SCP-8335 — SCP-8335 | Cost Breakdown

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SCP-8335 Thaumeli ~ medium confidence

SCP-8335

Expected annual

$18.5M

One-time setup

$4.2M

Annual recurring

$18.3M

Personnel

One-time setup is approximately $4.17M driven primarily by secure vault/TbC construction and Aristaeus.aic development; recurring annual operations are approximately $18.35M/year driven by large contingency/reserve budgets, remediation capability, long-term research, and ongoing staffing/monitoring.

🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $4.2M

Initial Research And Lab Setup $3.0M

[#3] Aristaeus.aic design, implementation, safe training, red-team memetic safety testing and prototype R&D to reach production-grade safe model.

Per Additional Tbc Setup $425K

[#23] Per-additional-hive one-time cost (vault + hardware) for scaling additional TbCs/geographic redundancy.

Facilities $275K

[#1] Hardened, access-controlled containment cell/TbC vault build-out with Faraday shielding, HVAC/humidity control, inert-gas fire suppression, physical locks, intrusion detection, and decontamination air handling.

Archival Format Dev $145K

[#18] One-time development of canonical TbC file formats, font engineering, and conversion tools to sanitize character/glyph compatibility exploits.

Equipment $100K

[#2] Airgapped TbC hardware: industrial servers, WORM media, hardware write-blockers, tamper sensors, secure consoles.

Power Backup $70K

[#19] One-time UPS/generator purchase and installation to provide continuous power and redundancy for TbC hardware and vault environment.

Incident Toolkit $60K

[#12] One-time build cost for digital redaction & neutralization toolkits, secure OCR/replace utilities, and safe insertion tools for neutralizing glyphs.

Backup Cold Storage $52K

[#11] Offline geographically-separated cold backup infrastructure (encrypted WORM media, secure vaults) initial setup and rotation-capable hardware.

Training Development $38K

[#14] Initial development of memetic-safety courses, SOPs and materials (one-time course dev).

🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $18.3M/yr

Catastrophic Reserve $10.5M/yr

[#25] Large-scale mitigation/insurance reserve to fund national-level remediation, mass replacement of publications and extreme containment scenarios.

Public Remediation $2.8M/yr

[#17] Public content remediation budget for publisher campaigns, ad-space purchases, mass redaction/neutralization campaigns and national-level suppression contingencies.

Staff Wages $1.2M/yr

[#5, #6, #7] Specialist containment researchers & memeticists (3 FTEs) plus secure-ops/IT personnel (1–2 FTEs) and 24/7 security guards (9 guards) salaries and benefits.

Long Term Research $1.1M/yr

[#24] Ongoing research grants, experiments, containment improvement projects and Project Memedovukha continuation funding.

Research And Monitoring $600K/yr

[#16] Monitoring & discovery infrastructure: web crawling, OCR pipelines, memetic-detection heuristics, partnerships and takedown workflows.

Cover Story And Legal $550K/yr

[#15] Legal, PR and cover-story budgets for suppressing/modifying public records, negotiating with publishers, FOIA management, and litigation contingency.

Emergency Response Fund $500K/yr

[#8] On-call emergency memetic response team readiness budget and rapid-response reserve for swarm events and contractor availability.

Aristaeus Operations $350K/yr

[#4] Operational hosting & update cycle for Aristaeus.aic: airgap-assisted approval workstations, retraining/compute, security patching, memetic auditing and AI-engineer salary (1–2).

Per Additional Tbc Recurring $275K/yr

[#23] Per-additional-hive recurring staff & operations for extra TbC instances (staffing, media handling, operations).

Administration And Compliance $125K/yr

[#21] Recordkeeping, secure databases, administrative staff and oversight board meeting costs for classified registry and reporting.

Logistics And Transport $105K/yr

[#9] Secure courier & logistics for media transfer: armored/credentialed couriers, tamper-evident containers, provably-clean media for 5–20 trips/year.

Cybersecurity And Audits $90K/yr

[#20] Yearly security audits, memetic red-team penetration testing (digital & memetic), and third-party compliance audits.

Training And Drills $62K/yr

[#14] Ongoing memetic-safety training, tabletop and live drills, SOP maintenance and compliance records.

Disposal And Decontamination $55K/yr

[#22] Safe destruction, incineration and decontamination of infected external materials and contaminated consumables.

Psych Medical Support $32K/yr

[#13] Psychological screening, counseling, neurocognitive monitoring, and memetic-isolation leave support for exposed staff.

Archival Format Maintenance $30K/yr

[#18] Yearly maintenance of canonical TbC formats, conversion tools and font/renderer updates.

Supplies And Consumables $15K/yr

[#10] Controlled print/media consumables: archival paper, certified inks/pigments, sealed sleeves, sterile optical discs, PPE and disposable protective consumables.

Incident Toolkit Upkeep $12K/yr

[#12] Annual training, verification and upkeep costs for redaction/neutralization toolkits and utilities.

Power Maintenance $10K/yr

[#19] Annual fuel/maintenance and service contracts for UPS/generator and power redundancy systems.

Backup Rotation $6K/yr

[#11] Annual rotation, storage and handling costs for cold backups and geographically-separated media copies.

Facilities Maintenance $0/yr

[]

⚡ Cost Scenarios

📊 Baseline (baseline) $18.3M/yr

90.0% probability / year

Normal year with regular operations, monitoring, and no major swarm or public-infestation event.

no_swarm_events routine_maintenance regular_monitoring

🚨 Minor Incident $18.8M/yr

8.0% probability / year +$500K vs baseline

Localized swarm or containment incident requiring emergency response, targeted remediation, and short-term increased operations.

small_regent_swarm localized_breach rapid_quarantine_and_media_replacement

🚨 Major Swarm $23.3M/yr

2.0% probability / year +$5.0M vs baseline

Significant multi-document/national-level infestation requiring large-scale remediation, legal/PR action and use of catastrophic reserves.

regent_swarm_cross_publication public_corpus_infestation national_media_remediation

👥 Personnel 16 total

Role	Count	Notes
Research Scientist / Memetics Researcher	3	[#5] Core memetics researchers and computational linguists responsible for weekly maintenance, pruning and supervised interactions (3 FTEs).
Security Officer / MTF Agent	9	[#7] 24/7 physical security for containment cell: 3shifts of guards, trained in memetic safety.
IT Technician / Secure-ops Technician	2	[#6] Personnel for TbC operations, secure media handling, backups and hardware maintenance (1–2 FTEs; modeled as 2).
AI Engineer	1	[#4] Aristaeus.aic maintenance and operations (1–2 AI engineers; modeled as 1 full-time for staffing headcount).
Administrative Staff	1	[#21] Admin and compliance support for recordkeeping, secure databases and oversight coordination.

📋 Confidence Notes

Analyst notes are detailed and map to concrete items (vaults, TbCs, AI filter, staffing, monitoring), so estimates are grounded; however many line items include wide ranges and large contingency/insurance buckets (notes #17 and #25) that dominate totals, reducing precision.

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