SCP-3878
Words Will Never Hurt Me
Object Class: Esoteric
The area occupied by speakers of the Giimbiyu language, represented in purple.
Special Containment Procedures
The procedure required to operate SCP-3878 has been restricted to Level 5 clearance and translated into the Giimbiyu language. Decryption of the document will only occur with the majority assent of the O5 Council or when the semantic fallout produced by SCP-3878 fades, at which point in time SCP-3878 should be activated again in order to ensure that the Giimbiyu language's cognitohazardous properties (and thus tactical utility) are retained.
Knowledge of SCP-3878 and the continuing existence of the Giimbiyu language and people is to be removed from public access and restricted to Level 4 personnel and above. Extremely sensitive messages should be first translated into Giimbiyu by an authorised speaker (designated an SCP-3878-A instance) and then translated back into the appropriate language by another SCP-3878-A instance: both subjects should be amnesticised directly afterwards. Due to the difficulty of teaching the Giimbiyu language to subjects, SCP-3878-A instances should be exclusively drawn from the native Giimbiyu people.
Description
SCP-3878 is a semantic weapon developed by the Obskuracorps in 1938, derived from the study of anomalous conceptual objects retrieved from the Thule Society's expeditions into the multiverse. It represented a significant deviation from the majority of semantic weapons at the time, in that it did not rely on a bulky and easy-to-detect physical component: rather, it only used a single human who was subject to a sixteen-week psychological conditioning program.
The conditioning program uses a strict regimen of psychotropic drugs, electroconvulsive therapy and, at the conclusion of the program, trepanation to create an extremely strong anti-concept within the subject's mind. When the subject is "activated" via exposure to a previously chosen trigger stimulus, the anti-concept interacts with that of the subject's native language and turns all instances of that language (whether written, recorded or otherwise) into a lethal cognitohazard that exclusively affects people who do not fluently speak that language.
History: SCP-3878's to-date only activation was carried out by the Obskuracorps on the 2nd of July, 1939 as part of a effort to cut off secure Foundation communications channels. Seventeen years prior, an alliance between the Foundation and the Giimbiyu people had been formed for the sake of containment of an unrelated (now-neutralised) SCP object – during the Seventh Occult War, the Foundation hired members of the Giimbiyu people to securely transmit tactical messages using codes developed from the Giimbiyu language.
In an attempt to sabotage these channels, the Obskuracorps kidnapped a member of the Giimbiyu people from Site-43 (at the time Research Camp Quisling) and subjected him to the procedure used in the deployment of SCP-3878. He was then exposed to the trigger stimulus, resulting in the Giimbiyu language becoming a lethal cognitohazard to non-native speakers.
Soon after this activation, the Giimbiyu language was temporarily given the designation SCP-3878 while wide-scale containment was implemented and all agents fluent in Giimbiyu placed in containment. After several months of research into the anomaly and using the intelligence gathered by reconaissance missions in the Pacific Theater, the Department of Analytics concluded that SCP-3878 was in fact a result of the semantic weapon deployed by the Obskuracorps now designated SCP-3878, and that this in fact increased the utility of Giimbiyu speakers as a tactical asset, since eavesdroppers trying to intercept their communications would be killed.
Further intelligence obtained following the surrender of Germany indicates that the actual effect of SCP-3878 deviated significantly from the original intent of the weapon. This can be attributed to the lack of rigour present in the Obskuracorps' linguistic investigations, mainly as a result of bias introduced by researchers attempting to prove the "linguistic superiority" of the Indo-European language family – the detonation thus produced a "fizzle" in which a large amount of conceptual fallout was dispersed, but no actual conceptual destruction occured.
Had SCP-3878 functioned as intended, the entire language would be erased from the consciousness of all its speakers. Following the breakup of the Obskuracorps, several copies of research notes used in the creation of SCP-3878 were lost: investigation as to the possibility that these notes were leaked to hostile Groups of Interest is ongoing.