SCP-270 Secluded Telephone

SCP Explained - Story & Animation

SCP-270 is a nondescript black phone of mid-20th century make. What makes SCP-270 of continued interest is the audio stream from the earphone, which has since been discovered to contain encrypted messages that are of value to the Foundation. Said ciphers are referred to as SCP-270-1.  LIKE & SUBSCRIBE to SCP Explained - Story & Animation  Follow us on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@scpexplainedofficial  Join our Discord, share your SCP art, submit video feedback, chat with other fans...: https://discord.gg/scpexplained   Please let us know in the comments which SCP's we should cover next   Narrated by https://www.youtube.com/c/hitherehunter  Content relating to the SCP Foundation, including the SCP Foundation logo, is licensed under Creative Commons Sharealike 3.0 and all concepts originate from http://www.scp-wiki.net and its authors.   SCP-270 Secluded Telephone is based on "SCP-270" by Mimi_42: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-270  #scpexplained #scp #animation

Transcript

00:00It started, as most horrifying things do, with a YouTube video.

00:04An upload of Matt Brewstein of the FunXplain channel, known for his travelogues across the globe.

00:11Discovering and documenting bizarre discoveries, Matt was deep in the forests of a country that were not at liberty to

00:18disclose,

00:18searching for a cryptid that locals claimed to have seen wandering through the trees at night.

00:23But instead of a phony baloney local legend, he stumbled upon something real, and something that might just hold the

00:30key to saving humanity.

00:33Or, if its call isn't heeded, ending it.

00:36The livestream was flagged by a Foundation webcrawler, and immediately sent to the live media team at Site 11.

00:42They were treated to a stream of Matt, in his hiking gear, standing in the woods, and lifting up the

00:47handset of what looked like an old black rotary phone.

00:51Immediately, the caseworker watching the video was intrigued.

00:54Bro, you guys are not going to believe this!

00:57Matt said, holding up the handset speaker and moving it closer to the receiver on his own currently recording iPhone.

01:03I legit just found this phone right here in the woods.

01:05I expected it to just be trash somebody threw out, but no.

01:08It's literally plugged into the ground.

01:10Listen to this!

01:11The caseworker could hear a voice coming through the phone.

01:14A female monotone, speaking random words with relatively even intervals between them.

01:20Strange.

01:21Very.

01:22Very.

01:23Strange.

01:24Matt held the handset back and centered himself in the video again.

01:27This is freaking insane, you guys.

01:29Some number station type stuff we got here.

01:32Gotta like and subscribe if you want to know more about this crazy mystery.

01:35We also recommend you subscribe to SCP Explained to get bespoke animated videos based on the strangest entries of the

01:42SCP Foundation right here on your YouTube feed.

01:45Sorry, that just felt like the most organic time for me to bring that up.

01:48I'm definitely coming back here, guys.

01:51Matt continued.

01:52I'm going to bring in the whole FunXplain team to investigate this one.

01:55Yeah, the caseworker thought as he flagged the video and called in the mobile task force to investigate and silence

02:01the involved parties.

02:02That's not happening.

02:04After applying some amnestics, deleting the VOD of the stream, and having Matt make a public apology for faking the

02:11paranormal in his latest video, the actual investigation began.

02:15Agents, professional cryptographers, and even one or two technomancers were sent in to take a closer look at the phone,

02:22now designated SCP-270, the secluded telephone, and see what kind of secrets it was keeping from them.

02:30At the time, nobody had any idea just how consequential the discovery of this little phone would end up being

02:36to all of their lives, and to the fate of humanity.

02:39It was a relatively small contingent of agents studying the phone at first.

02:44Matt was indeed telling the truth that the wire coming out of the phone was embedded into the forest floor,

02:49and no matter how deep they seemed to dig, the wire kept tracing down, down, down into the earth.

02:57However, on the level of pure construction, there wasn't anything actually all that strange about the device.

03:03Sure, it almost constantly received strange calls from a single source, but when the phone was taken apart, there wasn't

03:10anything in its construction that suggested anything other than a non-anomalous, typical corded rotary phone.

03:16But if the phone itself was nothing special, the calls were extremely perplexing.

03:22Matt's own comparison to a numbers station, infamous Cold War radio stations that seemingly released code over the airwaves for

03:29deeply embedded agents, wasn't entirely off-base.

03:33But the range of things coming in through the SCP-270 phone were actually much broader and stranger than that

03:39could have ever prepared them for.

03:41In its broadest sense, when the Foundation first discovered the phone, they heard a mildly distorted female voice speaking in

03:49a low, even tone.

03:50She would list off names with seemingly no context.

03:54She would speak in strange phrases like,

03:56The crow caws only beneath the bloody moon when the wheat is ripe for harvest.

04:01She would read off sequences of seemingly random numbers, give quotations from sources ranging from popular movies, to books, to

04:09things as obscure as an instruction manual for a discontinued brand of Swedish electric whisk.

04:15Sometimes the phone would play these same quotes, but mangled through audio editing into strange nonsense.

04:21Strings of strange letters with seemingly no discernible meaning, incomprehensible words, sometimes peculiar and unsettling noises not made by any

04:31known animal, languages not yet recorded in the SCP Foundation hyperversal language catalog, peculiar free associating monologues,

04:39the full text of nursery rhymes and folktales from a wide range of human cultures, and some from distinctively non

04:46-human cultures, which has researchers at the Foundation to wonder if we're even dealing with a human on the other

04:53end of the line here.

04:54But this continuing stream of endless, almost maddening audio also features more than what you could contain within the limits

05:01of human speech, too.

05:02Instrumental melodies, metal scraping noises, some of which have been calibrated to sound almost like a grim, industrial parody of

05:10classical music pieces.

05:12Morse code messages, pained human screaming, computer programming languages, pig Latin, condescending laughter, backwards music, and conversations that appear to

05:22have been recorded surreptitiously,

05:24ranging from high-intensity, top-secret political discussions to debates about grocery lists around family kitchen tables.

05:30And in, amongst all this, what seems like periods of eerie silence.

05:36Of course, it would be easy to hear all of this and assume that what we're looking at here is

05:41almost like a radio station,

05:42personally programmed by someone with a severe head injury or a number of intense chemical dependencies.

05:49But if you're ready to write it off like that, I'm sorry to say that you probably wouldn't get very

05:54far at the SCP Foundation.

05:56Here, lateral thinking, an investigative mindset, and an ability to tolerate large degrees of trauma are the greatest personal assets.

06:06Foundation cryptographers knew that what they were looking at here was code, pure and simple.

06:11They just needed to establish a cipher that would let them see the signal amongst the noise.

06:16It took weeks to create any kind of comprehensible message out of the chaos that eternally spewed out of the

06:21earphone.

06:22But when they did, the small team gathered inside the SCP-270 observation tent froze in genuine fear.

06:30It was a message telling them about some critical flaw inside SCP-682's containment chamber.

06:36Something that, any day now, the monstrous, hard-to-destroy reptile would easily exploit to breach containment and take untold

06:44lives in the process.

06:46Expectations were measured at first, until researchers and containment specialists at Site-19 checked and saw that the message about

06:53the critical containment flaw was absolutely correct.

06:56In a mad dash, they were able to correct the flaw and stop the breach before it even happened.

07:01Who knows how much money and how many lives were saved by decoding that one message?

07:06And with everything that had happened, with the constant deluge of audio leaving the phone, what would be the chances

07:13that the message had been a fluke?

07:15It wasn't long after this that they were able to decode another message, a set of coordinates and a warning

07:21to bring as many armored men as possible to the area.

07:24This was how the SCP Foundation first discovered SCP-082, a cannibalistic humanoid known as Ferdinand the Cannibal, and was

07:32able to capture him with relatively minimal loss of life.

07:36Not long after, another message was decoded, revealing a plan by the Chaos Insurgency to perform a raid on Site

07:42-75 and steal several anomalies.

07:45But with the advanced knowledge of exactly how the raid was going to occur, the Foundation was able to put

07:51preemptive defensive and counter-offensive measures into place, quickly neutralizing the raid before it could even begin.

07:58This was more than enough to convince the directors of the nearby Site-11 of exactly what needed to happen

08:04next.

08:04Researchers and a huge team were dispatched to create a large perimeter around SCP-270 and form Outpost Delta, a

08:13satellite base with over 100 members of personnel, both researchers and guards.

08:18Their job was to monitor and decode the audio spilling out of SCP-270 to find any possible messages that

08:25could reveal more information that was extremely useful to the Foundation.

08:29And wouldn't you know it, they often did.

08:32In a matter of months, the team at Outpost Delta uncovered a huge amount of coded information, a lot of

08:38which not only helped the SCP Foundation, but actually prevented a number of XK-class end-of-the-world scenarios.

08:44Clearly, Outpost Delta was worth any amount of funding or personnel that could possibly be diverted to the project.

08:50But for every vital piece of information, there were just as many peculiar duds as they came to be known

08:56around the Outpost,

08:57and a few incidents that were nothing short of extremely disturbing for everyone involved.

09:02As for the duds, once a month-long process of intense decoding revealed not a valuable message, but instead 50

09:09colorful synonyms for the human butt.

09:12In another instance, it revealed a secret recipe for Dr. Ransom's beloved cherry pie recipe, which had always been a

09:19hit at Site-11 company picnics.

09:21This actually proved to be one of the most stressful and challenging parts of working at Site-11.

09:26There was really no way of knowing whether the lead you were pursuing was going to be anything valuable,

09:31or a revelation that you'd spent months of your finite life exploring something of little to no consequence at all.

09:37As a result, decoders signed to the case have simply been instructed to follow the leads that seem most promising

09:43at any given time and ignore the rest,

09:46though this process is hardly scientific.

09:48A few years after the establishment of Outpost Delta, the woman on the other end of the line suddenly ditched

09:54her calm, disconnected demeanor.

09:56Instead, she appeared to suddenly be extremely distressed.

09:59She was loudly sobbing, crying so hard that she could hardly breathe,

10:03in a manner that felt upsetting to multiple members of Outpost staff,

10:07some of whom had seen colleagues die horrible deaths right before their eyes.

10:10The woman was repeating,

10:21The audio abruptly cut out after that,

10:24playing what appeared to be a pre-recorded segment from an earlier broadcast,

10:28before resuming normal transmission exactly twelve minutes later.

10:32Except this time, the voice on the other end of the phone was male,

10:35and remained that way from this point onwards.

10:39Something about the change seemed to mark a turning point among all the researchers,

10:43as they became convinced that there was some deeper message to all the different codes,

10:48something that they were missing.

10:51Every time a code turned out to be nothing caused a considerable drop in morale,

10:55and two separate discoveries made this even worse.

10:58The first was that the periods of silence in the broadcasts were not actually silence.

11:03Using advanced audio analysis hardware and software,

11:07they were able to discover that the silent periods were actually just audio played at a frequency

11:12alternatingly too low or high for human ears to properly hear them.

11:16This sparked a wave of panic and paranoia.

11:19Researchers began frantically revisiting silent segments in the years' worth of audio

11:23they'd already recorded and processed since the establishment of the Outpost.

11:27Maybe there was some vital clue that they could have missed.

11:30The other event that threw the whole Outpost into chaos

11:33came when a new researcher added on to the Outpost staff revisited one of the dud segments.

11:38They actually found there was a secret message that allowed the SCP Foundation

11:42to stop another looming XK-class end-of-the-world scenario.

11:47This, naturally, also had everyone at the Outpost panicked,

11:51requesting more resources and more staff to go back over all the previously recorded audio

11:56and search for any key codes that they may have missed, even in the apparent duds.

12:01It turned up the heat even more when the audio itself suddenly started to become a lot harder to decode.

12:06The encryption methods became more convoluted and extreme,

12:10taking each code longer to process while more of the endless reel of data kept gushing in.

12:15Louder background noise was added to much of the flow,

12:18making even the intelligible words much harder to hear.

12:22Sometimes multiple voices would be heard at once, talking over each other.

12:26And in one incident there was...

12:29Well, we can't tell you exactly what audio it played,

12:32but I can't say that one member of the Outpost was immediately put on mental health leave after.

12:37All of this seemed to be sending Outpost Delta to a boiling point,

12:41so much so that a message was appended to the file,

12:44requesting help directly from Level 5 members of Foundation staff

12:48as the situation spiraled out of control day by day.

12:51The message detailed just how dire things were getting.

12:54Paranoia and fear were running rampant at Outpost Delta.

12:58The level of pressure on each of the researchers to find meanings in the data,

13:02knowing that lives were almost always on the line,

13:04was pushing them close to the edge.

13:07The employees are regularly cycled in and out of the outpost,

13:10and given Class A amnestics to forget their time there,

13:14reassigning them to low-stress positions,

13:16and only bringing them back when they've had time to cool down.

13:19But that's not good enough anymore.

13:22The Foundation has found that even though the Class A amnestics

13:25can make researchers forget their time working with SCP-270,

13:29the increased sense of paranoia, fear, and general dread remains.

13:33And as more staff are cycled in and out,

13:36this condition seems to be a quiet epidemic spreading across the entire SCP Foundation.

13:42All this leads us to perhaps our ultimate question.

13:46Was SCP-270 an advanced warning system sent here to help the SCP Foundation

13:51catch some of its greatest threats early?

13:53Or was SCP-270 itself the greatest threat,

13:57with an insidious plan to force the SCP Foundation

14:00to tear itself to pieces from sheer paranoia?

14:03Now check out A Day in the Life of SCP Mobile Task Force 049 Experiments

14:09and Terrifying AI SCP and Other Tech SCPs

14:12that will make you turn your phone off for more.

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