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This is… my last log, forever. But before I leave the vault, I want to tell you a story. You, being any possible survivor still out there that might come across this recording. Give or take seven years ago, life was normal. I was in college majoring in theoretical physics and doing pretty well for a twenty-two-year-old in massive amounts of debt. Me and my best friend Ch- uh- Zero, had jobs at the Foundation. If you somehow don’t know what The Foundation is, it’s a massive organization founded in the early 1800s with a goal of containing anomalies and protecting common people like you or me. But anyway- I was in a band and had finally saved up enough to buy the legendary PS7. Everything was perfect, until daybreak.
My old boss Senior Director Locke had been warning everyone for years, but most people just chalked him up to being a bit kooky. Everyone always brushed off his rants about his proposal for Scp-001, except for me. I would listen to him go on and on for our entire lunch break, about the horrors of Daybreak. How one day the sun would come up and everything would be different. That the only way a person could protect themself was to get out of the sun, in any way possible. I didn’t realize then that listening to a crazy man’s ranting would save my skin, literally.
I think it was November, when it happened. I had planned on using my four weeks of paid vacation I had been saving to take a road trip with Zero to go camping. Or as he called it “cryptid hunting.” We were in my apartment packing the rest of my stuff when I got a Foundation alarm on my phone. It said: “ALERT. DAYBREAK HAS BEGUN. STAY AWAY FROM THE SUNLIGHT BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE. MAY GOD SAVE US ALL.” I was horrified. I never processed the fact that anything proposed for 001 could actually happen. Still, I was not going to disregard a Foundation alert.
Me and Zero dressed quickly. We still had our suitcases in my apartment, so we put on everything we could find: turtle-neck, boots, knee socks, ski masks, goggles. You name it; we managed to put it on. Then we hesitantly pulled back the curtain a little bit and saw the worst nightmare of any Foundation employee who’d managed to catch anything from Dir. Locke. The sun was huge, the sky was an orange color, and the people… they weren’t people anymore, only melting, screaming pillars of flesh-colored ooze. I don’t remember much after that other than what Zero told me.
I had hastily run to another room where the beams of light couldn’t reach me, and had promptly thrown up. After Zero got me cleaned up, he helped me get to the car and drove, even he didn’t remember for how long, until we ended up at an abandoned motel. After that, we lived a life mostly comprised of hiding, stealing, and running. Zero had been obsessed with finding other survivors, so when we found Vault 66, he quickly got to work.
Zero was never the type to back down easily. So when he decided to find a way to reverse the sun’s effects, there wasn’t much I could really do to stop him. He used to leave me alone for days at a time, while he went searching for the bits and bobs he needed for his experiments. But no matter how much he over-worked himself, he always managed to have side projects. Like the “radiar,” or that’s what he liked to call it. It functioned like a human life form and distress beacon tracker. I could always tell when he was tired because he would mix up wires on it, and make the whole bunker smell like smoke. But none of his experiments with his radiar worked, until about a month ago.
One month ago, he turned it on and saw a blinking dot right in the middle of it. Zero was ecstatic, to say the least. Which made it oh so much harder to tell him that… I was done. I was done fighting. It had been seven years, and I was tired. I’m not old but let me tell you I certainly feel it. All I wanted at that point was to seal myself into the vault with Zero and live out my days happy and free. He was, understandably, angry. After all, he had also spent the last seven years barely getting by and had spent two of those years working almost nonstop on the radiar.
Of course he wasn’t going to throw it all away now. We argued for a while. In the end he stormed off and locked himself into his lab. After I spent a few hours beating myself up over it, I finally decided I would let him go. Who was I to hold him back from something he’d worked two years for?
So at about 2 AM, I walked down to his lab and knocked on the door. I was pretty surprised when the door opened. I walked in to apologize, but Zero wasn’t there. I turned the vault upside down looking for him, but the only thing he left for me was a note. It read: “sorry for leaving and not waking you up i didnt want you to stop me from going. i made you breakfast and ill be back in at least a week if there is no one left manning the beacon ill turn it off and come back home. ily :)”.
I was really mad at him for that. But I’ve forgiven him for it now. He didn’t know what would happen. Anyway, I ate the breakfast that he made for me. He would always do it because I never had much skill in the kitchen. My days mostly consisted of cooking what Zero so lovingly called “styrofoam eggs,” daily chores, tending the garden, and then spending the rest of the day staring at the screen of the radiar for any sign of change. That change didn’t come for about a week.
Even though Zero wrote that he would turn off the beacon, it still scared me when the light ceased to blink. I waited two days, then three, then four. By the fifth day, I was frantic. I packed for a week, then set off toward where the signal was coming from. It took me a day to get there and almost as much to finally find him. He looked tired, hungry, and most concerning, defeated. I eventually managed to help him up, and we made our way back to the bunker. But when he finally was back up and healthy, something was wrong with him. I just wish I’d noticed earlier.
At first, it wasn’t that weird. The only thing I noticed was that he didn’t go back to his lab. I just assumed that he didn’t want to relive a failed project so quickly. Other than that everything was amazing. He wouldn’t got out as often, he cooked my favorite foods, we would garden and dance and watch movies on the archive. It all seemed perfect, a little too perfect. I kept asking him when he would get back to his projects, but he would always deflect or give me a vague answer. It confused me, but I was content with it. All I thought of it was that he wanted to give me a break from worrying, or let himself rest for a little while. I was so, so wrong.
A week after the radiar fiasco, we’d finally run short on a few supplies, so I had to do a grocery run. The place I needed to go to was pretty close to the Foundation base Zero had gone to, so I decided to leave him at the bunker. I didn’t need an upset Zero to drag around. On my way there were a lot more blobs than usual. One of them I kept seeing, but for some reason I assumed we were just going the same direction. When I finally got to the super market it was dusk, and a no-moon night. Because of this I decided to spend the night on the roof of the market.
I stayed up drawing for a while. I rarely got the chance to draw landscapes due to the murderous blobs roaming around and the fact that it was impossible to draw with gloves on. I couldn’t even go draw most nights because the moonlight was just reflected sunlight. So
no-moon nights were my only chance to draw huge landscapes. I was drawing a few buildings when I spotted that strange blob that had been following me earlier. I decided it was a lot more interesting than a run down tattoo parlor, so I started sketching it. I started with a rough outline then got to work: every curve of melted flesh, every mouth that once spoke kind words, every unclaimed plait of hair that a parent had once gently taken and done up. Then I got to the far right side of the blob and saw something that messed me up. I saw Zero.
A melted, deformed Zero, but Zero none-the-less. At that point I thought I was hallucinating from exhaustion, so I went straight to sleep. The next moning the blob was gone so I assumed it was just a dream. I ran home at the speed of light. But on the way back I got to thinking. Zero didn’t want what I wanted. It made me sad, yea, but why did he want it now?
The second I got back to the bunker I called for Zero, and he came right out. I asked him what happened inside the Foundation base. He said looking around. I asked him if he was going to keep at his radiar. He said he didn’t know. I asked him if he was going back out any time soon. He said he didn’t want to go out again. He- he said he was done fighting. That he was tired, and all he wanted now was- was to live out the rest of his days with me in the bunker, happy and free. Then I suddenly remembered it all. I never found Zero at that base. He died before I could save him. It really was his body in the blob I saw that night. Let’s just say I- I cried a lot yesterday. But today- today’s a new day, and… my last day. Now that my mind isn’t pretending that Zero’s here, I’ve finally decided what I’im gonna do. The blob that was following me is close by and… I think I’m going to finally gonna do what I need to do. To be with Zero, ya-know? So, I hope that, if anyone ever finds this recording, just know I’m- I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough. Ah- look, the sunrise. It’s beautiful.