Octo Expansion spoilers

POI-4062: Professor R⬛️⬛️⬛️ T⬛️⬛️

May be attempting to use anomalous resources in the construction of artificial intelligence. It is unknown at this time whether the anomalies will be used in the programming of the AI or simply to prolong the longevity of the hardware. Professor T⬛️⬛️ is not known to be affiliated with any major groups of interest at this time. Since he does not pose any significant threat at this time, surveillance will be maintained, but no direct action will be taken.

Present Day

I finished typing my report and hit “Send to database”. Once I clicked it, I waited until I saw the usual “pending approval” notice before closing the program.

I sat back and sighed. Why did I need to do research on this guy anyway? I was supposed to be specializing in memetics. It’d been two years, I’d finally turned 18, I should be out of “training” and doing my own thing by now. Granted, I had learned a lot since they took me in after the incident... but I still wished that they would let me do more things that I wanted to do. I guess they looked down on me because I was young. I didn’t blame them. I’d interacted with people my age.

I was about to open Skyrim; that was the last bit of work I had had and my wife Mjoll and I had some adventuring to do. Until the alarm went off.

“All personnel, proceed to your evacuation shelters immediately. Repeat, all personnel, proceed to your evacuation shelters immediately.”

I quickly gathered my stuff and started to hurriedly make my way to the evacuation shelter. Too hurriedly, though. Like a horror movie cliché, I tripped and fell down on absolutely nothing. I managed to get up, but then found myself pinned to the wall by an alien-looking entity.

I knew what it was. It was the most high-risk entity we contained at our site. It had shown signs of higher-dimensional travels, but no signs of hostility.

Until now.

It looked piercingly into my eyes, its head at a strange angle. “There are plans for you.” It said in the most creepily calm and stoic voice, and then everything went black.

12,000 years later

My name was Kira Yumatori.

Was.

I grew up like any other Octoling: oppressed and militaristic. We were taught only what we might need to know on the battlefield or supporting those who would be.

Once or twice I thought about asking “Why?” But those thoughts were quickly pushed down by the brainwashing and the hypnotic music that supplemented it.

I wished I knew more about the music. I felt like I should. I always felt... different like that. Like there was another part of me that knew more things than I should.

Those thoughts were quickly pushed back down, too.

Until that day.

Our leader, DJ Octavio, was going to be battling an inkling who had been terrorizing us and stealing our power sources. The squid was there to try and take our ultimate power source, the Great Zapfish, back for itself.

We all watched the battle eagerly, hoping for its defeat.

Until we heard that song.

Something clicked into place.

Honestly, my first thought was just “It sounds pentatonic”. An inconsequential thought.

But I didn’t know what pentatonic meant.

Until I did. I knew everything. Or, it felt like everything.

I clutched my head. I could barely stop myself from screaming right there and then. I was flooded with memories, with knowledge, of inconsequentiality and of importance.

They must have missed me, curled up on the ground, desperately trying to figure out what was going on.

When I finally was able to get up, everyone was gone. The inklings, the zapfish, the other Octarians, everyone.

And I was finally able to ask myself, “Why do we deserve all the resources? Why shouldn’t they be spread equally?”

I was... free.

I met others who had been freed by the song called Calamari Inkantation. They too were questioning everything that they had had drilled into them since they were able to understand.

But none of them were like me. None of them had these thousands of memories to sift through, figuring out what happened.

I began trying to write down everything I remembered.

My name was Caroline Gentara. I was a junior researcher for the SCP Foundation. I had been killed or transferred or something by an entity that had breached containment.

I was... human. But not anymore.

We had learned some about humans, mostly because their structures and remains still existed alongside us. But we had been taught little other than they were destroyed long ago.

But I had been one. A very long time ago.

Then who was I, really? My body was still Octarian. I still remembered growing up, overpowered by the memetic music.

Yet now I knew it was memetic.

I spent two years trying to sort it out.

First, I started writing down every little fact I could remember. I had hated reading books by Charles Dickens in high school. Hermaeus Mora was the Daedric Prince of Knowledge. Repeated tries to spell “Hermaeus Mora”. Even as much of the Bee Movie script I could remember. But I just couldn’t catalogue everything. And... it wasn’t helping my identity to write this all down. I still was confused to who I was. I didn’t know if I was Caroline Gentara, or Kira Yumatori.

For two years I searched for anything. Some kind of reason for all of this. Maybe a way out, a way to get back to the old Foundation site. I knew where it was. Maybe some data had survived.

But on the day I was finally close to getting out... something happened.

I was walking towards my destination, checking my map occasionally, when suddenly I was attacked. Two inklings, an older one and one who looked about my age, seemed to have mistaken me for hostile. I tried to tell them I wasn’t going to hurt them but before I could finish I felt something ensnare me, a strange, different sensation, and then everything faded away.

I woke up slowly, feeling cold stone ground beneath me. When I opened my eyes, I saw the older inkling who had been fighting me standing over me. I quickly shrieked and jumped back, pressing myself against a wall.

I guess he realized that I wasn’t a threat to him, and because we both agreed that we had no idea where the hell we were, we decided to work together to find a way out.

He introduced himself as Captain Cuttlefish, and then we got moving.

The area seemed to be some kind of subway. The only trains we saw were non-functioning, but there were train tracks everywhere.

Maybe we could take the train out.

After clearing the way a little bit, we found what looked to be a station, but there was still no train. There was, however, a telephone. It looked to be from the early 20th century of humanity, said my old memories.

It started ringing.

There was nothing to do but answer it.
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I picked up the receiver bit and put it to my ear, but that wasn’t necessary, as as soon as I did so, it immediately started blaring recorded dialogue so loud that they could probably hear it up on the surface, wherever that was.

Then it started talking in the style of a corporation trying to make a meme page. You know, “How do you do, fellow kids?” type stuff. It spouted slang that probably hadn’t been used since that Captain Cuttlefish behind me was a fucking child, with the occasional error message in place of some useful word, which made me feel like I was reading Foundation documents back when I still had only level 1 clearance, where I would look at the page and practically scream “’Redacted’? ‘Redacted’ what?!”.

From the little sense I could make out of this cesspool of bad attempts to relate to the “younger generation”, it was trying to tell me that I was applicant 10,008 (which Cuttlefish decided to shorten to “Agent 8”) and if I wanted to go the “promised land” I needed to do... something or other. It gave me a card and some kind of communication device.

Maybe I could call the Enterprise to beam me up. If I were as cheeky as I used to be, I would have tried, but A) It wouldn’t work, and B) I didn’t want Cuttlefish getting suspicious of me. From what I could tell, I was already on pretty thin ice, being an Octarian and him being someone who fights them and all.

I knew there was definitely something fishy about this whole situation. I think it was the words “promised land”. Any time you hear those words outside of the Bible, something’s up. Sometimes even when you hear them in the Bible. God was a pretty sketchy guy. Sent a couple of bears to maul 42 children for calling a prophet bald.

But for now, it was my only hope. Our only hope. Even if Cuttlefish was kind of my enemy, I wouldn’t abandon another person.

Almost on cue, a train came through the tunnel and screeched to a halt at the station. The doors opened. I looked at Cuttlefish, shrugged, and we got on.

Once the doors closed and the train started moving, I heard a kind of shlicking sound. At first, I thought... maybe someone was mopping the floor or something? On a moving train? But when I looked, there was this... blue thing wearing a cap on the floor. Then it introduced itself.

It said its name was C.Q. Cumber and it was the conductor. In order to reach the “promised land” the phone had been talking about, I needed to do some test chambers (suspicious) and find four “thangs” (things? thongs? I don’t know) and then I could go there. Then it showed me the way to the first test.

It seemed that these tests were about completing some task in order to get to the goal. I quickly completed the first one given to me. When I did, I received some points. Apparently, those were used to pay entrance to the tests. If you failed, you had to pay again. I also got this thing called a “mem cake”. They called it... my memory compressed into physical form? Sounded... anomalous.

I got back to the train, intending to go straight to the next test chamber. However sketchy it sounded, this “promised land” was literally our only hope of finding a way out. But before I could activate the CQ-80 device, Cuttlefish got a signal on his walkie talkie. “Come in, Agent 3!” He said, before the radio crackles resolved themselves into a voice.

“MIC CHECK, ONE TWO, WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?!”

“Excuse me?!” Replied Cuttlefish, rightly so.

“Pearl! Didn’t anyone teach you to respect your elders?!” Said another voice.

I’ll always remember the first words I ever heard her say.

Cuttlefish obviously demanded to know where his “Agent 3” was, but Pearl sidestepped the question and introduced herself as Pearl, or as she claimed she wanted to be called, “MC Princess”.

Yeah... I just stuck with Pearl.

Then she started rapping, for God’s sake. I was just... shocked. I thought Cuttlefish, being someone who seemed respectable, would put a stop to it, but to my surprise, he also started rapping.

I needed to find a classification for the anomaly that was causing my palm and my face to be extremely, possibly magnetically or gravitationally, attracted to each other and unable to separate.

Finally the other girl put a stop to it... luckily.

She claimed that they found a radio and heard his transmission coming from it. They were on Mount Nantai, a place I had heard of. It was very near Octo Valley, where I had lived. Apparently we had been near there when Cuttlefish and Agent 3 had attacked me and... well, this happened.

I guess Cuttlefish had stopped seeing me as an enemy. He just called me Agent 8 like I was his old friend or something. I guess that inklings were okay, after all. Better than the Octarians, at least. Maybe better than humans. Probably better than humans.

The girl introduced herself as Marina (aka DJ Hyperfresh, according to her). So I finally had a name to put to that voice. Nice name. I felt like I’d heard it before.

Maybe it was the similarity to the name Namira. I had always kept cataloguing memories, going through “phases” of cataloguing different types of information. I had been going through a Skyrim phase before this happened, and had almost been finished with my list of Daedric princes.

That reminded me. I grabbed Cuttlefish’s walkie talkie. “Uhh, Nami- Marina, did you happen to find a... journal? Very large? Two years worth of material? Because that’s mine.”

I heard the distinct sound of a book shutting. “No.” Pearl said. “Yes.” Marina said, slightly exasperated.

“Alright, uh... could you just... keep it safe?”

“Sure.” She said. There was a bit of a pause, and I suspected some stuff was happening out of range of the mic. It was a few minutes before Marina came back.

“Anyways... I’ll get to work analyzing your surroundings, and hopefully I’ll be of some help to you!” She said.

“I don’t really get what’s going on, but hang tight. We got you!” Said Pearl.

I didn’t know why, but with them watching over me, I felt... safer. More assured.
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Pearl and Marina arrived back at their shared apartment that night. It was a nice place, the kind that they needed Pearl’s rich dad to be able to afford. But Pearl had always been happy to share her good fortune, even when she had barely known Marina.



Reopening the computer and checking the video feed of Agent 8, she appeared to be fast asleep on the ground of the subway station. Pearl wondered how she could be sleeping so soundly in such a place, but Marina knew she must be used to it. She’d experienced it herself, once.



They closed the laptop back up and Pearl took out the journal they had found again. It was a large book, amateurly and somewhat shoddily bound. She opened it and started flipping through the pages, and a confused look came over her face.



“Pearl! What did I-“ Marina was about to make her shut the journal again, until she caught sight of what was in it. “This is...” She started flipping through it as well. “Incomprehensible...”



It was mostly in the Octarian language, that she had expected. But the content was... strange, and very diverse. It felt like a book of everything. There was music theory, lyrics to songs Marina had never heard of, plots for almost every type of video game, movie, and TV show imaginable... had Agent 8 come up with all this herself in two years?



Pearl could only speak a little Octarian, learned for necessity when teaching Inklish to Marina. And she certainly couldn’t read it. So Marina translated for her. But it was hard work, especially when Marina couldn’t stop laughing over a skit between two people named Skinner and Chalmers, which was also kind of hard to translate because part of its joke hinged on the phonetic similarity between the words “steamed clams” and “steamed hams”.



Eventually Pearl got tired and went to bed. But Marina stayed up, looking through the large collection. It was... very bizarre. For one thing, almost everything tended to center around humans. Marina knew of them, an ancient species that had died out long ago. But almost everything in the journal mentioned them as the main characters, and mentions of Inklings and even Octarians were incredibly sparse. Even when non-humans were mentioned, they tended to be fictional fantasy or sci-fi species that were based on them, like Vulcans, described as “humans with pointy ears, green blood, and mind melding powers” at one point. For one thing, how did she know the exact shape of a human’s ears? Maybe they had been pointy like Inklings’ instead of rounded like Octolings’. For another thing, how did she know they had red blood and didn’t have telepathic mind melding powers? Well, to be fair, the last part could be assumed, but how did she know for sure?



For another thing, Agent 8 tended to credit people with the work. But none of these people seemed to exist. They had strange names; most of them didn’t sound like any Octarian or even Inkling name Marina had heard. No matter how far she dug, there was no record of people with those exact names. Had she made them up too, as a sort of universe building exercise...? It was all kind of suspicious.



Planning to stop soon, Marina turned one more page and her eyes fell upon a page of hand drawn sheet music for a song called “Darude Sandstorm”. As she looked it over, something struck her. She could hear the chords in her head as she read them, and she liked it. She opened the computer back up and connected her headphones, intending to use the chord progression in a song of her own she had been working on. She noticed the video feed of Agent 8 was still going, but she hadn’t moved. Still asleep, it looked like.



What is going on inside your head? Marina briefly wondered, looking at her image. When the picture didn’t answer, she minimized the feed and began to work on her song.
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I remember, in my past life, when I was younger and obsessed with Portal 2. It was when I was 12 or 13, and I was just beginning that transition from childhood to adolescence. I would have done anything to be in the game and interact with the characters, even though it would have threatened my life to do so. Eventually, of course, I moved on to a different phase and forgot about Portal 2.

Over the first few days doing the tests for Kamabo Corporation, I wondered if I was in some marginal way finally getting my wish.

The tests weren’t hard. Well, okay - they were hard. I would be lying if I said I didn’t fail them many times. But they weren’t complicated. The tasks were easy enough to understand, but sometimes they were a bit... hard to execute.

I had been prepared for a lot of similar things as part of the Octarian combat training, but sometimes I had to take those concepts and use them in... interesting ways. Whoever had designed these tests had tried to make sure that whoever passed them had to be not only quick and tough, but also versatile and creative.

I found myself wielding weapons I had never heard of before, much less seen. Finding out how they worked was something that needed to be learned on the fly.

Luckily, Pearl and Marina were always on the line to help me. And... Cuttlefish too, I guess. Not that he didn’t help. He did. He had been working on fighting us, the Octarians, for decades, and even trained Agent 3 to do so as well.

I wondered if I ever met Agent 3 how it would all go. Cuttlefish said that she was young, maybe even younger than me, so she probably had enough of an open mind to at least tolerate me.

Pearl, Marina, and Cuttlefish gave me lots of good advice on how to go about doing the tests. Strategic tests, tips on how operate the weapons, and even just encouraging words help me through it.

But that wasn’t all.

One time, after failing a particular test a few too many times, Marina informed me that if I gathered enough data from attempting and re-attempting the tests, she could hack the corporation’s systems and make them think that I had passed the test.

I thought that was really cool. I made sure she knew that I thought it was really cool.

My respect for her grew immensely.

Pearl wasn’t useless, either. If I ever ran out of the CQ points used to pay for the tests (which I did... like, once) she could send me some using her dad’s money. I did have to pay it back, though... I mean, really, what did I expect? It was probably a lot of money.

Cuttlefish, um... occasionally did some rapping or something. It was weird.

Sometimes I talked to Pearl and Marina a bit, when I was taking a break or in transit to a different test chamber. I liked getting to know them. Pearl was... unique, but she still came across as a nice person, even cute at times. She sounded like a chibi, if that made any sense. Marina, though... I was really coming to admire her. I could tell she was an Octoling like me; I knew by the accent. But she was speaking the Inkling language quite fluently did someone who had only had at most two years. I knew it because I had been in programs since I was really young. I had inherited a knack for languages from my previous life, I guess... and they had decided that was going to be my specialty. But it had still taken years. There were still some things I didn’t know how to say simply because you don’t get taught those kinds of things in a language program intended for at most, espionage.

Marina seemed to be basically a genius. The language, and the hacking thing, and just the air she gave off when I talked to her. Not like a haughty, “look how smart I am” air that most “geniuses” give off, but just the way she analyzed things and took care of problems. And the way she acted like she knew she didn’t know everything.

Gradually, she also sent along logs from a chat room that she, Pearl, and Cuttlefish were talking in as well. I was starting to learn what kind of people they were, even just from the few lines that I could read.

Marina and I also seemed to share something in common. In the second chat log she sent, she talked about how she had analyzed my surroundings and found a lot of strange readings, like I was in a different dimension or something. I wondered if she desired to analyze and understand anomalies like I once did. Like I still wanted to do. Once I got out of here. It didn’t matter if the SCP Foundation was gone, I’d restart it. Or something. Didn’t know how that would go exactly.

There were vending machines where I could put in the points and get food out. Well, it looked kind of like food. It was really mostly tasteless, but it was... edible. I always slept at the central station. I couldn’t sleep on the moving train. And the flat ground was so much more satisfying than a train bench. I had developed a preference for flat stone ground to sleep on over the time I had spent free, trying to get out and figure myself out.

I didn’t like sleeping in front of the phone. I guess it was just a mix of personification and pareidolia, but seeing it “staring” at me just made me... uneasy. So I slept far behind it.

That morning, when I woke up, I knew it was finally time to get my first “thang”. When I got on the train, it was shown as the next place on the map. I selected the station where it rested and sat down to wait.

I sighed. “I’m nervous,” I confessed, speaking into my CQ-80.

“Huh? Why?” Replied Pearl.

“Well, I... you think there’s gonna be some kind of ultimate challenge there? Like a boss fight in a video game? Because, like... is it just gonna be sitting there?”

“Well... whatever it is, you can do it.” Said Marina.

“I’ve done enough. I just... I hope it’s not too hard.”

It was only a few more seconds before the train arrived at the station. I took a breath and got off.

I stepped into an empty-looking chamber. An equipper gave me a basic weapon and that was it. I cautiously walked forward, hearing my steps echo in the room and the hallway in front of me. The floor in the hallway sloped upward so I couldn’t see what was at the other end. There was only a faint light, like the light emitted by the goals at the end of the test chambers.

“Is anyone... here?” I said. I think I meant to call it out, but then I realized that’s what victims in horror movies do, and ended up saying it quietly, almost to myself.

“Doesn’t look like it...” Pearl said.

“Keep your wits about you, just in case.” Said Marina.

Alright. I’ll do it for you, Marina. I thought.

...Why did I just think that?

But I couldn’t stop to think about that thought. I walked through the hallway, checking my surroundings as I did so, and it opened up into a clearing. It was a platform that overlooked a large, open area. It mostly was empty space, but in the distance, past a large, insurmountable chasm, there was what looked like a trainyard of some sort. I wondered if those trains were part of another operation, or being used at all.

In front of me, an object floated suspended within a sphere of energy. I guessed that was the thang. I knew how those spheres worked; they were Octarian technology. I began shooting the sphere, watching it get more and more dyed with the color of my ink until finally it shattered and the thang floated to the ground.

It was large, and I had to use a nearby pallet jack to take it back to the train, where we strapped it to the top and began our return to the central station.

“...That was too easy.” I remarked, my faint apprehension having failed to dissipate. “There should have been some resistance.”

“Maybe it's just a reward.” Said Pearl.

“I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right. I had a... previous line of work that’s telling me so.”

We all were quiet until we finally arrived back at the station. After unsecuring the thang and finally delivering it to the platform, the stupid phone released some more slang-filled word vomit about how I only had three to go, Cuttlefish said some stuff I don’t exactly remember either, and I was off to continue.

When this all was over, I would be so relieved.
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