Item#: 8414
Level2
Containment Class:
euclid
Secondary Class:
none
Disruption Class:
keneq
Risk Class:
caution
Special Containment Procedures:
All employees of the water park, inside which the SCP-8414 is located, other than its director and owner, must consist of employees of the foundation. Preference is given to people with previous experience working in a similar environment, such as those trained as pool lifeguards. Customers who are not part of the foundation's staff, including Class D personnel, must visit the water park regularly and interact with SCP-8414. The foundation is to carry out minor marketing operations in situations during which the number of customers visiting the water park begin to drop suddenly, in order to maintain a steady number of visitors.
Any person who has come into contact with SCP-8414 must be subjected to discreet surveillance to check the possibility of obtaining information from SCP-8414. If a threat to leak sensitive data is detected, the person is to be treated with Class A amnestics. It is preferable to target people with a low level of education as customers of the water park in order to more easily detect the sudden appearance of complex or unusual information or memories in their consciousness. The methods currently recommended are mainly discreet marketing, manipulation of online ads, and organization of profiled group tours.
Secret surveillance is to include a network of microphones and cameras in pools, saunas, hot tubs, changing rooms, entrance ticket offices, and the parking lot. Individual agents are to befriend customers on the site of the water park and engage in conversations on topics such as: how using the sauna area positively affects memory; sudden recovery of memories; or bringing up the subject of unusual memories.
Staff working on site is expected to actively prevent inappropriate use of the relaxation room by visiting customers, while referring to the official rules and regulations of the water park as a reason for doing so.
Procedures will be refined and adjusted accordingly once a research consensus is reached on the proper nature and modus operandi of the anomaly.
Description:
Technical drawing of the loungers
SCP-8414 refers to all three heated spa loungers, located in the relaxation room at the Aqua Park geothermal water park in the Tatrzański [tat·ʂaɲɕi] County, Małopolska [mawɔpɔlska] Voivodeship, Poland, or to the relaxation room itself.
The three heated spa loungers have been designated as SCP-8414-1, SCP-8414-2 and SCP-8414-3. Each was made by the COVI company, labeled as the DIVANO 1600 model. Covered in ceramic mosaic of blue and white shades, they have the same dimensions, viz: 2160 millimeters in length; 1630 millimeters in width; and 900 millimeters in height; with the maximum height referring to the headrests and the deepest; central part of each lounger being 290 millimeters high. The leg rests stand at a height of 400 millimeters.
Relaxation room where SCP-8414 is located is a partially glazed room, with walls covered with plaster that imitates mountain stone. An informational sign in Polish and English is located on the entrance door to the room.
Version in English is avaliable below:
The Relaxation Room is the perfect complement to the Sauna Area. This is the place where you will calm down before visiting the sauna or recuperate right after leaving it. Resting in a comfortable position, you will soothe your senses, calm your breathing, and tame your thoughts.
Researchers disagree on the properties of the SCP-8414 anomaly. The two main competing hypotheses are: the hypothesis of transfer of memories, or information, and the hypothesis of creation of memories, or information.
The transfer hypothesis postulates that SCP-8414 is capable of implanting the memories, or information, of any person who has been in contact with the anomaly in the past to any other person who has subsequently been in contact with SCP-8414.
The creation hypothesis suggests that the memories, or information received from the SCP-8414, are not originating from people who have previously came into contact with this SCP, but from the SCP itself, being at least in some cases manufactured memories, or false information.
Regardless of this dispute, researchers were able to conclude that the information, or memories, acquired through contact with the anomaly cannot be called "perfect", and their detail varies from case to case. Moreover, not every contact with SCP-8414 triggers its anomalistic properties. The exact conditions required for this are currently unknown.
Research distinguishing such conditions from correlations within the observed cases is currently still in progress. Occasionally, the anomalistic properties of SCP-8414 may extend beyond the relaxation room and affect people at a distance. Whether prior contact with SCP-8414 is required for this is also currently unclear.
Increase in range of effects of SCP-8414 correlates positively with the following situations:
• Sudden decrease in customers visiting the water park where the SCP-8414 is located.
• Sudden drop in customers visiting the saunas inside the water park where the SCP-8414 is located.
• Sudden drop in customers visiting the relaxation room where SCP-8414 is located.
• Statistical difference in the number of people using any of the loungers exceeding 10 people per month.
• Attempted to move any of the loungers.
• Damage to any of the loungers.
• Attempted to take a sample of material from any of the loungers.
• Other misuse of loungers, including the death of any spa client while using any of the loungers.
History:
SCP-8414 first attracted the foundation's attention on January 11, 2009, when a woman appeared at Site-███, located in ███████, claiming to have recalled its existence during a visit to a water park that was part of her winter vacation. The woman was amnestied and sent home under surveillance and given the cover of a story of drunken parties on a business trip.
After a closer look at the situation in a short period of time, it was possible to confirm more than a dozen more cases of unusual recovery or retrieval of memories, all of which were linked to this particular water park. In early February 2009, the building was bought out and secured with a plan to begin testing. However, the sudden decline in the park's clientele resulted in a dramatic increase in cases of new recalls within the city where the water park was located. After the city was temporarily quarantined, increasing numbers of cases began to be reported throughout the Tatrzański [tat·ʂaɲɕi] and Nowotarski [nɔvɔtarskʲi] counties in Poland. And in a short time also in Prešovský [ˈprɛʃɔv.ski] and Žilinský [ˈʒɪlɪnskiː] regions in Slovakia. At the suggestion of Dr. Ziach [ʑax], the quarantine was lifted and the water park reopened, which stopped the process.
A view of the section of the water park where SCP-8414 is located
Similar situation repeated in 2010, growing in the extent of the effect area until the building was resold to the previous owners. In 2011, a sudden increase in cases of unexplained recovery of memories in people other than customers of the water park began to proceed right after the decision to put all the employee positions back into private hands. The situation was halted only at a time when all jobs were taken back by foundation employees. This included roles ranging from cleaners to cashiers to lifeguards, watchmen, and a manager, but excluding the director of the water park. It took a lot of reshuffling to uncover this combination, along with the foundation's realization that D-class personnel did not meet the standards required to stop the expansion of the SCP-8414 area of effect.
That situation has led to new cases of people obtaining random memories throughout the Małopolska [mawɔpɔlska] Voivodeship in Poland and the Prešovský [ˈprɛʃɔv.ski] Žilinský [ˈʒɪlɪnskiː] and Banskobystrický [banskobi'strit͡skiː] regions in Slovakia. All known cases in these three events were managed after a period of several months by personal cover stories preventing the leakage of any sensitive information.
During the 2012-2015 period, similar reactions from SCP-8414 was triggered by the following situations and actions:
• Attempts to take material samples from SCP-8414-1.
• Unintentional damage to SCP-8414-2 by a drunken water park customer.
• Attempted sexual intercourse by a pair of customers on SCP-8414-2.
• Failure of the heating system of SCP-8414-1.
• Statistical decrease in the use of SCP-8414-3 by spa customers.
• Fatal heart attack by a customer who used SCP-8414-2.
The procedures in place since 2015 reflect the current state of knowledge about how SCP-8414 works and have resulted in no further incidents of memory retrieval in the area beyond the relaxation room where the SCP-8414 is located.
Addendum 1:
List of a selected portion of the transported, or produced memories or information, along with the person's demographics and distance from SCP-8414, listed in chronological order:
Date of event
Sex
Date of birth
Memory/Information
Distance from SCP-8414
28 DEC 08
F
15 JAN 77
Existence and location of Site-███
0m
07 JAN 09
M
04 JUN 82
Names of all factory parts of the 2005 Honda Civic VII SPORT
0m
14 FEB 09
F
13 MAR 63
Recipe for homemade napalm
3297m
15 FEB 09
M
04 OCT 92
Memory of his daughter's wedding
7227m
21 FEB 09
M
12 FEB 50
Content of the previously unknown work of Porphyry [/ˈpɔːrfɪri/] of Tyre
28m
10 APR 10
F
15 SEP 91
Bogrács [boɡraːtʃ] recepie
0m
12 JUN 10
F
25 SEP 55
All lyrics of the song “Firooz” [fiː'ɾuːz.] by Iranian rapper Hichkas [hiːt͡ʃkæs]
0m
04 NOV 10
M
16 DEC 62
Names, surnames, and positions of the entire Czechoslovak national football team from 1962
55m
01 MAR 11
M
10 DEC 78
Plot of the seventy episodes of the Da Zhai Men [dà zhái mén] TV series
0m
28 OCT 11
F
19 SEP 93
A memory of participating in a horse racing competition somewhere in Yugoslavia in an unspecified year
3000m
02 DEC 11
F
13 NOV 47
Existence of SCP- █████
41100m
04 DEC 11
F
25 JAN 59
Location of a secret Brazilian military base with an accuracy of one kilometer, along with the passwords to access this facility
2419m
06 FEB 12
F
13 MAY 73
Existence of a creature described by the subject as a "monster from beneath the earth"
0m
16 APR 12
F
03 JUL 77
A way to grow agave in home conditions
0m
24 JUN 12
F
05 MAY 91
An unspecified fight involving individuals speaking in a language unknown to the subject which the subject was unable to characterize
0m
13 AUG 13
M
02 OCT 68
Being trapped inside gasoline-soaked car tires and the memory of burning inside them
0,2m
13 AUG 13
M
06 OCT 68
Memories of catching the subject's wife cheating on him with his coworker
1m
22 OCT 14
F
21 SEP 15
A dog saying “goodnight” back to its owner who is going to sleep in the upstairs bedroom after he turns off the downstairs light
0m
07 JAN 15
M
12 DEC 48
Death of a person unknown to the subject, remembered within the memory as someone from a close family
0m
Addendum 2:
Dr. Ziach [ʑax] report on progress in SCP-8414 research:
Despite the suggested name, my expertise will focus primarily on clarifying the problems we have encountered. Our team would appreciate assistance in analyzing the anomaly we have been entrusted with from any researcher who has access to this document. As you can see, we are limited by terminological problems. Due to an ongoing research dispute between proponents of two hypotheses of how SCP-8414 works, we have not been able to develop a consensus on the use of the terms memory, knowledge, and information. Because of this, most of them are used interchangeably in describing the anomaly.
Because of the way in which we learn about the content of most of the memories or information we acquire, that is: through seemingly loose conversations with clients, we must take into account that the loose form of expression about this acquired knowledge may distort the details of their characteristics. By this I mean not only their content but their phenomenological acquisition itself, so to speak. Some people seem to acquire specific information, others more contextual memories of varying detail – from very general feelings to specific memories of the process of knowledge acquisition that occurs in the subjects inside the more general context of the new memory.
Regarding the dispute between proponents of the two hypotheses, it seems important for me to emphasize why I, too, believe that resolving the origin of this information, or memories, is important. On a more trivial note, this will allow us to be consistent in terminology, which will translate into clarity of descriptions and efficiency of research. We are now in agreement that if we can prove that SCP-8414 creates what it communicates to the subjects, we will refer to it as information, and if it transports something between cases, we will refer to it as a memory. However, a much more important issue, in the context of either creating or transporting, is the content of what we have gleaned from the anomaly. With the help of SCP-8414, we have possessed knowledge of another potential anomaly, which ██████████████████████ and which existence we have not been able to confirm so far in any other way than through a memory or information from SCP-8414. What is important, then, is whether SCP-8414 simply creates information or whether its location was visited in the past by a person of interest who knew of the existence of the unknown anomaly.
It may be noted that what is revealed here is our pre-assumption valuing a memory as potentially true and, in turn, information as potentially false, which is not necessarily the state of reality. But it does give us, again, a starting point in analyzing whether this SCP-8414 perhaps has knowledge of other anomalies or whether someone visiting them in the past, about whom we know nothing, had such a perception. This difference is clearly important to all of us.
An attempt to settle the dispute on the basis of the other information we obtained was unsuccessful. The cultural references we obtain from the subjects seem to be correct considering the margin of error of false memories. By this we mean that if someone recalls the content of a song, a number to someone, a recipe for something, the plot of a TV series, ect., this usually coincides with the actual data, and the margin of error increases with the complexity of the information in question and may have different sources. For SCP-8414 to convey incomplete information or memories copied from someone who remembered them incorrectly, is as possible as the error of the research tool itself, arising from those obtaining this knowledge, who could also easily lose the detail of a given piece of information or forget to convey it in conversation.
A good example of the conflict is the lost work of Porphyry of Tyre, mentioned earlier in the documentary, recovered with the help of SCP-8414. Entirely recited to us in Greek by a fifty-nine-year-old retired police officer, suspected by the local parson of xenolalia. Verification of its authenticity is still inconclusive. Proponents of the information creation hypothesis see this as an argument for the random hallucination of SCP-8414 in a manner similar to primitive artificial intelligence language models. Those of our fellow researchers, who support the transfer of memories hypothesis, put forward the suspicion or suggestion that someone writing a habilitation, based on the yet unpublished, rediscovered work of Porphyry of Tyre, might have visited the water park. In a similar way, the memories of burning inside the tires, obtained inadvertently while attempting to take a sample of the material, should, as it were, settle the question in favor of producing memories. However, researchers from the transport of memories hypothesis camp managed to discover that in the past the water park was visited by a rehabilitation group for people with extensive body burns, including victims of organized crime. Thus, there is still a possibility that this is information taken from one of the group's clients.
Following the hypothesis of transport of memories – there is also the serious problem of the fact that we know nothing about what conditions would have to be met for the retrieval of memories to occur. We are able to more or less establish the conditions necessary for the retrieval of information from anomalies by following the correlations between known cases. Some correlations, however, border on apophenia. For example, everyone we know of who received memories from SCP-8414 was born on the day AC Milan [ˈmiːlan] won a football match, but we are not sure what to do with this information. We seek the patterns in all this, but we move like blinds in the dark.
Supporters of both hypotheses warn by pointing out the same problem: the real possibility of SCP-8414 passing infohazard to any of the visitors. I would just like to point out that the place receives an average of three thousand clients a day. Given the unpredictable nature of the anomaly, or perhaps the capricious nature if we were to consider it an intentional agency, such a threat could potentially involve outsiders as we have seen in previous years. We know that at least some of the people who received new memories during the 2011 incident have never visited the water park, which only underscores the threat we face here. The anomaly has already given one visitor knowledge of another known SCP in the past. In the course of researching SCP-8414, more than a dozen researchers have been in contact with it. So, we only need to assume that the memory transfer hypothesis is correct and then think about how many anomalies are using the acquisition of knowledge about themselves as a method of spreading their reach to understand what kind of problem we are dealing with on a daily basis.
Convenient working conditions in a water park may cause dismissive or ridiculous looks at our situation, but we should not be deluded. The fact that our agents are stretching out of boredom in lifeguard chairs and sitting for days in saunas should not distract from the ticking bomb on which we all sit here. Just because I'm writing this document in between passing customers at the water park's checkout doesn't mean I'm on vacation or that the anomaly is contained. Nothing in this situation can be called anomaly containment. We are all here in a blackmail stalemate that limits our chances of understanding the mechanisms of what we are dealing with. If the assumed agency of the anomaly, rather than the absurdly intricate cause-and-effect mechanism of its operation, means that at any time SCP-8414 can, of its own volition, expand the area of its range again without any known limits on the distance or information it can transmit. We need help. Dr. Ziach [ʑax].