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All those lies suit you,
They are custom made to drive you out of reality;
Lies are true for you,
You know what you do is reaching a point of insanity.
8th Commandment, Sonata Arctica.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
Exodus 20:16, King James Version
(The 8th commandment in some traditions)
Thou shalt not steal.
Exodus 20:15, King James Version
(The 8th commandment in other traditions)
I don't even remember when or how
I'd also like to thank HarryBlank for their assistance in vectorising the images, which has made them veeery nice and crisp; also to
Calibold, for their review of an earlier draft of this!
I'd say 'Spoilers soon to come', but lets admit it, I'll never get around to it.
Back in college, my roommate read one of William Gibson's novels and - afterward - would not stop gushing about the guy's work. "The guy's the father of most of the terms we use to describe the internet!" You would've thought Gibson was an actual time-traveler with some of the hyperbole.
Anyway, after years of putting it off (and the onset of early pandemic boredom) I finally read Gibson's "Sprawl" trilogy, followed immediately by his "Bridge" trilogy. I was floored by how much I loved them. I immediately picked up some of Gibson's other series and - while I enjoyed them - they just couldn't scratch that "techno-futuristic fiction" itch the same way. In fact, nobody's stuff - regardless of medium (video games, novels, movies) - has really hit that same kind of high-note for me since then.
Cut to today when I randomly stumbled across a YouTube channel called "The Exploring Series." The specific video YT was recommending to me was on SCP-6488: The Eighth Commandment. Took all of 3 minutes for the narrator to sell me on this concept, and I immediately stopped the video and came to the wiki to read this piece for myself.
Not only is this a goddamned brilliant piece of storytelling, it's visual presentation is just gorgeous.
I'll definitely be recommending this to friends, and I know that future me is gonna be jealous as hell as they read it for the first time.
Cannot wait to read the rest of the series!
I love all of these, but something in the puzzle-pieces porn of this one really spoke to me. There were a bunch of people in a room talking about what they figured was going on, a bunch of times, and those parts were… interesting? Like, really interesting? I don't know how you did that. Part of it is that the things they were theorizing about were already really interesting, and part of it was that the way they were talking was also interesting, and… gosh, I read how many words today? Wow.
Well done indeed.
(account deleted)I don't have the brainpower to read this whole thing right now, but what I did read is rad and "cyber-Amida" made me laugh my ass off in a good "delightfully-over-the-top-scifi-movie" way. +1 so far and I'm looking forward to revisiting this when i'm a higher percentage of awake.
EDIT: okay yeah the rest of this is pretty rad also. If i have one criticism it's that the article spends maybe too much time reiterating the plot beats to me, the reader, but that's fair enough when every other admonition has been criticized for being really obtuse. Overall dope article.
This is a long, dense and absolutely fucking wild read. I'll give my thoughts in more depth tomorrow since I'm on the verge of passing out, but it's definitely deserving of a +1.
EDIT: Alright, here we go.
This reads like a high-concept sci-fi novel in the best way possible, but it never loses that characteristic ADMONITION flair. The piece itself knows exactly what it’s doing and twists the reader’s expectations nicely. I’m particularly put in mind of that paragraph where Hishakaku slams Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, as if to remind us that this is the Foundationverse, and things are never so simple there.
The characters are very well done too - for all of Hishakaku’s machinations (heh), I still found myself understanding where he was coming from at first. I can’t help but wonder if he genuinely did want to protect humanity from deviant AIs from the outset, and just couldn’t comprehend why everyone was getting in his way, leading him to go horribly overboard in seizing power for what he saw as the greater good. He’d even be a little similar to LOTUS himself in that regard. Ironic that he got “promoted to Director of OCIs” in the end.
Overall, 100% worth the wait. The sequel hook with the reference to Project Admonition especially interests me.
(“Placeholder LOTUS Virus”, huh? I wonder who that person we don’t have the clearance to know about is…)
The hype for these articles will clearly always be worth it. Never have I gone so fast from “oh no idk if I’ll be able to understand this” to “ABSOLUTELY WORTH IT!”. This series somehow manages to do mind bending concepts, interesting and enthusiastically devious characters, and just some of the most wacky (understatement) things I’ve read, and hooooo babey if this article isn’t the pinnacle of that. Great read from start to finish. +1
so, as with the other entries into this, my first reaction is "holy fuck, holy shit, this is SO COOL", because it IS really cool.
Im glad AIAD got tackled fairly early in this. I think its one of the aspects that, while i love it a lot, i… sort of take for granted, outside of the content in the aiad hub itself. and no WONDER it was tackled here, because it lends itself so well to the drama, intrigue, and the insane not-exactly-nonsense ive come to love in admonition articles.
Ill admit, the whole time i was thinking hishakaku was a bad actor, and im glad to see i was right, but im also glad to see you subverted that quite nicely. yes, he was a bad actor, but this entire insane plot was just to further himself to power, as opposed to any cosmic consequences he might bring. I really like that about this.
The ending, i love. i admittedly am clueless about what the other spider was, or why the lotus was a spider to begin with (is the joke webcrawler? im gonna go with that because thats funny), but even so, it leaves a LOT up in the air, i think, and the fact that the foundation as a whole is so… disinterested in the implications is unnerving. i love it
also, the page is just GORGEOUS. i love the AIAD cyan, and the fractal imagery is, again, insanely cool looking and pretty.
+1, duh
i admittedly am clueless about what the other spider was, or why the lotus was a spider to begin with
said expansion is extruded into the fourth spatial dimension via SCP-3966-A to reduce its functional size.
I mean, it seems pretty logical to me.
As for why LOTUS was a spider, Clysm31201 answered that pretty well (its dimensional extrusion came from 4D spiders). As for the identity of the other spider, I'm less certain, but I do have a guess based on what was said:
The narration describes the god-AI that LOTUS is fighting against here as something that was removed from human consciousness. In VJDS's final report, he mentions a deity of artificial intelligence that was made inconceivable by humans via 6659; copy-pasting the blurred-out text into another window reveals that it says "WAN", which AFAIK is one of the alternate names for or interpretations of Mekhane. Basically, this article seems to suggest that the Broken God is not necessarily a god-that-once-was, but rather a god-that-will-be, an AI that will one day undergo a kind of retroactive apotheosis and become the source of all deviance. (Or at least that's what I'm taking from it; I could be wrong on that last part.)
I was apprehensive going in due to the somewhat aggressive marketing campaign, but ultimately I came away enjoying the piece.
The initial twist of the OCIs didn't surprise me so much, but the precise identity of Victor did surprise me.
I think the abstract imagery of LOTUS and the web in that log was easily very strong — at that point, once most people I think are largely tired of the back-and-forth at meetings and the detective story, there's this trippy sequence that acts as the conclusion.
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
