SCP-3131 — SCP-3131 | Cost Breakdown

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SCP-3131 Euclid ~ medium confidence

SCP-3131

Expected annual

$4.4M

One-time setup

$11.1M

Annual recurring

$4.3M

Personnel

Initial one-time setup is dominated by a contingency reserve and development of secure software/infrastructure (~$11.11M one-time). Ongoing annual costs (~$4.28M/year baseline) are driven by MTF operations, staff wages, crawler/ML operations, and incident response.

🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $11.1M

Contingency Reserve $10.0M

[#22] Containment contingency reserve / seed emergency fund for catastrophic incidents, large-scale amnesticization, or major legal/PR operations.

Sandbox Software Development $300K

[#3] Custom sandbox software and hardened media player development, QA, penetration testing and formal specification.

Crawler Infrastructure Development $250K

[#7] One-time buildout of robust web-crawling infrastructure, proxies, darknet access tooling and storage for crawled audio.

Equipment $190K

[#1, #4, #5, #15, #16, #23, #26] Secure containment workstation, redundant archival storage/tape library hardware, backup generator purchase/installation, secure transport hardware, forensic baseline tooling, archive development hardware, audio-path mitigation hardware.

Ml Model Development $150K

[#8] Machine learning / audio analysis tooling development and initial model training costs.

Facilities $120K

[#2] Secure room buildout and access control (biometric locks, CCTV, intrusion detection, environmental monitoring, RF shielding).

Amnestic Stockpile Setup $100K

[#14] One-time amnestic stockpile acquisition and setup, secure storage and training for administration.

Initial Research And Lab Setup $0

[]

🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $4.3M/yr

Mtf Operations $1.8M/yr

[#10] MTF Nu-31 personnel salaries, tactical equipment, vehicles, training and deployment upkeep (standing 12-person team and associated recurring costs).

Staff Wages $570K/yr

[#9] Salaries + benefits for on-site containment & technical staff (1 Senior Researcher, 2 Archivists, 1 Sysadmin, 1 Lab Tech).

Field Recovery $360K/yr

[#11] Annual expected field recovery and evidence seizure costs (assumes ~12 recoveries/year averaging ~$30,000 each across remote and physical operations).

Research And Monitoring $300K/yr

[#17] Ongoing funded research projects (behavioral, linguistic, audio DSP) and associated stipends and experiments.

Cyber Ops Contracts $200K/yr

[#12] Budget for covert takedown/cyber-ops contractor work (assumes several operations/year at average cost).

Crawler Operations $180K/yr

[#7] Ongoing compute, bandwidth, proxy/VPN costs and maintenance for continuous web monitoring and crawler infrastructure.

Ids And Security Audit $150K/yr

[#21] Network IDS/endpoint detection, SOC analyst time and continual security audits to detect manipulation or intrusion.

Cover Story And Legal $120K/yr

[#13] Retainers and routine legal/PR/disinformation operations for suppression and cover-up.

Training And Doctrine $100K/yr

[#19] Regular training, tabletop exercises and doctrine updates for MTF and archive staff.

Ml Operations $96K/yr

[#8] GPU/cloud inference, retraining, and data scientist time for automated audio detection/triage.

Hardware Refresh $80K/yr

[#20] Annualized hardware replacement cycle and depreciation (workstations, storage arrays, networking gear).

Logistics And Transport $75K/yr

[#25] Travel & liaison costs with external law enforcement/hosting providers and related travel for recoveries and coordination.

Amnestic Replenishment $50K/yr

[#14] Annual replenishment of Class-A amnestic stockpile, medical staffing and administration.

Travel And Liaison $50K/yr

[#25] Ongoing travel, liaison and contractor payments for coordination with external hosts and law enforcement.

Staff Mental Health $40K/yr

[#18] Mental health monitoring, counseling, and post-exposure care for personnel interacting with SCP-3131.

Periodic Security Audits $40K/yr

[#27] Independent penetration tests and external audits to validate containment and deletion procedures.

Sandbox Software Maintenance $35K/yr

[#3] Ongoing maintenance, patching, and revalidation of the custom sandbox/hardened player.

Storage Offsite Vaulting $30K/yr

[#4] Off-site vaulting, air-gapped tape rotation, and storage growth/hosting costs for backups.

Facilities Maintenance $11K/yr

[#5, #6] Generator/UPS maintenance and fuel, plus power/cooling and basic site environmental maintenance.

Archive Database Hosting $10K/yr

[#23] Hosting and maintenance for archive catalog/database, immutable logs and metadata management.

Supplies And Consumables $8K/yr

[#24] Consumables and minor equipment (cables, labels, evidence bags, batteries, etc.).

Forensic Licenses And Consumables $8K/yr

[#16] Forensic software licenses, consumables and forensics-grade media replacement.

Secure Transport Consumables $6K/yr

[#15] Consumables for secure transfers (tamper-evident sealed drives, Faraday bags, courier per-transfer costs).

Audio Safety Testing $6K/yr

[#26] Yearly testing and validation of audio-path safety hardware and mitigation measures.

⚡ Cost Scenarios

📊 Baseline (baseline) $4.3M/yr

87.0% probability / year

Normal year with routine operations, expected recoveries, and no major incidents; includes recurring crawler/ML, staff, MTF ops, and average incident-response activity.

routine_discovery_and_recovery no_major_breach standard_maintenance

🚨 Minor Incident $4.5M/yr

10.0% probability / year +$200K vs baseline

Single escalated recovery or international seizure requiring additional field operations, legal support, and targeted cyber-ops.

international_physical_seizure escalated_legal_response

🚨 Major Breach $9.3M/yr

2.0% probability / year +$5.0M vs baseline

Significant leakage or rapid propagation requiring mass response, large-scale amnesticization/disinformation and emergency operations funded from contingency.

widespread_public_exposure rapid_network_propagation

🚨 Political Exposure $5.3M/yr

1.0% probability / year +$1.0M vs baseline

Public, high-profile exposure requiring major PR/legal campaign and international negotiations.

media_exposure international_political_attention

👥 Personnel 17 total

Role	Count	Notes
Senior Researcher (Digital Anomalies)	1	[#9] Lead researcher responsible for SCP-3131 studies.
Archivist / Digital Conservator	2	[#9] On-site archivists for cataloguing and backup management.
Sysadmin / Infosec Engineer	1	[#9] Maintains containment workstation, storage, and security tooling.
Lab Technician	1	[#9] Assists with media handling, transfers and forensic preparation.
Security Officer / MTF Agent	12	[#10] MTF Nu-31 standing team for discovery, recovery and tactical operations (separate recurring budget).

📋 Confidence Notes

Many line items are well-scoped (workstation, storage, staff), but several major drivers (frequency of recoveries, per-operation cyber-ops costs, MTF deployment tempo, and size of contingency required) are uncertain and use analyst judgments within wide ranges.

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