Dr. Nox | 2023-12-15
Some new assignments had questions about our work here, so I'm publishing this to clear most of them up. Feel free to contact my office if there are any others.
The Atzak Protocol is a method for gathering and processing the Y-909 compound. It's a thick, brackish, grey fluid that SCP-3000 excretes as part of its metabolism. We don't know the exact method by which it does this, but we have some ideas, and none of them are great for us.
Initially, we thought it was bleeding. The first team we sent down to look at SCP-3000 went down to collect blood samples for analysis. When SCP-3000 attacked and consumed them, and began producing more of the substance, we realized that we were looking at something different entirely. It's definitely not blood, it's more akin to a prion slurry. It's extremely toxic, and spending too much time around the stuff causes a lot of the same effects as exposure to SCP-3000 does. Paranoia, memory loss, suicidal thoughts, etc. Refining the raw Y-909, what the processors call "eel jelly", allows us to create amnestics more effective than any we've ever had access to in the history of this organization.
Herein lies the ethical dilemma. SCP-3000 only creates Y-909 after eating, and it only eats humans. Remember when I said we had some ideas about how it does this? Some of our biologists have hypothesized that SCP-3000 is breaking down whatever makes sapient creatures sapient, filtering it through some part of its skin, and the residual ether is what we collect. You want to know something really fucked up? We've taken radiographs of this thing, trying to see what's going on inside of it. It's full of dead human bodies. It's not digesting them at all, it's doing something else, and the end result is Y-909.
When we first started using Y-909 in our amnestics programs, we tried to synthesize it. We got something close to what we were looking for, Y-919, but the side effects were catastrophic. The amnestics would work, we could get people to forget events, people, and so on. But then they would start to forget other things, too. The mental deterioration would rapidly increase until there was nothing left, and then they would die. A few of those researchers thought we might be able to figure out how to decrease the severity of those side effects, but the cost to continue those trials would have been astronomical, and the program was discontinued.
It's no secret that what we're doing here is abhorrent. The Ethics Committee, the Classification Committee, they're all looking at ways to make this more tolerable than what it is. But the hard truth is, if we want to continue to use modern amnestics, we have to have Y-909. If we want to have Y-909, we have to feed D-Class to SCP-3000. Otherwise, we'd be forced to go back to the metaphorical dark ages, where we were amnesticizing people with opiates and chloroform.
The good news is, we're developing ROVs that should be able to take over the job of collecting the raw material from our dive teams. This will eliminate any chance of accidental casualties like we've had in the past, and is a good first step. For everything else, only time will tell.
-Nox