SCP International

They are dead.
Everyone is dead.
And I am alone.
But I cannot die before completing this report.
Otherwise, no one will ever know what happened.
I cannot, I do not want for it to happen.
Whether you are a being like us or not, even one from the surface, please read what I have written.

We were one mind. Many bodies, this is true, but we were a whole. Generated by the Great Mother, our fulcrum, our centerpiece, what you can now find in the center of Goliban, our beloved city. Now it is just a piece of stone with no function or conscience, but it reminded us of who we were and it did not seem right to get rid of it.
Hundreds of years to build our home, I remember everything.
Everyone of us remembered everything.
The work that made us proud to be who we were is now but a memory. The buildings are silent, nothing moves in them.
On the streets the carcasses of my companions, other parts of myself. Cutruls.
For decades we worked as one entity, it was beautiful. We built tunnels, enlarged the central cave and The City grew. More and more majestic.
There were no disputes, we were of one mind, there was no doubt, there was no imperfection.
Then one day we discovered the surface. It was unbelievable, something never seen before, living species so different from us, that we had never encountered anything other than an insect found in the upper tunnels.
The discovery filled our mind with astonishment and curiosity. We have never felt like that.
However, this was not to last.

Exploring the surface was exciting, many bodies were sent out to explore this strange new cavern.
Immense, beautiful, and luminous.
The creatures that inhabited it were strange and different. None looked like us.
We did not believe there was intelligent life, but we were wrong.
They had two lower limbs and two upper limbs. They were similar in appearance to many other beings on the surface, but they walked and behaved differently.
It seemed that they could actually communicate with sound. It was amazing; to our minds the perception of vibrations in the air had always been a secondary, useless sense.
We wanted to connect, but how?
We were too different. We observed them and they observed us.
Yet the intentions of our species could not have been more different.
One day one of the groups of bodies on the surface was attacked by these beings. They possessed stone tools. When they hit the first of us, thousands of cracks formed on its surface. After a few moments, it fell to the ground.
Pain.
Never before have we experienced such a thing. Loss of a part of us.
The battle continued. Our hands easily pierced the limbs of the surface beings and we were more coordinated, but they were many. We lost five bodies. When darkness fell, we sent a group to retrieve them and bring them home.
We did not know what to do. We were shocked by pain and hatred. Reasoning had become difficult with our collective mind torn apart by these feelings.
These powerful emotions were destabilizing our mind. It would have gone mad, leading to the destruction of the species.
We had to act. We had to adapt.
It was then that the idea was born.

It took days to choose.
The city was standing still. All of its forces reasoning.
In the end, the decision was taken.
We would be divided. Our mind would have been dismembered and each body would have become an individual.
This way, the suffering of the individual would not destabilize the community. This way, the species survived even if some of its members perished.

The preparations took weeks. Rules of behavior and a written language had to be created, we would no longer share a single mind and we had to be able to communicate with each other.
When the moment finally arrived, it was strange.
Nothing seemed to have changed, but I felt empty.
Then I realized that I was no longer receiving information from hundreds of bodies.
Only from my own.
I felt alone.
I ran out of the building I was in and met another body.
So I approached the wall of a nearby building and started to write. They did the same.
"Hello"
"Hello"
"How are you?"
"Funny. Empty. And you?"
"Me too, but truth be told I find it interesting."
There. The first difference between our thoughts.
I found it disturbing. But deep down they were right.
"What should we do?"
"I honestly do not know."
"It was decided to reach the Great Mother, right?"
"Yes, I think so. Let's go."
So we moved in the direction of the city center. We met a lot of other bodies. Agitated. Frightened.
What we found was terrible. The Great Mother, who gave life to us all and who had always been the focus of our shared existence, was dead. To look at it, the huge crystal looked the same. But it was dead. There was nothing left in there.
However, we could not allow ourselves to despair. We began to distribute tasks to the various bodies, or Cutruls, I should say at this point.
As I waited for my turn I started to think.
In each of the beings before me, there was an individual. Single, with thoughts of their own. Maybe similar to mine, maybe not.
It was hard to believe, but there it was.

I admit that initially, things went well. Everything seemed to be in order, we continued to work, to build, to dig.
We continued to live.
Soon, however, the problems of this new reality began to appear.
Accidents, misunderstandings, disagreements, discussions. Everything was new to our species and we did not know how to deal with these situations properly.
The turning point was the discovery of the remains of a Cutrul about four months after the separation. It had been killed.
It was an unprecedented event. It had previously been inconceivable that one Cutrul could want to kill another.
The culprit was never found, but to be honest we never even tried to look for them carefully. We didn't know how to punish them, we had never had to deal with such a problem.
However, I doubt that it would not have happened sooner or later anyway. That this was the first such event was by chance.
It was by chance that this was the first step towards extinction.
The Goliban population lost faith in its own rules.
They lost faith in themselves.
In short, disorder began to spread through The City.
A part of society tried to set up a council to govern and maintain order. Many proposals were made, but never all agreed.
Many people openly rebelled against this attempt and clashes in the streets of The City became a sad daily occurrence.

By now, the fighting had turned into a real battle between two factions. Those who supported the idea of the council and those who did not.
It does not matter which side I fought for. What matters is that when I crushed the last opponent in the central square, I found myself surrounded by the remains of my comrades.
Of my brothers.
I searched the whole city in vain, there was nobody.
I stand alone.
The despair I felt at that realization makes me suffer days later.
For hours and hours, I was holed up in what had become my home without the strength to do anything.
Loneliness was something I barely understood before.
And now it is consuming me.
Yesterday I decided to write this diary.
Not only to give a warning to whoever reads it, but to remember that we existed.
To not be forgotten.
My life is all I have left.
My life is suffering.
I have no choice but to die.
It is a hard choice, I know. But I cannot live like this, hence why I want to throw myself into the well north of The City and to fracture myself in thousands of fragments on its bottom.
I hope you have learned something. You cannot always run away from your suffering, but I do not know how else to do it.
Farewell.