No scenario could be worse than the present reality.
No race against time.
No desperate countdown.
No last-minute salvation—that moment had passed years ago.
Nothing could be prevented now.
This was the endgame.
Human civilization's highest, most distilled form.
This was the shape of the next million years.
But none of that mattered to Adam.
Because he had reached Site-167.
No one could fathom how Adam had traversed this hellish world.
A task meant for seasoned agents now fell to him—a civilian.
The irony was palpable.
A man with no training, no enhancements, no weapons—
Facing a horror even the Foundation couldn't contain.
And when he finally arrived at Site-167, he couldn't help but curse.
The site was a sprawling, hostile industrial wasteland—
Four square kilometers of containment vaults, research labs, and administrative offices.
The architecture was brutal, utilitarian, aggressively ugly.
No greenery.
The ambient noise was a roar—built on flat plains, wind howling through concrete canyons, scraping against sharp edges.
Halfway through, Adam realized part of the site had been erased from existence.
A boundary.
Intact structures ended abruptly.
Beyond—only charred, flattened ruins.
But it didn't matter.
What he needed was underground.
Adam was at his limit.
He had traveled too far.
For too long.
In SCP-3125's universe, he could no longer exist—not sanely.
Yet he was the last living person capable of stopping it.
The weight of that fragile responsibility clamped around his skull like vice grips.
Exhausted, his vision blurred into bright, migraine-inducing static.
No more detective work.
No more sites.
This had to end.
Between Buildings 8 and 22E, a vertical shaft yawned open—
A thirty-meter-wide hexagonal abyss, a yellow crane looming above it.
Originally used to transport construction equipment underground.
So vast, so deep, that the airflow at its edges behaved unnaturally.
Metal stairs lined the interior.
The containment unit—S25167-00-6183—was identical to Site-41's, just as the schematics showed.
Only difference?
This airlock wasn't breached.
Adam's hand trembled as he swiped his stolen keycard.
The door rotated open, revealing a sterile white antechamber.
The air inside was stagnant, untouched for years.
He stepped to the center, waiting for the second rotation.
This was it.
His heart pounded.
[Multiverse Chat Group: Collective Breath-Holding]
Marvel Universe – S.H.I.E.L.D.
Nick Fury's fist clenched as he watched.
A bitter question gnawed at him—one last time.
"But if you're here, Hughes... if you built the machine... and it worked...
Why haven't you shown yourself?"
He couldn't bear another hope shattered.
Not because he couldn't take it—
But because the Anti-Memetics Division couldn't.
Fury answered his own question, bracing for the worst:
"Because the machine failed. Because you couldn't build it. Because you're dead."
Then—
The inner door rotated open.
The air inside was thick, tropical, cloying.
It tasted organic—like lymph fluid, or something worse.
Overhead, floodlights flickered—only one in ten still functional.
Debris everywhere.
To Adam's left:
A semicircle of massive automated factory units, each six meters tall, surrounded by wreckage—
Furniture, tools, canned food, foam bricks, circuit boards, fabric scraps.
To his right:
Hundreds of empty shipping containers, lining the vault's curved walls.
It took him ten minutes to find one still holding raw materials.
Ahead—
A three-meter steel wall, curving outward, enclosing most of the vault's floor space.
Just visible over its edge:
A slumbering, gargantuan organism, rising and falling in the dim yellow light.
From here, only its back was visible—
Smooth, wet, black, speckled with green.
Rounded. Almost spherical.
Like a scoop of liver ice cream taken from a two-kilometer-tall giant,
Then poured into this colossal petri dish.
[Chat Group: Dead Silence]
Even through the screen, the visceral horror of the thing struck every viewer.
Then—
[Explosion of Messages]
"WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!"
"Is this SCP-3125's doing?!"
"This is insane—ABSOLUTELY INSANE—"
Despair.
The only reaction possible.
Even at its peak, the Foundation would've struggled to contain this.
But now?
Adam was alone.
His only weapon—his battered hands.
Honkai Star Rail Universe – Herta Space Station
Herta's brow furrowed as she studied the fleshy abomination.
At first glance, she assumed SCP-3125's corruption.
But then—
Her eyes caught details.
Pipes—over a meter thick—snaking from the automated factory into the tank's edges, pumping fluids.
Towers lining the organism, emitting transparent mist.
Ventilation units the size of houses, roaring nonstop.
Nutrients. Oxygen. Climate control.
Everything a living thing needed.
But why would a mindless SCP-3125 byproduct require such precise maintenance?
A realization struck.
Herta's face paled.
"No... it can't be—"
[On Screen]
Seeing no one around, Adam cleared his throat and called out:
"Is... a Mr. Bart Hughes here?"
No response.
Just the roar of machinery.
The organism's slow, rhythmic pulsing.
Emboldened, Adam raised his voice:
"I'm looking for a device called—"
Then—
It woke up.
[Chat Group: Collective Heart Attack]
"—the Fiction Expander?" Adam finished, voice strangled.
The massive entity turned.
Liquids sloshed violently, waves crashing against the tank's walls.
It climbed, revealing more of itself—
Beyond what was already visible, there was almost nothing else.
No limbs.
No discernible features.
Just a gigantic, near-spherical biomass.
Eyeless, yet staring straight at Adam.
In that moment, viewers across the multiverse felt its gaze pierce reality itself—
Staring into their souls.
Despair flooded every mind.
Only one thought remained:
"We're doomed."
Against this, Adam stood no chance.
[On Screen]
Adam decided not to stay.
He turned to leave—only to find the airlock already sealed.
"Shit."
The controls were one-way.
He didn't run (too risky), but walked briskly, pulling out his keycard—
Then a thin red tendril lashed out, wrapping around his wrist.
[Chat Group: Panic]
Adam yanked his arm—but the tendril was slick, sinewy, with something hard inside—like bone.
It wasn't letting go.
He turned, but couldn't see where the tendril originated.
Then—
The organism opened its eye.
A single ten-meter-wide orb, taking up a significant portion of its mass.
Vivid pink iris.
Four thick black pupils.
Honkai Star Rail Universe – Herta Space Station
Herta clutched her chest, realization dawning.
She'd seen this before.
Long ago.
"The Embryo."
The O5 Council's last defense against memetic hazards.
This monstrosity was just an enlarged version.
"But how is it here?!"
Then—another memory surfaced.
Hughes.
Gunned down during the site's breach.
"Hughes...?"
As if answering, the entity spoke.
Not with sound.
But with maddening noise—stereo mosquito buzzing—directly into Adam's skull.
[DO YOU HAVE IT]
Adam froze. "Have... what?"
[NO DOCTOR. NO MACHINE]
Before Adam could react, a thicker tendril lashed out—
Snatching the keycard from his hand.
It retracted, holding the card up to the massive eye.
[WHEELER]
"Uh—"
The tendril yanked, lifting Adam off the ground.
He flailed, vision swimming—
Then—
Pink afterimages.
A scream.
A plunge—
Straight into the largest of Hughes' four pupils.
[Chat Group: Breath Held]
One second.
Two.
Three.
No gore.
No death.
Just—
[I AM HUGHES]
[Silence.]
The entire multiverse stunned.
Had they misheard?
"WTF?! THAT'S ACTUALLY HUGHES?!"
"God—he survived as an Embryo?!"
"This is beyond insane—"
But the true madness was yet to come.
Hughes explained—briefly—how he'd survived.
How he'd become this.
Then—
He produced something.
An auto-injector.
Short, thick, orange, with a needle under a safety cap.
A bold "Z" stamped on it.
Adam recognized it.
So did the viewers.
Z-Class Mnestic Enhancer.
The drug from SCP-377.
He knew it would kill him.
Make him remember everything.
And that would kill him—as it would anyone.
But he'd remember.
A song filled his ears.
Sunlight in a garden—blurry, fragmented.
He saw Hughes' eyes, glowing with gold-white light, smiling sadly.
Then—
He saw Wheeler.
Looking at him.
As if she wanted to speak, but Adam's brain screamed at him to stop.
Pain lanced behind his eyes.
Memories flooded back faster.
Every moment of his life shouting at once, the chorus growing deafening.
Yet through it all—
Wheeler.
Not unchanged—she'd grown, evolved, year by year—but a constant thread.
He focused on her.
"I don't have time to bring you up to speed," he said.
"This isn't real. We're inside Bart Hughes' mind. I don't know how much you—"
"There's an (anti-)memetic entity called SCP-3125," Wheeler finished, smiling.
"It killed me. And the Department. And the Foundation. Now it's taken over reality.
It exterminated humanity. The worst thing to ever happen.
Only you're left, and you can't stop it.
You can't even look at it.
Hughes needed a concept to amplify, so you took a lethal cognitohazard to manifest me properly—because I'm your best idea of hope. Did I miss anything?"
Adam laughed weakly, overwhelmed with relief.
His wife had grasped the situation instantly.
"That's it. We live in ridiculous times."
She stepped back.
Looked at him. At herself. At this fictional pocket of reality, brightening as the sun rose.
Then she "looked up"—
At the memetic construct she had to destroy.
Unfathomably vast.
In its maw—human existence itself.
All people, all actions, all words, all thoughts, all sights—buried alive.
SCP-3125 was, for the most part, P-3125's unstoppable, eternal lie.
But a lie nonetheless.
And now—she felt it.
She knew, bone-deep, that she was unreal.
A memory of life. An ideal. An abstraction.
Only seconds into existence, she'd already been stripped of complexity.
She could see the conceptual framework Hughes had built around her.
It looked familiar.
A reconstructed fragment of the Foundation's core idea itself.
Or at least—its noblest purpose.
Its highest calling:
To protect humanity.
To consume all fear, contain it, understand it—
Lock it away so others wouldn't have to be afraid.
And now—
It could finally end.