📋 SCP-001 [TwistedGears/djkaktus] — The Broken God
rating: +2+x

TwistedGears-Kaktus’ 001

Object Class: Maksur

Authors: TwistedGearsTwistedGears and djkaktusdjkaktus

Attributes: automaton, broken-god, factory, global-occult-coalition, horizon-initiative, k-class-scenario, mechanical, telepathic, unclassed, unusual-incidents-unit


This is my all-time favorite 001 proposal, partially because it’s the culmination of the Church of the Broken God, my favorite Group of Interest.

I will note that there are a lot of references to Groups of Interest, other SCP articles, and the like in the original article. Knowing what is being referenced does add to the experience, but the only required reading would be understanding the basics of the Church of the Broken God. Here's a brief overview written by one of our best authors.

Let’s do this.


This, like so many 001-proposals is a protected file. It’s described as a Maksur-class anomaly. Maksur is a non-standard object class, which is covered in greater detail in the glossary. Essentially, most of these non-standard object classes do not have standard definitions, and aren’t intended to.

The Maksur classification was codified in 1981 by the Foundation's Containment Committee, in conjunction with the Overseer Council, the Site Directors Council, and the Foundation Ethics Committee. Until such time that the Maksur-class was codified, SCP-001 was classified as "Neutralized," and the Maksur-class was created to replace this improper classification

This one has a clear origin in the footnotes: Initially this 001 was classified as “Neutralized” until they realized that was inaccurate. “Maksur” was proposed and approved as a special classification for this one object. (“Maksur” also means “broken” in Arabic. Probably more of an Easter egg than anything.)

It’s protected by a scary disclosure – “dissemination is strictly forbidden” and “imminent threat,” yada yada yada. We’re used to that by now. It does talk about “memetic inoculation,” which means becoming immune to a specific type of memetic effect through careful exposure to weaker forms, not unlike how a vaccine works.

Submit your credentials and we see a memetic image that, presumably, would kill anyone not inoculated against its effects. It is a picture of machinery, gears, pipes and the like, with some difficult-to-read text and three words highlighted – “APOTHEOSIS” and “IRON SCEPTER.” Apotheosis is the process of becoming a god. “Iron Scepter” was a bit harder to find initially.

After messing with picture settings I was able to decipher enough of the background text to see where it comes from. It’s quoting the Bible, specifically the Book of Revelations. (That’s the one with all the apocalypse bits.) The exact quote appears to be Revelations 12:1-5. I’d link it but Revelations has a reputation for obscure, dense imagery and symbolism that’s difficult to interpret. Suffice to say that it’s about the apocalypse.


Special Containment Procedures


Information on the relevancy of SCP-001 to the related anomalous objects are to be omitted from the respective objects' documentation. While connections with the Church of the Broken God can remain available, the origins of the items are to be omitted or obfuscated.

This means there are a variety of anomalous objects, contained and documented, that are related to this object, but their connection to 001 is kept out of their respective articles.

The inactive component of SCP-001 is to remain in its current location, and any shipping or diving is forbidden in that area.

There’s a core that’s not currently functioning, and it’s implied that it’s underwater.

Civilian discovery of SCP-001 is to be suppressed, and amnestics are to be utilized in order to maintain classification. Persons affiliated with the Church of the Broken God who make active attempts to seek out the inactive component of SCP-001 are to be taken into Foundation custody and questioned. Information pertaining to SCP-001, whether physical or digital, is to be confiscated and contained.

All very standard containment procedures. Don’t let anyone know about it.

The inactive component of SCP-001 is expected to remain inanimate; however, should SCP-001 experience spontaneous reanimation, all active Mobile Task Force units at nearby Site-27, Site-44, Site-90, and Site-101 are to be assigned to active countermeasures.

We expect the inactive part to stay inactive, but if it ever wakes up and starts doing its thing again, the Foundation will send a small army to stop it. This means it’s extremely dangerous. Just how dangerous?

Should this event (currently designated an 001-Apotheosis Event) occur in the modern world, it is believed that current means of information suppression would be insufficient. It is likely that an 001-Apotheosis Event would result in a SK-Class "Broken Masquerade" scenario, and likely following that, an XK-class "End-of-the-World" scenario.

That’s a hell of a thing to drop so quickly. It specifies “modern world,” indicating that it may have occurred previously, but given our information-dense and highly interconnected modern world, it’s much more difficult to contain information than before.

The “Masquerade” is the illusion of normalcy the Foundation perpetuates – the idea that the universe is logical, the laws of physics make sense, and anomalous objects just don’t exist. A “Broken Masquerade” scenario is a situation where the population at large becomes aware of anomalies (and, generally, the Foundation.) This represents a failure of the Foundation’s primary objective.

Oh, and then it would wipe out all life on Earth as we know it.

Extant active components of SCP-001 are not to come within 20km of the inactive component of SCP-001 under any circumstances.

Great – there are working parts of this thing too.


Description


SCP-001 is a collection of anomalous items, formerly a single, massive mechanical entity assembled by members of the Church of the Broken God in late 1942 near La Paz, Mexico.

Well, now. A “single, massive, mechanical entity,” whose parts are anomalous in and of themselves, assembled by the Church of the Broken God? For those unfamiliar with that organization, they believe in a divine entity called MEKHANE, a perfect mechanical being of logic and order, which bestowed the gift of reasoning on the wild, animalistic human race. They also believe that their god, MEKHANE, broke itself apart/was broken to save humanity from a great evil entity called Yaldabaoth, and their goal is to rebuild MEKHANE.

Yeah.

Items include SCP-217, SCP-1139, SCP-882, and several internal components of SCP-629. A full list is available here.

There is no full list, of course. I do recommend reading 882 at the very least once you’re done with this explanation – it’s one of the articles that inspired the Church of the Broken God mythos.

Members of the Church combined the various anomalous objects in an effort to restore their deity.

And, as we all know, in fiction, creating a god is always a good idea.

Upon activation, SCP-001 reportedly began to integrate metallic objects into itself while actively seeking other anomalous objects. SCP-001, and the resulting "001-Apotheosis" event that took place as a result of its assembly, was the cause of significant environmental changes in western Mexico, and required one of the most widespread use of amnestics to date.

This “001-Apotheosis” event took place, presumably some point in the past when the spread of information was more manageable. It required an extreme amount of effort and an enormous amount of memory-altering drugs (amnestics.)

Post-event, the active components of SCP-001 were taken to Foundation sites for containment, while the inactive component of SCP-001 remained on the bottom of the Gulf of California, at approximately 23.807269, -108.418369.

All the active anomalous bits were taken and contained, mostly as objects with SCP classification themselves. The “inactive component,” the core piece from earlier, presumably cannot be easily contained or relocated, and so has been left at the bottom of the ocean.

For a 001, this sure doesn’t have a lot of meat in the Procedures or Description. But that’s OK. It lives in the addendums.


Addendums


The first addendum is from “Father Jorge Castillo,” in 1945. Context suggests this is a priest of the Church of the Broken God (a later priest of the organization is also called “Father.”)

When they showed it to me I was taken aback. It was little more than a pile of gears, pistons, ticking pieces of clockwork and lubricated metal parts, all dutifully churning along without a power source. Within it I saw the heart, just as they described.

It spoke to me. Not like you and I would speak to each other, but… with images, and feelings. And pain. It was in so much pain. Like the spark that had given it life had made it realize what it was, or what it wasn't, and it desired only to be whole again.

Desire is a strong word, perhaps. Not desire, more than it was impulse. Something within the creature drove it forward towards some unthinking, unfaltering end. The creature they presented to me was not like the other artifacts I had found and blessed. This one was different, there was something wrong with it, and I did not know until later what they had done…

This part is very intriguing. He notes that it’s different from other (presumably anomalous) artifacts, but instead of treating it with reverence or worship as his friends do, he fears it and sees something “wrong” with it. He elaborates, indicating that the object, out of some instinct, some unthinking impulse, wants to build itself.

The object absorbs a wrench into its structure and demonstrates some degree of autonomous motion. There’s something else I want to address, though.

“Creature.” “Unthinking.” “Impulse.” These are not words used by the Church of the Broken God to describe MEKHANE. MEKHANE is universally described as being a logical, thinking entity, without organic corruption or things such as instinct. These words, though, are often used by the Church to describe another entity:

Yaldabaoth. The patron deity of Sarkicism, a religion of organics, instinct, impulse, and animalistic sensation. The anathema to all the Church of the Broken God stands for.

The interview reiterates that it communicates telepathically, using emotions and concepts instead of words.

This is followed by an interview with a member of the FBI’s Unusual Incidents Unit, and which references the Horizon Initiative. The FBI agent meets a very unusual woman “[with] iron chains for hair” who somehow induces an experience in her mind:

The world dropped beneath me and I fell. Something clicked in my mind, an image of two gears, formerly meshed together, now broken away. I felt the teeth of my spine arch out as I bent over, one step and I clicked along on the multidimensional cog that was the planet. It spun around the furnace of the sun, tethered to it by the chain that was gravity, and we hurtled together through an oily cosmos with all the power of an infinitely unwinding spring…

This experience persuades the FBI agent to part with a CotBG-related artifact and give it to the woman in question. Note the machinery symbolism.

This is followed by a particularly important interview from an excommunicated priest of the Church of the Broken God. He references how an important member of the Church, Robert Bumaro, had several agents who were “in tune with God and could feel its presence.” (Notably, Bumaro leads the Church in modern times.) Many of these agents sacrificed their lives in early augmentation experiments. Bumaro used these agents to identify mechanical anomalous artifacts which were part of their Broken God.

You heard Avery tell you that they had a stockpile of artifacts, right? …Most of it was worthless, but every now and then they would find something legitimate… They had tendons and ligaments and everything else, but they were all just parts. They would move on their own, but they didn't do anything together.

The texts refer to the God reassembling itself once the pieces are brought before its heart. All you need do is to feed the heart a limb, and the God will have a limb. But they couldn't find a heart. There were a couple of agents who had claimed to have found one, but they were all the same useless piece of machinery as the rest.

This tells us that the agents, while identifying anomalous artifacts, many of which were positively identified as being part of the Broken God, had never located the heart – a key, core piece without which their God could never be rebuilt.

Ezekiel was the one who told Bumaro that, if they could not find a heart, maybe they could build one of their own. This, at the time, flew directly in the face of the Church doctrine. The leadership, if they had known, would have excommunicated him. But it was quickly becoming clear that the project couldn't last through to the summer. I was sent in with my mission to resupply them after Ezekiel had left, and their supplies were nearly exhausted.

We have very religious and very talented individuals, who were willing to give their very lives to the Church, desperately searching for the pieces to rebuild their God. It’s implied that this was a directive given to them by the Church’s leadership. They were desperate, rapidly running out of resources, and were missing the single most important part, that, without which, their efforts would be a failure. These individuals had access to a large number of anomalous artifacts and were at least partially anomalous themselves.

What did they do?

[Foundation Agent]: Our records indicate that the heart was something they discovered. Is that not true?

Of course it isn't true. You can't preach to a congregation about God giving parts of himself to you and then turn around and tell them that the most essential part is something you conjured up out of nothing. Worse than nothing, though. The details of what they did to create that heart and make it live were never revealed to me, but you can draw conclusions from evidence. There was a drought that year, and the polio crisis hit an all-time high. Thousands died, all of natural causes. A freak event, never accurately recorded because of the attention on the war. Dios mio > [My God,] but who can say.

They made a desperate bargain. They created a heart, using their anomalous artifacts, their anomalous knowledge, and (it is implied,) massive human sacrifice.

A quote from the description of Sarkicism, emphasis added:

Adherents practice ritual cannibalism, human sacrifice, corporeal augmentation, thaumaturgy, dimensional manipulation, and the formation of pacts with otherworldly entities.

But that’s none of my business. Back to the interview.

That was not the heart of God, agent. That was something altogether different.

Next addendum. This, a transcript of a video recorded in 1942.

Shot begins on a destroyed home, the wreckage centered around the garage. Metal fragments and strips of rubber trail down the driveway and onto the asphalt, and go down the street. Pieces of various automobiles are strewn across the street and sidewalk. The trail leads to SCP-001, which is integrating a truck into its chassis.

SCP-001 continues to the nearest house, where it begins consuming the gutters. Residents of the area flee the scene, several injured by discarded shards of glass and twisted metal discharged by SCP-001. Lights produced from various parts of SCP-001's body focus on the various prone figures. A section along the undercarriage of SCP-001 alters and drops away from the main body, which continues down the street in search of more sources of material.
The ejected subsection continues alterations, forming a vertical pod somewhat resembling a human spine and rib cage. Pod collapses in various areas, the rib-like protrusions extending outward as the rest of the pod changes into a humanoid form roughly three meters tall. Light is produced from the head, which is focused on a nearby civilian.

The machine they have created is actively searching for metal, glass, and anything else it can integrate to continue building itself.

The metal humanoid picks up the civilian, who appears to be dead, and places it into a small chamber between the humanoid's ribs. The ribs vibrate as the humanoid approaches a second civilian, who is attempting to crawl away. She attempts to struggle as the humanoid lifts her and places her inside its chest cavity. The humanoid turns away from the camera to approach a third civilian, and what appears to be the woman's dismembered hand falls to the floor.

A growth on the humanoid's back slowly expands as it continues to gather bodies, the body of the humanoid decreasing in size as it does so. By the sixth consumed body the growth is larger than the humanoid, and it is unable to continue bipedal movement. The limbs recede into the body and the ribs extend to allow it to scuttle onto the roof of a nearby house.

It remains in place for twenty minutes. The bulbous exterior cracks and is torn away from within, revealing three humanoids. They each appear to be symptomatic of SCP-217, and exhibit physical characteristics of the six captured civilians. One, a female with chains extending from its scalp, shakes another, which appears to be dead. The third, a male with clockwork limbs, examines itself before jumping from the roof, landing on its stomach. It does not appear to be damaged by this, which seems to cause it distress. It then pursues SCP-001, which is consuming another vehicle farther down the street.

This blasphemous mechanical organism flies in the face of logic and order. It’s antithetical to the Church but fits perfectly into Sarkic patterns of behavior, besides its mechanical construction. It’s an animal, doing what animals do.

Eating and reproducing.

Also, remember the female with chains for hair from earlier?

The next interview is between Robert Bumaro and a local agent overseeing the feeding of their god. Bumaro is asking how things are going for them, noting that things need to move quickly as the Foundation is starting to pay more attention to their efforts, but he hopes that everyone is focusing on the ongoing War in Europe. The agent is… concerned.

Agent: Our God, uh… is ravenous. We cannot seem to satiate him, the supplies we were given are not—

Bumaro: (Cuts off again) What is the issue?

Agent: Father, our… the Lord is eating its own housing. We cannot convince him to stop, he cannot be reasoned with, it—

Bumaro: Nonsense. The heart of the devout may speak directly to our God. Can you not hear his words when he reaches out to you? Do you not feel the machine moving inside of you? Or do you need more proof other than the living, breathing God before your own eyes?

Agent: No! Father, it is not that, it is—

Bumaro: I will hear nothing of it. For years, we have prayed and asked for our God to be unbroken before us. And now, he has presented himself. We know that the divine will speak to the heart of the devout. If you are telling me that there are none among you who are devout enough to commune with our Lord, tell me now so you can be replaced.

Agent: Our faith is strong, Father. Please, forgive my insolence. I am only misguided.

Bumaro: See to yourself, then. I worry for your faith. Have one of your brothers, one who is stronger than you, have him speak to the Lord and tell him of the necessity for secrecy. Our Lord will understand, no doubt. The Unbroken God is a reasonable god.

Agent: Yes, bless you Father.

Bumaro: Bless you, child.

Bumaro, either through hubris worthy of Icarus, or intentional ignorance, tells his agent to “believe harder” and everything will work out. This, while the agent is watching their miracle become a catastrophe.

This next part begins with one hell of a picture.

mexico.png

Let that sink in. That’s 160 million square kilometers of land just gone. That’s roughly half of Germany, or the entire state of Florida, just straight up being removed.

What the fuck happened in Mexico?

Maybe the next interview can help. It has a site director of the Foundation interviewing one of their own Commanders.

The Commander starts by saying they had heard about Church activities in that part of Mexico, but it was all supposed to be minor and they were (as Bumaro correctly guessed,) more concerned with keeping anomalous objects out of the German Army’s hands. Due to a lucky accident, leadership ended up in La Paz, Mexico, when a train went the wrong direction.

Director Cornwell: When did you first hear about the 001-Apotheosis Entity?
Commander Peterson: (Laughs) Jesus. Is that what they're calling it now? The machine, I guess, we first heard through the grape vine of increased activity in the area in… I guess it would've been a little over a year ago. We ended up in La Paz in October of '42, so… yeah, that sounds right. The first concrete evidence we got that something was wrong was when a train of… refugees? Seems kind of silly to call them that, but I guess that's accurate. They showed up in La Paz near the end of October, talking about how their entire town had been mulched. They didn't really elaborate much, just kept saying "la máquina, la máquina," you know, "the machine". That's why we were calling it that, by the way. We had no idea what it was supposed to be.

The agent indicates that the trains stopped running, and Agent DeMarco was sent to investigate what happened.

We didn't hear back from them after three days, and were going to send the rest of the leadership east anyway so they didn't have to wait, but then after five days one of DeMarco's guys showed up at our camp. He was delirious, talking about the "world eater", and how the rest of the guys had gotten mulched. And they had, hadn't they? I know it wasn't as big then as it ended up, but it wasn't something to fuck around with. DeMarco…

Director Cornwell: Are you alright?

Commander Peterson: Yeah. He tried to kill it. He probably knew then what we wouldn't find out until later; that we couldn't contain this thing. There wasn't a hole in the world big enough to put it in, or a box that it wouldn't eat its way out of. But it didn't matter for him, or anyone he went with. The Machine didn't care.

“We couldn’t contain this thing.” There’s not much worse that a Foundation agent can say.

It was already… I mean, you saw what it did to that side of the country. I've never seen anything that big that could move. It was like a mountain of moving parts, blackening the sky as it burned through whatever it was shoveling into its chest. And it was small then! It was… I don't know. We all had XK-Event preparation training, but this went above and beyond anything we had trained for. It was inevitability. We knew that we were going to die, and this thing was going to kill us. It was just a matter of when.

We are graced by letters written in the area by Foundation personnel during this time. A few key quotes:

The skies down here have been dark for weeks. Smoke from up north every day, makes it hard to breathe.

A man came into town today with damn near half of his face cooked off. He was like a dead-man, didn't respond to anybody. He got towards the middle of town and collapsed. When he finally woke up in the infirmary later, he was delirious. Telling a story about a machine the size of a mountain that spoke to you. Said there were people jumping out of their homes and running, just to throw themselves in it. Said they were shredded, like jumping under a lawn-mower. Then he died, and nobody knows why.

And then… this:

The mountains crumbled before our own eyes. We saw a figure rising through the smoke, slow and lumbering but with terrifying momentum. It didn't crawl like a beast or walk like a man, but was propelled forwards by the turning of a million cogs, like an iron centipede. Its body extended upwards, into the smoke, higher than we could make out. Within its chest we saw fire, like the furnaces of Hell. It came to the mountains north of us and did not stop, or go around, but went through, and devoured them. It reached out with a long, pulsing arm, and pulled an entire village into its maw. I saw men leaping to their death as their homes were swept away, into the same inferno as the rest. And it howled, not just through the grinding of the gears and the churning of the machine, but in our minds. I could hear it in my heart. It was screaming.

Hey look, a picture.

bg.png

FUCK.

The final letter:

Temp site lost. La Paz in ruins. Mechanical entity contained. Massive geological alterations. XK avoided. Requesting amnestic support.

We’re here. Let’s meet 001.

Note: The following is an excerpt of a post-event interview conducted with a Global Occult Coalition lieutenant, codenamed "Revenant".

There's this story that gets told among Foundation agents… They say, "Don't you know? The GOC killed God."

But the greenhorns will say, "No, that's not true. God is in a cell at site-whatever… And they're talking about that type green they've got locked up somewhere, the one who thinks he's the Christian god. Then the vets will smile and shake their heads, and won't say anything. Because they all know.

They know that in 1943, in the midst of the Apocalypse, the Foundation could do nothing but watch the end while the Allied Occult Initiative, a poorly funded, undermanned, inadequate predecessor to the Coalition, saved the world.

The metaphorical gun was found on an island off the coast of Greece. I can't even remember what it looked like, all I get is that sort of fuzzy recollection the amnestics leave you with…

Why the amnestics? I was with the detachment deployed to the area, and apparently one of the pieces had some mind altering effect to it. I have a vague sense of feeling something wrong, so I'll take their word for it… I can't recall how it destroyed that much land… But I can still feel it, in my gut, that that wasn't how things were meant to be. We stood before what looked to be an angry and vengeful God, and all it did was beg us to kill it.

We were all too happy to oblige.

Recovered video transcript:

00:01: Recording opens on a town. Many buildings are collapsed or engulfed in flames. There is significant seismic activity present.

00:03: Video pans to show SCP-001. Size is indiscernible in the video, but the entity takes up the entire frame. It is slowly moving forward.

00:09: SCP-001 is seen moving large amounts of earth into itself. Occasional flames erupt from within the entity.

00:15: …The sky lights up, as if by lightning. The clouds directly over SCP-001 part momentarily. SCP-2399 is visible, its underside slightly damaged. Foundation mortar fire is seen passing overhead.

SCP-2399 is a space-based weapons platform, currently orbiting Jupiter, armed with antimatter weaponry as well as anomalous weaponry that we don’t fully understand. Its weapons systems are still active, actually. We can see their effects from here – we call it the Great Red Spot.

00:20: One such mortar strikes SCP-001. No damage is visible.

00:22: The underside of SCP-2399 is glowing blue.

00:24: A bright beam of light erupts from SCP-2399 and strikes SCP-001. SCP-001 violently reacts and reaches towards SCP-2399.

00:26: There is an explosion. Nothing can be seen on video.

This tells us that the 2399 article is also doctored to remove certain key pieces of information: That it has been to Earth, that the weapons systems were activated, and it was used to destroy a corrupted god.

The next addendum just recaps what we’ve been through – the Foundation made a desperate alliance with the Allied Occult Initiative (precursor to the Global Occult Coalition) to use an anomalous device. This caused 2399 to teleport to Earth and fire. The resulting aftereffects destroyed the corrupt god (and carved out the Gulf of California,) but damaged 2399 so heavily that it teleported to Jupiter and has been repairing itself ever since.

The Foundation found the inactive part of 001 – “a massive, unassembled group of machine parts,” where it fell – at the bottom of this new Gulf. They did remove the false, corrupt heart from the corpse it had birthed:

Upon removing SCP-882 from the inactive superstructure, the remainder collapsed and became wholly inert.

That… explains a lot.

A massive amnesticization of individuals in and around the area now known as Baja California took place. These efforts were aided by the quantity of thick, black smoke that accompanied SCP-001, and current historical records describe the event as a forest fire. Significant effort was made to adjust maps of the area, as well as relocate displaced civilians. Because of the need for a widespread amnestic regimen, several experimental neurotransformers were used, and because of their poorly understood side effects, it is estimated that no fewer than two million people across the world died in the decade following the 001-Apotheosis Event.

I suppose it tells us a lot about this event when the cleanup is a disaster in and of itself.

We have a document from the Global Occult Coalition indicating they encountered Ms. Chains-For-Hair, and not much else.

Two more addendums, troopers. One about the cleanup project itself – fathering all the little bits and pieces, and encountering 882.

We took what we could from the shores first. Little things, gears and pulleys and pistons…they were still twitching, spinning, turning. They still had life in them. The small stuff sort of died off after a couple hours, but I heard that the bigger pieces were still churning weeks later…

The important parts, the ones we knew were actual Church artifacts, we managed to bag and get moved to the train in La Paz for transport. I counted, Christ, maybe a hundred? Individual anomalous artifacts.

So there were a lot of pieces left over – a LOT – many of which kept moving on their own even after disassembly.

We kept casualties low… I think we only had one death the entire time…

But I don't know, I didn't see it. I did see the tags, though.

The individual makes note that manufacturers will always put their logo or other identifying marks on objects they produce. The mass-produced stuff that 001 gobbled up still had recognizable marks. The artifacts from the Church didn’t, further strengthening the implication that they are actual parts of the original Broken God, especially considering that they exuded a sort of serenity or peace. Almost like they were thankful.

Except for the heart. When we finally got it out of the bay, we had to keep it on the shore for a day because of the weather. Some of the locals started to get itchy. Said they were hearing voices, wouldn't go near it. Didn't matter how much money we offered them. Had to wait to bring in more support from the base up north just to get it loaded on a ship…

Right, the tags. It was as we were leaving and loading it on the ship that was going to take it north that I saw them for the first time. I didn't even think to say anything then, didn't even pass my mind until I started looking into some other files. Then that ship crashed in the storm, and they lost the heart, and the whole time I kept thinking about those goddamn metal tags. I realized it then, I think. That wasn't a Church artifact, Johnny.

They said "Property of The Factory".

The items from the Church of the Broken God didn’t have tags. The false heart did. It has a manufacturer. The Factory. That is its own canon entirely (and even its own 001 submission) Let’s just say the nature of 882 is no longer a surprise, knowing its origin.

To close out this lengthy article is one, final interview, from an individual who claims to be a part of a sect of the Church of the Broken God, but not one we’re familiar with.

Well, you're not entirely wrong… There are a few key details I feel you may be overlooking, and you may be overvaluing information handed to you by a self-admitted amnesiac…

He starts off by indicating that our information is incomplete, according to his knowledge of the situation, and reminds us that the primary source (besides the video) is a man who admits his memory was altered by the events.

The GOC did not kill Yahweh, as they may so proudly proclaim. And that was not the Broken God they destroyed. It was a piece of it, surely, but would you show me a camshaft and call it a car? Oh, so you have some parts together. An engine, perhaps. But not a car.

“Yahweh,” is, in many Judeo-Christian traditions, one of the names of God. This individual refutes the GOC’s claim that they killed that entity, and says that the machine we saw wasn’t the Broken God any more than an engine is a car.

God is much simpler than that. God is everything. From the biggest star to the smallest particle. Each tiny parts, completely insignificant on their own. Doing whatever it is they're meant to do. Meshing together, gnashing at each other. All a part of a cosmic machine.

He describes a more pantheistic perspective than a traditional member of the Church – believing God to be the Universe itself, moving in its own rhythms according to the laws of physics, and understanding it as an actual machine is a misguided tradition due to a misunderstanding.

This isn’t the “true canon” of the Church of the Broken God. There can be no true canon, first of all, and secondly, this is only representative of one small sect’s beliefs. But they do form a compelling explanation for this article’s events.

…Whatever God once was doesn't matter, ultimately. What matters, to you, is that that it must remain as it is. "Broken." God knows that. The more powerful parts, the mechanical components the more conventional sects may label as holy, they know they are not meant to be one solid thing. And even when forced together, a foreign force driving them, they know what they really are. Bits of the monster will work to destroy itself, deploy smaller entities to do the job. The GOC didn't kill it, they took the gun from its own hand and claimed credit when they pulled the trigger.

He explains that, to him, MEKHANE does not want to be rebuilt. It is supposed to be broken. Separated. When forced together by the unholy powers of the Factory, they rebelled and destroyed themselves, refusing to allow such an evil and corrupt machine to destroy the Earth. The GOC just took the credit.

The problem is that humans are too small a part of God to remember. Remember what it was like before. And so those like Bumaro will invent new ways to push us toward a singularity.

Here he calls out the (current leader) of the Church of the Broken God for his short-sightedness and misunderstanding.

Because that's what will happen. Did you see the underside of the destroyer? It was damaged even before the encounter in '43. And if you looked very closely, you might have seen the scars were getting closer and closer to the power core. It even managed to damage whatever lets it slip between the layers of reality this time. Eventually the monster will win. It will destroy the destroyer, devour it, and with its power consume everything. And I mean everything. God will return to being one gestalt being, a singularity, and then break. Only this time it may have some outside force within it. The rust of The Factory. The blood of a Daevite king. The Fifthists, Wondertainment, some random person on the street with enough spark in them to be a reality bender. They will have a hand in remaking the universe, and close the secondary loop of all this.

No, that doesn't concern me. It's an eventuality, it's meant to happen. Who's to say it hasn't already happened, and your people were the winner? Maybe humanity itself was the winner. But that doesn't mean I'd be against putting it off, allowing the primary loop to continue.

This reveals a belief that the Universe is cyclical. He believes that the “destroyer,” SCP-2399, is an integral piece of the Broken God, but will remain separate from it until the very end. In his mind, the Broken God will eventually be rebuilt, despite its own desires, and the rebuilding will create that monster 001 again. The monster will do battle with 2399, consume and absorb it, and, using its terrifying array of weaponry, unmake the universe. Those still alive at this time may be able to influence how the new universe will be created. He acknowledges that it’s entirely possible that this has already happened, creating our universe.

I will say that it is refreshing to see a “destroyer” in religious mythology actually be the good guy.

He also, in saying “your people” and “humanity” in the third person, implies that he himself is not human.

Finally, he leaves us with his own interpretation of what the “Broken God” really means.

Yes, it's possible. I know you couldn't damage the monster last time, and that the destroyer may not be able to repair itself by the time it is needed. But who's to say you can't aid it? Or mimic those who will seek to rebuild God, and acquire outside help? Working together, nothing is impossible.

Apart, we are Broken. But united, we are God.


And there we have it. My personal favorite 001. My appreciation for and love of this article was only increased by reading it again for this declassification.

I recognize that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s not even the highest-rated 001. That would be Clef’s Proposal, the Archangel, which I’m not personally a fan of. But what this is is a new take on the Church of the Broken God, in which they get everything they wanted, only to realize what that actually meant. It’s poetic, builds tension, and the climax smacks you in the face with a sledgehammer. The fact that it’s about my favorite GOI is just icing on top of the cake for me.

Don’t play God, kids. You might succeed.


tl;dr: TIFU for using bootleg heart for my god
-/u/nazuuka


Link: SCP-001 [Gears & Kaktus]: The Broken God

Written By: u/chaltak

Date Published: November 23, 2017

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License