What is the first scp

In this article:

• SCP-001 is hinted to be dangerous enough and/or integral to the SCP Foundation that the true nature of the anomaly is obscured by about 30 different versions of the containment file.
• A look at the six strangest versions of the SCP-001 file.
• The true first SCP is on the loose and there’s nothing the Foundation can do to stop the containment breach.

Has there ever been a moment in your life where you found yourself confronted with the strangeness of reality? Maybe it’s that one time you couldn’t find the exit at Ikea. Or a staircase that never seems to end. Or an unnerving image you found while absentmindedly scrolling in bed that gets eerier the longer you look at it, but you aren’t sure why.

If any of those feel familiar to you, you might have had contact with an anomaly. Anomalies are creatures, gods, objects, realities, and unrealities whose existence threatens anything from the safety of a city block to the very fabric of space and time. To protect humanity, the SCP Foundation has made securing, containing, and protecting anomalies its job.

While many SCPs are easy to contain, like this standard coffee vending machine, others require measures so extreme that their very existence must be obscured from anyone that isn’t top-ranking Foundation personnel.

The most infamous among these is SCP-001. With over 30 versions of the same file, the real identity of the Foundation’s first anomaly remains a secret even among senior staff.

That leaves non-05 personnel like us with no other window to the true nature of SCP-001 than to piece it together from the different versions classified under the SCP-001 file.

SCP-001 Explained: A Declassification of the 6 Strangest Versions of SCP-001

1. The Factory

Filed as “SCP-001:O5” by AdminBright, “The Factory” is a version of SCP-001 written as a letter from an O5 council member to Dr. Everett, one of the researchers working for the SCP Foundation. In it, an O5 tries to get him to stop looking into what SCP-001 is by exasperatedly telling him that it’s a toy factory built in 1835.

What’s so anomalous about a toy factory? According to the O5, this one produced toy guns that shot real bullets, living skeletal horses, and a shadow dimension. It manufactured small anomalies and end-of-the-world scenarios alike. But the O5 and his peers, who at the time still didn’t call themselves the SCP Foundation, discovered that some of these anomalies could be used to contain other ones.

However, the gifts of the Factory didn’t come free. It’s heavily suggested that the Factory is some sort of Eldritch god that has formed a pact with the Foundation. The Factory makes helpful anomalies in exchange for the Foundation’s “offerings.” The entry ends with the O5 telling Dr. Everett that he’s getting old and should he pass, the doctor will be the one to keep “feeding” the Factory.

This SCP-001 entry is connected to one other SCP-001 tale, “The Gate Guardian,” which “The Factory” claims is just a decoy designed to satisfy the curiosity of nosy researchers. “The Factory” also mentions a conflict with fae folk, tying it to the exiled fae creatures of SCP-4000.

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2. The Scarlet King

“The Scarlet King” is one of the biggest versions of the SCP-001 file, not only due to its popularity but because of how many of the other SCP documents tie back into it. In this version, SCP-001 refers to an ancient god-like entity that has existed since the beginning of time.

The Scarlet King is said to exist in multiple alternate dimensions at once but is unable to enter our reality, the prime dimension. Though its true appearance and nature are unknown to the SCP Foundation, the idea of the Scarlet King appears throughout several cultures in the SCP universe, often wearing red and a symbol of royal authority. It’s suggested that Satan, as he’s seen in pop culture, is a derivative of the Scarlet King.

Like “The Factory,” the entity described in “The Scarlet King” entry implies that it’s an Eldritch being and/or primordial deity. The Scarlet King’s lore is spread out across over a dozen entries, the most obvious of which is SCP-231, an anomaly whose containment protocol is the infamous Procedure 110-Montauk.

Another is SCP-2317 which is the basement door of a Massachusetts brownstone that teleports people into an alternate dimension. Later, it becomes evident that the true anomaly is an unstoppable “Devourer of Worlds” that can’t be contained.

To prevent panic and keep up morale inside the Foundation, personnel have been given instructions for a false containment procedure involving ritualistic and religious practices — the exact type of protocol used for SCP-231.

3. SCP-001 Is JFK’s Assasination

“The Conspiracy” is an SCP-001 entry that moves away from the cosmic horror of the earlier mentioned entries in favor of a good old-fashioned conspiracy theory. But “The Conspiracy” version takes a more sophisticated approach compared to saying that lizard people did it.

This time, the anomaly is the bullet that killed former U.S president John F. Kennedy and the conspiracy is the in-universe fact that JFK’s assassination is the last fact in the observable universe.

Here, the SCP Foundation takes the inconsistencies around the events of JFK’s death and amps the horror up to 11. In this document, JFK’s assassination marks the last point in time when humanity was able to agree on a truth or, better yet, the concept of truth.

This version manages to do two things: explain why conspiracy theories have become increasingly common and why there are several SCP-001s. The document states that the nature of JFK’s assassination as the last near-universally helps stabilize a “base” reality.

Unlike most SCP-001s, “The Conspiracy” is meant to be preserved and prolonged rather than contained and destroyed. It’s stated that the Foundation has been performing life-extending experiments on eyewitnesses to the assassination in an attempt to preserve the idea of truth.

3. SCP-001 Is a Sheaf of Paper?

Filed in 2008, “Sheaf of Papers” was one of the first SCP-001s to take a meta approach to the origins of the SCP Foundation and its many anomalies. The document claims that SCP-001 is a sheaf of paper that would be completely normal if not for the fact that it contains information on all known SCPs.

The papers comprising SCP-001 are stored in a code-locked briefcase that can only be opened with clearance by all O5 council members. Personnel lucky (or unlucky) enough to see the documents will find a top sheet covering the front that reads “Confidential Report on Special Items—Classified.”

Though the sheaf of papers doesn’t appear to change in size, the number of SCP files it contains at any given time ranges from three to thirty.

What’s even more ominous about this SCP is that anomalies appear in the real world after their file in the stack of papers is read. The SCP Foundation is yet to agree on whether SCP-001 is a form of advanced warning system or the creator of the anomalies itself.

Outside of the SCP lore, however, SCP-001 is among the first thousand SCPs added to the Foundation’s wiki site and its document gives a subtle nod to this by saying that the Foundation made the mistake of reading it, bringing about a thousand anomalies.

5. You Are SCP-001

You (yes, you) are the anomaly. The strangest, reality-breaking phenomenon in the universe is the existence of the human race.

“You Are the Anomaly, Tumor of the Worlds” states that SCP-001 is comprised of all living members of the Homo sapiens species, whether they’re in the plain vanilla universe or one of its many alternate versions and paradimensions.

According to this proposal, the Butterfly Effect is real and every living human can trigger it, leading to the creation of alternate dimensions whenever some random guy chooses to drive into a McDonald’s parking lot rather than the Wendy’s across the street. For some reason or another, our dimension-creating curse threatens the stability of the reality we live in.

As ridiculous at is it seems, this SCP-001 is the bleakest version of the file because it requires the complete destruction of the human race. One of the letters attached to SCP-001 is resigned to the need for humanity’s destruction.

Its writer only hopes another sapient race could emerge after humanity’s demise and not be afflicted with the same Butterfly Effect “curse.”

6. The SCP Foundation Wiki Itself Is SCP-001

In a fictional universe where reality breaks, alternate timelines exist, and objects can infect ideas, fourth wall breaking is just another Tuesday to the writers behind the SCP Foundation wiki.

As a result, the entire site itself might be the true SCP-001 in the sense that it’s the only SCP-001 scenario that we can be certain is actually true. In “The Database,” the fictional SCP Foundation becomes aware of the real-life SCP Foundation after noticing the strange disappearances of SCPs and their corresponding documents.

The in-universe writer of the document dismisses the document-altering SCPs and memetic hazards contained by the Foundation as child’s play compared to what’s really going on with SCP-001.

“Not just SCPs, but personnel, whole sites, and entire decades of the Foundation’s history would be re-written, seemingly at random. And our own memories, and all external research would confirm that “objective” reality matched the current version in our database,” the narrator, who’s clearly having an existential crisis, claims.

The document ends on a funny yet existentially horrifying note: “We found out that there is a God, and it is SCP-001. And it’s a bunch of horror writers.”

SCP-173, Not SCP-001, Is the First True SCP

Back to the real world. If you really want to know what SCP-001 is in the sense of what the first true SCP is, it’s SCP-173.

While the SCP Foundation wiki was launched in 2008, the true origins of the SCP Foundation dates back to June 22, 2007 at 8:33 AM EST. A user by the name of “The U.S.S Walrus” made a post on 4chan that used Izumi Kato’s “Untitled” as inspiration for a monster that moves whenever you aren’t looking at it, much like Doctor Who‘s Weeping Angels.

While the concept itself was already done, what made SCP-173 the cornerstone of the largest collaborative storytelling project on the internet was the format it was written in. SCP-001 was an epistolary story, a fictional tale told entirely through documents.

The entire SCP-173 document is only about 200 words long, but in those 200 words, the document manages to establish several essential facts about the SCP Foundation that remain true about it to this day.

Let’s break down the post for a second. “From the Files of Site 19” alone tells us that there are multiple other containment sites. In the same vein, the designation “SCP-173” implies that there are 172 SCPs that precede this anomaly.

That there are special containment procedures, hazard classifications, strict protocol, and personnel reports communicates that the person who wrote the file belongs to a professional organization of some sort.

As short as it is, all of the roughly 7,000 SCP documents that followed this 4chan post use the same formula. While relatively niche, the SCP Foundation wiki is a cultural behemoth in the circles it’s known to. Just take a look at Control‘s Federal Bureau of Control and Soma‘s way of expressing existential themes through an incomprehensible enemy.

While the influence of the Foundation has grown over the years, it still remains a labor of love for its contributors. All of its content is under a Creative Commons license, making it vulnerable to Russian rogue agents trademarking the Foundation and the release of SCP-173 into the wild.

As of February 2022, the SCP Foundation no longer uses the image of SCP-173. In an announcement made earlier this month, the site’s administrators explained that they would be removing SCP-173’s likeness from all of the official SCP Foundation sites out of courtesy to the image’s creator, Izumi Kato, who never asked to be part of any of this.

The artist is understandably not happy that their creation will forever be associated with the SCP Foundation, but has been tolerant of fans’ use of his work. Meanwhile, the writer of SCP-173 has asked not to replace the image after its removal.

The SCP-173 creature was affectionately nicknamed “Peanut” by the community.

Run free, Peanut, and break all the necks you find. Here lies internet history 2007-2022.