I really enjoyed this. There's an SCP-XXX in the last addendum, but other than that little slip, very nice work.
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2087.
This isn't doing anything for me. Neutral vote.
Edit: On further consideration this was boring enough that it bothered me. Downvote.
I think "this is boring" downvotes are the price I'm just going to have to pay for banking so heavily on fridge horror. Better to lose those points than to lose the point.
Is the fridge horror you're talking about the implication that the Foundation's fucked up primary universe is the best of all possible timelines? If so, it doesn't pay off well. The buildup is awkward and obfuscated. Overall, the piece is underwhelming for the implied magnitude.
Is this article derived from this?
Dr. ██████: Do you know what it means for me to say that to you? That it is all for the best? That this is the best of all possible worlds? That this is?
I meant to deeply underplay it. Maybe that didn't work? I'd gotten sign-off from the chat, but — yes. There's definitely some dryness. But there's nowhere for a log to go, because it's not really the SCP itself that's the punchline: the SCP lets us detect the punchline.
(account deleted)This relies too heavily on pseudo-jargon up front, so that by the time the actual point of this article arrives at the very end, I'm not really interested.
This is positively rated, so it's working some level. Vox populi, vox Dei. For me personally though, and I suspect a few others, this is conceptually akin to reading the phone book out loud to someone for ten minutes, then going "and the call was coming from inside the house."
That is absolutely hilarious. I had a different experience of the article (I liked it quite a bit) but that is nevertheless hilarious.
I found it very obtuse and difficult to find the point. Actually, I'm still not sure what's the point.
There are a handful(well, infinite, but you get what I mean) of timelines *juuuust* ever so slightly out of sync with our own. The changes are likely to be as miniscule as one or two differently-charged particles. But these changes butterfly, and eventually, people who are(by chance) more closely entangled to their "whole self"(all versions of you from the multiverse) are phasing in and out of *our* timeline. These are noticable because these people suffered horrific accidents that they did not in our world, or they *didn't* suffer these accidents in our world and the alter-thems did in another. Regardless, they're coming through. Not wholy, just enough to notice. Glitching through.
So, the Multiverse Foundation of Foundations(patent pending) was founded and everyone sort of agreed on a similar way to track known problem-people using rare radioactive metals. So when those show up in quantities improbable to happen naturally, we know there's a breach.
Then, one day, 41 *million* people started showing those signs. And then 21% of the entire human population got (nearly unnoticeable, harmless) radiation poisoning. The Alter-foundations were telling us that something *BAD* happened, and somehow, we're the only ones(in contact with the others, that is) that didn't have that happen.
And we don't know *why* it missed us, or if the ones we got the message from were actually slightly 'ahead' of us in time, and if we just haven't gotten to that 'point' yet.
I think that explains it.
Do I get a medal?
If that's true, then I like the concept, but I dislike the execution.
I may pull it and revise. The author here is exactly right about the point of the article, but my problem here is the amount of exposition necessary to get to that point:
There is something <i>very specific</i> going on here: for some reason, only a very particular timeline has continued viability. But we aren't sure what's going on in the timelines we can't talk to for fear of contamination.
This might be one of the few cases where telling rather than showing could be better suited. I mean, you're dealing with something that very few people really understand. I only get it because I'm into alternatehistory and the concept of parallel and otherwise timelines is second nature.
Hell, I don't see many people outside of the Foundation's specialists on the thing really grasping the magnitude of what's happening, without it being spelled out. It's hard to fathom, on your own, the idea that of all the timelines we are aware of, the only one making it past this (subjective) point is us.
The part where they twitch a bunch because of nearby Schroedinger Errors really, really makes this one remind me of Bioshock Infinite.
Piffy is an SCP Foundation Moderator, Lv. 9001 Squishy Wizard, and Knight of the Red Pen.
Okay, this article hits enough sweet spots of mine (plausible-sounding ,if "boring" anomalous science, charming use of body horror (legs walking on their own? six molars and a part of brain alligned as if there was a head there?), causality messing) that the final addendum, good as it is in a fridge horror sense is just a cherry on the delicious cake here.
Enthusiastic upvote, please don't change a thing x3.
With divergent timelines, why is any one timeline considered "primary"?
For the same reason that an AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
The more I look at this SCP, the more unsatisfied I am with how it turned out. But since it's up here, I think I'll take an opportunity to see if the issues I need to fix aren't more structural than conceptual. The rewrite would look like this:
Containment stays basically the same. However, we contain everyone in a facility built with far more cells than people, because it's meant to contain the equivalent SCPs in other universes.
Transboundary contact is limited as a concept. Instead, what the Foundation does is to precommit to containing persons whose counterparts are radioactively tagged.
Description contains the two people we have right now, and includes their physical descriptions.
Addenda include:
A case report. (The hospital one.)
A brief, somewhat personal memo from a scientist discussing the theory here, and speculating about the dangers of contact with parallel timelines
A slightly different shutdown memo discussing the destruction of every other viable timeline.
What do people think?
It would work. But I really like this as it is, because the horror is extremely subtle. The rewrite would make it too obvious as to why this is terribad.
The fact that this is essentially people with Tear Sickness from Bioshock Infinite bugs me to no end.
For those of you who don't know, Tear Sickness (referred to on the Bioshock Wiki as being "Merged") is what happens to some corpses in Infinite when Elizabeth enters a new universe/timeline via a tear. Living individuals often get nosebleeds as their memories try to compensate for the incongruity with the one they originated from. Dead individuals, however… well, it's somewhat inconsistent, but usually, if their corpse is in close proximity to an opened tear, they start phasing in and out of existence, have jerky movements, and talk in a distorted voice.
This, combined with the ability to move between alternate timelines the Foundation has, makes me see this as Bioshock Infinite: The SCP. And as much as I love Infinite, this concept doesn't feel original at all.
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page revision: 1, last edited: 02 Apr 2021 15:16
