The Double Decree

Summary:

A mystery surrounding a looping explosion

The Double Decree

Frostilicus 28 Sep 2020 20:59

Seeking Greenlights: Yes

Page Type: SCP Article

Genre: Science-Fiction Horror, Mystery, Time Travel

Elevator Pitch: a perpetually looping explosion occurs within a Foundation facility, and investigation reveals it as evidence of a contained breach that has yet to occur

Central Narrative: This SCP takes the form of an accident that loops every 10 seconds. A D class prisoner appears and after one second is annihilated by an explosion. With no method of intervention having any affect on the event's subsequent generation, Foundation scientists have to theorize based off a limited body of evidence.

By analysis of eye movement it is discovered that the man at the center of the explosion is conscious of the passing of time outside of the loop- he appears to begin the loop looking in the direction of the observers who were present in previous loops. Communication methods are devised but after a few days of being perpetually killed he is unresponsive- it is theorized that mental strain has rendered him effectively catatonic.

Hook/Attention-Grabber: With no record of this D class prisoner within Foundation records, he is later identified as a civilian with no record of involvement with SCP. It is finally concluded that the loop is an event from the future, and after internal debate it is decided that to maintain causality he is to be incarcerated.

Last edited on 28 Sep 2020 21:06 by Frostilicus Show more

Forum Criticism Team - Captain Post

Zyn 02 Oct 2020 05:07

Since this thread has fallen to page 6 with no responses, this is a quick staff reminder to the author that if you haven't yet, you should contact reviewers directly to request feedback as needed.

Please refer to this thread for more information: http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-13282692/how-to-get-more-reviews

If you have already reached out to multiple reviewers and received no reply, notify a staff member for assistance finding a reviewer.

Re: The Double Decree

Pedagon 02 Oct 2020 07:00

Hey Frostilicus

Pedagon here from the Team of the Oinks! I'm here to be your critter!!

+ First critique

This is a really cool idea and it pulled me back to my favourite episodes of Dr. Who while I read it! I love the idea of the looping event happening from something in the future and the Foundation needing to piece it together! That is a brilliant idea! However, I am left wanting to know more. How will you tell this story in your article? What evidence will you have the Foundation piece together? How does the reader figure out that it is a future containment breach? etc. These are the questions I want to know that you have thought through.

You've done a great job of getting me interested in what you will be writing an article about. Now tell me how you will write it!

Welcome to the site! I'm looking forward to hearing back from you! :)

-Brian

Re: The Double Decree

Frostilicus 02 Oct 2020 20:31

Hey, thank you for your response. Time travel stories are funny things, usually if the reader winds up thinking too hard about it they get disgusted by some obvious loophole (why *didn’t* Thor hop into the time machine and then just actually aim for the head?) but in this article I was thinking about how the classic SCP article structure itself is always a bit of a time travel story- we start out with containment, describing the box, and we tell the story of what’s in the box, and we tell how it got there, all reversed foreshadowing.

So in this article the Foundation is presented with the same kind of thing- a contained anomaly appears, they work to describe it, and then create its origin.

Wearing a d class jumpsuit with the identifying denomination would let the Foundation know it was from the future- if their system had not yet allocated that particular number they’d know roughly when it was to be issued, and as other numbers were issued they’d arrive to nearly a specific date, a deadline in which they’d have to imprison the poor guy. Who at that point would be identified and under surveillance but not apparently guilty of anything.
So the Foundation team is given one second out of every ten seconds to intervene- even in the space of a second there’s a number of methods you could use. Some kind of ballistically rigged snare could snag identifying material.

So they’d be able to find his identity, leaving the two largest pieces of mystery- how is he able to remember each loop, and how he got stuck in this Promethean loop of torture. I’m actually not sure if that’s a story that needs to be told, for me I’m more interested in the Secure Contain Protect principle being the source of horror- that the Foundation would be willing to damn an innocent man to eternal torment rather than screw with time travel. But, the original idea I had was that this loop was the Foundations way of trapping a malicious time traveler- tricking them into a loop somehow, into “quantum suicide”. But if he is a D class, then the likeliest scenario is that exposure to an SCP sometime in the future would cause the event, and the Foundations pragmatism would likely entail the distribution of amnesics to all involved so his involvement in the temporal SCP would happen “naturally”. At least, this is how I’m thinking about it now.

Last edited on 03 Oct 2020 03:11 by Frostilicus Show more