Records On the 2041 Final Earth Evacuation

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RAISA NOTICE

The following are a selection of interview transcripts gathered by the Foundation as part of the 20 Years From the Cradle documentary. Each is prepared for general release on Martian, Venusian, and Ashburn Station media services. Early screenings for Foundation personnel begin on 01/01/2061.

No file revisions are to be made at this time.

RAISA NOTICE


LOG 1

[insert_name], Evacuation Logistics Director: By the time 2040 rolled around we knew Earth was, as much as it hurts to say, a lost cause.

We tried Schulman devices. We tried mass memetic shielding. We even tried to patch up the holes in people’s heads by hand. But SCP-3848 was an unrelenting force, something that no amount of our effort could outpace. And with the seismic readings on SCP-001, well, it was clear there was no halting the inevitable.

At the start of 2041, half of the solar population was off-world. Less than a fifth of the remaining half were still functional after rampant ED-K Lethe events. We had the combined resources to rescue a tenth of that fifth. Even then putting those resources to full use would strain our logistics to the breaking point. It was going to put the 2030s evacuations to shame, assuming it didn’t falter. No one I knew was certain about it, and everyone — and I mean everyone — was braced for the worst, but we knew we had to do this.

We had to get them out.

LOG 2

LOG 5

Val Dell, Former Operative: Yeah. You skippers are still bastards as far as I’m concerned. That much of the UIU can still stick with me, no matter how many holes in the head I have. The US gov getting the notion of law enforcement Lethe’d out of their minds never changed it either. Didn’t give me much of…

[Coughing.]

…didn’t give me much of an option when it came to working for you, though.

I was on the Rapid Repair Crew. Our job wasn’t to fix the ships when they broke on the ground. Our job was to fix the ships when they were dropping back to the ground. It was me, a couple of other Unit agents, and a fighter jet zipping along the sides of heavy lifter rockets while I strained my psionics to twist broken mechanics back into place. If it went well, you’d see the rocket keep shooting past the atmosphere. If it went south, you’d watch clumps of civilians get [coughing] vaporized by a detonating booster. Or exploded out.

Eventually you guys got smart enough to know the planes were more inclined to hit the rockets than not. Easier to take agents like me, wire us to extrasensory peripherals, dunk us in a bath of inertia-dampening gel, and fire us off in our own hypersonic ramjets. Before— [coughing] Before then, though, I got contaminated. Sometimes when our jets skirted the upper atmosphere a stray bolt would crack my helmet visor or oxygen pack, forcing me to psychically tug the oxygen towards me, any amount that was around.

This was the same time when, what was the public name for it, SCP-001? When SCP-001 was tearing Europe a new one. After France and half of the Balkans had been volcanically erupted into the sky. I can bet every ship from North America had to pass through those ash clouds, and every time my visor broke those clouds were mixed into my oxygen. I… [coughing] I don’t know how… [coughing] how much I got in me, how much of it was [coughing] people, how much of that was still… [coughing] still… [coughing] living—

[The coughing turns into intense hacking, lasting for several seconds. The noise subsides and is followed by throat clearing, along with metal clinks from the adjustment of external lung tubing.]

…I don’t know how much I got, but I can’t say the ash ever has left me.

LOG 6

[insert_name], Evacuation Logistics Director: When the new evacuation reports reached my desk, I thought I'd lost my mind when I read that the Factory had joined the evacuation efforts.

But no. They did.

I can't remember vomiting harder in my entire life.

LOG 7

[insert_name], Civilian: You know what 1920s foundries looked like? Massive chunks of rusted metal, girders running over every surface and ceiling, grime-coated blast furnaces around every corner? The Factory's rockets looked like those. Turned on end. With engines.

Before we entered some researcher type lectured us, telling us to follow absolutely every order security told us, to never stray away from the group, to never investigate any odd noise or missing belonging or sudden prodding. We got led in silently, guards behind enough layers of armor to make it impossible to guess what they were focusing on more: us, or the ship.

With enough trudging we reached reached a cylindrical silo, flanked by furnaces on all sides, extending so high up that all we saw above us was dark haze. Got reverse vertigo staring up there. I think everyone knew the interior had to be larger than the exterior, but nobody questioned it. Nobody questioned why the tents the Foundation set up beforehand were rusted and scratched. Nobody questioned why, when the ship took off, no one felt a thing. Nobody questioned why people would wake up at the silo edges near manufacturing equipment. Nobody questioned why my pal Jess was jolted awake at our relative midnight only to find his missing cat shipped to him in an envelope.

Me? I’d have dreams of assembly lines. Constantly constructing the same equipment while my limbs became lines of their own. I could always sense a commotion behind me, like mass applause in reverse, but it was always… Muted. Restrained. Even when I was awake I got that sense, that the applause was ever so slightly out of our hearing. I’ve thought about it a lot, and… No. That was definitely it. It was the reason nobody questioned why. We all knew something in there was holding back — nobody wanted to be the one who broke the spell.

A week later and we landed on Mars. Faster than any other ship sent from Earth, we were told. We'd gotten there before everyone else did.

It was after our first few days there that we heard that all those ships had vanished overnight.

[…]

…You know, now that I'm thinking about it, I don't think I ever saw a single pilot on one of those things.



















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