"You are not a small and unimportant creature confined to the form of this physical body, contrary to popular belief. At the core of your being you are pure awareness, and this awareness is the same source from which everything in the Universe arises, exists as, and returns to. Consciousness is the dimension of yourself that you have forgotten you are, and of which you long to return to." - Joseph P. Kauffman, some frickin hippy
Thanks to everyone in chat that reviewed this or gave their opinion- fairydoctor, dxvi, ddvault, OptimisticOri.
I'm sure I could've made this more accessible, but I want to see what everyone thinks is happening here.
I'll need about 24 hours to assemble all the cc links with work and stuff. But it's all cc, I know that much. Special thanks to Jeff Vandermeer (vanderfrog) for having the polish covers of the Southern Reach trilogy available with compliant CC.
I did all the graphs and emblems/logos and modified the Vandermeer artwork appropriately
ETA:
And yes, I realize that Jack Ike, resident king of RCT has just posted a skip about temporally certain events during the present, literally within six hours of this. That was not anticipated, as you can see by the amount of effort I put into all the images and length…. That's what I call spooky action at a distance, amirite?
Recommended listening: Great Dane - 307 ("Hey boss, this is the voice of your past….")
Starting from the top of page:
- Iconohazard made by myself
- File main image made myself, asset used for hollyhock crest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_clan#/media/File:Tokugawa_family_crest.svg
- Three temporal diagrams made by myself
although I did study the curves from The Physics of Bending to make the nice, smooth graphs.
- Explosion pic is by Michael Gill, CC-BY-A 2.0
- Omega Event pic is by Jose Nicdao, CC-BY-A 2.0
- Three Polish cover arts of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer (aka vanderfrog), remixed by myself under Generic CC-BY-A 2.0
https://www.flickr.com/photos/vanderworld/14333482737
https://www.flickr.com/photos/vanderworld/14516549641
https://www.flickr.com/photos/169899254@N07/51573365719
- AOI emblems various pic made by me, used assets from GOI pages.
- AOI document cover image made by me using already discussed assets.
might add another image or two, will update
Okay, so this piece has a lot of moving parts and a few red herrings, not to mention being very theory dense, so I'm gonna get this out of the way immediately: Don't trust any of the claims made in the final note, but do trust the date on the final note. That is the year you are reading from.
You might think you're reading from the same year as O5-7, you might think that the document you're viewing is the one that RCT gave to him and it's now just farther in the future. You might think you're reading it while it's being updated by RCT in the future. All of these are wrong.
If you look at how the words are structured and how the updates come through, you can see that the article is updated several times since it was given to O5-7. The parts given to O5-7 are outlined in the procedures. He was given basic info about The Sunrise Collective and the AOI, along with ways to eventually stop them, but refrained from elaborating on much else. This is to help O5-7 understand what is happening without too much potentially hazardous info that could alter timelines. You can read more about that conversation in SCP-4888. You might be saying to yourself "oh, so that means they're already stuck in the loop, because RCT is seeing AOI poke its head out already", but remember that the document explicitly says that Operation HIGHLANDER needs to occur before they see the anomaly- some "arbitrary point" after because it really doesn't matter at this point as long as it's after HIGHLANDER is carried out.
So- what's the deal? The deal is RCT made a fatal mistake- they tried to pass the buck.
Remember: the Copenhagen interpretation has a few key points to keep in mind that make it different from the other popular theories of causality like the ever-popular Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation or De Broglie–Bohm and classic mechanics.
The Copenhagen interpretation is indeterministic, which means that the flow of causality is not constrained to set paths established purely by initial conditions and choice. Things in the past and future can be changed and they won't have already been changed before you try and change them. That's determinism, which says that the initial conditions will always be how they've always been, there is no means of changing the outcome because everything, down to your ability to reason, has been shaped by an infinite number of infinitesimally small but truly calculable high order maths and can be predicted with a powerful enough computer. This is an idea explored in the FX show Devs- if you're curious about this topic, that would be a good place to start for related media, along with the netflix show Dark.
With Copenhagen, anyone can up and go back in time, change things, then watch how retrocausality changes things up when they travel back. It's not a matter of determinism- because in deterministic interpretations everything has already happened and already will happen based on concrete, established initial conditions that are immutable. Now, the difference between deterministic mechanics and deterministic quantum mechanics is that, such with the Many Worlds interpretation, you can go back and change something that was not changed before. It makes sense if you believe in free will; if I have knowledge of the past and present state, I can always focus all my efforts to change something with my fictional time machine that wasn't changed, and either the universe would blow up or it would permit me to change the thing.
With Everett, the changes you make create a branch reality, and really there are infinite branches across infinite moments, frame by frame, encompassing all the different choices that people make- there's no "chance" or "luck" here; such things imply randomness, but the universe has no random parts. Things like a die roll, a coin flip, quantum fluctuations and even random number generators are built upon calculable rules that, with perfect understanding of a system, can be reconstructed and simulated in either direction. I'd challenge you to find one "random" thing in the real world.
But probabilistic scenarios are at the heart of Copenhagen's interpretation and thus the Foundationverse can have good and bad luck. Things just happen sometimes, without cause. I explored this probabilistic quantity in SCP-1822, and Everett's system in SCP-2921, to contrast.
So, RCT made a mistake. They observed the future and panicked, they tried to divert things by sending the document back to O5-7 along with instructions to get O5-4 and O5-11 to ally with them in the future. Didn't seem to work out for them though. When 7 took a chance and pre-emptively struck the Sunrise Collective, the resulting failure changed the timeline, creating the loop, but it did not cause the anomaly. SCP-5541, as said in the final bits, was caused by the Heisenberg cut of observing the future timeline in the first place, plus the actions of the Foundation. The Heisenberg cut is another word for the liminal interface between the observer and a system. It is the conceptual space where wave function collapse occurs. WFC is when a system of possible outcomes is observed and it goes from being unknown, non-extant and/or superpositioned to collapsed into a single outcome.
The paradox that forms just shows that, after O5-7 dies some time around the inception of RCT (seen in figure 3), then by the time the initial point comes around, RCT will get spooked again and try to inform a young O5-7 once more. They are feeding on each other's fear and that makes the loop possible. The AOI is a certainty for completely different reasons: the Foundation itself and the RCT's continuous travel to the future, reinforcing the outcome.
The next thing to remember that this article describes zero anomalous activity whatsoever. The idea of a mind-affecting paradigm shift is a tempting distraction for the Foundation, who only know how to do business as usual and nothing much else. The problem with that is that anomalous things are still happening everywhere. It is not sustainable, eventually you will run out of space, money, employees, etc. That is what is described in the "Foundation Collapse" section- a plurality (60%) of cases were just simply lack of adherence to protocol and/or things failing due to general collapse of an industry with limited resources and unlimited work to do. It is inevitable.
The AOI is an inevitable result of Broken Masquerade events and likely just seized on an opportunity. The people weren't forced into unity. People just needed someone to make them feel part of something magical. The Foundation took that chance away from humanity.
The Foundation lies and cheats and steals reality from people. The AOI offered a much better deal than that- truth, enlightenment, peace.
Just by traveling so much, agents are starting to pick up fragments of the ideology- because of the effect described in the proposal. They are impacted by an ever-strengthening field generating strange things. But eventually RCT gets it- we need to change the way we're doing things, and YESTERDAY
They understood that the Foundation was fucked if they didn't change to being more rehabilitation-focused- Sites would overcrowd, budgets would bloat, and eventually containment would fail, somewhere. What is considered anomalous is just an unknown field generating things using maths and probabilities. That field would get worse in Sites with high density of captives, leading to random problems that contribute to more "spontaneous" problems occurring and even more, until the system fails.
Even the employee morale was at an all time low, which makes sense. And the note of interest here is the idea that RCT couldn't find any future versions of themselves, hinting that something weird will happen at some point.
So, we get to the end and RCT explains that the only "anomalous" thing is something underlying reality and causing it to manifest as physical, and this same process generates strangeness. The danger isn't in the strangeness but in the lack of resources that the universe has. The QKs happen when there is too much strangeness and not enough background reality to keep it in check, so it cascades out of control and the universe melts away in favor of a new one, a loop of its own.
The QKs happen when enough observers (or one of significant power) stops observing an already high-phenomena density area. Because observation raises humes (the unit of realness), looking away makes them drop. It triggers when the god-like creature on planet IX is unable to see Earth, it happens when a large group of humans play hide-and-seek, etc.
So RCT urges O5 to reclassify the database as explained and start rehabilitating anomalous entities into small communities or various locations where they can keep a secret and hopefully forgive the Foundation, going so far as to say that keter/apollyon entities are aggressive only when being contained and trying to escape containment, which makes sense, but the council will have none of it.
Suddenly both the entire Temporal Anomalies Department and the Time Donut are missing. Except, the 5541 document is still here because of a technology that was theoretically discussed but never prototyped in the article. 1968's document is gone, but there is an obvious hole where it was.
Remember: does retro-causality work like that in Copenhagen rules? NO. The checker would not have ever had a discrepancy, they would have simply remained open to use until it was taken by something, once the retrocausality effect was initiated. This is a fib from the Administration, which used 1968 or 3797 to erase the entire department from existence along with hiding/destroying the tools used. It's possible they disappeared with RCT, I wrote it so that the agents were erased some time before their exploratory efforts began so as not to disrupt timelines too much but erase any traces of the department from human memory- specifically O5-7. They then deploy an internal history re-write where the Allied Occult Initiative is made out to be the name for a defunct GOC predecessor from the 1940's, and claiming business as usual is the only option, damning them to their fate. The final date is a century from SCP-5541's activation.
Occultation, the name of the article, has three meanings here.
1. To become occult, or to make something the occult
2. A celestial body obscuring another
3. To obscure something from another party, perhaps deceptively
That's the basics of it. I can go on for days about little details, like RCT trying to stop RCT from trying to stop things already in motion and failing even though it should be possible, because they got the conceiving factors wrong. They'd do an attempt, check 2003, still see a future with the AOI and panic, doing it all over again, not realizing the forwards travel and their "homogenous wave function collapse synchronization", which they correctly predicted could be a cause but didn't realize it was essentially what they were doing. They were accidentally creating convergence nodes, achieved by traveling through timelines tens of thousands of times- this is what is setting 5541 in motion throughout the multiverse.
Questions? Good, cause maybe none of this analysis is true, maybe it is only partially true. Maybe i want you to find out all the small details that paint the bigger picture. Maybe you should just enjoy the ride.
If I had to give one definitely true spoiler it's "reread footnote 4 ya goobers"
Fun small details I'll give you as a freebee:
- Semel Dacia means "once/at one time nomad" in Latin
- The effects of Jupiter occulting Saturn describe SCP-2935 and also reference a commonly held astrological belief in the role of Saturn and the Saturn Return. Similar references can be found elsewhere.
- All the designations associated with addenda/incidental logs have relevance, as does the message in the iconohazard.
- Footnote 4
Special thanks to Frederica Bernkastel for translating O c c u l t a t i o n for the Chinese branch, down to the graphs and stuff. You're awesome.
