SCP-2495
The Well and the Pit
Connected to: SCP-1425SCP-2517SCP-2747SCP-3512
Special Containment Procedures
MTF Rho-93 ("Say It Ain't Sokal") are currently responsible for having copies of SCP-2495 circulated in academic publications removed, and the persons responsible for their publication detained and amnesticised. An archival copy of SCP-2495 has been stored on the internal Hazardous Documents Database, with Level 2 personnel and above being able to view selected excerpts of the full text.
SCP-2495-A is to be contained in a standard Type-B Humanoid Containment Chamber in Site-43. Researchers in face-to-face contact with SCP-2495-A must change into a supplied full-body garment to prevent it from using its precognitive abilities in a potentially compromising manner. In addition to this, researchers should not be exposed to predictions of events that mention or otherwise relate to them, so as to avoid undue emotional impact as a result of predicted events.
SCP-2495-A is currently undergoing treatment for anxiety and insomnia caused by its anomalous abilities, and as such is required to attend weekly appointments with its assigned psychiatrist (currently Dr. Adileh Khayyam, Humanoid Anomaly Specialist).
Description
SCP-2495 is a novel interpretation of the James Joyce novel Ulysses, first published in the Journal of Modern Literature by a University of Dublin student named Myrna Callaghan (now SCP-2495-A.) The interpretation analyses the novel from a linguistic point of view using natural language processing1 techniques and other advanced computing concepts to further a thesis about the novel as commentary on the relationship between the modern Irishman and the Irish language.
SCP-2495 causes all those who read and comprehend its full text to gain heightened pattern recogntion abilities over the course of several months. Initially, this simply manifests as an increased ability to recognise patterns in simple data such as numeric sequences — over time, the extent of this increases drastically so that affected subjects are capable of identifying seed values for pseudo-random number generators and performing other, highly difficult pattern recognition-based tasks.
As SCP-2495 infection progresses, subjects report an increase in migraines, elevated blood pressure and insomnia, presumably as a result of the compulsive pareidolia that affects them. Amnestic treatments have proven generally effective at curing SCP-2495 infection at any stage, with SCP-2495-A being the sole observed exception to this.
SCP-2495-A is a 27-year-old human female of Irish descent weighing approximately 83kg and standing 155cm tall. It claims its infection predates the completion of SCP-2495, possibly as a result of the events portrayed in materials recovered from its apartment (see Addendum SCP-2495-01). Due to its abnormally advanced condition, it experiences debilitating migraines when using its sight for even minutes at a time, and has been provided with protective sunglasses to prevent these from occuring.
In addition to the abilities common to SCP-2495-infected subjects, SCP-2495-A exhibits mild precognitive abilities, which it claims is a direct result of its prolonged exposure to SCP-2495. When it has line of sight with objects of personal signficance to an individual, SCP-2495-A is capable of making accurate predictions about incidents that individual will be involved with up to three hours in the future. The specificity of these predictions appears to be proportional with the quantity of these objects it can see and their degree of significance to the individual in question.
These abilities do not allow it to make predictions about events that will happen to it, or future events that will otherwise involve it. It is unknown if these additional abilities are the result of extremely advanced SCP-2495 infection, or some external factor unique to SCP-2495-A.
Addendum SCP-2495-01 Discovery and Recovered Material
SCP-2495-A initially came to the attention of the Foundation after its disappearance in 2015 and subsequent re-appearance in its apartment. At the time, it had been found amnesiac and suffering from symptoms reminiscent of those involved in Class-A amnestic overdose, including amnesia that prevented it from remembering significant amounts of the time period from 2010 to 2015. Despite this, it was still cognizant of its anomalous abilities and those of SCP-2495; after both these pieces of information were verified, SCP-2495-A was taken into containment and civilians exposed to SCP-2495 amnesticised.
During the initial raid on SCP-2495-A's apartment, six documents were found on its laptop, believed to be previous iterations of SCP-2495. Each document had an accompanying plaintext file titled in the format "changelog<iteration number>.txt", most likely comments from SCP-2495 related to the creation of the iteration. These documents are as followed:
| Iteration # | Date of Change | Summary of Version |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2011-06-13 | An outline of a thesis on a natural language processing project, presumably for the computer science degree SCP-2495-A was undertaking prior to it being placed in containment. The thesis details a way to use pattern-finding algorithms to improve parsing of language input by a human user, and provides a pseudocode algorithm presumably written for this purpose: said pseudocode is heavily obfuscated and nonsensical, with numerous abbreviations of unknown meaning composing much of its body. |
| Iteration # | Date of Change | Summary of Version |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 2012-01-13 | While still generally the same as Iteration 1, several section titles have been corrupted and the section containing the pseudo-code mentioned above has been expanded significantly. The title page now claims the thesis was co-written by both SCP-2495-A and a PoI named Natalia Ianucci. Ianucci was a registered student of the University of Dublin for three years prior to her disappearance under unknown circumstances: Foundation-led investigation is ongoing. |
| Iteration # | Date of Change | Summary of Version |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 2012-01-15 | A chapter of the thesis outlined in Iteration #1, titled "Practical Implementation of Solomonoff Induction-based Concept". Presumably intended to showcase a piece of code that would perform Solomonoff induction2, the section that would contain this code contains only heavily corrupted data and excerpts from other critics' analyses of Ulysses. |
| Iteration # | Date of Change | Summary of Version |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 2013-12-01 | A PDF copy of James Joyce's Ulysses with identical text to the Project Gutenberg version. The only difference between the Project Gutenberg PDF and this iteration is a number of functionally meaningless edits to metadata attached to the file. |
| Iteration # | Date of Change | Summary of Version |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 2014-05-25 | This version consists of a PDF of several hundred scanned pages of hand-written notes, as well as print-outs of statistics derived from computer analysis of Ulysses. Anatomical diagrams of hands, descriptions of the Sagrada Familia copied verbatim from a travel guide owned by SCP-2495-A, and sketches of a five-sided fractal figure feature prominently within the hand-written portion of the document. Only twelve pages of these notes actually mention Ulysses: all of them make reference to it as the "Fourth Imperfect Compilation". |
| Iteration # | Date of Change | Summary of Version |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | 2014-09-10 | SCP-2495's current state. |
No data on SCP-2495-A's computer has been found to originate from a point in time later than the 10th of September, 2014. The reason for this is unknown.