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SCP-5883 Unknown ~ medium confidence
SCP-5883
Expected annual
$2.4M
One-time setup
$2.3M
Annual recurring
$2.3M
Personnel
11
One-time setup costs (secure lab, development, and contingency) are approximately $2.26M; baseline annual operating costs are approximately $2.28M/year driven primarily by staff wages, ongoing crawling/compute, legal/cover budgets, and network/security.
🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $2.3M
Facilities $1.1M
[#11] One-time construction/retrofit of a secure memetic testing lab and safe exposure facilities.
Quentiam Development $725K
[#3] One-time engineering/development costs for Webcrawler I/O QUENTIAM (initial development, classifiers, QA).
Contingency Reserve $250K
[#25] One-time contingency reserve seeded for rapid-response amplification events (recommended minimum reserve).
Equipment $160K
[#1, #2, #14, #15, #16] Secure fileserver/HSMs and setup, endpoint MDM/group-policy rollout, audit tooling setup, air-gapped backup hardware, forensic takedown tooling purchases/licenses.
Fcm Iteration Initial $25K
[#10] Initial tooling/design costs for FCM-5883 production/iteration (per-iteration tooling/setup).
Initial Research And Lab Setup $0
[]
Large Scale Eradication Setup $0
[#20] Optional large-scale ISP/filtering setup; not included in baseline one-time spend (scenario-based).
Research Program Setup $0
[#21] Specialized research equipment/setup for reality-trigger research not funded in baseline (scenario-based).
🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $2.3M/yr
Staff Wages $920K/yr
[#5, #6, #7] Salaries for memetics/countermemetics researchers and lab techs, software/ML engineers and sysadmins, and human content moderators (baseline staffing: 4memeticists, 3 engineers, 4 moderators).
Cover Story And Legal $350K/yr
[#8, #17, #24] Legal retainer/takedown operations, public cover/OPSEC budgets (PR/false leads), and insurance/indemnity reserve.
Quentiam Recurring Compute $300K/yr
[#3] Recurring compute, storage and maintenance costs for QUENTIAM (model training, crawling at baseline scale).
Internet Scale Crawling $120K/yr
[#4] Ongoing compute & bandwidth for internet-scale scanning, pageview tracking and mirrors at baseline coverage.
Fcm Iteration Production $100K/yr
[#10] Annual budget for iterative production/testing/deployment of FCM-5883 (multiple small iterations per year).
Network Cybersecurity $100K/yr
[#19] SIEM, IDS/IPS, firewalls, pen-testing and cybersecurity for containment & deletion pipelines.
Facilities Maintenance $80K/yr
[#11] Upkeep, consumables, safety officers, and facility O&M for secure memetic testing lab and safe exposure booths.
Incident Response Program $60K/yr
[#13] Incident response team exercises, tabletop/field drills, simulated takedowns and audits.
Logistics And Transport $50K/yr
[#22] Retrieval missions and logistics for replacement/containment/destruction of physical printed media.
Vendor Payments $50K/yr
[#9] Covert cooperation/vendor payments, CDN/hosting expedited removals and prioritization retainers.
Audit And Compliance $36K/yr
[#14] Continuous monitoring of the containment document, PKI, version control and tamper alert maintenance.
Endpoint Management Licensing $30K/yr
[#2] Enterprise MDM/group-policy licensing & support to enforce default wallpaper and auditing for endpoints.
Psych Medical Monitoring $20K/yr
[#12] Psychological screening, counseling and medical monitoring for exposed personnel.
Research And Monitoring $15K/yr
[#18] Monitoring & analytics subscriptions for pageview analytics and social listening.
Training And Compliance $15K/yr
[#23] Training modules, delivery and compliance tracking for staff to avoid accidental spread.
Secure Filespace Colocation $12K/yr
[#1] Ongoing colo/hosted secure filespace maintenance, onsite backups and integrity monitoring.
Supplies And Consumables $10K/yr
[#15] General consumables and archival media rotation for offline backups and small consumables.
Forensic Tools Maintenance $6K/yr
[#16] Maintenance and small-license renewals for forensic takedown & cache-purging tools.
Air Gapped Archival $2K/yr
[#15] Off-line archival storage rotation and vaulting costs.
Large Scale Eradication Maintenance $0/yr
[#20] Optional ISP-level filtering/eradication maintenance; not funded in baseline (scenario-based).
Reality Trigger Research $0/yr
[#21] Long-term research into reality-bending trigger; not funded in baseline (scenario-based).
Contingency Replenishment $0/yr
[#25] Contingency reserve seeded as one-time; no recurring replenishment budget in baseline.
⚡ Cost Scenarios
📊 Baseline (baseline) $2.3M/yr
85.0% probability / year
Normal year with steady-state containment operations and no major incidents.
routine_operations no_major_breaches
🚨 Minor Incident $2.8M/yr
10.0% probability / year +$500K vs baseline
Localized viral spread needing extra takedowns, overtime, and temporary cloud scaling.
localized_viral_spread multiple_platform_takedowns moderator_overtime
🚨 Major Breach $3.8M/yr
3.0% probability / year +$1.5M vs baseline
Wide uncontrolled outbreak requiring emergency PR, large legal actions, contingency deployment, and rapid cloud scale-up.
rapid_global_propagation high_volume_of_mirrors public_exposure
🚨 Research Scale Up $4.3M/yr
2.0% probability / year +$2.0M vs baseline
Decision to fund a multi-year research program into the reality-bending trigger with substantial recurring budget.
trigger_research_initiated multi-disciplinary_experiments
👥 Personnel 11 total
Role Count Notes
Research Scientist / Memeticist 4 [#5] Memetics and countermemetics researchers and lab techs included in staff wage estimate.
Software Engineer / ML Engineer 3 [#6] Engineers for QUENTIAM, ML model maintenance, and ops.
Human Moderator / Content Reviewer 4 [#7] Human moderators to review detections, appeals handling and complex casework.
📋 Confidence Notes
Ranges in the analyst notes provide useful estimates for staffing, tooling and hosting, but several large items are optional or scenario-driven (ISP-level eradication, reality-trigger research), so baseline estimates are moderately confident while extreme scenarios are highly uncertain.
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