SCP-001 - Which is the Real 001?

It isn't easy to work for The SCP Foundation.  Not only is the job dangerous - you could be   eaten by a giant, immortal lizard  or turned into organic furniture   inside the world's scariest living room - but it's  also insanely complicated.

How do you make sense   of the nonsensical? What's the definition  of strange when your career is securing,   containing, and protecting anomalous objects  and entities? This brings us to SCP - 001.

Rather than a single object, location, or  being, SCP - 001 is a cluster of over 30   different proposals for potential candidates for  the prestigious 001 spot.

Some believe there's a   true 001 hidden in this group and the rest are  decoys, others think that these are all just   SCPs catalogued prior to the introduction  of the current classification system. Some even think that all of the proposals  have a valid claim to the SCP - 001 throne.

We're not here to make a final judgement, instead,   we're going to take you on a lightning-round crash  course through 31 of the SCP - 001 proposals. If   you'd like a more in-depth take on any of  these SCPs, let us know in the comments,   but for now, there's no more time to  waste. After all, we've got a lot to cover. Let's go.

Number 31: The Sheaf of Papers. This seemingly  innocent stack of paper is actually one of the   most mysterious and feared items under  the Foundation's lock and key. While   it appears to be a simple confidential  report, every time the papers are read,   it details the appearance of a new SCP that will  inevitably be discovered soon after. The question   is whether the sheaf of papers is warning us  about these entities, or creating them itself.

Number 30: The Prototype. This account details  the capture of an incredibly strange cycloptic   creature that emits massive amounts of  radiation and can create microsingularities.   The writing of this creature's file is  so basic, unformatted, and unredacted   that it's clear that the being was one of the  earlier creatures secured by the organization.   Interestingly, it was during the capture  of this creature that Dr. Keter was killed,   inspiring the creation of the  infamous Keter Class in his honor.

Number 29: The Gate Guardian. This huge,  multi-winged, sword-wielding Biblical energy-being   may have been the impetus for the founding of the  SCP Foundation. This being remains largely static,   guarding the intersection of the Tigris  and Euphrates rivers. Its flaming sword,   which is believed to be as hot as the sun,  can cleave any aggressor out of existence at   the atomic level. When the Founder of the SCP  Foundation first encountered the Gate Guardian,   they heard one word echoing through their  mind: PREPARE. And the rest is history.

Number 28: The Lock. This onyx gemstone and  the incredibly complex lock attached to it   are still a mystery. To this day,  all attempts to open have failed.   Personally, we think that's  probably for the best...

Number 27: The Factory. As the name suggests,  this SCP is literally a factory founded by a   pagan and a devil worshipper. While it's believed  that the factory could create just about anything,   its specialty was creating a number of the  SCPs we know and fear today. Pre-Foundation   Forces were able to disable the factory, but  not without sustaining their own heavy losses.

Number 26: The Spiral Path. This is a normal  appearing gravel pathway that, when travelled   clockwise, appears completely normal. However,  when travelled counter-clockwise, the path goes   uphill forever, in defiance of all laws of  physics. This simple anomaly opened a Pandora's   box of rampant anomaly creation - leading to  a number of the deadly SCPs we know today.

Number 25: The Legacy. This SCP is a  collection of seemingly random objects,   including a diary from a person  claiming to be from another reality,   attempting to halt a trans-dimensional corruption  that they themselves created. The diary claims   to have a solution to this Corruption,  but the solution has not yet been found.

Number 24: The Database. In one of the strangest  twists on the format, this SCP is actually the   various authors of the SCP Wiki, who are somehow  leaking top-secret information to the public.

Number 23: The Foundation. This  SCP, first discovered by the FBI,   is an anomalous high school building that  experiences shifting internal geometry   and sometimes manifests hostile humanoids within.

Number 22: Thirty-Six. One of the rare benevolent  SCPs, the thirty-six are humans with a truly   remarkable ability - they can dampen or even  neutralize any SCP they come into contact with.   Though it's implied that the thirty-six may have  the power to save the world, every time one of   them dies, a supernatural calamity occurs,  often leaving hundreds of innocents dead.

Number 21: Keter Duty. This refers to a  containment facility largely filled with   Keter-class SCPs, whose presence around each other  creates a kind of mutually-assured cancellation.   If one of these SCPs breaches containment,  that's bad news. But if all of them do,   it'll produce a bubble of reality  distortion that will fundamentally   alter reality as we know it. For all we  know, it may have even happened already...

Number 20: Ouroboros. This is a proposal that's  formed of four sub-proposals. Remember what   we said about complicated? These sub-proposals  include The Children - nine anomalous kids who   emit radiation and have destructive potential when  together. The Broken God - aka Mekhane, The god of   metal, intelligence, and machines. Atonement - A  researcher turned into a humanoid singularity with   the power to destroy whole realities. And The Way  It Ends - which isn't technically an SCP, but the   tales of the Chaos Insurgency's quest to eliminate  all the members of the Foundation's O5 Council.

Number 19: A Record. This is an SCP  File slot that is itself an SCP.   Whatever is written in this slot becomes  true, and one ambitious researcher attempted   to use this power to make herself  into a kind of all-powerful God.

Number 18: Past and Future. These  SCPs are a collection of powerful   entities that despise humanity, and  are apparently the source of all   anomalous phenomena - even making already  dangerous SCPs deadlier than before.   Much like in The Database, those pesky SCP Wiki  writers may have something to do with this...

Number 17: The Consensus. This SCP refers to a  reality restructuring event caused by an occult   war in a previous reality. That's right -  this SCP already won, and we're living in   its new reality. The only people who remember the  world as it once was are thirteen people who now   form the O5 council. And not all of them are  telling the truth about what they know... Number 16: When Day Breaks. This proposal details  a potentially world-ending SCP phenomenon, wherein   the sun becomes hostile and begins to melt all  living beings into a living wax-like substance.

Number 15: God's Blind Spot. This is an  anomalous area referred to as Facility T,   in which nobody can die. This anomaly dates  back to the Biblical age of Moses, and is   believed to have originated from the literal  blessing of the Abrahamic God. It's through   a covenant with this God that the Foundation is  able to make limited use of this death free area.

Number 14: Normalcy. Ever wondered what the  Foundation's definition of "anomalous" is,   exactly? It all comes from this proposal  - which is a document shared among the O5   council that gives solid definitions  to the fundamental laws of reality.   If something breaks these laws, that's an anomaly,  and it then becomes the Foundation's business.

Number 13: The World At Large. As the title  suggests, this SCP is our home planet Earth   and its ability to support life.  It's believed that these qualities   were planted on Earth in our reality  by another dimension's SCP Foundation   hoping to continue human life after some  terrible calamity in its own dimension.

Number 12: Dead Men. This SCP was an 84 year  old man whose body, when damaged and mutilated,   can affect the very processes of human  death at large. Before his own death,   he was used as a dangerous pawn in a civil  war between O5 Command and the SCP Foundation   Ethics Committee. Yeah, we were surprised  to hear they had an ethics committee too.

Number 11: The World's Gone Beautiful. This  SCP describes an anomalous event that will   take place just before the apocalypse,  in which flowers will grow all over the   world and everyone will be briefly at peace  before their destruction 24 hours later.

Number 10: The Scarlet King. This is an  extremely powerful, extremely malevolent,   extremely extra-dimensional being. Its  worshippers attempted to summon him in   the ritual that created SCP - 231, and  it's believed that he will finally enter   our reality after the death of SCP - 231 - 7.  You better hope you're already dead by then.

Number 9: A Simple Toymaker, aka Dr.   Wondertainment. This is a reality bender who  appears to be a normal human male, but has   the ability to create other anomalous objects  - a number of which are now catalogued SCPs.

Number 8: Story of Your Life. This is another  anomalous document that has the ability to warp   reality, but only when the writing contained  within conforms to narrative structure.

Number 7: A Good Boy. This is another  anomalous entity created accidentally   by the Foundation itself. A neural network was  fed information on other anomalous entities   in order to help the Foundation come up with  better containment and neutralization procedures.   Problem was, the computer got way, way  too eager with the neutralization part...

Number 6: Project Palisade. This is another  anomaly created by the Foundation, this time   to combat a potentially reality-destroying entity  known as The Worm. The Foundation created a number   of alternate realities as shields, but it's  possible that this just made The Worm stronger.

Number 5: O5 - 13. The final member  of the O5 council who, ironically,   may not even be anomalous. However,  seeing as all the other members of the   O5 council are anomalous, O5 - 13's lack  of anomalous properties is, therefore,   anomalous. Like we told you  earlier, it's complicated.

Number 4: Fishook. This is less an actual SCP,   and more about the difficult process  of ascertaining the true 001 - if such   a thing is possible. The very concept of SCP  - 001 is, to some degree, an anomalous idea.

Number 3: The Sky Above the Port. Another  particularly bizarre SCP regarding the permanent   threat of a ZK-Class Reality Failure. How is  such a calamitous event prevented? By keeping a   strange entity in a cave eternally entertained.  The current proposed solution is keeping the   entity entertained by allowing it to read its  own eternally recursive Foundation file entry.

Number 2: The Solution. Another one of the most  powerful anomalous items in the Foundation's   control, the Solution is a machine designed  with the capability of fully collapsing reality   in the event of an end-of-the-world SCP  containment breach. And then, fully rebuilding   reality to suit a given narrative. However,  things took a cosmically dangerous turn when   the machine began to act on its own.

When  the Foundation tried to reboot the machine,   it broke, and recreated reality with incomplete  data. This is the world we exist in now,   with no knowledge of what came before, and how  it differed from the world we experience today.

Finally, Number 1: The Tindalos Trinity. Put  very simply, the Tindalos Trinity represents   three timelines that converge and feed back in on  themselves. Even trying to summarize this one is   near-impossible, as its strangeness and complexity  resists all reduction. You can hunt down the   Tindalos Trinity yourself and hope to unpack  its secrets, but don't say we didn't warn you.

So, that's SCP - 001, all 31 potential  proposals. Is it one of them, all of them,   or even none of them? Perhaps that's a question  best left up to the Foundation. Or maybe the   simple answer is that you're just not meant  to know - we're talking about information so   privileged here that it's protected by a Memetic  Kill Agent that'll quite literally make you   drop dead if you view the files without proper  authorization.