WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.240 --> 00:00:05.840 Jack had always wanted peace and quiet, it’s  why, at first, the job at the firewatch tower   00:00:05.840 --> 00:00:13.920 seemed like such a dream. He never even imagined  that soon enough, it’d be his worst nightmare. 00:00:13.920 --> 00:00:18.880 While his tax returns would tell a different  story, Jack was a writer. At least, he was   00:00:18.880 --> 00:00:24.000 going to be, as soon as he actually got the  time to focus and hammer out his masterpiece.   00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:28.480 Every attempt so far had been a disaster.  When he’d taken that job as a caretaker at   00:00:28.480 --> 00:00:32.880 a hotel in the Rockies with his wife and son  so he could work on the Great American Novel,   00:00:32.880 --> 00:00:38.640 he’d gone a little stir crazy and the place  was really far too cold to get anything done. 00:00:38.640 --> 00:00:42.880 But when he decided to check in at a hotel  on the West Coast to work on a screenplay,   00:00:42.880 --> 00:00:47.200 the other occupants never let him have a  moment’s peace. In the end, the whole place   00:00:47.200 --> 00:00:52.800 burned down. Jack was beginning to worry that  maybe the life of the mind just wasn’t for him. 00:00:52.800 --> 00:00:56.400 Then he saw the firewatch posting,  and he practically jumped out of his   00:00:56.400 --> 00:01:01.920 skin with excitement. It was in his home state of  Washington, out in the Snoqualmie National Forest,   00:01:01.920 --> 00:01:06.880 and all he needed to do was man that 14  foot square cubicle and look over miles   00:01:06.880 --> 00:01:13.200 and miles of gorgeous greenery. Peace and  quiet, and so high up, a God’s Eye View,   00:01:13.200 --> 00:01:18.000 the perfect place to mainline inspiration  for the opus that he knew was inside him. 00:01:18.560 --> 00:01:22.800 When Jack found out that he got the job, he  was in the car with his worldly possessions   00:01:22.800 --> 00:01:26.800 the very next day. The fact that all  of his worldly possessions all fit   00:01:26.800 --> 00:01:31.040 into the back of his Buick didn’t bother  Jack, because he was just a temporarily   00:01:31.040 --> 00:01:35.760 embarrassed literary millionaire. He pictured  himself describing this moment years later,   00:01:35.760 --> 00:01:40.160 wearing a turtleneck and sitting on the  comfortable couch of a TV interviewer. 00:01:40.160 --> 00:01:45.120 “So yeah, I got this job at a firewatch tower,  figured it’d be an interesting experience,”   00:01:45.120 --> 00:01:49.840 he’d say, basking in the interviewer’s warm  smile and the adoring eyes of the live studio   00:01:49.840 --> 00:01:56.160 audience in the dark. “I had no idea it was  just what I needed to unlock my greatest work.” 00:01:56.160 --> 00:02:00.960 And then he arrived. It was a frightening  thing, to have to lug his vintage Smith-Corona   00:02:00.960 --> 00:02:06.000 typewriter up the rickety wooden stepladder to  the cab. Any literary fantasies were replaced   00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:11.920 by the simple repetition of three words: Don’t  look down, don’t look down, don’t look down… 00:02:12.960 --> 00:02:17.440 During his orienteering meeting, he’d been told  that the tower was at the perfect tip of Mount   00:02:17.440 --> 00:02:22.320 Suntop, affording maximum visibility  over the whole park. Standing on the   00:02:22.320 --> 00:02:28.480 dusty old floorboards of the cab, Jack  believed that. He’d never seen so… Well,   00:02:28.480 --> 00:02:35.120 much. The sheer muchness of it, the rolling hills  of evergreens, the kind of true wilderness that   00:02:35.120 --> 00:02:41.040 swallows human life like an Advil thrown back  with a cup of water. It was almost dizzying. 00:02:41.040 --> 00:02:45.440 The cab itself was surprisingly well-equipped:  There was a full kitchen area with a sink,   00:02:45.440 --> 00:02:50.560 a propane oven and stove, pots and pans,  baking sheets, plates and cutlery. Rain   00:02:50.560 --> 00:02:55.440 was collected in a 400 gallon nalgene tank, and  filtered into water that was safe to drink or   00:02:55.440 --> 00:03:00.560 cook with. He had charging ports, an FM radio,  a double bed, a desk, and a dollar store toolkit   00:03:00.560 --> 00:03:05.760 for maintaining the facilities. His duties were  simple: Keep the tower itself in good condition,   00:03:05.760 --> 00:03:10.160 and perform systematic observations for  fire across his part of the national park,   00:03:10.160 --> 00:03:14.080 reporting back any relevant information  to his contact at the forest service. 00:03:14.080 --> 00:03:17.920 That contact was Tabby. He’d  never actually met the woman;   00:03:17.920 --> 00:03:21.360 as far as he’d experienced, she was  just a voice on his two-way radio,   00:03:21.360 --> 00:03:25.520 but she seemed nice enough. The two would  speak every evening so he could share the   00:03:25.520 --> 00:03:31.040 information he’d gathered. On slow days,  she was still on-call just to chew the fat. 00:03:31.040 --> 00:03:34.080 But other than that, it was all beautiful, pure,   00:03:34.080 --> 00:03:38.720 perfect writing time, with nobody to  bother him or disrupt his creative flow.   00:03:38.720 --> 00:03:43.680 He could exhale and let his fingers work  like lightning on the keys of his typewriter. 00:03:43.680 --> 00:03:46.080 And yet… he didn’t. 00:03:46.080 --> 00:03:50.240 In fact, Jack found every possible way  to procrastinate on his supposed life’s   00:03:50.240 --> 00:03:53.920 work. When he could get enough data  on his phone to actually surf the web,   00:03:53.920 --> 00:03:57.840 he’d sometimes watch YouTube videos.  His favorite channel was Dr. Bob,   00:03:57.840 --> 00:04:02.160 because of its entertaining and informative  breakdowns of Foundation anomalies and the   00:04:02.160 --> 00:04:06.480 often horrible things that happen to people who  fall afoul of them. He subscribed and hit the   00:04:06.480 --> 00:04:11.280 bell so he’d never miss another video,  and hey, I recommend you do that, too. 00:04:11.280 --> 00:04:15.040 It’s just a shame that, through some  temporal paradox, he wasn’t able to   00:04:15.040 --> 00:04:20.640 see this very video and know what he was in  for. It would have saved him a lot of trouble. 00:04:20.640 --> 00:04:24.800 If you’d asked him at the time what the problem  was, he would have deflected, perhaps said,   00:04:24.800 --> 00:04:29.600 “I have the energy, I have the drive, I just  don’t have any decent ideas.” And maybe that   00:04:29.600 --> 00:04:35.680 was true. Or maybe he was scared. Scared that,  with all this time and opportunity to himself,   00:04:35.680 --> 00:04:40.640 he’d reveal that his skills never really lined up  with his ambitions. Afraid that, if he committed   00:04:40.640 --> 00:04:46.000 to one idea, one path, perhaps he’d miss an  even better one rolling by. Perhaps his whole   00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:52.880 life had just been a pear necklace of bad ideas,  and he was working his way towards the clasp. 00:04:52.880 --> 00:04:57.440 To avoid getting immersed in thoughts like  that, he’d talk to Tabby over his radio instead,   00:04:57.440 --> 00:05:02.000 leaning back on his chair and looking out over  the darkened forest. He didn’t even like to look   00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:07.040 at the typewriter after 8 PM, it always  gave him bad dreams. Come to think of it,   00:05:07.040 --> 00:05:11.280 he had more bad dreams than he ever  used to when he was manning the tower. 00:05:11.280 --> 00:05:15.440 “Is that common? Weird nightmares?”  Jack asked over the radio. 00:05:15.440 --> 00:05:20.000 Tabby’s voice crackled in. “Oh yeah,  Derek said the exact same thing.” 00:05:20.000 --> 00:05:21.840 “Derek?” Jack asked. 00:05:21.840 --> 00:05:27.600 “Yeah, he was the last fire tower operator,” he  said. “Big guy, looked like Paul Bunyan. Beard,   00:05:27.600 --> 00:05:32.960 flannel shirt, everything. Not nearly as good a  conversationalist as you. He’d sometimes put in   00:05:32.960 --> 00:05:37.280 calls in the middle of the night, half-awake,  saying he saw things moving in the dark.” 00:05:37.280 --> 00:05:41.440 Tabby said that like it was supposed  to be funny, so Jack laughed along,   00:05:41.440 --> 00:05:45.120 hiding his discomfort. There was enough  for him to have bad dreams about,   00:05:45.120 --> 00:05:49.600 he didn’t need to think about  anything “moving in the dark.” 00:05:49.600 --> 00:05:52.800 “What happened to Derek in the end?” he asked. 00:05:52.800 --> 00:05:57.120 There was a long silence, like Tabby  realized she’d said something she shouldn’t,   00:05:57.120 --> 00:06:00.720 and now she was trying to  think of an exit strategy. 00:06:00.720 --> 00:06:05.920 “Derek, he… voided his contract,” she  said. “Stopped responding someday,   00:06:05.920 --> 00:06:08.160 we never really knew what happened.” 00:06:08.160 --> 00:06:12.560 It was an almost surgical strike into the  very last thing Jack could have possibly   00:06:12.560 --> 00:06:17.680 wanted to hear. And Tabby seemed to pick up  on that in his silence, and shot back in. 00:06:17.680 --> 00:06:20.320 “--This kind of thing happens all  the time, of course,” she said,   00:06:20.320 --> 00:06:25.360 affecting an almost performatively carefree  voice. “Doesn’t mean anything bad’s happened.   00:06:25.360 --> 00:06:28.800 It’s demanding work, emotionally, and  some people just can’t hack it. They   00:06:28.800 --> 00:06:34.320 bail before they find their rhythm. Not you  though, Jack. You’ve got real initiative.” 00:06:34.320 --> 00:06:39.280 Yeah, Jack thought. If only it could be  initiative at something I actually wanted to do. 00:06:39.280 --> 00:06:43.440 The days marched on, then the weeks.  Surfing the internet got boring,   00:06:43.440 --> 00:06:48.720 and he was so damn sick of looking at all those  stupid trees. His attention turned inwards,   00:06:48.720 --> 00:06:53.840 studying every detail of the cab instead.  He could see why Derek went mad from boredom   00:06:53.840 --> 00:06:59.120 and went AWOL. Even the internet felt like it  wasn’t offering up new distractions anymore. 00:06:59.120 --> 00:07:04.400 He was three weeks and two days into his post when  he noticed the hatch in the ceiling. It was nailed   00:07:04.400 --> 00:07:09.760 in place, but Jack, with his wannabe writer’s  curiosity, wasn’t going to let that stop him.   00:07:09.760 --> 00:07:14.000 He took the claw hammer out of the dollar store  toolkit and pried the nails out of the wood   00:07:14.000 --> 00:07:20.240 until the door came swinging down, revealing the  darkness up ahead. Some kind of attic space. There   00:07:20.240 --> 00:07:25.280 was a flashlight in the top drawer of his desk,  and he had pretty decent upper body strength. 00:07:25.280 --> 00:07:29.840 If he wasn’t going to write, he  should at least do some exploring. 00:07:31.040 --> 00:07:35.600 He held the hard plastic of the flashlight between  his teeth like the blade of a pirate’s cutlass,   00:07:35.600 --> 00:07:38.400 carrying the hammer in one of his belt  loops, and gripped the edge of the   00:07:38.400 --> 00:07:47.120 hatch into the ceiling. He felt dust under his  fingertips and pulled himself up into the dark. 00:07:47.120 --> 00:07:52.080 The air was musty up here. He suppressed a  cough and scanned the beam of the flashlight   00:07:52.080 --> 00:07:57.280 around the room, squinting, trying to drag  the abstract shapes from void into form.   00:07:57.280 --> 00:08:03.680 Jack could hardly believe what he was seeing:  This wasn’t some attic space, it was… The cab.   00:08:03.680 --> 00:08:08.640 An exact replica of the cab he’d spent three  weeks stewing away in, even down to the same   00:08:08.640 --> 00:08:13.669 Smith-Corona typewriter that he’d brought  with him, covered in a thick layer of dust. 00:08:13.669 --> 00:08:19.120 “What in the hell am I looking at?” Jack said,  before breaking into a dust-induced coughing fit. 00:08:19.120 --> 00:08:24.400 He looked out the window. Same view into the  dark forest, from just a little farther up. No,   00:08:24.400 --> 00:08:27.840 no, this didn’t make sense, he knew it.  He’d seen the fire tower from the outside,   00:08:27.840 --> 00:08:32.720 miles away, and he knew that there was no  second floor, he knew it. Just a sloped,   00:08:32.720 --> 00:08:38.080 corrugated-iron roof. He was standing  in a physically impossible room. 00:08:38.080 --> 00:08:41.680 It could have driven a person mad if they  thought about it too hard but what Jack   00:08:41.680 --> 00:08:47.120 was thinking was a whole lot simpler:  This would make for one hell of a book. 00:08:47.920 --> 00:08:51.040 He continued to sweep around the room  with his flashlight, looking for some   00:08:51.040 --> 00:08:55.200 inconsistency that would make the illusion  shatter around him, like light collapsing   00:08:55.200 --> 00:09:00.960 around a dying star. But he found something  even stranger. When his light hit the ceiling,   00:09:00.960 --> 00:09:07.800 he saw another impossibility: A second hatch in  the ceiling, nailed shut, just like the first one. 00:09:07.800 --> 00:09:12.560 It couldn’t happen twice, could it? No, no way… 00:09:12.560 --> 00:09:17.840 Just as before, he prized out the nails  and let the hatch fall free. He reached   00:09:17.840 --> 00:09:21.440 up again and pulled himself up into the  dark space above, illuminating it with   00:09:21.440 --> 00:09:27.680 his flashlight. And just as he’d wondered,  just as he’d hoped, it was another exact copy   00:09:27.680 --> 00:09:32.880 of the cab. Even down to the dust on the  Smith-Corona. This confirmed everything,   00:09:32.880 --> 00:09:36.960 he was dealing with a physical impossibility,  something that would rewrite the understanding   00:09:36.960 --> 00:09:42.640 of all of humanity. He’d break the story, hell,  he’d write the story. He’d be a millionaire. 00:09:42.640 --> 00:09:47.360 But curiosity still tugged at him. One  exact copy of the room was impossible,   00:09:47.360 --> 00:09:53.120 another exact copy was even more impossible.  But how far did the impossibility reach?   00:09:53.120 --> 00:09:57.760 He had to know, had to see the end of it.  It’d only make the story more interesting. 00:09:57.760 --> 00:10:03.040 Another hatch, another climb, another  cab. Another hatch, another climb,   00:10:03.040 --> 00:10:08.080 another cab. Another hatch, another climb,  another cab. It went on and on like that,   00:10:08.080 --> 00:10:13.120 he was astonished, counting the ascent  into the tens. He lost count after fifty.   00:10:13.120 --> 00:10:16.880 When he looked out of the window, he was  so far up that he couldn’t even make out   00:10:16.880 --> 00:10:23.280 individual trees. Just an impossible,  indiscernible mass of deep, dark green. 00:10:23.280 --> 00:10:28.240 At a point it became compulsive to Jack. He  ignored the tiredness in his limbs, didn’t pay any   00:10:28.240 --> 00:10:33.600 mind to the trembling or the burns as he pulled  himself into the next level. Had he passed a   00:10:33.600 --> 00:10:39.680 hundred? Two hundred? Three hundred? He was so far  up in the air now and it was so dark out there. 00:10:39.680 --> 00:10:44.080 And then it stopped. There was no more  hatch in the ceiling. It somehow caused   00:10:44.080 --> 00:10:49.200 this immense wave of both disappointment and  relief, but at least now he knew he’d seen   00:10:49.200 --> 00:10:52.800 the full extent of it and he could make  his way back down to the lowest level,   00:10:52.800 --> 00:10:58.000 where he could write all this down  and tell his story to the world. 00:10:59.920 --> 00:11:03.920 It was at this exact moment, when he  was turning to jump back down the hatch,   00:11:03.920 --> 00:11:08.800 that he saw the walkways. There was a door in  the side of the cabin that wasn’t there before,   00:11:08.800 --> 00:11:14.000 one leading out to what seemed like a complex  web of rope bridges, which in turn led to more   00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:19.640 cabins suspending out there in the dark, which led  off into more rope bridges and on and on and on. 00:11:19.640 --> 00:11:25.040 He… He had to know… He just had to. 00:11:25.040 --> 00:11:27.760 He stepped out of the cabin  into the freezing night air,   00:11:27.760 --> 00:11:31.760 and walked across the rickety bridge.  He looked out at the expanse of it,   00:11:31.760 --> 00:11:38.080 each rope bridge seeming like a singular thread in  some gigantic spider web woven across the skies. 00:11:38.080 --> 00:11:41.760 And then he realized he wasn’t alone. 00:11:41.760 --> 00:11:45.760 There was a man on one of the other  bridges, just standing there, staring   00:11:45.760 --> 00:11:50.400 off in the other direction. Jack screamed  out to him, trying to get his attention,   00:11:50.400 --> 00:11:54.800 but he didn’t move. Jack had to get closer,  maybe this stranger had some answers,   00:11:54.800 --> 00:11:59.360 something that could add to the story  somehow. Make it even deeper, richer. 00:11:59.360 --> 00:12:03.600 He crossed two different bridges, passing  through two different cabins in the process,   00:12:03.600 --> 00:12:07.600 until he was finally able to approach  the figure on the bridge. Details came   00:12:07.600 --> 00:12:11.520 into sharper relief. The man’s  large frame, his plaid shirt,   00:12:11.520 --> 00:12:18.240 the edges of a bushy beard. Like Paul Bunyan,  Jack thought to himself, and came to a halt. 00:12:18.240 --> 00:12:21.520 There was silence. Neither of them moved. 00:12:22.080 --> 00:12:24.160 “Derek?” Jack said. 00:12:24.160 --> 00:12:30.080 Slowly, the figure - Derek, presumably  - turned around. Jack gasped. 00:12:30.080 --> 00:12:33.840 The skin on his face was all  wrong. Like ill-fitting clothes,   00:12:33.840 --> 00:12:37.760 it was stretched across a skull that it  was never meant to cover, with these wild,   00:12:37.760 --> 00:12:42.560 staring eyes and a mouth of vicious  fangs. It gave as much of a smile   00:12:42.560 --> 00:12:48.160 as it could with such little control over  its face, and began striding towards Jack. 00:12:48.160 --> 00:12:50.160 He thought about begging for “Derek” to stop,   00:12:50.160 --> 00:12:54.640 but on some level, Jack knew that his words  would mean nothing to this thing. Instead,   00:12:54.640 --> 00:12:57.920 he reflexively grabbed for the hammer  and pulled it out of his belt loop,   00:12:57.920 --> 00:13:02.480 lunging for Derek and swinging the hammer  down towards his head with tremendous force. 00:13:02.480 --> 00:13:06.640 It just embedded into the skin of his  forehead. Derek didn’t even stumble.   00:13:06.640 --> 00:13:10.480 His wrong-smile broadened,  and he kept walking forward. 00:13:10.480 --> 00:13:15.440 Jack could barely even scream  when the hands closed around him. 00:13:15.440 --> 00:13:20.240 In a distant office, Tabby sat next to her  radio, listening to music to pass the time,   00:13:20.240 --> 00:13:24.320 when the speakers crackled into life.  It was the familiar voice of Jack,   00:13:24.320 --> 00:13:28.240 sounding a little frazzled, raw around  the edges. But it was still him. 00:13:28.240 --> 00:13:31.920 “Tabby… Tabby, are you there?” the voice said. 00:13:31.920 --> 00:13:36.000 Tabby picked up the receiver. “Yeah,  Jack, I’m here, everything okay?” 00:13:36.000 --> 00:13:42.560 The ragged voice said, “Oh, Tabby,  more than okay, things are wonderful.   00:13:43.120 --> 00:13:47.120 You wouldn’t believe the  things I’ve seen tonight.” 00:13:47.120 --> 00:13:51.920 Weird, Tabby thought. He sounds  spaced, is he on something? 00:13:51.920 --> 00:13:57.040 “But Tabby, I’m a little worried,” the  voice said. “I think I saw smoke… from   00:13:57.040 --> 00:14:00.320 the trees… I need you to come check it out.” 00:14:00.320 --> 00:14:04.720 That lit the proverbial fire under her.  Tabby grabbed her forest ranger hat. 00:14:04.720 --> 00:14:06.640 “I’m on my way,” she said. 00:14:06.640 --> 00:14:10.880 “Please hurry,” the voice said  back. Tabby didn’t realize,   00:14:10.880 --> 00:14:17.040 but the voice was practically shaking  with an unrecognizable kind of desire. 00:14:17.040 --> 00:14:22.000 The thing wearing Jack put down his  receiver and smiled in the dark of the cab,   00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:25.120 reaching up and readjusting the skin of his face,   00:14:25.120 --> 00:14:29.840 making sure that its eyes could get a good  view though the eyeholes. When it grinned,   00:14:29.840 --> 00:14:35.600 it grinned with long, pointed teeth that it  licked clean of blood with a writhing tongue. 00:14:35.600 --> 00:14:40.160 It sat on Jack’s bed and looked at the  hatch on the ground. It just needed to   00:14:40.160 --> 00:14:45.600 be patient. Tabby would be here soon, and  good thing, too. It was already feeling   00:14:45.600 --> 00:14:52.640 hungry again. Perhaps Tabby’s skin would  be a better fit even better than Jack’s. 00:14:52.640 --> 00:14:56.000 What Jack and many others fell  victim to there was an anomaly   00:14:56.000 --> 00:15:01.520 known to the SCP Foundation as  SCP-3333, codenamed “The Tower.”   00:15:01.520 --> 00:15:05.760 It’s not unusual for something contained  by the SCP Foundation to have a body count,   00:15:05.760 --> 00:15:12.160 but SCP-3333 is a rare example of an anomaly  that has a high body count among civilians and   00:15:12.160 --> 00:15:18.400 Foundation personnel. All because, as Jack found  out the hard way, appearances can be deceiving. 00:15:18.400 --> 00:15:24.480 It’s an anomaly with two main components: Spatial  and biological. Spatial accounts for the location,   00:15:24.480 --> 00:15:29.360 a fire lookout tower with a cabin that extends  into seemingly infinite other cabins. The   00:15:29.360 --> 00:15:33.760 “biological” element accounts for the creatures  that call that infinite series of cabins their   00:15:33.760 --> 00:15:38.400 home, and who gleefully prey on anyone unlucky  enough to find themselves exploring them. 00:15:38.400 --> 00:15:42.640 When news of the disappearances and reports  of impossible spaces reached the Foundation,   00:15:42.640 --> 00:15:46.880 they sent a Mobile Task Force to investigate.  The Task Force traversed hundreds of floors   00:15:46.880 --> 00:15:52.160 worth of cabins, until they briefly dropped  contact, and then began behaving strangely.   00:15:52.160 --> 00:15:57.680 This was assumed to be the true anomalous power  of SCP-3333, disorienting people, altering   00:15:57.680 --> 00:16:03.200 their behavior, until subsequent investigators  discovered piles of organs and bones in the dark. 00:16:03.200 --> 00:16:08.400 It was only then, too late to prevent many deaths  and an inexcusable level of Foundation security   00:16:08.400 --> 00:16:13.600 compromised, that the Foundation really realized  what was going on. The entities inside the spatial   00:16:13.600 --> 00:16:20.000 anomaly, dubbed SCP-3333-1, were emptying  out their victims and wearing their skin,   00:16:20.000 --> 00:16:25.840 transforming into a workable facsimile and  using it to seek out and do the same to others. 00:16:25.840 --> 00:16:30.240 And when you consider the number of experienced  Foundation personnel that have died in the cold,   00:16:30.240 --> 00:16:36.320 dark world of SCP-3333, you begin to realize  that people like Jack and Tabby never really   00:16:36.320 --> 00:16:41.600 stood any kind of chance. So if ever you find  yourself in a certain Washington national park,   00:16:41.600 --> 00:16:45.600 and you see the alluring silhouette of  a fire lookout tower on the horizon,   00:16:45.600 --> 00:16:52.480 my best advice is to walk in the other  direction as fast as you possibly can. 00:16:52.480 --> 00:16:55.200 Want more nightmarish anomalies  that’ll really get under your   00:16:55.200 --> 00:16:59.120 skin - pun absolutely intended? I  recommend you check out my file,   00:16:59.120 --> 00:17:04.160 “You Won't Realize This Parasite  Has Stolen Your Body (SCP-150).”