A Carefully Orchestrated Escape

For Overseer C-023, Ji Ning’s daily routine had never changed: dressing, getting up, eating, singing those damned and dreadful songs into the surveillance camera—this monotonous existence had persisted for an entire month.

Of course, that was merely on the surface.

Not all wanderers lose themselves; there are always some who wait for the road to light up once again.

Every night, Ji Ning would hide beneath his blanket and attempt to communicate with SCP-CN-655. Although his odd sleeping postures and subtle movements had attracted the overseer’s attention on more than one occasion, Ji Ning always ended these sessions by crumpling up a tissue and tossing it in the trash whenever he felt he’d communicated for too long. In this way, his strange behavior acquired an entirely reasonable explanation.

Though the Foundation staff were thorough to the point of perversity, after inspecting the trash several times, they let the matter drop. This was only natural; no normal person would care to investigate what a twenty-year-old boy got up to under his covers at night. Best not to hear those wicked and depraved fantasies firsthand.

The experiments over the past few days had confirmed for Ji Ning that SCP-CN-655 had granted him a single, rather useless ability: to turn into a puddle of liquid. Nothing more. However, after some thought, Ji Ning found he didn’t resent his fate or the uselessness of SCP-CN-655. If he were to follow the path of some all-powerful protagonist, cutting down everyone in his way, he’d likely have to think twice before setting out.

But now, the situation was perfectly clear. After all, being able to become an amorphous puddle of liquid sounded tailor-made for prison breaks.

And it even carried a hint of forbidden delight—who wouldn’t want to play the slime that blocks the path of a brave heroine? With such thoughts in mind, he even drafted three separate plans for infiltrating the women’s bathhouse, right after the prison break scheme.

After a month of preparation, Ji Ning knew that all he needed now was to wait; a good opportunity would be far more useful than fruitless effort.

Chance is ever-present in life, but once it occurs, it becomes inevitable. So, even as the gentle, attentive lady in his dream was about to give him a full-body spa, when the shrill alarm startled Ji Ning from his sweet slumber, he leapt from his bed like a frog doused in boiling water.

As he dressed, he paid careful attention to the sounds and lights outside his cell. The flashing red lights and ceaseless alarms filled him with a sociopathic excitement, as though he relished chaos. He knew: this was the chance he had been waiting for.

Ji Ning put on the same T-shirt he’d worn when he arrived—a cheap fifty-five yuan shirt he’d waited so long to don again. Though the Foundation had provided him with plenty of comfortable, well-fitting clothes, only this threadbare shirt offered the ritualistic sense of self he craved.

I was arrested in this shirt, and now, as I leave, I choose to wear it again. I’m not trying to prove anything; I just want the world to know that my freedom is mine alone—no one can take it from me.

This sense of ceremony lasted only a few seconds. To be precise, the moment he melted into liquid form and oozed through the food slot into the corridor outside, he realized perhaps he had spoken too soon.

After numerous tests, he’d discovered that every five hours, he could maintain his SCP-CN-655 transformation for about one hundred to one hundred twenty heartbeats—while clothed. If he liquefied without his clothes, he could last up to two hundred heartbeats.

But, given the Foundation’s absurd penchant for installing seventeen cameras in a single room, he preferred not to suffer social death if he could avoid physical death.

Determined not to waste his transformation time, he reverted to human form as soon as he emerged from his cell. After escaping the cage that had confined him for a month, everything outside caught his wary attention. The instant he regained his shape, he heard something flowing—like a stream trickling through a garden at dawn.

Looking down, he saw a pool of vivid red liquid, origin unknown, slowly streaming down the corridor, the deep crimson seeping along the floor’s patterns, forming shapes at once unfamiliar and instinctively horrifying. Ji Ning recalled Black Glove’s explanation a month ago—these patterns were meant precisely to prevent such an event.

As a second-level drop-out specialist, Ji Ning wasted no time; faced with the corridor turned slaughterhouse, he decided perhaps today was not the day to go out.

He began communicating with SCP-CN-655, intending to liquefy and retreat to his cell, but a sudden message from SCP-CN-655 gave him pause. Then, with all else forgotten, he bolted in the opposite direction of the flowing blood, desperate as a wild dog freed from its leash.

“Behind you. Danger. Approaching.”

Though he lacked any spider sense, he wasn’t foolish enough to test SCP-CN-655’s warning with his own body like a horror movie side character. Still an atheist, he was perfectly willing to set that aside if the need arose.

Few things are as exhausting as running in terror. After just ten minutes, Ji Ning was half-collapsed against a sealed alloy door, gasping and retching.

This damned door required iris identification; he couldn’t simply swipe a pilfered ID card as before. Staring at the door, he forced himself to ignore all distractions, holding back nausea as he tried to recall where he’d last seen a fresh corpse before being brought here.

Once he’d pinpointed the location, now thoroughly emptied of bile, Ji Ning took deep breaths, resting and gathering strength with eyes closed, rehearsing what he would do upon finding the unfortunate corpse.

Thank heaven the blood in the games he’d played in high school hadn’t been green. That summer after his college entrance exams, following advice from forum veterans, he’d stumbled into Western single-player games set in lawless lands, enduring titles like “Prototype,” “F.E.A.R. 3,” and “Blasphemous”—each a tomato-sauce spectacle. Though he’d never become a bald, unflinching hero like Kratos, he was hardly the type to cry over a scraped finger.

His youthful, vigorous heartbeat echoed through the corridor. Ji Ning gave himself little time to rest; every second spent stationary meant danger drew closer.

He silently cheered himself on, steeling his nerves to turn back. But he’d barely turned halfway when a pale hand landed on his shoulder.

Flashing red emergency lights, fingers flying over keyboards, a feverish atmosphere swept through the lab-coated crowd. A middle-aged man, who should have been seated quietly at his terminal, now trembled all over, his face wild as he screamed, “Dr. M said it would be fine! How did this happen… It’s out—We’re all going to die…”

Black Glove and Dr. Quillin watched the surveillance footage with cold detachment. Black Glove spoke first, “Mobile Task Force MTF-CN-Eta-3 has already been notified. The advance team only managed to rescue this guy, but it seems we won’t get anything useful out of him.”

Before Quillin could reply, the man on the floor erupted again, “Twenty minutes! No—ten minutes, and we’ll all be turned into those things! It’s here…”

“Since this incident was caused by your negligence, I’m demoting you to D-class personnel. That’ll be all, Researcher—you may be quiet now.” Quillin frowned, cutting him off. She recalled that, during this year-long exchange visit, headquarters had allocated two slots for accidental casualties. Good, this would use up one.

“I still think the Foundation has no reason to conduct pure academic exchanges with Prometheus Labs. They actually sent a bunch of bookworms, all obsessed with scientific ethics and academic rigor.” Black Glove sneered at the broken researcher, then nodded thoughtfully. “Then again, perhaps they deliberately left us a few accident slots. Clearly, no one can bear working with an idiot for long.”

“We’re all going to die… All of us…” Berkney was already delirious. He’d never faced such an anomaly; when something that lived only in files and footage appeared before him, the utter helplessness destroyed his sanity.

“Send him out. Begin Experiment SCP-610-d01.” Quillin turned away, indifferent, as the holographic screen froze on a blurry silhouette.

Within two minutes, the researcher known as Berkney appeared on the monitor. His face twisted as he cackled toward the unseen end of the corridor, “Come on… I’m right here…”

On-screen, Berkney seemed to vanish into thin air. In an instant, he reappeared—now a near-perfect sphere.

Without instruction, Foundation technicians rewound the footage at adjusted speeds. A withered hand trailed a blurred afterimage; the nearly motionless Berkney melted like cotton under a gentle touch. Once he became a “ball,” only then did his warm blood, freed from its container, spray everywhere, hanging in the air like a web.

After three brief replays, the feed returned to real time. Most researchers, like carnivorous cultists smelling blood, eagerly analyzed the data. Only a few retained the normal reaction of fear, but even that quickly faded—after all, this was their job.

“In three-thousandths of a second, it reshaped the human body purely through force. Looks like SCP-610-08 has become even more perfect after the cross-test.”

“Just twenty minutes to infection—truly worthy of Keter-class status.”

“I’ll play it again. Someone fetch popcorn. I’ve got cola.”

Black Glove rapped the table, smiling. “We need more data. Anyone want to volunteer as the next D-class?”

The noisy conference room fell instantly silent, followed by a storm of frantic typing.

“Contact headquarters to initiate biological full lockdown…”

“Alert the Special Containment Procedures Maintenance Team, Keter-class…”

“Activate remote weapons on the vehicle channel and conduct self-scans…”

Quillin seemed to recall something, turning to instruct her assistant to pull up a specific surveillance feed. The room was, as expected, empty. She narrowed her eyes, and just as she was about to take action, an unremarkable email popped up on her computer.

Every computer in this building was connected only to the local network, isolated from the outside internet. As secretary to the Site Director of the Pennsylvania branch—the one with the highest clearance—she was, in theory, answerable only to Black Glove.

She opened the ghostly email. There was only a single line:

“Let him go.”

She scrolled down a bit, glimpsed the opening digits “05” in the signature, and quickly closed the email as if burned. As she looked up, the always relaxed Black Glove was now sitting upright and grave; in all these years, she had never seen her old friend wear such a serious expression.