There was nowhere left to run.
The bulkhead doors had locked in both directions. Red security glyphs lit up along the walls not numbers, not letters, but shapes she recognized in her bones, not her mind. Symbols like the ones she used to doodle as a child before she even knew what writing was.
Behind her, the hallway echoed with footsteps that didn't make sound.
Ahead of her: a metal door she didn't remember passing before.
It was labeled simply:OMEGA-9 – OBSERVATION WING[AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY]
The keypad didn't beep. It didn't blink. It just…opened.
"Do not open doors that open for you.""Do not trust clearance you haven't earned."
Cassandra stepped through anyway.
The room was circular. Cold. Every surface gleamed like black glass. At its center stood a chair bolted to the floor, and behind that a curved observation window.
Behind the glass sat three people. Watching.
Two men in suits. One woman with no visible ID, dressed like a therapist and a corpse at the same time.
Cassandra swallowed the bile rising in her throat.
The speakers crackled.
"Please sit, Cassandra," came a voice. Calm. Flat. Familiar in the way a scalpel is familiar when you've had too many surgeries.
"Where am I?" she asked.
"This is Omega 9 Pre-Isolation. We use this chamber to evaluate potential carriers of memetic deviation."
"I'm not-"
"We'll be the judge of that."
The woman leaned forward, her voice replacing the male speaker's.
"Cassandra. We reviewed your childhood psychological records."
"What does that have to do with SCP-7329?"
"You drew a symbol at age three that matches the current recursion glyph embedded in its vocal structure. It didn't exist in our system until seventeen years after you drew it."
"That's-"
"We also found footage of your mother during her employment with the Foundation."
Cassandra's breath caught. "My mother worked for the Foundation?"
"She died during the neutralization of SCP-███. We believe the event passed on linguistic contamination. To you."
They pressed a button.
A distorted video flickered onto the glass wall in front of her. A woman, younger than Cassandra was now, stared into a handheld recorder.
She was beautiful.
Fierce.
Cassandra saw her own mouth in the woman's.
"If I die, it's because the word inside me came awake. Burn my brain. Not my child."
The video cut out.
"We believe she may have carried the early stage of SCP-001 exposure. It's possible she passed it on. Biologically. Or through language learned in utero."
"That's not possible," Cassandra whispered.
"Correct," the woman said coldly. "But it happened anyway."
Then the lights dimmed.
Something growled through the intercom—not animal, not machine. Something wet and mechanical at once.
The lights came back on, but the people behind the glass were gone.
No trace.
Only a piece of paper left where the woman had been sitting.
Cassandra approached the window, shaking, heart hammering.
She read the first line.
"You were never supposed to understand it.""But you're doing it anyway."
Her vision blurred.
Her teeth clenched against a rising scream she couldn't place.
Then, from the speaker overhead:
"HELLO AGAIN, ARCHITECT."
The walls of the room shimmered, like film melting in a projector.
And then-
The girl appeared.
Not in a mirror this time. Not in memory. She was here.
Standing on the other side of the window, inside a now-empty observation room, face blank.
Then she reached up and pressed her palm against the glass.
The surface cracked.
From Cassandra's side.
That wasn't how glass worked.
That wasn't how anything worked.
Cassandra stepped back, but the crack grew, splitting downward in sharp, almost deliberate lines. She saw not her reflection in the broken pane, but the same sentence from the Protocol folder, bleeding across the glass like handwriting done in veins.
"We gave you language before you were born.""Now we are taking it back."
The girl opened her mouth.
No sound came out.
But Cassandra heard it.
She dropped to her knees, head splitting in pain.
A new word buried itself into her skull. A shape. A structure.
Not a normal word. It had no vowels. No syllables.
It existed more like a command than a language.
A rewrite function for something older than reality.
And she understood it.
Then the door behind her opened.
Dr. Grumman stepped inside, breathing hard, eyes wide.
"Get away from the glass."
"I saw her. She said-"
"I know what she said. You're not the first she's whispered to."
Grumman grabbed her arm.
She didn't resist.
But she asked: "What is SCP-001 really?"
He didn't answer right away.
He just stared at her.
Then, with his voice low and breaking:
"It's not an object. It's not a god. It's not even a file.""It's a sentence. The last one. The one that ends everything.""And you're carrying pieces of it."
They ran.
Down forgotten tunnels beneath the Site. Through service hatches not logged in any modern blueprint. The emergency lights turned off behind them one by one.
But Cassandra could still feel it.
A pulse. Like a heartbeat in the walls.
Not hers. Not Grumman's.
The world's.
Slowing.
Waiting.
At last, they stopped in an old maintenance shaft. Grumman keyed in a ten-digit code to a rusted panel. A hidden door opened. Inside: a circular room filled with old-style terminals and a massive red monitor that displayed:
WELCOME TO FOUNDATION SUBNET: OMEGA 9
In the center was a steel coffin. Sealed. No labels. Only a nameplate:
"DR. ISABEL RAYNE"
Her mother.
Cassandra stepped forward.
The monitor flickered. Then typed a single message.
Do you remember her voice?Would you like to hear it again?
Y / N
She looked at Grumman.
He said nothing.
She pressed Y.
And the room began to speak.