Chapter 8: Code

12.4K 417 335
                                    


TW suicidal implications? It'll probably come up often.

------

━━━━━━━━━▲━━━━━━━━━

|| "Good! Maybe if we're both lucky, I'll stay dead!" ||

━━━━━━━━━▼━━━━━━━━━


"Time loops," the doctor repeated. "I know enough about them."

"It's pretty simple," you said, shrugging in the same way that people did when they thought they were uninteresting. "Basically, when I die, I'm dropped back anywhere from a few minutes to a few seconds before the death happened."

"I see," they mumbled, probably writing it down on the clipboard.

"But time travel, in and of itself, is sort of complicated. I've got two main theories about the whole timeline thing." You held up two fingers. "The first is that I'm dropped into a parallel universe that's just a little bit before when I died in the other universe. The first universe then continues on with my death being permanent while I live in the second universe. My second theory is that the entire universe literally goes back in time with the timeline where my death happened being erased."

You paused for a second to let them write down your thoughts. "There's another sub theory that I go back in time and the point where I died becomes a branch of the timeline and each new reset creates a new branch, if that makes sense."

"Do you know which one is correct?"

You stared at them. You literally just said they were theories, not facts. If you knew which one was true, you wouldn't say they were theories! Sighing, you answered, "Of course I don't."

"Hmm," they tapped the pen against the clipboard. "How many times have you died so far then?"

"Not that much." You vaguely waved your hand. "Enough times."

Enough times. Enough times to know what to do to live. The foundation didn't need to know the exact number. They didn't need to know anything. You were definitely going to die in the future anyways. What use would a number be now? You shifted in your seat, bringing one leg over the other and waited for the next question. The doctor flipped a page over the clipboard.

"About the containment breach, how did you know what to do?"

"Like, in general?"

"The keycards, dealing with the SCPs, the gate, everything."

"Everything. M'kay. First of all, you guys leave files everywhere. Have you considered organizing better? There were at least 5 papers I found scattered on shelves for no reason and I get that you're probably in a rush during breaches but some of them were so random. As for keycards, you guys also leave those everywhere. I found the level 4 keycard in 049's room and level 5 keycard in 106's containment chamber. Why was that there?"

"Okay fair," they muttered quietly.

"You should really be more careful with where you put things. As for dealing with SCPs, well." You shrugged. "Trial and error I guess? I figured it out eventually I suppose. And for the gate... Are you aware of the deal 079 and I made?"

You were only half lying when you said trial and error. Sure you may give them a wrong impression of how many times you died but trial and error was true. Just not always with your life. Some things you figured out by virtue of playing the game. Even then, the game was also a lot of trial and error.

Retrograde Motion [SCP X Reader]Where stories live. Discover now