Excerpt from Document 180047109-L4799-098, User's Guide To Chemical Mnestics:
The Class-X mnestic drug is a failed eternal youth serum. X rejuvenates both mind and body by up to ███ years, but its effects are temporary, wearing off in a matter of hours. Furthermore, as the drug wears off, the suppressed time reasserts itself all at once, causing a harmful "whiplash" effect on the subject's physiology. X can rejuvenate an individual safely by up to thirty days, but with stronger doses the whiplash effect becomes dangerous, and past a threshold of 16-18 months it is fatal in all known subjects.
X's restorative effect on the human memory is essentially a side-effect of all of this. However, this side-effect is so useful that it has become the drug's main practical purpose. The Antimemetics Division uses small doses of X to temporarily sharpen or restore memories from the recent past. This aids Foundation operatives in the accurate recall of incidents involving memory-corrupting entities.
*
Marness seems like another man once the second X dose takes effect. Wrinkles are sliding back up into his face, muscle mass is returning to his limbs, but it takes Wheeler a second to realise the real reason why; she's just booted him back across the field/desk agent transition. Marness has regressed a little way past senior management, the realm where most problems were solved by saying the correct words, and into a time where he survived through physical fitness, situational alertness and hands-on experience.
Marness gets to his feet for the first time in years. He scans his surroundings, examining the placid golden lake and the sky and the boat itself. He doesn't sit down again. He smooths down his hospital gown, wishing he had a sweater and, separately, some fishing gear. He brushes a hand through new, old hair. His sideburns are back.
"We weren't Foundation at first," he says. "The first Antimemetics Division was a U.S. Army project. It ran parallel with Manhattan during World War II. We called ourselves the Unthinkables.
"It began as an experiment in advanced propaganda. The objective was to cut through the physical conflict and find a way to rupture the ideological machine, to obliterate the idea of Nazism. After two years, enough theory had been developed that the task had been reduced to an engineering problem. Another two years, and the engineering problem had been reduced as well, and what we had built was a very special kind of bomb.
"Unfortunately, we didn't understand what we'd built. Back then, we didn't have the mnestics or the shielding that we could use to protect ourselves. We didn't understand how far ahead you need to think when you're working with this kind of technology.
"We got looped. It was textbook. We built the unthinkable bomb and test-detonated it... and it worked perfectly. The bomb destroyed itself, and erased its own successful detonation, and flattened all the knowledge which had gone together to build it. We forgot that we had ever built the bomb at all, and started over."To our credit, we realised pretty quickly what must have happened. There was a four-year gap in our progress now, and there was no other way to explain it. But by the time we put the pieces together the second time, the war was almost over. The Nazis had been defeated by conventional means, and the Japanese had been broken by the first atomic bombings. So we completed the second antimemetic bomb, and after that, we sat on it."
Marion Wheeler is silent for a long moment.
"The U.S. Army," she says doubtfully, "was secretly developing antimemetic weaponry as early as the 1940s."
"We sure were," Marness says, with more than a hint of pride.
"Of course, there is no one in the whole world who could back this up."
"That's right," Marness says, flashing a smile he hasn't flashed in decades. "You only have my word for it. Cute, huh? Still, this is why you resurrected me, isn't it? For the sake of one more good war story. God, I've missed shop talk."
"I resurrected you because I want a very specific question answered," Wheeler says. "Although I can see that in a way you've already answered it. This bomb was the means, wasn't it? The old Antimemetics Division—"
"—the Unthinkables—"
"—bombed themselves. Somehow."
"That's right," Marness says.
"From context," Wheeler goes on, "I assume that they knew what they were doing that time. I assume it was not an accident."
"It was not," Marness says.
*
The displaced half of Marness' brain is anchored in the Seventies now, so the True History of the New Original Unthinkables is an open book to him. And he reads:
"After the war the second bomb collected dust for years. We began sketching improved designs for a third bomb, but around that time oversight was starting to flicker out. We completed our research and production objectives, and were given no further objectives. Funding became shaky and we couldn't figure out why. It wasn't entirely clear that the project overseers knew what we were doing. Or even that they remembered we existed. It was a side-effect from the research, of course, one we had no way of managing at the time.
"In 1951, a cult movement began in Ojai, California. It was... wrong, everything about it was just wrong. In a matter of days it was a national phenomenon and still growing. It was all over the news. To spread that far in months would have been credible, but days was simply impossible. We, in the team, could see that the philosophy behind the cult was unnaturally contagious. It was the opposite of unthinkable, it was unforgettable. We knew that this was what our bomb was designed for. We prompted the overseers for direction. But there were no orders.
"At the time that the outbreak began, we were a U.S. Army laboratory, through and through. Eight days into the crisis the Foundation 'acquired' us. All the classified research, all the material resources, and all the compliant top staff, including me. Anybody who wouldn't comply was mind-wiped and sent back to the Army. Twenty hours after the acquisition, we deployed the second bomb and the cult was gone. Nobody remembered it, nobody remembered being part of it, zero loss of life. A completely clean detonation.
"After that is when everything really kicked off. Once we started working for the Foundation, the pace of research ramped up. Every new technological advancement uncovered new hidden SCPs. I passed the Foundation field exams and went out catching ghosts. My life turned into the Twilight Zone. I—"
Marness blinks hard. He covers one of his eyes, then the other.
"I remember all these different people now," he says. "It feels like my memory is in stereo. Almost every antimemetic SCP we caught before the wipe in '76, we caught again soon after the wipe. That means I remember two acquisition logs for each one. I remember two Antimemetics teams and I don't remember who belongs on which side of the wall. Do you remember Goldie Yarrow? The neurologist? Studied the mechanism of anomalously accelerated memory loss... wrote a library on the subject..."
Wheeler doesn't.
"Dr. Ojobiru? Julie Still?"
"El, this is important. Are you at the right place in your own timeline to remember what happened yet?"
Marness focuses. And he discovers that he is. Something changes in his eyes, as he stops reminiscing. He speaks more slowly now, his voice dropping almost to a whisper:
"There is an SCP which your division has never seen. The SCP which my division couldn't contain. The escapee. This is what you wanted, isn't it, Marion?"
"Yes," she says. "This is the data I'm killing you for." She leaves a gap where, if she felt there was anything to apologise for, she would apologise.
Marness locks eyes with her. "It was eating my division alive. It came at us so hard and so fast that the only way we could stop it was to self-destruct. But we had no site nuke, and in retrospect it is obvious to me, now, that this was because the SCP had consumed our site nuke first of all.
"If you know it exists, it knows you exist. The more you know about it, the more it knows about you. If you can see it, it can see you. And you can see it. You've been looking right at it all afternoon."