{$caption}
To: You 11:26PM (4 minutes ago)
From: Chris Aster <caster@site7.scp>
Subject: Doing okay?
Hey. Hope you got back to base safe after the service ended. I didn't hear the Condor taking off, but it was raining pretty hard, so you know. It was a nice funeral, I think. She would've liked it. Never was the type for big fancy events.
Anyhow, I was writing to share this. We found it on a USB among her possessions. Normally they have RAISA techs scan this sort of thing to make sure it's not anomalous, but I think they didn't even bother this time. If Maria Jones wanted to sneak something past the Foundation, she would've done it before she died, and probably would've gotten away with it too.
Sorry, got distracted again. Evie's taking it pretty hard. Take a look once you get back on-site. I think you'll appreciate it.
Chris Aster
RAISA Assistant Director
 |
1 attachment — site7.doss |
Foundation Secure Facility Dossier
RAISA Headquarters — Site-7
Official Designation: Foundation Protected Norton Bay RAISA Command/Data Center
Site Identification Code: RAISA-Site-7
FILESERV NOTICE: Significant edits have been made to this file while offline. Please connect with a SCiPnet uplink to sync file versions.
Hello. If you're reading this, it's quite likely I've died. Don't be too broken-up about it, it happens to all of us. My name is Maria Jones, and I served as the founding Director of RAISA and of Site-7 until my retirement four months ago in August of 2022. It's nice to meet you, whoever you are. More likely than not, a RAISA technician ordered to sort through my personal belongings.
If so, consider this a gift from an old woman for your troubles. In the throes of post-retirement idleness, I downloaded a copy of the .doss file (P.S: Please fix the backdoor allowing external access from the DEEPWELL Replica Sync Applet. Thank you.) of my Site and began making my own annotations. Some are my commentary; some are excerpts from the original Secure Facility Dossier from 1970. I hope they paint a clearer picture of the organization I have given 99 years of my life to cultivating. [2022]
General Information
Protected Site-07, during a storm.
SITE FUNCTION: Site-7 is a centralized command center for the Foundation Records, Archival, and Information Security Administration (RAISA). As such, the Site is built and tailored to provide a base for RAISA technicians to perform the vast array of duties that support the Foundation's technical backbone.
Until it was migrated into a secure pocket dimension, the SCiPnet server cluster was hosted at Site-7; the technical offices have remained, as have the AIAD Artificial Intelligence Farm and the PANOPTICON surveillance program.
The "pocket dimension" line is a lie, known only by a few trusted RAISA systems engineers. We do keep regular backups in several different dimensions (automatically every 30 minutes, if I remember), but the main working data set is required to be in our universe for latency reasons. [2022]
FOUNDED: Chartered on January 3rd, 1970, by O5 Edict #10243.
FOUNDING DIRECTOR: RAISA Director Maria Wesley Jones
LOCATION: 81 kilometers off the coast of Alaska, Norton Sound, Alaska, United States
COVER STORY: N/A (Shielded by means of SEP field)
SIZE: Total of 100,000 m2:
- 40,000 m2 (external surface area)
- 60,000m2 (internally-expanded area)
30,000 square meters, across 3 platforms. The largest technical site in the Foundation! [1970]
Site Overview
Site-07 Oil Rig Plan.
Protected Site-7's nickname among the wider Foundation is "the Site at the end of the world". This is well-earned.
Most employees of the Foundation will never visit or hear of Site-7. Among those that do, details are limited to it being a secure data center for RAISA. While technically true, this dramatically undersells the value and importance of the site — intentionally so, as the nickname was first disseminated by RAISA technicians themselves.
The individuals who do visit discover that in an organization of isolated facilities, Site-7 stands a cut above, well into the realm of the paranoid. It can only be reached after a series of commercial flights and a long drive across the frozen waste of western Alaska, followed by a short quadcopter ride (or, if you arrive during the seasonal blizzards, a longer boat trip) the 80 kilometers offshore to where the nine refurbished oil platforms lie. From shore, it looks like nothing more than an ever-present blizzard.
90% of personnel stationed at Site-7 belong to RAISA's various offices, and work on the vast cornucopia of projects under the Administration's purview. These range from the upkeep of SCiPnet (the inter-site database) or work on PANOPTICON (the Foundation's global surveillance program), to more esoteric applications of technology that the Foundation relies on, such as cybersecurity research to conceptually gap Foundation networks. The Engineering Office's small army of machinists handle the material and logistical challenges of running what is essentially an offshore city, aided by a select group of Thaumiel-class anomalies.
Protected Site-07.
The situation is a strange paradox: as the host of the Foundation's database but physically separated from civilization by miles of water, Site-7 is at once disconnected and intricately connected with the rest of the Foundation. All of this has contributed to a culture of staunch isolation and independence at the Site, as is often the case with technical specialists; doing work few see and even fewer understand, personnel at the Site at the end of the world are exceptionally tight-knit and willing to step up to the task at hand in the interest of helping their colleagues.
You cannot understand Site-7 without understanding how the Records, Archival, and Information Security Administration was born. They are so intertwined as to be inextricable, and in many cases functionally the same entity.
RAISA was officially created in 1969, but the reality is that it existed well before that. I was hired by the Foundation in 1963 in a programming position at Site-19. At the time, computers were a novelty. They had little use to the mission of containment outside of some limited tasks. No real database systems existed, and we were still decades off from having meaningful simulation technology. But the Foundation is and always has been cutting edge, and so there were computers, and where there are computers, there are programmers.
Back then, programming was a woman's job, akin to a secretary. I didn't see it that way. I saw the devices for what they were: limitless potential for organization. The problem was that we didn't have any kinds of standards. Most documents and records were still on paper, and every Division had a different method for loading and storing data, recording anomaly information, et cetera. And this is to say nothing of regional language differences.
So I worked. I got in touch with several key secretaries and programmers at 19, and we founded the first informal technical standards committee. The first task was standard personnel listings (e.g. an SCP's lead researcher, relevant departments). It was a pain, but after four months we unified all active research files to use the same system for employee listings. Luckily, the Site Director had our backs throughout this process. (And HR was very appreciative).
I pushed to initiate standardization more widely throughout the Foundation, meeting with other programmers from around the globe to start what ended up as a decade plus process of developing new formats for storing and searching the vast quantities of data the Foundation intakes every day. Soon I was visiting other sites to inspect their storage, write reports on data flows, and see what changes we had to make to our proposals. It was horribly slow and frustrating — nobody took us seriously. They scoffed and stonewalled us from accessing their records. Then Incident NEOLITHIC happened.
I'll spare you the dirty details, but a particularly nasty anomaly "woke up" after a botched feeding session, and decided to teleport 9,000 km away to Prague. Site-19 had the technology to keep it docile, but it was still a growing, screaming ball of plasma. And now it was in Europe, where none of that know-how existed.
Administration desperately tried to search through and mail over all the relevant documents, but by the time it arrived, the anomaly would've grown unmanageably big. Were it not for the fact that both sites were trialing our standardized SCP Containment Record Format, the heart of Europe would be a second star in our solar system.
They started taking us seriously after that. [2022]
Staffing Information
Site Director: N/A
RAISA Director: O5-2 (D. Rosen)
Maria Wesley Jones [1970]
On-Site Personnel: 389
83 [1970]
Site-7's unique status as fully intertwined with RAISA means that it does not have a designated Site Director; instead, the current RAISA Director occupies both positions, running both the Site and the organization it hosts. The day-to-day operations of the Site are delegated to the Subdirectors of the various offices. There are four offices, each handling part of RAISA's purview.
Additionally, Platform 9 (MOUNT AUGUST) is a restricted sector of the Site. There are no walkways leading to it, and aerial transport is only permitted with express authorization. Staffing information does not factor the number of personnel, if any, that are stationed at Platform 9.
Offices
The three platforms that make up the Site have finished the extensive process of refurbishment to suit our needs. Internal rooms have been expanded, drilling and monitoring equipment has been torn out and replaced with computers and magnetic tape recorders, underwater cables have been laid providing power and connection. Three platforms for the three wings of RAISA: Archival, Technical, and Engineering. [1970]
Records & Archival Office
Archival Subdirector: Head Archivist Sandra Wellick
Area(s): Site-7B (RAISA Vault)
Briefing: The Archival Division predates RAISA by almost twenty years, and was tasked with organizing and storing Foundation internal records; the idea of organizing all of the Foundation's documents was a pipe dream, so their purview was limited to documents like O5 Edicts and memos, diplomatic records, et cetera. It was only folded into RAISA as the Archival Office in 1985, with the construction of Site-7's satellite facility, Site-7B: the RAISA Mass DEEPWELL Storage Facility, affectionately referred to as the RAISA Vault, is still where most of the Archivists live and work.
The RAISA Vault is a support installation holding the vast majority of paper records after they were digitized into SCiPnet, constructed in an underground cave that was hermetically and ontologically sealed with prototype DEEPWELL technologies. I submitted the project proposal to the Council under the belief the cave was empty; I was mistaken. [2022]
Technical Office
Technical Subdirector: Chief Technician Evelyn McKay
Area(s): Platforms 3, 4, 5, 8 (STARSEEKER, DEEPWATCHER, PLAINGAZER, PARTHENON TOOTH)
Briefing: The Technical Office comprises most RAISA personnel and Site-7 resources, as well as almost half of the Site's platforms. The initial billet of the Office was simply the maintenance of SCiPnet, but has expanded wildly in recent years to include satellite observation, anomalous programming, technical standards, machine learning, and others. Personnel have backgrounds ranging from traditional computer security to anomalous languages; everything is applicable to the Foundation.
The Technical Office is Site-7's bread and butter; nearly all data we handle is, at one point or another, processed by the small army of technicians employed here. We do everything that can't be handled by the AICs — when someone needs support for a flawed file sync, a technician is with them. When someone's terminal has been taken over by an infohazard and needs to be quarantined, a technician is making the call to Site Security. And, god forbid, when a bug is discovered inside a Foundation service, a technician or ten are there trying to sniff it out. Seeing this office evolve from a handful of secretaries on dial-up to an offshore complex with over two hundred personnel has been one of the high points of my life. [2022]
Engineering Office
Engineering Subdirector: Head Engineer Rita Vargas
Area(s): Platform 1, 2 (ZHU DEEP, FJORD)
Briefing: The Engineering Office handles the mechanical issues associated with the Site, which are many. From cable management to physical gapping to hardware and paratechnology repair, they do it all. They also process all new materials brought onto the Site from the regular supply ship visits. The electricians, plumbers, and engineers are the invisible support network keeping the Site functional despite the never-ending cavalcade of problems and a scarcity of spare parts. It's a common refrain on the Site that if you're not sure where something is, stop looking for it and start looking for the nearest blue jumpsuit instead.
Living on an artificial archipelago 80 km offshore presents unique difficulties. Waste and power management are constant concerns, the unique pieces of hardware are near-constantly subjected to below-freezing conditions, and it's often said that if every wire at Site-7 was laid end-to-end, they would encircle China. The Engineering Office have the Sisyphean task of keeping a set of oil rigs older than many of the personnel themselves in working order. Crisis after crisis, incident after incident, the engineers have earned my hard-won respect for doing the impossible. [2022]
Security Office
Security Chief: Captain Pierre Gauthier
Area(s): Platform 7 (REDEYE)
Briefing: The Security Office mostly consists of the Site guards reporting to the security chief and patrolling the various platforms of the Site (with the notable exception of Platform 9, which has its own security force), but also has a sizable contingent of cybersecurity experts specializing in both mundane and anomalous network security. Despite the 'low-action' posting of Site-7, security personnel are plucked from the cream of the crop, regularly performing facility sweeps and participating in war games — the slightest gap in the proverbial castle walls could cause unspeakable damage.
There is a common misconception that technical security somehow supercedes physical security. The reality is often the opposite: the most secure server in the world means nothing if someone can walk right up to it. The company of Site Security Division soldiers that live on and patrol Site-7 are our answer to that threat. [2022]
Projects
Surveillance Division
Project Lead: Head Analyst Robert Chen
Area(s): Platforms 4, 5 (DEEPWATCHER, PLAINGAZER)
Auxiliary to: Security Office
Briefing: The Surveillance Division is primarily known for their maintenance of the PANOPTICON global surveillance network. Aside from this, the Division has several other duties as well, ranging from monitoring SCiPnet usage, access patterns for classified material, and analyzing stolen technological reports from groups of interest.
Globally, many different RAISA operatives perform Surveillance Division duties, such as installation or maintenance of access points, cameras, etc, but these are not officially part of the Division. Due to the need to ensure the highest operational security for analysts, all personnel are based in Site-7, with visits outside the facility requiring Site Director approval and a security accompaniment.
Few people realize RAISA has a Surveillance Division, and those who do assume it is solely responsible for keeping PANOPTICON up and running. While this is not entirely wrong, it misses the forest for the trees: the Surveillance Division is responsible for keeping an eye on *everybody*, both inside and outside the Foundation, and the threats that they pose.
The Division has scores of analysts who study reams of data, from whatever source, and determine what the risk is and who needs to know about it. A small outpost of the Department of Analytics is stationed on Platform 4, constantly attempting to improve the statistical models and AICs which keep a close eye on any new surveillance data. In particular, there is a heavy emphasis on technological espionage: we take no risks that the Foundation is ever left behind, or worse, taken by surprise.
Fun fact: The Department of Applied Influence runs several fake "Surveillance Division outposts" as honeypots. They're full of supposedly RAISA personnel working on surveillance systems, but in truth are fully staffed by counterintelligence officers. The tantalizing desire for a peek behind the curtain has led several groups of interest to unmask their own operatives for us. [2022]
Special Technology Applications Group (STAG)
STAG Director: Dr. Victor Moses
Area(s): Platform 9 (MOUNT AUGUST)
Auxiliary to: [REDACTED]
Briefing: [REDACTED]
STAG is to RAISA what RAISA is to the rest of the Foundation: fiercely independent and intensely secretive. I'm afraid I can't share much, since I don't know who'll be reading this or when. But in short, Lockheed Martin had a 'skunkworks' division granted broad autonomy and an almost unlimited budget to pursue whatever radical research and development projects they wanted, unburdened by bureaucracy or red tape. The results were some of the most important engineering advances of the century, and the system was adopted by many groups — including the Foundation. If the Foundation is the cutting edge of technology, then RAISA is the leading edge — and STAG the bleeding edge. [2022]
Notable Anomalous Implementations
Y-66 Acaster-Crow Thaumokinetic Runereactor
A one-of-a-kind alchemical-thaumaturgic reactor that produces the █,███ megawatt-hours of power that Site-7 consumes on a monthly basis. A thaumaturgic 'hot rune' is submerged in an alkahest solution that gradually dissolves it, the resulting vapors spinning a turbine and producing electricity similarly to a mundane nuclear reactor. Produced in 1989 by a joint task force of Applied Thaumaturgy, Alchemy, and Paratechnology Division personnel.
Artificial Intelligence Farm
A server farm kept isolated by the Artificial Intelligence Applications Division to 'breed' and train new shackled AICs. Site-7 is the origin facility for all Foundation AICs, which are then reset and uploaded to their host site. The exact process is classified Level 5/AIAD.
PANOPTICON System & Atreus Array
PLAINGAZER platform, the hub for PANOPTICON Control, under construction.
The Atreus Array is a network of 29 (12 geostationary, 17 LEO) satellites that provide real-time communications, weather, geographic, and anomalous data on Earth and the solar system. The PANOPTICON system is the global surveillance system that has allowed the Foundation to monitor anomalous activity and ongoing situations in nearly any location on the planet, patched into well over ███ million devices worldwide; it has been hardened and braced through anomalous means, including noospheric conceptual anchoring, to minimize an outage risk.
Ancillary Server Cluster
The PARTHENON TOOTH platform hosts a server cluster on which non-essential RAISA services, testing software, and other Foundation environments are hosted. The servers are regularly administered blessings/barakah/puja/et cetera by Tactical Theology Division personnel, and circuit boards have been printed in runic patterns. Additionally, the entire server cluster rests on an elevated platform that can be lowered directly into the sea in the event of a catastrophic meltdown; individual servers have been thaumaturgically waterproofed.
WARHOL Supercomputer
[REDACTED]
Site-7 has a lot more leeway in applications of the anomalous than the rest of the Foundation does. It's a bit of an idiosyncrasy — a Protected site that uses more anomalies than some others even contain. But then again, many things about RAISA are idiosyncratic.
The only way that these marvels of software and hardware engineering can be created is separated from the politics of Overwatch Command and the daily trials and tribulations of containment. Here, isolated and surrounded by the Bering Sea, we've created a floating city filled with the brightest minds of the generation, and given them a free pass to build whatever they can build that makes our impossible task a little bit easier. Isolation is Site-7's defining trait, but it frees us from the burdens of the rest of this massive behemoth of an organization. It's a sword we wield with impunity to cut the Gordian Knots in our path. [2022]
Notable Incidents
This is an abridged listing of notable incidents that have occurred at Site-7.| CODENAME | DATE | SUMMARY |
|---|---|---|
| SYRACUSE | 1985/2/2 | Partway into the construction of Site-7B, significant preexisting architecture was discovered within a sealed portion of Deep Well Cave, as well as extensive paper records of the kind intended for eventual storage in the cave. |
| PITCHBLACK | 2022/05/19 — 2022/05/24 | On May 19th, the global PANOPTICON surveillance system, SCiPnet, and numerous Foundation communication systems suffered a major outage. Such an outage should have been extremely improbable due to metaphysical anchoring; the failure cascaded throughout the world and caused a number of containment breaches and incidents. Unexpected disruptions and technical issues have periodically manifested since, it is believed that these are related to the PITCHBLACK incident. |
| MELTDOWN | [REDACTED] | A power surge from Site-7's thaumonuclear reactor caused an electrical fire on PARTHENON TOOTH secondary servers, where non-essential SCiPnet servers are hosted. Several redundancies failed to activate, causing service outages for multiple hours while the fires were fought and the services were temporarily migrated to the Red Sea Facility. Following the incident, an extensive internal investigation was conducted to ascertain the cause of the failures. |
Site-7 has remained largely free of the kind of capital-I incidents that are constants at other sites of its size. That said, our internal files are still full of events, problems, solutions, and more problems; even with our file organization, they can sometimes be hard to navigate.
In the interest of mitigating that, in 2004 I requisitioned DIDACT.aic from RAISA's Artificial Intelligence Application Division and released it into the RAISA internal archives with orders to observe the database and select files it considers particularly relevant to Site-7's history. To this day, it is still sorting through our digitized archives, faithfully following its orders. I have attached its findings, continously updated; I hope they help you understand what life might be like for the good people stationed in the Norton Sound. [2022]
DIDACT.aic Files of Interest
FILE SERIES — "DOGS OF WAR"
File 76-951508/P8760 — TEMPEST: In the middle of one of the worst snowstorms to strike Norton Sound in years, Secretary Ariadne Katsaros arrives at Site-7.
File 20-372736/E9129 — AIRGAP: The new Director and his new bodyguard get (re)acquainted with the facility.
File 12-763104/J1433 — WARPAINT: Site-7’s security chief is a man with a lot of stories to tell.
File 33-462011/Z9988 — HUMINT: A series of wholly unrelated events on a Tuesday at Site-7.
File 41-983742/L1922 — REPLICA: A RAISA backup facility in Japan suddenly goes dark. The Director and Ari fly out to investigate.
File 11-236267/M2138 — AUTOPSY: Returning home from the mission, Ari and Two try to figure out who — or what — made an attempt on his life.
File 67-759932/B1681 — SEGFAULT: A moment of calm — while the team tries to locate Farhan, Ari and Two descend into the RAISA archives to dig up information on their assailants.
File 98-586936/P1940 — DAEMON: Ari and Pierre deploy to the hot-zone of Kashmir to try and hunt down Farhan. Things catch fire very, very quickly.
Institutional Philosophies
This section is classified Clearance Level 5/Site-7, and is intended for Foundation executives. You have adequate clearance.
Protected Site-7 insignia.
RAISA and Site-7 have maintained a strong independent streak as entities within the Foundation. Their unique status and situation as a physical enclave of an entire department has led to idiosyncrasies and peculiarities in structure. This has caused friction in the past, particularly with regards to cross-site interaction. RAISA technicians also have a reputation for being mavericks and preferring to solve perceived problems without waiting for bureaucratic approval.
These are negative side effects of an overall positive state of affairs. The physical and organizational isolation of Site-7 has allowed it to form a unique working culture, one exceptionally well-suited to the unique job we require them to perform. Rather than depend on Foundation resources, personnel are trained to rely on their own knowledge to produce dynamic solutions to technical issues, many of which have literally never been faced before, and given broad license to implement them.
It is infeasible for any large organization to operate wholly on this philosophy — a clear, top-down command structure is necessary for an organization as large as the Foundation to function effectively. However, at the same time, an organization as large as the Foundation begets the need for a smaller, more independent arm to quickly act, maneuver, and solve problems where the larger body cannot. This is RAISA.
Once upon a time, there was a big caveman and a little caveman. As is the way of things, big caveman got the food, the women, and the power. Then one day, the smaller caveman made himself a particularly sharp rock, and the world changed forever.
Technology can be an amazing equalizer. It's no perfect egalitarianism like some people claim, but it lets you shift the dynamic of power in a way nothing else can. It lets outsiders seize the throne, if they have the will for it.
RAISA has always been an early adopter of outsiders. Outsider technology, outsider knowledge, and outsider peoples. The rest of the Foundation sneered when a Black woman was handpicked to lead the department of keyboard jockeys. They were — and often are — still tethered to society's judgements and idiosyncrasies. It limits their scope, their ability to see the whole board. They weren't sneering after I turned my office of technicians into one of the most powerful security organisms on the planet.
RAISA's relative independence from the Foundation allows us to hire and staff with impunity. We don’t have to worry or care about what things "look like". The abilities people have, the perspectives they offer are simply far too important.
The rest of the Foundation can call us weirdos, bleeding-hearts, progressives, but the fact is so much simpler than that: we are the sharp rock. [2022]
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