Going through Groundhog Day with twenty thousand strangers, forever and ever and ever...
I confess that this essay may not fully accord with the guidelines set forth by the Déjà Boo project; in any case, my editor approved it, so here I go. It’s not a film, but an article on a horror wiki. It scared me deeply at one point in my life, but that was my adolescence, not my childhood. I came upon the SCP Foundation when I was in high school from the off-topic section of alternatehistory.com, and I found this one early on in my reading of that site, in what I believe was the first half of 2013, which was my sophomore year of high school (year 10 for non-Americans). It was the first work of web horror that really got under my skin.
For those not familiar with the SCP Foundation: it is a community-written horror wiki focusing on the titular non-governmental covert organization dedicated to protecting humanity from a wide variety of anomalous entities, objects, and phenomena. Its name reflects its mission: Secure, Contain, Protect. Every mainline article (tales excluded) takes the form of a case file in this organization’s labyrinthine database, detailing the nature of the anomalous phenomenon and how the Foundation is working to protect humanity from it. This format has gone into some deeply strange, deeply scary places. I have something of an up-and-down relationship with the SCP wiki (I’ve never had the bravery to try my hand writing one myself); for one reason or another I find myself on the wiki, browsing articles until the sense of dread endemic to reading this type of horror leaks into the rest of my life, and then I put it down to recover.
For the reader: here is the article in question, written by the pseudonymous user bbaztek. It is a brief read. Be sure to click the red heading “Partial Timeline Document 001” at the end so you can see the testing logs, which are a major part of the story. After this paragraph, I will assume that you have read it.
Clearly, I’m not the only person this article left an impression on. It is one of the highest-voted pieces on the entire wiki. It has been made into a YouTube video several times by various creators piggy-backing on the brand the Foundation has built. The comments on the article are laudatory, saying it is one of the scariest articles on the wiki.
Why did this scaled-up horror take on the premise of Groundhog Day worm its way under my skin as much as I did? In the months after I first read it, my mind would wander to the sheer terror of the people trapped inside that stadium, as civilization falls around them, leaving utter barbarism in its wake.
Part of it, I think, was my particular experience of high school, by virtue of my social class, background, and area. I grew up striving middle-class in an affluent Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Like many kids from that background, there is a lot of pressure thrust upon you to make something of yourself. High school, in particular, for this type of kid from this type of background, is suffocating. This is when your grades really start to matter in the endless rat race to get into a good college, which will hopefully get you scholarship money to boot. This is the season of massive amounts of homework, extracurriculars chosen for their value on a college application, endless fretting about your grades, an unhealthy lack of sleep, and a deep, existential fear of what the future holds. As if that weren’t enough, I had a white father who worried endlessly about everything, and a Filipina mother who embodied every stereotype about the Asian tiger mother (I have explained my youth to my younger cousins as “surviving your auntie’s academic death march.” I later went to a university with a notorious stress culture over academics, to the point that it was nicknamed “suicide central” for a wave of suicides in the years before I was there, but I found the whole thing quite restful, as I could control the rhythm of the panic, rather than having it imposed on me based on my mother’s erratic mood swings).
It is very easy for a kid that thinks too much, works too much, and experiences too little to feel deeply trapped by that particular cycle. That, I think, glommed onto this SCP. This story is a repeating loop of miserable experiences that wears you down, leaving hope a distant dream. I was teetering on the edge of a mental breakdown (which finally came true my sophomore year of college), and the whole experience felt like pointless suffering. On some level I saw my experience in that story.
I had another reason, I believe. I am autistic, and as such I have a very hard time discerning what other people think of me, and what other people intended. I had very little idea if the people I spent time around actually liked me or simply tolerated. I was afraid that my peers found me stupid or annoying or downright repulsive (and, statistically speaking, I was probably right). This is an emotion that can easily spiral into worse; you begin to worry about which of your friends are actually bad people, with ill intentions. That, intertwined with the themes of the story, where just the wrong situation can throw otherwise normal people literally at each other’s throats, tapped into my paranoia. Who, given a bad day and a horrific situation, would kill me for no reason?
I have returned to this article periodically, and thinking about it, there is a lot going on here on a thematic level that makes the horror really work. What is striking is that the supernatural conceit is only scary in an abstract sense. It is, from the perspective of the unfortunate souls trapped in the recording, doors that will not open, ever. This is a scary idea primarily because the entire point of a door is to go through it. The very premise demands the consideration of the thoughts of the people who are denied passage through the doors. The horror, then, comes ultimately through the human psyche.
Human beings, obviously, live in linear time. Our very existence is mediated through the fact that we are born, we grow up, we age, and then we die. We have rites of passage for different milestones along that path that ends, for everybody, at the same destination. We become ourselves, day by day, by accumulating experiences, and through that accumulation we grow as people. Buddhism, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t necessarily deny the existence of the self. Rather, it says that the self is endlessly changing based on the experiences it has and the conditions through which it is put. We come to understand, intimately, that a man cannot walk through the same river twice.
SCP-1733 arrests the flow of time in a fundamental way. With every rewind of that recording, the lives of some twenty thousand people are reset to the same moment. But, cursedly, they remember what happened in every previous playback. They are eventually struck by the fact that none of this hell ends. It has to keep going on, and on, and on, and the sense of self deteriorates. There is now nothing to look forward to, other than macabre suffering. They are furthermore ripped from the human networks that define them—job, school, neighborhood, family—and give their lives meaning. Not only lacking a future, they could also be said to lack a history, and from there they might lack a self, and lack a meaning. They are forced into a situation where existentialism—the choice to make your own meaning in an utterly meaningless universe—is impossible. There will be no graduations, no weddings, no promotions, no births. There will simply be senseless, random deaths, right in front of their eyes, over and over and over again.
With that lack of meaning made painfully apparent, you glimpse at the different ways people try to cope with a loss of meaning. Some of them eventually kill themselves, finding a life with no meaning to be not worth living. Some of them take solace in defending others, in choosing to protect a semblance of decency as the people around them find no point in morality. Some of them simply choose to accept hedonism, and put up banners to conceal an orgy. All meaning has collapsed, so why not fuck every attractive person you can find in the arena? There are no churches in the TD Garden.
But there is another response. To illuminate it, I will turn to an oft-misquoted book that has been in some ways terrifyingly prescient: The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. No, he did not argue that the fall of the Soviet Union would lead to world peace. He did argue, though, that the rising standards of living throughout the world would lead to a sort of existential boredom that would lead many people to rage against the order that gave them such standards of living to begin with, because they want to be recognized. To quote him:
“Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.”
The experience of these twenty thousand people is, without question, existentially terrifying, and at first the comparison does not feel apt, even to me. But consider Ursula Le Guin’s words from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas:
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
The people in the TD Garden in that recording are certainly in great pain, emotionally and existentially first, and then all too physically. And if the monotony of this awful experience can be considered boredom, you can then see how some people would find reasons to rage against whatever is available. Whatever has trapped them there is not vulnerable to them in any way they can see, so they rage against the only people who could help them.
The Faithkeepers, the zealots who escalate the situation, have created meaning through the shared experience of their confinement. This is how many groups, cultures even, have come into existence in reality. African-Americans became a group through the shared experience of slavery. Filipinos became a group through the shared experience of the brutalities of Spanish colonialism. The Faithkeepers have bonded over their confinement, and an initially vague idea as to why they are confined, namely the belief that they are being punished in some way for the excesses of life in the First World in the 21st century. They engage in violence to feel something, to give themselves a purpose, to gain recognition as people in a situation where they are mere playthings.
Note, in particular, the rituals of sacrifice they develop after several replays of that recording. The notion of sacrifice requires an initial belief that two different things are valuable, but that one is more valuable than another. This valuation demonstrates that the person conducting the sacrifice has values to begin with, and from there the beginning seeds of an identity. By sacrificing their phones, they demonstrate their belief that freedom is more important than the ability to call people. By dragging LeBron James and Paul Pierce from their locker rooms and disemboweling them publicly, they state that they value freedom more than the lives of the notables of their society. By calling for the sacrifice of children, they are saying that they value freedom more than the most vulnerable. Some sacrifices are done out of commitment to a belief. These sacrifices, on the other hand, are to create and enforce the belief, and from there to create and enforce a self in opposition to forces around oneself.
The scariest thing about this is how it echoes into this decade. Existential boredom among people, particularly rich people, has led to a massive growth in the popularity of far-right movements whose ultimate creed is utter nihilism. You have people who are bored fall into worlds of conspiracy and hate ultimately just to feel something. These people have been driven to kill, to massacre even, just to have a sense of identity in a world that is constantly changing. People will kill for a self.
And then there is the meta aspect of it: these people are suffering at the hands of a force they cannot see. We, however, can see that force: the SCP Foundation researchers rewinding the recording over and over and over again, just to see what happens. It is not a major leap of logic, then, to see that force as the reader. The horrors are happening because we want to see the horrors. This is reality television, and social media mobs, and large-scale harassment campaigns, and so many other realms in the social realm. SCP-1733 forces us to confront what we are complicit in. What horrors occur because we want to see what they bring forth into the world?
The horror of this story comes from its unmooring of one of the fundamental aspects of the human condition: time. All purpose fades away, all connection fades away, all identity fades away. As the African philosophy of Ubuntu argues, a person is a person through other people, or put another way, I am because you are. What happens, then, when people are severed from the other people who made them people themselves, and confined with strangers over and over and over again? Given the limitations posed by Dunbar’s number, most people you come across will not have any meaning to you. In confinement, you are ripped from your old meaning and forced into a process of meaning-making, and that is terrifying.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.