Knowledge changes perspective.
That was the first thing I truly understood after acquiring Cursed by Knowledge. Ideas no longer arrived as fragile sparks that needed nurturing. They arrived whole—fully formed, interconnected, demanding to be acted upon. And once that happened, it became impossible to not act.
So I did something utterly unreasonable for this era.
I invented electricity.
Not the crude, half-understood static tricks of philosophers, but functional, repeatable, scalable electrical systems. Dynamos driven by water wheels. Copper wiring refined through controlled metallurgy. Insulation techniques adapted from resin, cloth, and treated oils. Switches. Fuses. Primitive circuit logic. All things that, historically, would have taken centuries of trial, error, and dead ends.
For me, it took weeks.
The Foundation facilities were the first to benefit. Hidden sites that had once relied on torches, oil lamps, and risky open flames were transformed. Lights came on at the flick of a switch. Clean, steady illumination flooded containment corridors and research halls. No smoke. No soot. No shadows for anomalies to hide in.
The psychological effect alone was staggering.
Personnel stood frozen the first time the lights activated, staring upward as if the sun itself had been trapped inside glass. Some crossed themselves. Others laughed nervously. A few cried.
I didn't blame them.
Then I went further.
Plumbing.
Clean water systems, pressurized through gravity-fed reservoirs and sealed piping. Waste removal routed safely away from living and research spaces. Sanitation protocols that reduced disease, infection, and contamination risks dramatically.
In medieval times.
The implications were enormous. Health improved almost immediately. Mortality rates dropped. Productivity soared. The Foundation became not just secretive and powerful—but comfortable. Efficient. Sustainable.
All without alerting the outside world.
We hid it well. Underground facilities. Isolated regions. Front structures that looked mundane from the surface. To the outside observer, nothing had changed. To those within the Foundation?
We had leapt centuries ahead.
The system chat exploded the moment the reports spread.
Julius (O5-2 — Sentinel):By the gods, Administrator, my security teams are working double shifts and not a single one is exhausted. Do you realize what this means for containment response times?
Cleopatra (O5-5 — The Accountant):Medical infection rates are down drastically. Clean water, sterilization, lighting—this alone just saved us thousands of lives across the next decades.
Darius (O5-3 — The Watcher):You've just made our black sites impossible to infiltrate by conventional means. No torches. No sound cues. Controlled illumination. I approve.
Alexander (O5-7):Recruit morale is through the roof. They think we're touched by the gods.
I leaned back, grinning, basking shamelessly in it.
"I know," I replied through the system chat. "I'm amazing."
That, of course, only encouraged them.
Ashoka (O5-8):Please remind me never to let the general population see this. Civilization would collapse overnight.
Gilgamesh (O5-10):You realize kings would kneel for this knowledge.
"Oh, I'm very aware," I typed back. "Which is why they won't get it."
I bragged. Openly. Unapologetically.
I talked about voltage regulation. About safety redundancies. About how the lighting systems were designed to fail-safe rather than catastrophically. I explained, in perhaps excessive detail, how plumbing reduced disease vectors and why that mattered for long-term Foundation stability.
They called me a genius.
I didn't deny it.
But beneath the humor and pride, I understood the deeper significance. Electricity wasn't just convenience. It was control. It meant we could power containment systems. Surveillance devices. Early warning mechanisms. Eventually—if we were careful—defensive measures that didn't rely solely on manpower.
This was the beginning of technological asymmetry.
The Foundation was no longer merely hiding anomalies.
We were outpacing the world.
That night—if night could still be measured for someone who no longer needed sleep—I walked alone through one of the main corridors of the primary site. The lights hummed softly overhead, steady and unwavering. Pipes ran silently behind reinforced stone walls, carrying clean water where it was needed, removing waste where it wasn't.
Everything worked.
I placed a hand against the wall and felt the faint vibration of the systems I had designed.
"This is only the start," I murmured.
Because with electricity came computation. With computation came automation. With automation came containment on a scale humanity had never imagined.
And somewhere out there, SCPs were watching. Waiting. Emerging one by one into a world that was quietly, invisibly preparing for them.
Let them come.
We had brought the future into the past.
And we were just getting started.