SCP-7470 - M is for Moonlight.
The moon, much like the sun, has obviously been one of the most culturally significant
and symbolic aspects of human life since the dawn of our species.
Practically every culture has attributed some beliefs and significance to the moon, sometimes
in reverence in its own right or sometimes just as counterpart to the sun.
The moon has also long been associated with insanity and irrationality, with the words
lunacy and lunatic being derived from the latin name for our moon.
While these claims have long been debunked, an individual could still draw some rather
unscientific conclusions about the moon, and could be influenced by it in their own minds.
That brings us to SCP-7470, where an individual has some very unique thoughts about the moon,
leading to a very unique situation.
SCP-7470 has the neutralized object class, but it was the designation for the disappearance
of Daniel Collins and associated phenomena on the night of March 6th, 2023, at roughly
7 PM.
Collins, who had experience working for NASA and other aerospace organizations, had been
a professor of astronomy at Le Blanc university for well over a decade prior to the event.
An extensive background check revealed no abnormalities besides an antisocial childhood.
Prior to the event, Collins had been conducting an extensive study on lunar activities using
university funds, with an emphasis on the annual variations of orbital patterns.
The exact nature of his research was never fully disclosed to the faculty or student
body however, and his findings were expected to be revealed during the lecture that resulted
in his disappearance.
Readings taken from local monitoring stations after the conclusion of the event discovered
slight gravitational abnormalities concurrent with the advent of the event, but they were
not nearly as powerful as the nature of the incident would require.
The current theory is that the event generated a localized spatial/temporal anomaly to reduce
damage caused by its gravity on planet earth, but this cannot be confirmed.
Following the conclusion of the event, the moon now possesses an inverted synchronous
rotation, so that its far hemisphere, known as the dark side of the moon, orbits facing
the earth.
Foundation-operated astronomical divisions have been placed on notice should future incidents
arise, and disinformation campaigns are suppressing ongoing public alarm.
We’re then given a log of a recording of the event, captured by a member in the audience
during Collins lecture at Le Blanc University.
In attendance were 54 students, faculty, and members of the public, with this footage recovered
by foundation cleanup crews following the incident.
Collins comes on stage to applause and steps up to the podium, thanking everyone for coming
despite the less than ideal weather.
He says that when he was eight, after a particularly nasty bout of night terrors, his mother took
him out into the cold mojave night, sat him down on the dusty rocks, and told him a story.
She said that every night, once the sun settles over the horizon, the moon comes out to watch
over the earth.
It would watch all night, and keep all the monsters away, because it could see everything
from the biggest trees to the smallest mice.
She even told him that it could see all the fishes of the sea, all the way to the bottom.
It was so big and powerful that none of the monsters dared to face it, and of course it
could even see him, sitting cozy in his bed, and would watch all night long.
Then the sun would come up, chase the moon out of the sky, and bathe the earth in golden
light until the next night.
He says that he doesn’t know where she got that story from, but it did wonders to ease
the frightened mind of a child.
He jokes that it must be pretty good at its job since he never saw any monsters around,
but the audience remains silent.
On his twelfth birthday, Apollo 11 put men on the moon, and for the first time he saw
the moon, not through the dirty lens of a telescope, but live on television.
After that, he became fascinated with space, truly obsessed, and in his room he had a rocket
ship bed, an astronaut helmet and a flight suit and at least a half dozen telescopes.
He also had the Moon in my Room, a little bisected moon lamp you hang on your bedroom
wall that talks to you in your sleep, and you can click it through the lunar phases
and it’ll tell you about science and folklore.
But nothing could compare to the real thing, and he brings up an image of the moon on a
projector.
As he got older, he started studying the moon, staring at pictures like this for hours.
He’d pore over images from the apollo missions, and once he even held a piece of moonrock
in his hand.
As embarrassing as it sounds, he would sometimes regard the moon as less of an object, and
more as a person.
Someone, rather than something, and he thinks he held a conversation with it on more than
one occasion.
He then brings up an image of the 1974 issue of Popular science Magazine, displaying a
group of highschoolers alongside Nasa technicians, with him standing out in the foreground wearing
a bright red Hawaiian shirt and oversized glasses.
The audience laughs and Collins chuckles, saying that that used to be in style.
This was a few years before he got an internship at NASA, and although he was never on the
table for the astronaut program, he did work directly under those who were.
He was jealous of them, and needed to get out there and make a name for himself.
So when he was offered a job here at the university, he was over the moon.
He took up a position as an assistant researcher, worked his way up to professor, and the rest
is history.
But enough about him, as they’re all here to learn what they won’t teach in astronomy
101.
If they’re like him, they’ve seen every documentary, read every journal you can find
about the earth’s only natural satellite.
Many of them have probably studied the many theories about its creation, that it was flung
from the earth during an early impact event, or captured and brought into earth’s orbit
from some other source.
Some of them might believe that it was always there, formed from the same accretion disk
and at the same time as the earth.
Collins clicks to the next slide, showing an image of the moon cracked with red chasms.
He says that this is what the moon would’ve looked like in its early years, fragile and
impure, with rift valleys like this one making it nearly unrecognizable.
He clicks to the next slide, an image of the moon as it would’ve appeared four billion
years ago, and says that there would’ve been vast pools of magma, lunar seas.
They can only guess what they would’ve looked like, and he always imagined that the moon
would have appeared as earth did in her infancy, full of fire and heat and life.
He clicks to the next slide, showing a Hawaiian lava flow.
He explains that when solid rock superheats, it becomes a bit like taffy and stretches,
becoming something in between a semi-solid and a liquid.
The moon would’ve been amorphous, malleable, and it would’ve done the same to anything
that touched it, assuming it got hot enough.
It’s hard to believe that the moon could’ve been anything other than the dead rock it
is now, but it was, for millions of years.
Moving on to more recent history, man has known of the moon as long as they’ve known
each other, and it’s been the centerpiece of countless fables, symbols, and religions.
It has captured and mystified us longer than we can measure, and he clicks to the next
slide, showing a grainy, distorted image of the moon.
He explains that this is the first image of the far side of the moon, as photographed
by the soviet probe Luna 3.
The first to see this were the Russians in 59, who later mapped it in 60, and by all
accounts they were the first humans in history to have seen the entirety of the moon.
They should have been, but they weren’t, as he saw it almost five years before the
soviets, in the twilight hours of the early night.
That time when the space on the horizon where the sun used to occupy is still fiery yellow,
before the blues and blacks of night swallow up the sky.
It’s then when the moon is most prominent, right as it peeks up above the tree line.
On this particular night, it felt so close, like he could just reach up and touch it.
He then shifts his speech to begin referring to the moon as “you”.
He says that you were wrong, you weren’t the same you’d always been, and your face
was blemished and scarred.
He didn’t recognize the craters, and thought he was dreaming, but it all felt so real.
You were bigger too, and not just because of the atmospheric distortion, but you were
closer.
He knew that you were here for a reason, you were here for him, you were trying to show
him something but he couldn’t see it, as you were still too far.
The audience becomes noticeably uncomfortable, and murmurs begin to rise.
Collins says that he had to get closer, as he was on the verge of something more spectacular
than any other scientific breakthrough in the last hundred years.
The moon had called him, and he had to answer.
Why it chose him, he doesn’t know, but it didn’t matter.
For the first time, his guardian, his protector, had revealed its true self to him.
But it was a fleeting moment, and was gone in an instant.
He had to see it again, as he couldn’t let this die with him, and needed to document
it for generations to come.
He needed a spectacle, and needed an audience.
There’s silence on the recording, as Collins checks his watch and murmurs something before
clicking to the next slide.
It displays an image of the moon surrounded by a number of equations mapping its orbit
with the earth.
He explains that tonight is a supermoon, and it’s currently seven in the evening, so
sunset will occur in a few moments.
He turns to look at something off-screen, and the camera maneuvers to the left to display
the auditorium’s floor-to-ceiling windows.
A large, pale object dominates the horizon outside, and the camera focuses to reveal
it to be an immense, vaguely spherical presence similar in appearance to the moon, but distorted
in both size and shape.
A low pulsing vibration rattles the camera and causes noticeable discomfort in the audience.
Collins says that all those times he called to the moon, it was listening, and he never
should have doubted it.
He’s sorry, but he thinks he’s ready now.
He tells the crowd not to be alarmed, that he will go first to show that it is safe,
and all he asks is that they watch, for posterity.
Collins steps down from the stage and cautiously approaches the doors leading out of the building.
A low murmur from the audience erupts, and several produce cell phones to record the
event.
The object on the horizon has grown in size, and the pulsing has increased in tempo and
intensity.
Collins exits the building, stepping several meters into the open courtyard outside.
He is now enveloped in pale light, and is visibly shaking while speaking upwards, but
his words are unintelligible.
The presence is directly above him, as the building’s power cuts and the room is bathed
in pale light.
Collins' body begins being pulled upwards by an invisible force.
He is elongated and his torso stretches towards the presence above.
He opens his mouth to scream, releasing a semi-liquified, red-tinged slurry of blood
and internal organs.
The substance demonstrates non-newtonian properties, initially falling to the ground as a solid
before gradually softening and levitating alongside collins’ upper torso.
The audience erupts in screams as the ambient pulsing increases to a deafening volume.
Collins’ body can be seen becoming gelatinous, with pustules of skin, bone, and hair dripping
off his body, hanging in the air, and then falling upwards.
After nearly three minutes, Collins’upper body disappears beyond the view of the camera.
His lower body continues to stretch without breaking for an additional ten minutes until
it too disappears from view.
Chaos within the auditorium renders much of the remaining footage useless, but at several
points, members of the audience can be seen attempting to barricade the doors shut with
their bodies and other movable furniture.
After several minutes, the camera is knocked from its tripod and trampled.
The remaining few hours of film have been destroyed.
All 54 people present for Daniel Collins’ lecture, including Collins himself, have been
declared missing.
When janitorial staff accessed the building the morning after, they found it empty and
in disrepair.
I’ll preempt the inevitable comments for this one by saying that this is a pretty classic
case of the moon being haunted.
Although, in actuality, the moon here might not actually be haunted.
It’s notable that the anomaly here isn’t the moon itself, or something the foundation
has discovered on the moon, but the anomaly is just the disappearance event, and it’s
listed as neutralized.
The anomaly here could very well just be Daniel Collins himself, who has projected so much
of his personal beliefs onto the moon.
Perhaps Collins had some sort of reality bending capabilities, unbeknownst to him, and he just
projected them through his beliefs and obsession with the moon.
Or perhaps this is another example in the SCP universe of faith and belief giving power
to something that didn’t have it previously.
In the end, we’ll never really know how or why Collins and those 54 people seemed
to get sucked up into the moon, acting much like the superheated rock that Collins mentioned
in his lecture.
Maybe Collins and those people are still alive up there on the moon somehow, but since this
is the scp universe, if they are, we can probably imagine it’s not too pleasant.