Item #: SCP-2000
Object Class: Thaumiel
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-2000 is the Foundation's highest-priority asset. Its location beneath the Yellowstone Caldera is known to O5 Council members only. The facility is self-sustaining, self-repairing, and requires no active maintenance. Staff rotation protocols are classified Level 5. SCP-2000 is to be held in permanent readiness.
Description: SCP-2000 is a facility. It occupies a complex of chambers and tunnels extending approximately 4 kilometers beneath Yellowstone National Park. It was not built by the Foundation. It was not built by any government. The age of its construction cannot be determined by available methods.
SCP-2000's purpose is the reconstruction of human civilization.
The facility contains the following, in brief: comprehensive genetic archives for every known species of plant and animal. Stored embryos. Stored seeds. Complete archives of recorded human knowledge in multiple redundant formats. The facility is capable of producing cloned human beings at scale, introducing false memories compatible with a constructed history, and distributing them across a depopulated Earth within an estimated recovery period of 60–80 years.
In other words: if humanity ends, SCP-2000 can restart it.
This is the Foundation's final contingency. This is why we contain. This is what we protect.
Addendum — Classified Note, O5-1:
The facility has a usage log.
We found it during the third survey. It is not a document we created. It was already there.
The log records activations of SCP-2000. It is written in a notation system we have partially decoded. It records dates in a calendar we do not recognize.
There are nine prior activations.
The most recent prior activation was approximately 10,000 years ago by our current reckoning.
We do not know what ended the civilization that preceded ours. We do not know if they had a Foundation. We do not know if they saw it coming.
We know they left this behind. We know they built the machine, or inherited it, or found it the way we found it.
We know that whatever they did, it wasn't enough.
The Foundation works every day to prevent an XK-class end-of-the-world scenario.
What the log tells us is: we are the tenth attempt.
What it does not tell us is whether any of the others made it past this point.