Canon Hub » From 120's Archives Hub » SCP-8572
ITEM #:
8572
CONTAINMENT CLASS:
NEUTRALIZED
Fig 1.1: The aftermath of an SCP-8572 activation event, as depicted by Victor Adam, 1838.
NOTICE FROM THE FOUNDATION RECORDS AND INFORMATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION
The following Overseer-Clearance file is currently pending review as the information contained therein remains either under heavy academic debate or is outright false. As such, all incoming personnel are warned that at the current moment, the SCP-8572 file does not properly reflect reality and is under the process of grounds-up redrafting. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
— Maria Jones, Director, RAISA
Special Containment Procedures: Due to present geopolitical tensions rendering the Foundation unable to freely operate within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, SCP-8572 cannot be properly recovered for containment. However, as the threat posed by SCP-8572 in its current state is close to nonexistent, recovering the object is not considered a high priority.
As SCP-8572's current state has rendered the asset effectively useless, it necessitates no real containment. Its remnants are to be transported to the nearby Site-120 for further study, whenever convenient.
Description: SCP-8572 is a proto-eigenweapon located under the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was constructed sometime during the 18th century through various thaumaturgic and alchemical engineering methods, and has since been utilized by the Romanov dynasty and the Soviet government to serve the interests of the Russian Empire and USSR until SCP-8572-1's expiration sometime around 1991.
Prior to its expiration, SCP-8572-1 was a spectral entity of unclear make and capabilities. It possessed a high concentration of spiritual and thaumic energies; as such. it was the centerpiece of the machine and its de facto battery. Channeling said energies through a series of arcane runes, mechanical appliances, and ontological rituals, SCP-8572 allowed the user to exert limited control over the weather and climate over most of Eastern Europe and North Asia.
SCP-8572 has historically been primarily utilized as a military asset aimed at halting the approach of forces adversary to the Russian Empire deep enough into the country to pose a threat to its regime(s). However, with SCP-8572-1's power gradually fading, SCP-8572 has eventually become incapable of being applied militarily on the scale of the whole country, and instead has been repurposed as a localized asset. This has remained the case until the late 1980s, during which SCP-8572-1 ceased to be capable of fueling operations even that small, and has become essentially useless to any further serious occult endeavors.
Addendum 8572-1: Wider Historical Context
Were the world a fairer place, it wouldn't be me writing this report. I've hardly any expertise in matters quite this esoteric, and though I can have an educated tell on the historical part of this document, it is Mikhail who knew the actual in and outs of the machine. He could tell you all about it. I wish he was here to pass on that knowledge.
Well. Time makes fools of us all inevitably. Or martyrs. There's not that much of a difference.
Still: 8572. For as long as this file has existed — both in our and the Seers' archives — there has always been one issue we could never figure out: why was it fading? Even Mikhail had no answers. We've certainly never been strangers to the occult changing, but spirits like 8572-1 don't die of natural causes. They quite literally can't, as Abigail tells me; they're not of the material world, so by all means they shouldn't surrender to this kind of entropy, and the end that does reach them could not have possibly grabbed 8572-1. So what was going on?
Fig 2.1: Shah Tahmasp II, one of the parties involved with the 1723 Treaty of Saint Petersburg.
SCP-8572 was constructed sometime during the early 18th century, most probably the late 1720s or early 1730s. First writings pertaining to it extant in the Tsar Seers' archives have been dated to 1732; however, due to a history of incomplete or missing documentation resulting from the merging of Foundation precursors into its database, such files have not been deemed as sufficiently trustworthy as being the first instances of SCP-8572 documentation, as per general RAISA guidelines.
A similar uncertainty exists with regard to SCP-8572-1, caused by the same issue. Nevertheless, as per consensus from the Department of Tactical Theology and third-party theo-thaumic experts, the current interpretation holds that SCP-8572-1 was, most likely, some variant of a djinn; an elemental theological spectral entity of great thaumic potential native to the Levant and the Arab Peninsula regions. Its power to exude force over local weather paired with its clear lack of nativity to the Russian Empire certainly supports that hypothesis.
Another reinforcement of that interpretation comes from the timeline of the weapon's construction lining up with the end of the Second Russo-Persian War. Among other things, the Treaty of Petersburg — which concluded the conflict — mandated the handover of several islamic occult artifacts over to the Russians as part of the price for peace. Certainly, a captured djinn would not be out of the ordinary for the oft-heretical practices of the Persian mystics who — like all occult organizations subservient to any regime throughout history — had very little regard for the ethical or theological ramifications of their actions.
The first theory holds that, just like everything, SCP-8572-1 is not immune to the zeitgeist shifting. With the practise of pre-Islamic faiths and Islam itself changing alongside the times, it would make sense that SCP-8572-1 — which is intrinsically bound to that practise — would also get affected by said change, perhaps being shafted to the theological margins of significance by the emergence of new trends and cultures, and therefore slowly diminishing.
Were SCP-8572-1 a free spirit, the above-outlined proposal most likely would have been deemed sufficient in explanation by the Foundation and the file on the anomaly would be closed as a concluded matter. However, two facts rather explicitly contradict it: one, that with the change of the years and eventually centuries, the number of Islamic believers has grown, and not decreased; and two, that SCP-8572-1 is a bound spirit. Unlike those which roam free, spirits that are incapable of possession and are bound by a person or an object do not fade. Their state is parallel to that of its prison, which in this case would be SCP-8572 itself; a machine that has remained in good shape for all of its existence.
There are certainly many things to be said about the occultists that served the Tsars and the Soviets, as is there to be said about their eventual work — but they never were sloppy in what they did. Certainly not in matters like this. It would be unlike them, to leave an asset as important as this and let it corrode under their nose.
The first concrete writings pertaining to SCP-8572-1 would not emerge until the early 19th century. Though there do exist records claiming that the weapon had been sporadically used on a small scale prior to 1812, it is only in that year that its first proper activation has occurred — more specifically, during the French invasion of the Russian homeland by Emperor Napoleon I.
Fig 2.2: Napoleon's retreat from Russia, as depicted by Adolph Northen.
It remains unclear why the Tsar's Seers did not deploy SCP-8572 the second that Napoleon stepped foot into their country, though this is, in the grand scheme of things, of little importance. It is possible that the warlocks were aware of some hidden cost to the weapon's activation — perhaps of its collateral damage — or that they were simply afraid of "using up its power" on a conflict that had not yet grown desperate. It is also plausible — and, in the end, most probable — that SCP-8572-1 could not outright change the weather, but similarly to how a kinetomancer influences movement, that it could only modify that which was already extant and occuring.
Whatever the truth, when the summer of 1812 ended, SCP-8572 was activated against Napoleon, bringing with it thousands of deaths and hastening the eventual defeat of the French belligerents at the hands of the Russians, who also suffered heavy collateral casualties. The Russians who were particularly affected by this were the peasants and commonfolk, whose preparations for the winter did not account for paranormally low temperatures which they could not potentially anticipate.
The second hypothesis — presented primarily by third party experts consulted by the Foundation — claims that SCP-8572-1 fell victim to a different kind of entropy than the natural decay of paranormal life: that of the Impasse, the gradual degradation of the paranormal ecosystem caused by containment efforts.
Of course, we have always been aware of the possibility of such an event occuring (and having already occurred several times in the past), but by that time, we were still skeptical. Skeptical on both the large scale and the small scale. The Foundation had still not yet come to accept the Impasse as a reality that we ought to deal with (as we have, as of writing, already began to deal with). More importantly, however, were we to accept the slowly emergent Impasse as the factual reality which affected SCP-8572-1 over its time, the facts, again, did not quite add up.
As already mentioned, the Impasse was caused by containment efforts inherently destabilizing the paranormal ecosystem at large. However… the Foundation had little to do with the occult realities of both Russia and the Levant and Arab Peninsula.
With respect to the former: the creation of the USSR has affected the Foundation's operational extent inside the country, rendering it very low, save for engaging with high-threat phemonena (which SCP-8572 was not). The body that did take its place as the paranormal organization within the country, the GRU Division "P," was explicitly not a containment initiative but rather a military organization. Its actions led to the suppression of the anomalous, of course, but on a small scale — one that, with how large and mostly unpopulated Russia is, did not properly affect its environment.
With respect to the latter: though the Foundation is a global effort, it is one primarily focused in the Northern Hemisphere. It does operate in the Global South, but the Levant and Arab Peninsula remain more firmly under the control of other normalcy organizations, such as the Horizon Initiative or the Organization for the Reclamation of Islamic Artifacts, both of which do not execute the Veil protocol with quite the mercilessly interventionist nature that the Foundation practises.
Fig 2.3: Grigori Rasputin (right) alongside other court warlocks, seen prior to his elevation as the group's primary leader.
Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the establishment of the Holy Alliance, Russian writings pertaining to SCP-8572 began to become increasingly sparse. Part of this was caused by the Tsar's Seers being folded into the emergent Foundation in 1868, leaving its duties to the less-funded and far more loosely-organized court warlocks. That SCP-8572's assets were no longer immediately necessary — or, that after such a significant activation as against Napoleon, the weapon most likely needed to properly recharge — also affected the need for research to be done upon it. As such, SCP-8572 entered an era of relative academic stagnation. The only notes that did describe it during that period were those regarding the regular inspections performed upon it, and cross-references to other projects related to spectral entities performed by the warlocks.
This state changed following the outbreak of World War I. Although the decadent Russian Empire had made a profusely documented attempt to weaponize SCP-8572 in its campaign against the Central Powers, the funding cuts against the warlocks necessitated by the Russians' actual war efforts rendered that task almost impossible. The assassination of the warlocks' primary leader and most proficient member — Grigori Rasputin, who had climbed the falling, undercapitalized ladder of the group in a very short time following the demise of his many predecessors by prior political machinations — due to unrelated matters certainly did not help. As Rasputin was the only person within the warlocks' employ that possessed enough power and actual knowledge to control SCP-8572, the weapon remained inactive for the duration of the Great War, as did it during the Russian Civil War that followed.
As such, when Tsar Nicolas II's downfall properly began and he needed SCP-8572 to protect the continuation of his dynasty against the emergent February revolutionists, he did not possess the resources necessary to actually use it, ending his regime alongside the order of court warlocks that served it. With that — and the advent of the Soviet takeover of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution — SCP-8572 permanently changed ownership.
The third — and by far most popular — theory says that, just like most occult artifacts do when exploited, SCP-8572 merely ran out of energy that could be harvested from it. That, as previously mentioned, it quite literally ran out as a potential battery. That the fuel necessary to power the rest of the weapon has gone, already used up by all the previous, extensive activations.
Again, were this any regular occult artifact that we were discussing, the book would most likely get closed there and then, with this particular interpretation written in its post-scriptum. Nobody would do the actual math, of course, partially because it's almost impossible to perform this task post-mortem and with so much uncertainty in the documentation and partially because who would actually bother financially, but that would be it. All would be said and done.
And again: just like before, here, SCP-8572 is a special case. For unlike its standard occult brethren, it can never run out of power by mere use.
As already established, SCP-8572 is most likely a djinn. Just like any other high-profile theological being, its life energy is not dependent on its own internal processes; rather, it is dependent entirely on the ontological energy supplied to it by its continued relevance within religious tradition. Therefore, should one use an entity like this to harvest its power to fuel external machinery — as Prometheus Labs has already done in the late 1960s with its HIROSHIMA HIEROPHANT project — they could never run out of energy, for as long as the imprisoned entity remains properly relevant. And, as we have already discussed before, SCP-8572-1 was and still is nothing if not relevant within the growing culture of Islam.
Though it was perhaps not as relevant in the region that it remained imprisoned in, but it certainly was in relation to the world at large; as such, it ought to remain indefinitely potent, which it very pointedly did not.
Though an attempt was made to weaponize SCP-8572 during the Polish-Soviet war in 1920 by pre-GRU-P Soviet occultists, just like with all other attempts at actually using it on the frontlines of an external military conflict, the project was unsuccessful. After that, for over two decades, the Soviets remained scarcely interested in SCP-8572 until the later creation of GRU-P to succeed the court warlocks in their occult duties to the current regime. With the emergence of the USSR proper, SCP-8572 once again entered an era of relative stagnation. As SCP-8572's loss of power was already beginning to become substantial, and the GRU-P had little use for a weak asset that only operated within the confines of the growing Soviet state, SCP-8572 was again shifted to the margins as a cross-referential, low-priority project.
Fig 2.4: Nazi forces advancing through Russia under Operation Barbarossa.
Though the USSR did not yet start to allocate large resources towards occult research as it would during the Cold War, with the breakout of World War II, SCP-8572 once again became of general interest to the GRU-P; of interest that grew to great proportions after Nazi forces began their invasion of the country under Operation Barbarossa. Though, as mentioned before, SCP-8572 was by then too weak to be utilized in the same manner that it was deployed against Napoleon, it nevertheless assisted the Soviet defence on several fronts. GRU-P records suggest that due to its limitations, it was primarily only used twofold: as means of slowing down the Nazi approach towards Moscow, and as means of assisting the defenders of the besieged Leningrad.
Its usage under Moscow was mostly limited as it consisted almost solely of worsening the weather enough to make the Nazi army unable to complete its advance towards the capital; however, as it quite literally was stationed under Leningrad proper, there, SCP-8572 was put to extensive use. Though it could not be fully outright activated with all of its available potential as doing so would inevitably terminate both the city's attackers and its inhabitants, it was still used over the city's long siege to assist the defenders in more down-to-earth matters. The most well documented of these was the deep freezing of the nearby Lake Ladoga, which was reinforced via SCP-8572 so as to be able to withstand automobile transport, allowing for the opening of the Road of Life relief transport routes upon its frozen surface.
Its utilization during World War II was the last actual documented use of SCP-8572, and marked the end of its power, which by then had faded almost entirely. During the course of the Cold War that followed, SCP-8572 became essentially useless as the GRU-P took interest in other, far more fruitful occult endeavors, leaving SCP-8572 and the entity contained therein to fade first to obscurity, then into eventual terminus.
And thus, more than two centuries of analyzed material later, we arrived right where we started: at total ambiguity. We were no better off than we were when we had started this endeavor. We were therefore faced with two options: to either accept this low priority project as one of the many mysteries the ends of which we never are given the chance to see, or to indulge it further, perhaps against all reason.
Well. I'd be damned if I couldn't admit that by now, this had properly caught my attention. I therefore decided to indulge it, personally.
I once again started right where the whole thing began. Instead of retreading the trail like my Department had done before, however, I went straight to the root of the problem: Mikhail's absence. You see, the actual issue we were facing when trying to figure this whole thing out wasn't the lack of concrete information and the fact the scavenger hunt was scattered across 250 years of history — it was that the man that could just hand us the answer on a golden platter was gone, forever.
But all that remained of him was not.
As the position of O5-9 within our organization has had a somewhat turbulent history, the office of Nine at Site-01 never did remain full for a long period of time. For all of the pain caused by the previous Nine, this meant one more thing: that, if I was lucky enough, some scattered writings of the man that came before her would maybe still be lying around the old place, in one of its many storerooms.
After more than a week of searching, it turns out I was right.
It wasn't much — personal research journals rarely are — but it was something; a half-coherent tome filled to the brim with notes pertaining to projects undertaken by Mikhail in the last decades of his life. Among them, I've found with difficulty, were several passages that I believe might have indirectly referenced 8572. Most of them are barely relevant, and oscillate around runic and theological calculations. They're not particularly captivating, or really important. However, after more than 10 pages of this content, a single passage appears, one that apparently concludes the topic, since after that, nothing else within the journal even points in the direction of 8572.
Verbatim, the passage is as follows:
How could we have been foolish enough to see the wonders of man, and think them miracles of God?
Addendum 8572-2: File Update
On 19/05/1996, following further extensive study performed on the remains of SCP-8572-1 and other theological writings, Site-120 staff discovered that, in fact, a djinn — both as an entity and the energy harvested from it — is fundamentally incapable of affecting weather outside its native regions in any capacity. Further research into the implication of this research in the wider context of SCP-8572 is ongoing.