SCP-5990

ITEM NUMBER: SCP-5990 LEVEL 4/5990 CONTAINMENT CLASS: KETER SECRET

Special Containment Procedures: The containment of SCP-5990 involves securing the location of an SCP-5990 event as it is reported and assisting in the clean-up of any damages, normative or anomalous.

There is currently no known means of ensuring physical containment of SCP-5990 without the use of worldwide amnestic treatment or memetic reengineering. Efforts are instead directed toward improving environmental, ecological, social, and economic parameters by any means available to the Foundation.

Description: SCP-5990 is an occurrence wherein human minds (conscious and subconscious) and their corresponding physical housings (the brain) undergo a rapid, anomalous expansion.

SCP-5990 occurs when triggers such as stress reach a critical emotional mass within an individual's mind. This can lead to an intense mental fallout that most commonly causes migraines in the affected person. On the extreme end, this leads to brain aneurysm, the rapid swelling of nervous tissue to ten times its baseline size, and cascading psychic surges among other unaccounted for anomalies. SCP-5990 is extremely rare, currently affecting ~7,100 people per year, with one in 550 incidents being fatalities.

Addenda Materials

The following is an abridged list of major SCP-5990 events in chronological order.

Background

In the 1976 draft of the DSM-III, the American Psychiatric Association first declares “rapid subconscious expansion” a rare psychological phenomenon. The World Parahealth Organization (WPO) undergoes an extensive investigation into the phenomenon and observes significant mental flareups in clinical trials over four years.

By 1980, they conclude that the phenomenon is likely anomalous, with a variable probability of damaging the shared psychospace after each occurrence.

What follows is a series of corporate medical payoffs; the mass expungement, revision, and outright destruction of research and clinical data related to the phenomenon; and the amnestic treatment of in-the-know medical professionals. These factors lead to its mass cover-up in the mainstream sciences, including its removal from the DSM.

Q3, 2008

Amid the 2008 Recession, the United States' paranormal market takes a considerable hit. The Global Occult Coalition cuts their funding of several organizations, including the WPO. A record high number of persons in the paranormal community experience the phenomenon out of stress.

7 March 2009

The WPO leaks several uncensored documents to the Foundation in secret. After verifying the source, the Foundation designates the phenomenon as ‘SCP-5990.’

All future SCP-5990 incidents under the purview of the Foundation's Medical Department are covered up as non-anomalous mental illness causing a variety of symptoms.

1 January 2010

Portland resident Fabian Keanes (POI-5990-00), a GOI-004-C “Church of Maxwellism” adherent, celebrates New Years while under the influence of a black market Maxwellist drug. The drug — known by its street name “overcloxia” — stimulates cranial augmentations to temporarily improve mental performance and reaction time and create euphoria. The drug has side-effects that may cause overheating of both the body and brain, and in its comedown, it throttles brain processing speeds.

Keanes overdoses on overcloxia, causing his brain to undergo SCP-5990, which short-circuits his augmentations. Electrical impulses arc from his cerebellum and destroy the building around him, injuring 12 people in the townhouse complex and setting his cranium ablaze. Keanes is declared clinically dead at 01:47 AM PST.

Keanes is the first person under Foundation purview to experience SCP-5990. The phenomenon continues in individual persons at a similar rate as observed by the WPO.

12 April 2013

The anomalous veil of secrecy falls; the Masquerade breaks. The Global Occult Coalition and SCP Foundation are revealed to the public, among other normalcy preservation agencies.

23 October 2013

The Foundation's Public Relations Department experiences high pressure at the administrative level due to overwhelmingly negative publicity over the last six months.

Public Relations Co-Director Tatianna Embla barricades herself in her office at Site-89 and attempts suicide by hanging. Embla displays SCP-5990 before her death. Because of her unshielded exposure to ontokinetic entities over ten years of her career, Embla displays a rare and spontaneous emergence of Class-IV Reality Manipulation capabilities brought on by trauma. Multiple low-level ontokinetic disturbances strike the site.

Site Director Cristian Darshan (Embla's former superior, who she filed several undisclosed workplace reports against in the past) loses all bladder control. The door to his private quarters simultaneously disappears, transforming into a solid wall. Several hundred litres of urine flood the room. Site security recover him nine hours later in soiled clothing.

Embla's staff of 90 employees each discover a full year of added earnings in their bank accounts, as well as a single Hershey's Kiss on each desk in the Public Relations Office. The Foundation's Department of Economics allows them to retain all additional income.

Embla's brain inflates in volume by 5000% and explodes with ~20 MJ of energy, causing significant structural damage.

16 April 2014

An independent journalist releases an anonymous report to CNN about corruption by Russian officials in the city of Kursk. The report accuses up to 160 Military Police members of attending private weekly banquets that were funded, to a considerable degree, by laundered monies intended for the construction of a children's hospital. These banquets involved ritualistic psychic procedures for an as-yet unknown purpose.

At the last banquet, nine officials — six men and three women — are reported to have engaged in an intensive hivemind-based sexual ritual and experienced SCP-5990 at collective climax. All nine officials then disappeared. Officials later reported the scent of sulfur, scorch marks on the walls and ceiling, and deep, disembodied guttural laughter. Their current location is unknown.

10 May 2015

SCP-5990 trends upward in frequency following the consumer expansion of “Mindscaping” in the post-Veil world. Mindscaping is a burgeoning New Age industry involving psycho-spiritual-oneiric mechanisms that can create a shared imagined space, referred to as a “mindscape.” Mindscapes are mass inter-connected communes that can be inhabited on a mental level, differing from Oneiric Collectives in that they can be accessed both in waking and in sleep.

A mindscape can inhabit a space as small as a single human brain, which itself can undergo a one-time SCP-5990 explosion fuelled by hundreds of external psychic connections.

The emergence of Mindscaping, alongside increased social upheaval in low-income non-anomalous communities, leads to a dramatic increase of SCP-5990 such that it recurs in global communities over the next five years.

9 March 2020

At 0600 hours, the Overseer Council holds an emergency meeting at Site-01. Following the meeting, O5-6 is recorded communicating with an unknown person or entity via mobile phone. A transcript is as follows.

[BEGIN LOG] O5-6: That many? Well, fuck me twice. [Pause.] O5-6: I hear ya'. I just don't get why they all can't pipe the hell down sometime, y'know? There just, there ain't no need for that to happen. After throwin' the blame on 'im the whole time, she lost 'er damned mind and jumped 'im like a mouse, beat 'im senseless, an' then he just got up and walked out. And we didn't call off the meet'in or nothin'. Everyone just left. Bunch of children is what they are, but what can I do, y'know? [Pause.] O5-6: No, I won't. An' you know what, she always does this, doesn't she? One day her big head'll balloon up 'n' pop, an' then what. [Pause.] O5-6: We should — what? Toss 'er in a shack? [He laughs.] Oh yeah, that'd do it. That'd really do it. Just don't look 'er in the eye or you'll change into stone. [Pause. O5-6 sighs.] O5-6: I just wish everyone, the whole human race, just calmed down for a minute, maybe looked around an' figured what the hell they got under their skin. What made 'em feel they were so ugly inside. What made 'em go over 'n' over in those pained heads o' theirs. An' just looked at the big picture. Maybe then we wouldn't have everyone's heads explodin' or wishin' them neighbours' heads did. [Long pause.] O5-6: Or, or damn the whole thing. Maybe we don't need 'em. Maybe we just don't need 'em all weighin' us down. If we just had one damn human revolution 'n' put our heads up in the clouds– [Abrupt pause.] O5-6: We'd all just fly away. [END LOG]

Following this, O5-6 slips a hand in his coat, removes a cigar, and lights it. Minutes later, his head balloons in size by a factor of five, detaches from his body, and floats away.