D-class personnel



D-class personnel (or Class-D personnel) are the lowest-ranked staff members of the SCP Foundation.

Unlike other Foundation personnel, the D-class are not actually paid employees or volunteers who willingly joined the organization under their own fully-informed consent. They are unlucky conscripts, usually (though not necessarily always) convicted criminals taken from prisons around the world; who were either coerced or tricked into serving the Foundation as disposable slave laborers and expendable test subjects. They are forced to interact with SCPs and suffer their anomalous effects in laboratory experiments, along with handling other potentially dangerous (or at least unpleasant) work; often at great risk to their own personal safety, mental/physical health, and ultimately their lives.

Recruitment and conscription
As mentioned before, the majority of D-class personnel are prison inmates, especially convicted felons serving long terms for serious violent crimes. Preferably, they have been sentenced to life imprisonment or the death penalty for high offenses like murder. It is not known how exactly the Foundation acquires these prisoners, though it is often implied that they were deceived and lured under false pretenses of freely volunteering at one of the Foundation's secret research facilities, in exchange for receiving parole or commuting their prison sentences. Given that the Foundation has ties to almost every national government in the world, it is also possible that state authorities have made a secret agreement with them to quietly transfer a small percentage of their countries' prison populations over to the Foundation's custody.

Though perhaps most disturbingly, one does not actually need to be a wicked murderer or rapist to become one of the Foundation's D-class; even putting aside the fact that some countries may lock up prisoners in death row for non-violent offenses, or that innocent people can be wrongly convicted in miscarriages of justice. Under the Foundation policy known as Protocol 12, during times of duress or drastic shortages of potential recruits, then relatively innocent civilians (including non-violent criminals like political prisoners, or refugees and other homeless people) can be unwittingly recruited as D-class personnel. The Foundation may even take young children to use them as sacrifices for anomalies that specifically target victims of their age range, such as SCP-089 or SCP-974.

Sometimes, D-class personnel are acquired through more internal sources. Occasionally, Foundation employees may be demoted down to the level of D-class as a penalty for certain kinds of severe offenses; though this is a rare occurrence, and employees who screw up badly enough are far more likely to just simply be "terminated" (executed) as their punishment. There is also a possibility that some D-class may be enemy prisoners (members of hostile Groups of Interest) who were captured as a result of combat or encounters with Foundation agents.

Aside from regular, naturally-born people, it has also been theorized that the Foundation may at least partially use cloning in order to increase their D-class population, whether through mundane or more anomalous methods. Some SCPs, like SCP-222 and SCP-2000, are capable of producing (almost) perfect copies of specific individuals; in fact, SCP-222's file explicitly mentions that the Foundation has used it to make clones of their own personnel (which may include D-class too); while SCP-2000 can produce 100,000 human clones on a daily basis. Furthermore there is also SCP-1680, a school bus that can endlessly produce identical copies of an 8-year-old boy named Tyler Buchanan, which has been officially utilized by taking in the Buchanan clones as spare D-class personnel.

Termination
As D-class personnel are essentially slaves deprived of their human rights, it is not surprising that the Foundation uses harsh methods to keep them in line. D-class who disobey direct orders during an experiment or mission, or otherwise attempt escape or rebellion, may be punished through "termination" (summary execution) by security guards at the discretion of a higher-ranked researcher or site director. D-class may also be terminated if their mind or body has been severely and permanently altered or disabled as a result of exposure to a dangerous anomaly (especially if the effects are contagious).

Older SCP articles make mention of D-class personnel being terminated on a monthly basis; whenever 30 days have passed, all D-class detained at Foundation sites are killed. However, such a practice raises far too many questions, both in and out of universe. Eliminating all D-class personnel every month, aside from being a completely pointless act of cruelty, would be totally counter-productive as D-class are an expensively finite resource, and would force the Foundation to acquire even more prison convicts to replace their dead predecessors.

At least according to the file for SCP-2193, the so-called "monthly termination" of D-class is actually a memetic infohazard anomaly affecting SCP documents; which compels staff members who read about it to round up all D-class personnel at their site, unwittingly sacrificing them to an unknown entity which causes them to float up high into the sky and disappear (presumably leaving Earth's orbit for outer space). Affected Foundation personnel during these events will falsely remember that the missing D-class victims were simply terminated with firearms by the security guards.

Also see

 * List of individual D-class personnel