(Connected to SCP-003)
Rule number one was simple: do not look.They drilled it into us in training briefings, in mission rehearsals, in the last joke before deployment. Keep the visors down. Keep your rifles steady. Treat the target like a live grenade.
I thought I was ready.
We found him standing in the middle of a ruined street — young, unnervingly calm, dust hanging in the air like a soft gray film. No panic. No movement beyond the slow turn of his head as we approached. No plea, no attempt to flee. He just watched.
And then I slipped.
It was a fraction of a second — a hairline through my visor when his face aligned with mine. I shouldn't have looked. I did anyway.
His irises were wrong. Not reflection. Not cataract. A mark — a red sigil burned into the dark of his eye. It pulsed for less than an instant and felt like someone had planted a coin on my tongue.
He spoke.
"Drop your weapon."
My hands obeyed before my brain finished hearing the syllables. The rifle clattered from my grip and hit the pavement with a sound that belonged to someone else. Voices rose behind me — the squad — but they were distant, muffled, as if I were listening through water.
"Kneel."
My knees hit the concrete. Pain flared for a blink and then dissolved. I had the absurd realisation that resisting would have been like trying to stop the tide with a clenched fist. I couldn't — not because I was weak, but because my body had stopped being mine to command.
He walked closer. The gravel crunched under his boots; I could feel the rhythm in my chest as if it were a second heartbeat. Instinct screamed to fight, to wrench myself free, to bite and claw. My fingers flexed uselessly. My throat held only the small shore of air a drowned man remembers.
"Tell me everything you know."
I told him. God help me, I told him everything. Safehouses, cipher keys, rendezvous points I had sworn never to speak. Names I had swallowed and carried into graves. Each secret left my mouth like a coin sliding from a slot; there was no shame in the motion, only the mechanical click of compliance.
He listened, a small, quiet smile forming as if waiting for a punchline. When he finished — when he had everything he wanted — he turned and walked away down a street I now knew would lead to trouble I had helped carve.
My squad pounced on me after he left, shouting, hands grappling at my arms and collar. They demanded answers. I tried to tell them what happened, but the words came like a drunk's apology — scattered, unbelievable. I laughed then, and cried, and said nothing that would save us.
Because the truth is worse: the moment I looked into his eye, my life stopped being mine. Something took the steering wheel and drove. Later, when I was scrubbed and anaesthetized and questioned, I could not find the thread of myself before that look. All I had left were the echoes of the commands he had made me give and the knowledge that those commands lived inside him now — my voice folded into his mouth.
They amnesticized us, of course. They did what they were trained to do: sanitize the witnesses, patch the holes, seal the files with neat redacted lines. But I remember. I remember my hands dropping the rifle, the weight of obedience like a coat I couldn't shrug off, and the tiny smile on his face as he walked away with my secrets.
Some nights, I still dream the sound of my rifle hitting concrete — and I wake thinking the floor beneath me is a stage I no longer own.
— Recovered Testimony of Operative █████Incident: ██/██/20██Source: Site-██ Internal Interview Log (classified — partial transcript recovered)