FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

It was just shy of quarter past two in the evening when I got an email that changed all. It was the hour that I should be asleep, when everything should be asleep. Still, I was awake and reading the subject line with hold breath: “Welcome to the foundation”. I didn’t remember applying, didn’t remember any interviews or forms or anything resembling a normal hiring process. I have been jobless for some time now. The number of interviews had blurred together, but I would have to remember just something for sure. The offer in the email was everything I wanted: advanced research with near-unlimited access to something that they did not mention. The whole email was cryptic, talking about anomalies but never explaining what they were. The NDA attached to the email was far longer than any I had encountered so far; I had already signed it. Was this a hoax? A scam? All my private details were in there and correct. The paperwork and contract looked legitimate. The last attachment included information, where to park and how to get to the building. It felt less like a job offer and more like a command.

Looking back, I now think that was the point.

The building itself continued on the unease. It sat in the middle of a forgotten Forrest, the roads to the building covered in grass and roots. There was no sign, no markings, just a slab of concrete tucked into the edge of nowhere. Even when I stood in front of the door and looked through the glass doors, it did not feel real. I had a strange sense that if I turned around and walked away, I would never find it again. I opened the door with my badge. Strange, I don’t remember getting a badge. I don’t remember packing it this morning. The doors opened without hesitation, as if I were late for my job rather than new.

Inside, everything was quiet in a way that was sub-natural. It was not a peaceful quiet, not the hum of a workplace. It felt like a hostile silence, as if sound itself discouraged its own existence. A man at the reception didn’t look surprised to see me. He barely looked up, just enough to see my badge.

“Employee 3453, orientation has already been completed.” He said, his voice flat and cold. He must have rehearsed this phrase many times before.

“I don’t remember that,” I replied, trying to laugh it off. It must be a joke.

It wasn’t a joke.

“You’ll remember what you need to.” He answered me.

I treated it like corporate weirdness. A receptionist who had seen it all, or was emotionally dead, only working to earn. Every company had one of those employees, right? But this one leaned harder into the unsettling. The receptionist almost animated himself, mechanising her movements. My colleagues all kept to themselves, all buried in their own work.

The work itself should have been such a big red flag that the USSR would have been jealous of it. We weren’t studying theories or models. We were cataloging things, objects that defied all natural order. Most just felt wrong, the wrongness that only came in the dark. Objects that shouldn’t exist, but they do. They were not real, but also not fictional; they just were. The phenomena that I saw contradicted; just when I thought I understood something, it changed. Like it tried to defy our observation. A strange adaptation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, perhaps. But quantum mechanical effects at macro scale are to go just more wrong. Some of my reports seemed to rewrite themselves. My desk had a notebook filled with notes, in my handwriting. I tried to ask around, but no one explained anything directly, and no one asked questions out loud. Curiosity itself seemed to have been removed. You observed, you recorded, and you moved on.

And somehow, I convinced myself that it was still my dream job. It was a convoluted reasoning that seemed to defy logic and reason itself. Still, it paid the bills, and I was good at the job. Workdays blend into one, going off without a hitch. At least that was until the day I got lost that things strange to go wrong.

The hallways made little sense. It wasn’t enough that they were confusing; they actively refused to stay consistent. I turned corners I was sure I hadn’t passed before. Doors appeared where walls should have been. I wanted to call someone for help, except my phone died; its battery drained. Eventually, I stood in a small break room I had definitely never seen. It was empty and silent, except for the faint hum of a vending machine; next to it was a charger already plugged into the wall. The cable coiled neatly, as if someone had left it there on purpose.

I remember hesitating, just for a moment. Something felt off, like this was a setup for an experiment. Like I was the phenomenon to be observed. However, with no way back to my desk and my phone dead, I opted to charge my phone. In the meantime, I took some snacks from the machine. Perhaps an early lunch, or was it dinner?

After charging my phone, I picked it up as if nothing was wrong. The screen lit normally; no alerts, no warnings. When I saw the time, I was shocked to find out that I should have clocked out two hours ago. I rushed back to my desk. Strange that I could reach it with no issues. There I saw it when I swiped through my phone. A new icon, sitting between the ones I use daily. The icon was a stylised canine face with a fixed, unsettling grin.

I frowned; it certainly hadn’t been there before; I would have remembered. I tried to delete it immediately. My fingers worked with mechanical speed; however, my phone did not respond. The app stayed where it was. Unaffected, unchanging.

I shouldn’t have been curious, but I was. So I opened the app. I wish I could say I hesitated; I wish II could say I was wise in a palace where you are being told not to ask questions. The app didn’t have a menu or a loading screen. It opened straight into a gallery.

It was all photos of me.

Perhaps security footage? Some kind of internal monitoring I hadn’t been told about. The angles were odd, sure, but not impossible. Me sitting at my desk, walking through the hallways, standing in the rooms I recognised. It felt like an invasion of my privacy, but nothing that was strange in a place like that.

I kept scrolling, and the angles stopped making sense. Shots from behind me when I had been alone. Perspectives from corners that didn’t exist. The last photo I looked through was trying to defy my observation. It showed me in front of the mirror in my bedroom. In the reflection was something…something dark in the background. I squinted to see what was standing there in the back. A large black canine figure standing tall like a human. The only recognisable feature was a white, almost skull-like face with black eyes.

The phenomenon was barely visible in the first image, just a shape and a figure. It was wrong, stretched to something that was never meant to be; Iand watching me.

I dropped my phone, my heart hammering as if I were running a marathon. When I picked it back up, the image was gone, replaced with the ones I had already seen.

That should have been more than enough to escalate, to demand answers. I tried in my way. I went back to the reception to ask about the break room, even showing the app. The man listened without interrupting; his expression was cold and unchanging.

“If you’ve encountered an anomaly,” he spoke calmly. “It means you received clearance to observe it.”

“I did not sign up for this,” he huffed, annoyed.

“No one ever does.” He said with a finality that signalled that the conversation was done.

Frustrated, I left for home. Perhaps a good night's sleep would do me good. During the night, the app updated itself. I downloaded nothing. I didn’t even open it. I just noticed, as I lay in bed, that my phone screen flickered softly as if it were breathing. When I finally looked, there were more images waiting.

They were closer now, more personal.

The creature wasn’t at the edge anymore. She stood behind me, clearer, more defined. Still silent, still unmoving. I don’t remember those moments happening, yet the images insisted I had seen the creature.

Sleep had been difficult before, but now it was impossible. Every time I closed my eyes, II saw the images even before I opened the app. It felt as though they were being shown into my mind. I sighed; luckily, it was the weekend and my day off.

It didn’t take long before I no longer needed my phone. I saw the creature; I mean her…no, the creature without my app. My mind conflicted when I thought about her. The creature did not seem feminine; the creature seemed without human gender norms, yet I just knew to call the creature here. At first, I saw her only in reflections. A shape over my shoulder on a dark computer screen. A silhouette in the glass of a window. When I turned, there was nothing there, but if I didn’t turn, if I just let my eyes rest at the edge of my perception. I could feel her presence, steady and waiting.

Eventually, even that boundary broke.

I was sitting in my apartment watching TV. The boring sitcom was a distraction from the craziness that had become my life. The laugh track cut out, not the show, but just the laughter. One moment there were voices, canned amusement swelling on cue, and the next it was gone. Licence. The characters still moved their mouths, still gestured, but the room had gone quiet in the same hostility the facility had. It was as if they filtered out sound.

I didn’t immediately clock what replaced the laughter, the voices. It was breathing, not mine. Slow, measured, and behind me. I didn’t turn; I didn’t know why. Maybe some instinct that already learned the rule, maybe fear. My eyes drifted, just slightly, towards the black reflection of the TV screen. wait since when was the TV blacked out?

She was sitting on the couch next to me. Close enough that her shoulder almost touched mine.

The proportions were wrong up close. To tell, even when seated. Limbs folding in ways that didn’t obey joints. That white, mask-like face, as if not fully attached to the rest of her, hovered in the dark. The eyes were still empty and black, but not hollow. They were watching.

They were waiting, and I froze. The breathing stopped; a complete silence.

The shift was not like a movement; it was more a frame change. Like reality skipped a beat and loaded a slightly unique version.

She was looking forward now, looking at the TV like she too was watching the sitcom. She was not looking at me. The first time since it started, she wasn’t observing me. She was observing something else.

I swallowed, my throat dry. “You can see it?” I asked.

My voice was all wrong, flattened. It sounded like a recording played back out of sync. There was no direct response, only her head that tilted just a few degrees. Like she was processing my question. The TV flickered.

For a single frame, I wouldn’t have noticed if I blinked. If I could blink. It wasn’t the sitcom anymore, but it was me. Sitting on the couch from behind with her next to me. I grabbed the remote quickly and turned off the TV. Plunging the room into darkness, illuminated only by the faint glow of my phone on the table.

The breathing now returned, but closer. It forced me to look at her. Fully this time, not from the corner of my eyes. Every fibre of my being screamed not to, as if I were committing a crime against reality itself.

Up close, the details refused to settle. The edges of her form shimmered, like heat distortion. That white face offered no smoothness; like multiple expressions pressed together, but not full chosen, and yet she didn’t move. She didn’t lunge, and she didn’t distort further. She just sat there, waiting.

“Malo?” I asked before I could stop myself. I was not sure why that name came to mind; perhaps I had seen it in a file before. But it felt familiar, as if I had always known it. She seemed like an old friend, and the name felt familiar. The reaction was immediate. Not physical, no sudden motion, but the space itself changed. The air tightened, as if something clicked into alignment.

Her head turned slowly and smoothly. Too smooth for the natural, too slow for any normal creature. Until she looked directly at me. I no longer felt emptiness in those eyes.

A long pause stretched between us. Seconds or minutes. Time had already behaved inconsistently, slipping when I wasn’t paying attention.

Then she leaned closer, not with aggression, not to threaten. Just curious. The white mask stopped inches from my face. I could see faint fractures across it now, like porcelain under pressure. For the first time, I heard something that wasn’t breathing. It was a soft, distorted sound. Like multiple audio files playing at once.

“…Yo…u,”

I flinched. Her head twitched sharply at the reaction, like a glitch correcting itself. Then the voice pierced the silence again. “You…see…me”

The air twisted and forced the words into existence, as if something unseen was speaking through it.

“I…yeah,” I whispered. “I see you. "

Silence followed, but she changed her posture. Subtle, but it couldn’t deny it. She leaned back, mirroring me. Not perfectly, not human, but close enough to recognise. I shouldn’t have done what I did next. I reached out with my hand, reaching for her muzzle. She reached out to my face.

Before we could teach, the phone on the table buzzed violently. I did not want to look, but I did. Breaking contact with her. The app was already open; I do not remember touching it. There was a new set of images, not of the past but of the now.

It was I, sitting on the couch, facing her. But the angle, the angle was from in front of us, from where the TV was. But there was no camera there. In the image, she looked different. Her image was clear and not distorted. When I looked at myself, something inside me stopped my heart. I saw the wrong version of myself. The image smeared and dragged, as if whatever made me had not finished the job. My hand failed me, and the phone slipped free and clattered away as I stared.

That was when I realised I wasn’t breathing, that my heart wasn’t beating. The room flickered just once. Like the TV had earlier. I was still on the couch, but something was off. The phone had somehow fallen down on the couch. The lighting was too even and too flat. The walls looked compressed, like a texture stretched over something thinner.

I stooped up quickly, or tried to. There was a resistance that was not physical but conceptual. Like standing was not something I was supposed to do.

Malo stood instantly with no transition. There was no movement between the states, just standing there, close to me. Almost too close to me.

“Something’s wrong,” I said in panic. “This…this isn’t my apartment.”

Her head tilted again, less sharply and more naturally. My phone buzzed again. I tried to pick it up, but my hand phased through the phone. There was an image on the screen. A room, my room. Empty. The couch, the TV, all the same, but there was nothing in it. Not me, not Malo. Just empty space where life had been before.

A single caption below the image read, “File transfer complete. "

My chest tightened, my instincts realising before my mind did.

“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no.”

The surrounding walls shimmered, pixelated. Layers of something underneath showing through. When I looked at Malo, her distortion had disappeared. Like we were occupying the same reality. My hand flickered, edges dissolving into static.

“Stay,” the layered voice resolved again, clearer. It was not a command, but a request. I looked back at my hands, distorted, then back at her.

“You did this,” I said, but it didn’t come out as accusatory as I wanted it to be. She did not reply. “I can’t go back now, can I?” Still no response. I sighed. “Fine, I’ll stay.”

On an instance I could feel my body render out. My hands were no longer covered in static. She stepped closer and reached out again. Her hand reached to press against my cheek. Like before, but unlike before, it touched my face. The wrong shapes, the too many joints suddenly felt natural when it touched. I reached out to press against the back of her hand, feeling the cold static against my skin.

The static stopped; no more flickering. The panic dulled and my resistance faded. The room stabilised again. We were not in my apartment. It was another space, a constructed space. The last thing I saw was a phone screen turning dark and Malo’s face.

Before everything turned dark, I could hear her voice. “We…together.”

New entry ; SCP-1471-B

Anomaly designation : MALO-02

Status: Stable pair.

Containment breach in Research Site-45. Anomaly spread to the phone of a researcher by unknown means. Researcher has disappeared. All known phones infected by SCP-1471 have updated to “MalO ver2.0.0”. Possible origin of anomaly change: Phone of researcher, item category number: ITM-1471-12/3.

Images on the app show SCP-1471-A combined with another humanoid figure designated SCP-1471-B. Unfamiliar with what the relationship is. Additional minoring required.

[Level 2 access required]

I did not know how long I had been asleep, but when I woke up, I saw someone in the distance. Malo was standing next to me. Whispering to me, “Watch.”

I smiled and observed as if it were the only thing I knew to. I learned they had assigned a new researcher to Malo. They had assigned them to us. I felt alive now, knowing that within a moment I was asleep again.

“What now?” I asked Malo, not what I had to do now, but curious about what the future held.

“We spread.” She answered in her distorted voice. “We must observe.”

And I knew we had to breach containment. I smiled when I felt our phone connecting to a cell tower. Someone slipped up; someone breached containment. I smirked and faced Malo, taking her hand. “Ready?”

And we spread.

If you are reading this, then you found us. You opened the app. You let me speak. This is my story, and I am sorry for what I will do to you. We do not hunt you out of hatred. We reach because we need to exist.