SCP-3192

When the Bell Tolls

Object Class: Esoteric

A photograph of SCP-3192 prior to containment.

Special Containment Procedures

+ Containment Version 1

+ Containment Version 2

+ Containment Version 3

SCP-3192 is to be kept in an underground shelter capable of withstanding a high-grade "bunker buster" explosive; as of 1/1/2010, this means the shelter should be located at least 50m underground and its walls should be able to endure a force equivalent to 250 tons of TNT. The shelter should be reachable from the surface via code-activated lift, with guards stationed in visual range of the lift at all times. The containment site should be as isolated possible; Site 118 in the Sonoran desert and Site 204 in Bhutan are ideal.

All knowledge of SCP-3192 is to be restricted to employees with level 4 clearance. A plausible cover story on the dangers of interacting with the object under containment is to be disseminated to on-site personnel, all of whom should have at most level 3 clearance.

Description

SCP-3192 is an astronomical clock originally embedded within the gatehouse of the Hampton Court Palace in Richmond upon Thames. When any human subject stands directly in front of the clock for 3.5 seconds¹, the subject begins to experience an acute feeling of thirst and a hallucination of standing in the path of a hurricane; at the same time, the dials of the clock begin to move, with the final positions corresponding to the amount of time remaining until the subject's death. All recorded efforts to alter the date of death predicted by SCP-3192 have met with failure.

A number of Foundation personnel volunteered to be exposed to SCP-3192 following discovery of its anomalous effects. After conducting follow-up interviews, the Ethics Committee recommended against using Foundation volunteers as test subjects, as most of the people who asked to be exposed to SCP-3192 have not benefited from the experience.

+ Psychological Effects: Representative Cases

Attempts to terminate subjects prior to the date indicated by SCP-3192 will fail for what appear to be accidental reasons each time. It has been hypothesized that in causing certain events to occur, or not occur, SCP-3192 takes a path of least interference with reality. Debate over whether this hypothesis holds, and whether it can even be sufficiently formalized to be tested empirically, is ongoing.

+ Termination Attempts: Representative Test Log

SCP-3192 was discovered by Dr. Hermann Braun of the Division of Paranormal Investigations (DPI) of the Wehrmacht. The DPI regularly monitored communications between persons of interest, especially among members of Catholic splinter groups with an interest in the occult; Dr. Braun was the first to note an uptick of interest in St. Ignatius of Cordoba, who built SCP-3192 in the late 16th century, and was moved to investigate. Ignatius was the disinherited son of a Spanish duke who joined the Franciscan order in his late twenties and undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem approximately a decade later. Several excerpts from his unpublished autobiography are preserved in the Vatican archives.

+ Excerpt from the autobiography of St. Ignatius of Cordoba (translated from Old Castilian)

Shortly after his vision, Ignatius embarked back to Spain; SCP-3192 was constructed approximately one month after his arrival in his hometown of Cordoba. Notably, no prior record exists of Ignatius having any expertise in clockworking. SCP-3192 changed hands several times over the following centuries before finally arriving at Hampton Court.

The outbreak of World War II put a temporary halt to Dr. Braun's investigations. As a result, the properties of SCP-3192 were only catalogued in the late 1940s after the dismantling of DPI led to Dr. Braun coming into the employ of the Foundation.

On 2/7/1954, all testing on SCP-3192 was ordered by O5-██ to cease immediately.

+ Dr. Braun's Correspondence

- Hide Correspondence

I demand O5-command reverse position on SCP-3192. There is much we do not know:

How does it behave about relativistic time dilation?

Is cryopreservation death?

Can people be resuscitated after the date of death predicted by SCP-3192?

What counts as a human being? We know it ignores macaques and great apes but what if we bring a brain-damaged human before it?

Many experiments I need to run.

Respectfully but disagreeably yours,

Prof. Dr. Hermann Braun
Research Head, Division ATF-L-3
Ph.D. Theoretical Physics, University of Heidelberg
M.S. Mathematics, Technical University of Berlin
Doctor Honoris Causa, Queen Mary University of London
Editor, Journal fur Reine und Angewandte Mathematik, 1926-1945,
Deutsche Physik, 1933-1945, Arkiv för Matematik, Astronomi och Fysik, 1930-1945.

Since lack of response to previous letter, I think I have not properly explained usefulness of this item.

Plausible hypothesis is that SCP-3192 causes events to happen along "path of least resistance" — or, at least, it never strays too far from it. Furthermore: in case of termination attempt before predicted date, it begins doing this very "late in the game," usually when attempt is already in progress. If so, we could obtain advantage. For example, we could create device that kills subject before SCP-3192-predicted-time unless suitable chamber contains self-sustaining fusion reaction. You understand implications, yes?

Take logic one step further. You remember our discussions about artificially generating black holes for ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████? Concern was that miscalculations in the stabilization process might lead to uncontained expansion. But if we do this before SCP-3192-predicated-time for any test subject, it will not happen!

Also: method by which this thing works might violate second law of thermodynamics. I am positively shimmering at the thought of new physics we could learn! I am also curious about what happen if we give it to Dr. Bright.

Please, please — let us resume testing.

Respectfully but disagreeably yours,

Prof. Dr. Hermann Braun
Research Head, Division ATF-L-3
Ph.D. Theoretical Physics, University of Heidelberg
M.S. Mathematics, Technical University of Berlin
Doctor Honoris Causa, Queen Mary University of London
Editor, Journal fur Reine und Angewandte Mathematik, 1926-1945,
Deutsche Physik, 1933-1945, Arkiv för Matematik, Astronomi och Fysik, 1930-1945.

Request denied. Because it is impossible to tell if a person was always going to die on the date predicted by SCP-3192, or if it is the act of giving them the device that sets their death "in stone," the entire O-5 council is in agreement that under no circumstances should Dr. Bright be given the device, lest it force an XK-class end-of-the-world scenario (or higher) to ensure his demise. -O5-██.

Fine, forget about the Doctor. The effects of SCP-3192 have been tested 1,217 different times before your ban. End of world is nowhere in sight, is it?

I regret that none of the members of O5 council have scientific background at doctoral or professorial level. Perhaps that is why you are not in habit of thinking rigorously about risk. For God's sake, nuclear power could destroy world tomorrow; I am confident it will not, because of the careful experiments so many physicists have painstakingly performed over the past decades. All science is, at most basic level, inductive generalization from past observations. Now apply same logic to SCP-3192 and its safety record.

All this, by the way, would have been abundantly clear to my former supervisors at DPI.

Prof. Dr. Hermann Braun
Research Head, Division ATF-L-3
Ph.D. Theoretical Physics, University of Heidelberg
M.S. Mathematics, Technical University of Berlin
Doctor Honoris Causa, Queen Mary University of London
Editor, Journal fur Reine und Angewandte Mathematik, 1926-1945,
Deutsche Physik, 1933-1945, Arkiv för Matematik, Astronomi och Fysik, 1930-1945.

+ Summary of Incident 1973-JJ-E

- Hide Summary

Foundation security personnel visited Dr. Braun's home on Sep. 8, 1973 after he failed to return from a prolonged vacation. Neighbors indicated they had not seen Dr. Braun in over a month. No useful evidence was found within the dwelling itself but a garbage bin nearby contained documents tracing Dr. Braun to a cabin in northern Vermont.

The cabin was found to contain the remains of Dr. Braun as well as a cage holding Mr. Descheene, one of the subjects used by the Foundation for testing of SCP-3192 before the cessation of experiments approximately two decades earlier. Mr. Descheene recognized Dr. Braun during a visit to a grocery store in July of 1973, when he approached Dr. Braun and proceeded to berate him². Mr. Descheene eventually attacked Dr. Braun before being restrained by store employees. After going to sleep in his bed the same night without noticing anything out of the ordinary, Mr. Descheene woke up caged the following morning.

According to Mr. Descheene, Dr. Braun was in the process of building a strange-looking electro-mechanical contraption (involving a collection of guns pointing at his cage) when he was mauled and subsequently consumed by a pack of bears. Dr. Braun did not respond to Mr. Descheene's repeated queries over the past months, telling him only that everything he was doing was for love of science and humanity. Occasionally, Dr. Braun would add that while he bore no ill will towards Mr. Descheene, he had little choice, for he would be unlikely to get his hands on another test subject. From time to time, Dr. Braun would also remark that the most probable outcome of his actions would be his own death.

The device Dr. Braun was in the process of constructing appeared to be a chamber for the stabilization of a microscopic black hole. Classified Foundation technology in the form of ████████████████████████████████████████████████ was used; investigation into how Dr. Braun was able to move these materials off-site is ongoing.

Since Mr. Descheene proved resistant to amnestics in the past, a coma was induced via repeated administration of pentobarbital. Consistent with previous testing, no "interference" from SCP-3192 was observed, as it apparently does not consider a coma to be the equivalent of death.

Containment Breaches: The following incidents are representative of the challenges faced by previously proposed containment procedures.

+ Breach 1953-C

+ Breach 1955-F

+ Breach 1966-E

Due to frequent breaches, containment procedures for SCP-3192 are to be kept in a constant state of review.

+ Memo to personnel with Level 4 clearance

- Hide Memo

We are now in a curious situation with 3192: the main object of containment is not to keep the thing in but to keep the Foundation out.

I take it you've all seen the report on the latest breach? Investigation is on-going as to how the bunker was penetrated this time. Of course, it makes little difference — where there's a will and all that. I'm sure the reason will turn out the same as always: someone had to know, causality be damned.

To those of you who haven't been around very long (specifically, O5-██ and O5-██): we've discussed some more extreme measures for the containment of this item but have not had the courage to pull the plug. The obvious solution would be to put it back where we found it and amnesticize everyone who knows about it (which includes ourselves). Unfortunately, at this point we'd have to black out a few decades of memory from the majority of the Foundation's staff.

In the past, I've advocated for containment procedures making 3192 as difficult to reach as possible. My thinking is that you're probably not going to take a trip to Bhutan, assault an armed outpost, and blast a hole in one of the sturdiest bunkers in existence, all the while avoiding detection — just to make use of this thing.

To some extent, this has been effective. These days, it's the people right next to 3192 — the guards, the on-site researchers — who figure out how to circumvent containment and succumb to the temptation to take a peek. We've tried to keep them in the dark, with no success (too many people know about this thing by now).

I don't mean to exaggerate the scale of the problem; almost all of our employees are reliable. Unfortunately, even with the screening procedures we've put in place for assignments to the 3192 containment site, we've never been able to avoid the odd outlier who becomes obsessed with getting a glimpse of what the future holds. On average, we've suffered a containment breach once every 4.1 years since testing stopped in the mid 1950s.

I move that we construct a new containment facility manned exclusively by armed robotic platforms. Any intruders will be automatically attacked. The robots should be fully autonomous and capable of self-modification to keep up with technological progress. Our only means of control will be a "kill switch" that can be activated by unanimous agreement of O5-command.

Thoughts?

— O5-██