In this article:
- SCP 343 is one of the friendliest threats to humanity that the SCP Foundation has found.
- The SCP Foundation’s protocol for containing the humanoid anomaly doesn’t really work all that well.
- Despite all appearances and attitudes of being the God from Abrahamic religions, the Foundation firmly believes SCP 343 is not God.
- Two other SCPs have a stronger case for being the actual Abrahamic God.
Most SCPs kept in captivity by the SCP Foundation are murderous beasts and Lovecraftian horrors, but every now and then, the organization comes across one that seems to be a regular person.
Well, as close as you can get to a regular person in a fictional world about anomalous creatures because in that case, regular just means someone who doesn’t try to kill Foundation personnel outright.
Enter SCP 343, one of the few anomalies that will invite you into its containment cell, conjure up a garden of earthly delights, and make you a cup of tea.
The friendly, almost fatherly, SCP has been a source of joy for many of the staff stationed on Site 17. His kindness towards staff makes it feel almost wrong to question his motivations, but an experienced agent like you will soon notice what’s wrong with SCP 343’s file.
What Is SCP 343?
SCP 343 is a male humanoid anomaly. That’s all that can be definitively said about him. Attempting to deduce further details about SCP 343’s appearance results in either proof of it disappearing from records and memory or an inability to perceive additional information about his looks.
Either way, what’s clear is that the anomaly evades identification and definition in a way that isn’t completely on its own terms.
SCP 343 is described as being “raceless” however no notes on his age or coloration appear in his file. Everything else that the Foundation identifies SCP 343 by is based on his demeanor. He’s a great lover of people, often being seen chatting up personnel and altering his containment cell to make it more welcoming to guests.
Personnel who come to visit SCP 343 always seem to have just enough time in their day to drop by and they always leave in a better mood. His demeanor and abilities are why Site 17 personnel have nicknamed the anomaly God, after the central deity of Abrahamic religions like Christianity.
SCP 343, for the most part, seems to agree with what personnel believe him to be and stays within the site โ except for when he suddenly disappears and comes back with a cheeseburger.
How Does the Foundation Keep SCP 343 Contained?
Asking whether SCP 343 can be contained comes down to the question of whether you can keep God in containment.
The SCP Foundation obviously doesn’t have a real containment procedure for SCP 343 aside from asking him to come back every now and then so they can keep track of his whereabouts.
SCP 343’s “containment cell,” not that it’s doing much containing, is a 6.1 by 6.1 meter room according to official records. This hasn’t stopped SCP 343 from turning the room into an Old English style home several times larger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Unable to keep SCP 343 away from personnel, the Foundation tried to issue orders that prohibited staff under an SL-4 security clearance from making visits to SCP 343. The order was made to no avail.
Guards stationed outside the anomaly’s cell often abandon their posts or simply let other staff enter the containment chamber, likely due to SCP 343’s anomalous effects.
Given what we know about SCP 343, it’s easy for an under-experienced agent to assume that SCP 343 really is the Abrahamic God, but if you take the time to check the files on other SCPs that should be related to him, you’ll find that none of them seem to care about his existence.
Why SCP 343 Isn’t God
SCP 343’s file leans heavily towards the interpretation that he is God. However, reviewing the files of other SCPs with confirmed Biblical origins reveal that none of them mention SCP 343, much less refer to him as God.
Not once in the Addendum 076-2 did SCP 076-2 mention God or SCP 343, preferring instead to talk about other agents he had a begrudging respect for despite them being responsible for his containment.
When asked to translate documents from ancient Sumerian, SCP 076-2 only expresses interest in The Epic of Gilgamesh. The only time he does react to someone who is part of his Biblical story is when he is shown the symbol branded on SCP 073‘s forehead.
For those of you who haven’t read either document before, SCP 076-2 is “Able” and SCP 073 is “Cain,” though their personalities and abilities are the exact opposite of what the Biblical tale claims them to be, almost as if their names were switched.
Assuming that SCP 073 is the brother who would revere God the most, it’s strange that he never mentions SCP 343.
The O5 Command Dossier, a document that tracks all of the purposefully contradictory accounts of who the O5 council members are, includes one O5-1 member nicknamed “Eve” who appears to have been one of the founding members of the SCP Foundation. Her file mentions both her sons and Adam, but not SCP 343.
One of the SCP’s 001 proposals, The Gate Guardian, makes no mention of SCP 343 despite SCP 001 clearly being the angel tasked with keeping humanity out of the Garden of Eden. The experimentation logs listed under Addendum 001-a also show no records of SCP 343 ever being presented to the Gate Guardian, even though both SCP 073 and SCP 076 have been brought to see SCP 001 before, resulting in both brothers refusing to approach the guardian.
Of course, you might be thinking that SCP 343 couldn’t possibly know about the other SCPs if he wasn’t told by the Foundation about their containment, but that just raised more questions that work against his favor. Why would he need to be told if God is supposedly omniscient? Why did SCP 343 never assist the personnel he claims to care about when they were being slaughtered by SCP 076-2?
Lastly, how come he never talks about the other Biblical SCPs?
SCP 343’s Edits to His Own Document Show He’s Just a Reality Bender and a Really Stupid One, Too
Unlike Anantashesha, the Mind Eater, SCP 343’s true nature as a non-deity is easier to suss out.
SCP 343 is just a reality bender. He’s a powerful reality bender, but he’s not experienced enough to be as old as he claims to be or wise enough to be as divine as he says he is. The proof is in the edits SCP 343 has made to his own document.
There are several things wrong with SCP 343’s file that reveal his lack of omniscience. A true capital-G God would know what changes to make to his own file to make it appear consistent with the Foundation’s own SCP classification system.
SCP 343’s file states that he is a Safe class SCP, contrary to standard classification procedures that call for all SCPs that show signs of intelligence to be classified as Euclid. But that’s just scratching the surface.
Remember that SCP 343 is revealed to have considerable cognitohazardous abilities and has been documented to leave and return to Site 17 at will.
At the bare minimum, he should be classified as a Keter class anomaly.
Additionally, SCP 343’s file shows a messy attempt at cleaning up his murder of a Foundation researcher. While Addendum #343-2 shows that SCP 343 retroactively erased a doctor from Foundation records, the simple fact that it doesn’t take much work to figure it out says a lot about SCP 343’s true abilities.
He’s unable to erase all records of Dr. โโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโ that he doesn’t know about and the ones he knows about, he doesn’t do a great job of erasing either.
In Addendum #343-3, Foundation personnel are able to recover data from the network drive assigned to Dr. โโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโ, showing, again, that traces of his existence remain even if his coworkers all believe he never existed.
The network drive contained Documents #343-1a and Document #343-1b which told of how Dr. โโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโ’s reports to senior personnel seemed to disappear before it could reach them and how SCP 343 thwarted dr. โโโโโโโโโโโโ โโโโโโโโโโโ’s attempts to question visitors about their motives for visiting SCP 343.
Okay, so SCP 343 isn’t God. What is he?
Like all good SCP tales, there’s no singular canon that defines what the SCPs are outside of their documents. However, stories about SCP 343’s life outside of the Foundation exist.
It Might Have Been provides an answer to why SCP 343 liked living in the Foundation’s containment cell so much: he was safest under their containment.
Keeping consistent with the file, It Might Have Been is written as a goodbye letter from SCP 343 to the Site 17 personnel. In it, he admits that he’s a relatively young reality bender born to a poor family living in the Prussian Empire.
After accidentally pausing his father permanently, SCP 343 ran away and was discovered by the Global Occult Coalition, a.k.a the GOC, which SCP 343 referred to as “crows.” Unlike the SCP Foundation, the GOC is committed to hunting down and destroying any anomalies it finds.
Eventually, SCP 343 was discovered in Prague by the SCP Foundation and their non-hostile treatment of him made him stay.
But if SCP 343 really isn’t the Abrahamic God, then which SCP is?
If SCP 343 Isn’t God, What SCP Is?
Two other SCPs are heavily implied to be connected to the Abrahamic God, SCP 1348 and SCP 1730.
A quick disclaimer though: if you know another SCP that is implied to be or related to God and it isn’t listed here, feel free to mention that in the addendums (read: comments) below since it’s not exactly feasible to manually read around 7,000 SCP entries for the purposes of this document.
Moving on.
SCP 1348 is a Keter class SCP located in El Taebah, Syria. It’s not a humanoid SCP but is instead a cave complex that contains several Biblically coded anomalous instances such as SCP 1348-02, a humanoid performing a complex ritual to prevent an XK class end of the world scenario, and the mangled body of a humanoid with ten limbs, most of which have been amputated. The body is implied to be the remains of a Biblically accurate angel.
A close reading of SCP 1348 tells us that God is “injured” and ailing, unable to have full control of where he is and what he is, though he still retains his omniscience and omnipotence. The reason for his illness? Waning human belief.
SCP 1730 isn’t one single anomaly but several anomalies and an anomalous event where an SCP Foundation from a different alternate universe ends up in ours.
According to their logs, they “contained God. Not just any god, either. The Abrahamic God. The actual, thunder and lightning, Y-H-W-H, fire and brimstone god.”
Whichever SCP among the two is God, either of them is more plausible than SCP 343.