This is my second SCP and my first in 4 years. I was inspired by jokes about actuaries being sociopathic body counters and/or probability wizards. I hope you all enjoy it.
SCP-3141 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-3141.
Hewlett-Packard could learn a thing or two from this. +1
So, I like this idea – if I'm honest, partly because it reminds me of my own SCP-2791. However, the reason I wrote 2791 is because I thought there was artistic merit in using horror to highlight the under-appreciated power wielded by intangible financial/corporate systems. And that's exactly what you've done here! Good job on appealing to my biases. Let's write more of this kind of thing, buddy. +1.
Despite the above, I was frequently tempted to downvote while reading this, because the quality of prose was quite poor throughout.
- You need to decide whether or not you're going to capitalise "Foundation" in phrases like "Foundation agents" or "Foundation custody". (Hint: it would be very non-standard if you didn't.)
- "Ethics Committee", not "Ethic Committee".
- The singular of "phenomena" is "phenomenon".
- "You know what a like in an employee George?" – this "a" should be "I" or "we", and I would personally place a comma before "George".
- "Three Foundation agents; Amanda Stiles, Philip Morehouse, and Juan Schaffer, hereby referred to as “the team”; stationed…" – this is very non-standard use of semicolons. I would recommend using dashes or brackets instead.
- "… in the room, referred to hereafter as subjects were naked…" – Dead Spectra, come on! You gotta close that non-restrictive relative clause with a comma! (Put a comma after "subjects", in non-grammar speak.) The subordinate clause "Upon reaching the sixth floor" needs a comma after it too, and so does "From the tattoos on the subjects involved in Incident 3141-A"… There are lots of places in this piece where you'd ideally have an extra comma.
- "All subjects possessed tattoos on their body…" – should be "their bodies". It makes it sound like they've only got one body between the five of them otherwise!
- "In the center of the pentacle lay a pulsating organic mass that is impacted with…" – you're mixing past and present tense. You have to stick with one!
- I'm sure I caught a possessive without its requisite apostrophe, but I can't find it now.
- '… “reasonable” desired result.' – If you're going to opt for the gambit of "avoiding having to explain precisely what I mean by surrounding a simpler word in quotation marks instead", I think you should at least provide an explanatory footnote. (I'm not going to judge you too hard, because I've used that strategy a bunch of times myself!) You could also avoid both the footnote and quotation marks by actually telling us what you mean, which I presume is "a desired result that [does not contradict / is in accordance with] [physical laws / the laws of physics]", or similar.
- "… in their utilization of it." – This is a personal bugbear of mine: you should avoid using the word "it" when writing in scientific tone, especially to represent a specific noun. It's an object rather than a subject here, which feels less wrong, but it's worth keeping in mind.
- "… but estimates range from 2,000 to [REDACTED]." – I feel that the standard method of censorship here would be to have a blackbox with an appropriate number of digits rather than a [REDACTED] tag. Like the bullet point above, this is a minor concern.
- (I'm not putting this in the "basic grammar" collapsible, because incorrect word choice isn't necessarily basic grammar.) "markedly unique" – not sure I agree with the use of "markedly" here. Something is either unique, or it isn't – it's a binary thing to me, so there's not really room for shades of grey. I'd personally instead say something like "each reported discovery of SCP-3141 in the literature has provided a unique derivation of the proof", or state the converse with something like "no two proofs of SCP-3141 observed have the same derivation". (On another note, I'm not 100% sure how 'realistic' or narratively useful this point is, although I'm not good enough a mathematician to know.)
- You take a while to get to the interesting part where private individuals are using the anomaly for selfish reasons. Had I been writing this, I'd have been tempted to whack something into the very opening of the description to keep people interested while they slog through the theoretical set-up; something along the lines of "SCP-3141 is a mathematical theorem that can be manipulated by individuals to decide the [long-term] probability of real-world events." I'd also stress once more that it's often discovered by people working in the actuarial profession, but that's because I try to write in a particularly pedantic and over-obvious manner.
- I would completely get rid of the "only 15% of people manage to use it". It doesn't add anything interesting to the anomaly at all; it just means more time before you arrive at the interesting stuff. You seem too over-rigorous in explaining the precise conditions for the anomaly to manifest; you could cut, simplify or footnote at least some of the mathematical jargon.
- I'd put addendum A after addendum B, if you're going to include it at all. Is it absolutely necessary for the narrative to say that the effect maybe, gradually, possibly, dissipates over time? You don't bring it up afterwards to develop the story, and it doesn't fill any obvious logical hole. If anything, saying "it gets better on its own" just makes the anomaly less scary, which is hardly a good thing for this website!
- Having spoopy rituals is good, and I liked the incident report overall, but you don't make it clear why these people have decided to use the anomaly to make big flesh beasts, or even how the anomaly can be used to make flesh beasts. I mean, what, did they set the "probability for a big flesh beast to appear in my room right now" to equal 100%? Because if that's the case, what you've got here is pretty much indistinguishable from plain ol' reality bending. You should really stress (even harder) that this anomaly only works on the distribution of long-term outcomes over large numbers of events. The "organic mass" and ritual seems tenuously tacked on right now – you really need to tie it in better.
- The incident report was short and (largely) sweet, but I feel like you could have stretched it out a bit and let the tension build. I mean, this is your chance to show us the kind of people who employ the anomaly, and how it's affected their mindset, and what kind of mark it's made on the setting around them… You didn't really have any description at all! It would be a nice juxtaposition to describe a really banal office with all the usual water coolers and cheesy motivational posters; or maybe having the power of gods has gone to their head, and the departmental manager has hagiographic portraits of himself everywhere, and there's a creepy arrogance in all the employee's body language, and they've just let rubbish pile up everywhere because they don't give a shit and they're untouchable. I mean, you obviously don't need that level of detail, but you need a little bit so I can imagine it around me!
- "The Foundation hasn't been able to come up with an independent proof" is a slightly bland point to end on. You don't even need to include it at all – again, it's another thing that doesn't add to the story! It would be much punchier to end with the revelation that multiple firms have discovered and used the anomaly to shorten or lengthen people's lifespans.
Overall: think harder about what emotional effect your words, sentences and paragraphs will have on a reader; think about how you can modulate that effect by adding or removing elements, or changing their position; and try to paint a very clear picture in your head about the people and locations involved, which will only help in telling a convincing story. You don't need to include every detail that comes to your mind when you're writing this – conjure up as much detail as possible in your head, and then only commit to writing the most impactful and narratively useful bits.
Thank you for your feedback! I've implemented the grammar changes and most of the tonal ones.
As for your issues with the structure: I understand your reservation one hundred percent! I was on the fence about adding -A and I did so because several people told me they felt like something was missing. I put it before the incident report so it could act as foreshadowing.
As for your point about the rituals/spoopy organic mass. The point of that, as I tried to show in -C, was that there was no point. The foundation has absolutely no clue why these industry professionals are utilizing ritual components along with the theorem. They're not sure what the purpose is and what it contributes. Whether or not its a requisite or byproduct. If it is needed, why does the theorem work without it? Are these people just really mentally imbalanced? Can normal people only accept this kind of anomaly into their worldview if it conforms with something they have at least heard of before? (e.g. satanic rituals)
Regarding the last part about the Foundation being unable to find an independent proof—For me that's the scariest part. 3141 is popping up all over the place in the heads and work of normal, non-anomalous people, and the Foundation, who presumably has a crack team of mathematicians, can't figure it out. Is that one of the properties? Who knows?
Anyway, that's what I was trying to convey at least. It's open to interpretation.
You see, I really like those two points – the rituals and not being able to find a proof – now that you've explained them! They add some interesting, mysterious layers to the story, but they weren't obvious from how the piece was originally written. It's more difficult to do it within the framework of scientific tone, but you need to use a teeny bit of emotive language and a breadcrumb trail to lead your readers to non-obvious conclusions. e.g. for the lack of proof, you should say something like "Despite many years of study by a dedicated research team of 12 personnel, the Foundation has been unable to derive an independent proof of SCP-3141. Accordingly, it is suspected that knowledge of SCP-3141 is imparted anomalously to its discoverers. How this occurs, and whether the knowledge is imparted spontaneously by a feature of the anomaly itself, or imparted by a person or group of interest, is unknown." (that's a bit clunkily worded – I'm sure you could do better!)
That's a good idea man. thank you, I'll start drafting a change for that last paragraph.
I appreciated the very accurate math jargon (or, at the very least, inaccurate math jargon that looks convincing enough to fool me), but the second and third paragraphs are dense enough with it that I didn't realize during my first read-through exactly what it was that SCP-3141 did, and didn't really understand what was so bad about this theorem until Addendum 3141-C. By that time, a lot of the 'mathematical horror' implicit in the concept had worn off, and I was just left with the normal Satanic ritual stuff.
Also, you're missing a comma after 'referred to hereafter as subjects' in Addendum 3141-B, and 'Convention laws of probability…' should be 'Conventional laws of probability…' in footnote 2.
Neutral vote for now, but may very well change it to a +1 later. The idea has a lot of potential.
Thank you for the grammar catches. Changes have been made!
It's a math equation that changes probabilities- for example, the probability that a given person will have a tragic gardening accident.
The idea of an insurance company manipulating eldritch mathematics to ensure that policy holders live long lives while annuity recipients die early is, in a word, delicious.
That the dancing around a bloody pentagram/pentacle wasn't actually necessary was just the anomalous cherry on top. Having the Foundation agent cry out in horror made me anticipate the reveal, and you did not disappoint.
/forum/t-2265848/scp-3141#post-
page revision: 1, last edited: 25 Feb 2021 03:57
