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This one's been sitting for a hot minute. Lots of people have provided feedback and helped in brainstorming. And to those many people I give my thanks.
SCP-2783 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2783.
Removed a weaker log, added two logs that ought to be a move in the right direction, at the very least.
(account deleted)I am not a huge fan of the origins/recovery section; there seems to be a lot of needless blackboxing, and it seems to have little relevance to the rest of the article. I get the sense you're trying to imply something, but it's difficult to see what (although I am v. bleary at the moment, so perhaps I'm missing something).
Other than that, this is great; it's complex, involving, subtly horrifying and pleasantly mysterious. +1.
…there seems to be a lot of needless blackboxing, and it seems to have little relevance to the rest of the article. I get the sense you're trying to imply something, but it's difficult to see what…
- The blackboxing is because, well, it seemed likely to me that the Foundation would censor these incident logs as much as possible.
- The main implication of the recovery log ties back into what I told Soulless in the collapsible'd reply to their post. But basically, the idea is, hostile AIs were destroyed by humans working alongside benevolent AIs. But in the process, some human lives and the AIs were destroyed. Leaving the remains of the hardware that stored the AIs in a single spot basically signalled to whoever is in charge of the graveyard that the laboratory was a graveyard for heroic AIs; in the brainstorming phase, I'd planned on mentioning the AIs in the list of grave markers. I just sort of… forgot to find a smooth way to include it.
Hopefully, that provides some insight into my intentions and the stylistic choices I made.
The Serpent within the Library bestowed upon her great Wisdom
Should the her here be capitalized?
Radar investigation of the grave indicates that the entity interred within possessed biology atypical of baseline humans
I think this is missing a period at the end.
I think overall I'm missing what is trying to be implied. The imagery here is good but not good enough or striking enough to warrant the very long read with little to no payoff at the end.
Living the dream, or dreaming the life?
The Serpent within the Library bestowed upon her great Wisdom
Should the her here be capitalized?
Pronoun confusion. The "her" is the person in the grave. If you or someone else provides an alternative that reads better, I'll make the change.
Radar investigation of the grave indicates that the entity interred within possessed biology atypical of baseline humans
I think this is missing a period at the end.
I'll try to fix that right now but I'm on mobile so it may have to wait.
I think overall I'm missing what is trying to be implied. The imagery here is good but not good enough or striking enough to warrant the very long read with little to no payoff at the end.
The Big Picture Idea is, there was a war tens of thousands of years ago, before recorded history. On one side, there was an empire of worshipers of a violent, vile, wrathful god. On the other side, there was a city-state of rational, forward-thinking engineers who built a machine that achieved apotheosis. The empire won but the remnants of the city-state survived to become the foundation of modern humanity.
The graveyard started as a memorial to the lost city-state. However, part of the magic that went into the graveyard to keep it hidden also meant that it kept expanding to accommodate successors of the lost city-state, the first engineers.
Tl;dr: an ancient Church of the Broken God graveyard became a Foundation graveyard because the Broken God likes the Foundation more than she likes her own church.
I'm not above editing this to make that narrative clearer or more emotionally engaging.
Keep this explanation in your first comment. Would be nice.
That's a cool narrative – especially the "Broken God actually prefers the Foundation" part – but there's no way I'd ever glean it from the text as currently written.
Also, I'd have appreciated more backstory on The Scarlet King. I had to do a bunch of googling to figure out the connection between the phrase "Crimson Crown" and the daeva, which is surprising given how many scips I've read. That reference to the Sarkic corpse confused me for a second, and made me temporarily believe this "Crimson Crown" was linked to a Sarkic entity rather than a Daevite one, especially because it's Sarkites rather than the daeva who are the standard enemy of CotBG. (The Scarlet King is a Daevite deity for the purposes of this article, right?)
Yeah, Big Red is a Daevite deity. He's THE Daevite deity. He's the Zeus of their pantheon.
What would you suggest to make the intended narrative more clear? More graves and inscriptions?
Edit: also, the reason there's a Sarkicist memorialized here is because the war was more complicated than the summary I gave above. Ion's followers were a third faction, fighting Daevites on another front. This individual somehow got to the Middle East and found himself fighting machine worshipers and Daevites at the same time. Before he died, he decided "enemy of my enemy" and went out surrounded by a pile of Daevite corpses.
Ways to do exposition off the top of my head:
General:
- have (some aspect of) the .aic appear and provide some explanation
- "ghosts" in the graveyard manifest and tell Foundation agents what happened to them
War:
- have a separate section of the graveyard with a sign etc that indicates the graves her specifically hold casualties of the war
- mention that the tomb in southern Iraq is known by the Foundation as the site of a battle/siege between Daevites and Mekhanites
Mekhane prefers Foundation to CotBG now:
- un-redact some inscriptions for the graves of Foundation agents with some explicit mention of them being the 'truest incarnation of Mekhane's will on Earth' etc
- explicitly mention that CotBG-associated graves become less frequent in newer regions of the anomaly, and that the inscriptions on them become gradually less adulatory, more dismissive, and eventually condescending; in the newest areas, there are no CotBG graves, and a bunch of Foundation agent ones
- dialogue with the coffin-bearers (perhaps a little on-the-nose)
- make the coffin-bearers display specifically CotBG icons, or intone some prayer to Mekhane while interring the body
- CotBG followers, distraught and remorseful at Mekhane preferring the Foundation over them (which they have somehow discovered), keep trying to access the anomaly to inter their members/pray for forgiveness from Mekhane at the site
I've added a few logs.
One point I'd like to clarify is…
The Church of the Broken God doesn't have any direct continuity with the actual cult that built the Machine Goddess.
The "Church of the Broken God," in my headcanon, is just a cover-all term the Foundation uses for machine-worshipers who have access to real anomalous machines. There is an organization loosely founded on the idea of reconstructing a broken machine god that was founded by a Spanish blacksmith/machinist prior to and during the Spanish Civil War but it's far from the only machine cult. There are Buddhist and Hindu sects that have a thing for clockwork and the pursuit of nirvana through machines. There are also Christian, Judaic, and Muslim sects with similar ideology (some related to Bumaro's cult, some independent).
None of those people know about this graveyard. This graveyard is for spiritual successors to the city-state of engineers who built the Machine Goddess. One of the weird quirks about the Machine Goddess is that she worships humanity right back; she is the living embodiment of human curiosity and innovation. She is our spirit of exploration, our drive to peaceably discover new knowledge. An overwhelming majority of people in the graveyard interred before the Foundation was formed are scientists and engineers and scholars. During WWII, the Foundation destroyed and contained a large number of paranormal weapons; afterwards, they became the world's premiere researchers into the occult. The Machine Goddess saw these scientists and engineers and agents working tirelessly to expand human knowledge and protect their fellows without hope of recognition and decided that, if she's going to have a graveyard, she might as well dedicate to people who are carrying on both her work, and her creators'.
There's a lot of mythology-building that went into the brainstorming for this that is patently not showing through in the execution. :/
Marvin.aic
Holy crap! The reddit bot makes its debut in the Foundation-verse!
An excellent article, now one of my favorites. Also, a possible addition could be SCP-2165, like, something like this:
| ██████ | They shall not be remembered. | The significance of this is unknown. |
That particular suggestion is not really in-line with the theme/point of the story.
I'm really glad you liked it, though!
Eh, figured it wasn't. Although 2165 was written for a shortworks contest, and as such it has little material, I feel like someone could do something really good with it at some point.
Honestly, the fact that the plot is so opaque in the actual article is the only thing keeping it as just unmemorable, rather than actively insufferable. I don't want or need a story about how
some empire defined by its adherence to a vile religion (NOW WHERE HAVE I SEEN THAT CHARACTERIZATION BEFORE) destroyed a city-state that was euphoric because it was enlightened by its own intelligence (also lmao a city-state of engineers? What does that even mean? Who does all of the actual work? Why would there be such a thing? oh okay nvm this aside), and a few thousand years later their God has deemed the SCP Foundation (aka the 'I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about the status quo?' people) as the specialest little engineers on the planet.
if your reading this your gay
a city-state of engineers? What does that even mean?
It's a type of technocracy. The current government of China is a good example- the majority of the party's leaders are trained engineers, and their five-year plans are basically a way of applying the principals of systems engineering to running a nation.
Pretty much this; what I meant by that turn-of-phrase was a society with a strong education system and a culture geared towards STEM fields, especially mechanics. People still have to do unskilled labor, that's inescapable with everything besides possibly a fully-automated society. But even a lot of the unskilled laborers have a basic mechanical education and tend to solve problems without needing repairmen.
As for the rest of your crit, I'm trying to leave as much open to interpretation as possible; if people aren't connecting dots, they'll say as much (which they are) and I'll try to make edits to correct it (which I have, but clearly that hasn't been effective yet).
I enjoyed reading this SCP article. But I noticed that there are two different types of censoring going on. There is the regular kind that stays censored when you highlight it, and then there is a kind that looks like it's been marked with a spoiler tag. You can read what's underneath when you highlight it. I figured I should point that out, since I don't know whether you intended for some of the censored stuff to be readable. Personally, I like that style better. We get to see what normal researchers in the SCP Universe would see in the articles, but we can also take a peek behind the curtain, so to speak.
Edit: approved by author, edits made
The WikiWalk team is proposing edits to this page. All proposed edits will be in a collapsible below this post, and after 7 days if there are no serious objections to the edits, the feedback received will be taken into account as the edits are made. If you have questions not directly related to the article about this project, please pm a member of the WikiWalk Team.
This SCP mentions an "Artificial Intelligence Wing". I propose linking this to the AIAD, considering that they both involve artificial intelligence.
Editing this:
SCP-2783 is an extradimensional anomaly accessible through the door of the former Laboratory 37 of the Artificial Intelligence Wing at Site-43.
To this:
SCP-2783 is an extradimensional anomaly accessible through the door of the former Laboratory 37 of the Artificial Intelligence Wing at Site-43.
👍👍
Do your thing.
This SCP references so many other SCPs and tales, but to me it feels very respectful and a homage, rather than riding off the fame of others. It's very cohesive, and yet the references come from both fairly recent skips, to some ideas which I'm sure have been mostly forgotten. A great stroll through nostalgia.
Not so much homage as an attempt to make a cohesive narrative out of disparate parts, then present a glimpse into that narrative. Regardless, I'm glad you liked it!
It is better to view this on an actual computer rather than on mobile. If you are reading this, you probably know about the hidden text by now. You can just highlight it with a mouse on a desktop or laptop. On mobile, that doesn't work.
/forum/t-2763478/scp-2783#post-
page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
