he continues to hold out right up until one of the people pinning him produces a pair of wire cutters and begins to work on the metacarpal bone of his first finger, right where it meets his palm, and then he folds. It's wrong, the shape of it is awful and it's too big and slick with poison and he knows if he lets it in it'll swamp everything he is, filling his home up with sludge and broken glass. The dread idea is beating on the door of his mind, angrily, demanding to be let in. They wrestle him to the ground and pin his arm out flat, forcing his fist open to give access to his left index finger. This is probably the most violent scene in any Antimemetics Division story. I eventually decided to avoid diverging from what had been published on the SCP Foundation wiki. I strongly considered unredacting this passage for the ebook releases of There Is No Antimemetics Division but I decided that would be a slippery slope to a ground-up re-edit of the entire thing. There are large tracts here which are still one thousand percent ultracanon and actually in retrospect fairly plot-critical. There are bits and pieces here which I would definitely consider 'wrong', and in need of a second pass of editing. This was written at very high speed with negligible editing for content, tone, wording or specific facts. But I didn't want to just jam arbitrary blocks of redaction together, I wanted to work from something real, so I put this together. I wanted Wheeler's experience of being inside SCP-3125 to be a lengthy, mesmerising stream-of-consciousness nightmare of which he only recalled unpleasant fragments. This is the lead-in to Ará Orún, without the redaction.

Antimemetics division book