SCP-2405

Item #: SCP-2405

Object Class: Safe

Special Containment Procedures: A copy of SCP-2405 is to be maintained by the Department of Information Technology in the Secure Foundation Network File System (SFNFS) at all times. Access to SCP-2405 is to be restricted to the current head of the SCP-2405 Automated Experimentation Project. As of Experiment-2405-279198, videos derived from SCP-2405 are to be screened by a Cognitohazard-Sanitizing Expert System (CSES) before being viewed by humans.

Description: SCP-2405 is a MPEG-4 Part 14 video file originally named 2017_acf_nats_fianls.mp4 [sic], with non-deterministic content. Although the file size and the binary representation of SCP-2405 resembles those of similar non-anomalous .mp4 files, SCP-2405 has the anomalous property that each time SCP-2405 is opened by a program capable of playing video files, a different video, albeit one that is thematically similar to previous videos, will be played. That anomalous property is maintained by copies of instances of SCP-2405 created by an operating system's copy and paste function , renamed instances of SCP-2405, and instances of SCP-2405 whose metadata has been modified, but not by instances of SCP-2405 whose video data has been modified.

Without variation, SCP-2405 depicts a game of quizbowl , conforming to the 20/20 format used by the Academic Competition Federation (ACF) , being played on the stage of a lecture hall as the final match of a tournament. The games depicted by SCP-2405 can vary drastically in their participants, content, and, in less than 0.0005% of all cases, historical context. The contents of some games, if taken as fact, suggest that those games, if not nearly every game depicted by SCP-2405, take place in timelines which have diverged from Baseline history. Because of the extreme rarity of such games, they were discovered only through the SCP-2405 Automated Experimentation Project, in which recurrent neural networks were trained to identify dissimilarities with Baseline history.

SCP-2405 was identified on ██/██/2016 by PANOPTES, a Foundation web-crawler designed to analyze videos on video-uploading and file-sharing websites for non-deterministic content. SCP-2405 was found on and retrieved from █████, a popular file-sharing website, before it was removed from that website under Standard Cover E-3 ("Internet Piracy"). Under the same cover, Foundation agents gained access to the databases of that website to determine the origin of SCP-2405, although no records that identified the uploader of SCP-2405 could be found. The discovery of the origin of SCP-2405 remains a priority in research concerning SCP-2405, as does the source of its anomalous properties.