[Redacted] is ****** and further [Expunged] -- An SCP Musing
Nobody in the Foundation actually knows what's going on. It's so important that you come to understand this. There's nobody that knows the breadth of what's happening. Nobody holds all the cards. No one will save you.
Your average new employee, after their recruitment, tends to start with a naive resentment of their superiors for holding back all the info from them. But as you build up seniority, you hope more and more fervently that your superiors really do know everything.
They don't.
There are so many drains on memory and information within the Foundation. There's RAISA's strict classification policies and the compartmentalization. There's antimemes and cognitohazards. There's CK class events. All of this isn't to touch on the rampant abuse of amnestics within the Foundation.
Which is part of the horror. The Foundation is an environment where you can never be sure how much of the memory loss was willing. If you wake up with the taste of amnestics in your mouth or the mark of a needle in your neck and no memory of prior events, this could have been an allowance from your psychiatrist for trauma, or treatment for a cognitohazard, or part of a containment procedure. Conversely, it could be part of a punishment for treason or the actions of an enemy organization. It's unlikely for you to find out in most cases. Even if the people around you know, there are both benevolent and malignant reasons they might not tell you.
And that's just one vector of it all. There are employees working on antimemes that have to be onboarded every single day for a project they've been a part of for years. There are those who were standing next to an SRA when reality shifted and recall a jossed timeline. The Foundation sincerely believes it has a right to your mind and memory, and it may also go full Severance on you, or allow you to voluntarily (voluntarily?) erase your recollection of your life before recruitment to better cut ties with your past.
One of the most haunting lines from any SCP tale to me is this exchange between Troy Lament and Sophia Light. To paraphrase "Did it Hurt When You Fell from Heaven" by MontagueETC:
Sophia: "You don't remember your childhood? None of it?"
Troy: "Am I supposed to?"
While being a low level employee or (heaven forbid) a D-Class is constantly confusing, you can at least imagine that somewhere it all comes together. Descending further and further into the labyrinth through promotion chips further at your mind and leaves you in despair. It's too large. It's too complicated. And broken. There are whole clearance levels and departments that the 05's don't know about, and plenty that are 05 level only. Even the overseer council doesn't really know that much about the administrator, and do you think he tracks the minutae of an organization of hundreds of thousands or millions? Parts of the database actively exist in other layers of conceptual reality. Departments like Temporal Anomalies lurk outside the command structure through founding themselves. The Pataphysics Department is ambiguously real. The Unreality Dept. definitely isn't. The SCP-2000 article is the Foundation discovering something they built ten apocalypses ago. Site-5 doesn't exist, and neither does Antimemetics, and Omega-7 is probably internal misinformation (counterintelligence, let's call it). Of course, in an insular subculture, the gossip mill is inevitable and endless, but make sure you don't hit too close to home on speculation. You wouldn't want to attract the attention of MTF Alpha-1, now would you?
So most people just focus on what's in front of them and desperately trust in the Foundation to run as it should. In this case "as it should" is a very mixed bag at best.
