SCP by Series
Other SCP
Feed
Stories
Discovery
Random
People shape bureaucracies. Bureaucracies shape people. Individuals view their own work as of prime importance, necessitating the continuation of the bureaucracy as the means by which important work is done. Also, missiles.
More writing can be found at my author page.
Signature images were generated with this website.
(Also thanks to fieldstone for giving this a look when it was a draft. Thanks to
DrMagnus for coding help.)
If 231 and Ecce Perago didn't already exist this could be a classic, but as both of those are both existent and venerated, I can't really sink my teeth into this. It feels like it goes halfway in both those directions instead of going all the way in its own direction. The Ethics Committee's actions also felt wildly disproportionate to the point that it stretched my suspension of disbelief, as did the O5s and their supporters being defeated almost effortlessly. The setup and payoff with the two email exchanges was quite nice though.
I imagine their actions feel more proportional in the context of a long series of humiliations and general undermining, which has always seemed to me to be the most realistic relationship that could be had between the two. I would also quibble with the effortless description, but it is what it is.
Btw, this should have the Ethics Comittee tag.
That was my eventual interpretation, though I was also was like "Whoa, hostile takeover for one black-box?" at first. You might want to make that idea a little more explicit.
Concurring with Erasmus:
The Ethics Committee's actions also felt wildly disproportionate to the point that it stretched my suspension of disbelief, as did the O5s and their supporters being defeated almost effortlessly.
I feel as though there is a way around this that's pretty much telegraphed, though. You're setting up right from the initial exchanges that the Ethics Committee has information on pretty much every procedure the Foundation has. Get enough analysis going and you can probably ferret out the routines of the 05s from deviations in the procedures.
Not a perfect piece in detail, but a good narrative arc and an interesting take on the format seems worth a +1.
My issue with this is that, as said by others, the response of the ethics committee seems extreme to the point of laughability. I was waiting for the reveal that 3985 was something that caused them to react in such an extreme to a lack of information about it, or something like that, and it never came.
Maybe if there was some more indication that in 2066 the entire Foundation had become massively guided by the ethics committee to the point that some redacted text like this would be unthinkable (which would be a stretch given the redacted info in other articles), or some indication that the O5 Council had become dictatorial tyrants as the committee chair tries to imply, it might have landed a bit more. (Although for the record, I think the O5 Council is MEANT to have absolute control over everything like that anyway.)
As it stands, I feel that "thing that is so bad/scary/whatever that we can't possibly even let anyone know about it" has been done many times before.
Decent enough and well written though, and I did like the timeline of events, so I'll leave it at no-vote.
I'll add a line or two in the intelligence memo to suggest a broader history of conflict/escalation since that's clearly been a point of concern with multiple people.
As to the point about O5s having absolute power over the Foundation, I think that would be extremely infeasible in any iteration of the organization that wasn't extremely small. Even if they intend to execute unilateral authority, they need to delegate to accomplish complex tasks (especially when they involve incredibly specific fields of research taking place in locations across the world.) That means the creation of power centers that may prioritize their interests differently and may be willing to make life difficult for their bosses. This is particularly difficult in membership-voluntary organizations, as preserving employee morale and satisfaction is necessary to maintain a continued workforce, especially one consisting of very smart people who could probably find jobs elsewhere (protecting reality is important, but at the end of the day people are still going to be people.)
All of that is to say that O5s probably love to think that they can order everyone else around, but I don't think the Foundation could function without other powerful bodies forming and eventually coming into some mode of conflict with them.
Yeah, those are some fair points. What I meant specifically was, if one of the O5 says that some document is going to be heavily redacted or whatever, or something is or isn't going to happen, that's more or less the way it's going to go. Still, setting things a significant distance in the future as your article is can get around a lot of personnel canon conflicts like that, so it's not a huge issue.
My head canon is such that, while people will be people as you said, if someone was going to kick up that much of a fuss about it to actually cause problems, they would indeed find themselves in different employment, but it wouldn't be their choice and they wouldn't remember ever working for the Foundation after the fact.
This is pretty much how I imagine the O5's relationship with the rest of the Foundation, based on my understanding of how complex organizations work - especially ones where day-to-day business involves making decisions that affect people's lives.
There's an official hierarchy to every organization, but as things get larger they have to decentralize, so enclaves form, and then power and influence get redistributed little by little. Eventually the authority of the leaders effectively becomes limited to courses of action they can get a majority of their subordinates to approve of.
That's usually about the time everything falls apart.
But just what IS it? it looks like sakurya managed to get into the council, and now she agrees that the information must be kept confidential, so what the hell is it?
Incident involving Site-106 internal security culminating in the death of 26 research research.
26 whole research? Egad! (Might want to fix this one :p)
Also, I'm going out on a limb and saying the "14 humanoids" are the ex-councilmen and ex-councilwomen, in addition to the original SCP-3985. But is there any significance to the original 3985? Is it meant to be a political prisoner, or something the O5 Council have reason to keep under wraps, or is it just a generic high-value SCP? The O5's keeping it under wraps for seemingly no reason is the crux of the article, so unless they've got good reason to hide it, the civil war seems kind of pointless
Thanks for pointing that error out for me. Something always manages to slip through.
I’m not going to comment on the anomaly itself because I’ve been enjoying reading people’s theories about it, and I don’t think it’s particularly important to what I had intended the article to be about.
Idk. It feels like it's just a tale where a self-insert character kills the whole O5 council instead of being an actual scp.
I’m curious what about Elif gives the impression that she's a self-insert.
I disagree with the idea that the chairwoman's a self-insert (an OC does not a self-insert make), but otherwise, well, that's kind of the point. The SCP itself (so far as I can tell?) is supposed to be insignificant and not have any traits besides being a humanoid-rights concern. The meat of the article's in the "killing the whole O5 Council".
Did you miss the (spoiler alert) whammy at the end about the one entity now being fourteen?
