#scp ramble

[aleph-trix]

Pataphysical Interpretation of the Noosphere - a small SCP Foundation ramble/thought exercise

If you’ve delved deep into the articles and pages of the SCP Wiki, you are most likely familiar with several concepts that have been created as the site progressed and are the basis of a more modern way interactions with the anomalous are presented in various stories and articles. Before, anomalies were presented from the viewpoint of the Foundation’s baseline science. Now, the Foundation has created new anomalous sciences and terminology to properly understand anomalies and their interactions. Akiva radiation, thaumaturgy, EVE etc.

One of these new terminology is the noosphere. Now the noosphere is not a strictly SCP-exclusive concept. It was created by a biogeochemist and a priest/philosopher to describe what they called “the planetary sphere of reason”. In the SCP Wiki, the concept was introduced through the Antimemetics Division set of series: being used in the way it is now first in SCP-2111 and becoming integral to later interpretations of SCP-3125. So what exactly is the Noosphere? There are a lot of answers but SCP-6659, has in my opinion, the most clear cut answer: the Noosphere is a plane of existence embodying abstract human thought. Most of the time it seems less to be psychological in nature and rather more metaphysical in nature relating to memetics and antimemetics. It is inhabited by various constructs and concepts, often memetic in nature with some being embodied and personified through deities, manifestations and totems.

Dialing back a bit here, pataphysics is another anomalous science-related term. It refers to an anomalous science that focuses primarily on the fictionality of the SCP universe from the perspective of its characters, often it focuses on stuff such as narrative layers as well as components of narratives and how they emerge in a scientific presentation from the perspective of those within the narrative. Usually, it is essentially metafiction.

What this ramble is about, and this is just my interpretation mind you (there is no correct interpretation or headcanon to the SCPverse), is a way in which these two concepts intercept.

Memes are often considered base units of culture or information, the same way genes are base units of biological information. But there exist other base units of information within other disciplines. Particularly, narremes which are the base unit of narratives.

If the noopshere is the realm of memetic constructs and concepts such as pain, chaos or life and it exists within a universe that is in fact a narrative then what if the noosphere is a reflection of that narrative’s conceptual abstract state?

To communicate this idea more clearly: narratives and stories often have themes which are usually related to concepts and ideas. These can be represented in the story through characters, themes, events, groups etc.

In Chaos Theory (SCP-6747), we learn about pataphysical particles and how they link and interact together to create narratives and as such. What if the noosphere is a medium for thematic narratives to emerge by taking abstract ideas and concepts and constructing narratives out of them, influencing the people and settings in them.

In this interpretation, the noosphere could be seen as an abstraction of the narrative. A conceptual, lesser form of it.

This entire ramble was just formed from my weird thoughts and I could’ve definitely misinterpreted a lot of things I’ve read from articles but hey you win some, you lose some. I mainly just wanted to make this so I could look at it later if I ever wanted inspiration for my own stories

[bookwormsbutterfly]

Scp 1730 has got to be one of my favorites. Mostly because it's a whole big story, and it contains appearances of a bunch of familiar SCPs. It's also one of the few SCP files that has legitimately made me feel utterly repulsed, which is the closest i really get to scared when reading these.

The premise of SCP 1730 is "what happened to site 13" that question is easy to answer, site 13 was never built in our dimension. But another dimension had a security measure where should Site 13 experience a mass containment breach it would be sent to another dimension to protect its home one, and we were the unlucky dimension to get site 13 dropped on us. The dimension site 13 came from, followed a different path than ours, the SCP foundation focused on getting use out of anomalous objects, and destroyed anything not helpful. There was no ethics to how they did things as SCPs were considered objects, no matter how sentient or human they were. This means that every empty containment cell, is something powerful on the loose, that likely has formed a strong hate for humanity and the SCP foundation. And there are a lot of empty cells. The way they contained things was beyond what this dimension could dream of, keeping what we call "literal gods" in giant boxes to test on and use.

Several of the best SCP task forces were sent in, some agents found themselves killed by leeches, some wound up as paint on the walls, one lost his legs, but that guy is actually fine, can still use his missing legs as if they're there, but he's trapped with the others, as there's no way to escape without mass death in the group of survivors. Their only hope was mobile task force Samsara. It's uncertain how human Samsara is beneath all their cybernetic enhancements, but they have beyond human intelligence, and the physical capability to stand in lava doing data analysis on radioactive material and be just fine. So if anyone can rescue those trapped in site 13 it's them.

Within site 13 is a large collection of horrors. The original cause of the containment breech seems to be "leech boy" as some called him. A human boy who's anomalous thing was he drank blood like a leech. In an attempt to spare this mere odd child from being ground and incinerated like all the other "useless" SCPs, a researcher had stopped the incinerator, and while trapped in a pile of anomalous corpses, leech boy transformed into a huge leech with the ability to spawn and control millions of smaller leeches, which also had wild abilities and were very quick to take down the site. In this chaos several other things were released or given new power, and the site turned into hell very quickly.

One curious find in this wreck was Bobble the clown. Who begs a curious question: if a good person driven to insanity can become a twisted murderer, can a twisted clown who tricks children into killing their families, when driven to insanity, become helpful and empathetic? Bobble just might. Other curious finds include the immortal Dr. Bright, dead in a containment cell. An angel meant to be guarding the gates of Eden just contained in a room. The site directer attached to a monster, which no drawing has managed to capture the absolute nightmare that appears in my mind at its description, and burned Samsara's ocular implants to destruction just from looking at it. And the thing that took that one guys legs, a rising void that I theorise to be an unwanted side affect of them grinding up Josie the half-cat, theorizing that in killing her her anomaly was released from her and became that. Trying to take more. But this idea is one of the things that repulses me, because Josie is a darling little kitty and the idea of anyone harming her is horrible.

In the end , They get rid of this hell the same way they got it. Sending it off to be some other dimensions problem. And it only killed several people from our dimension while severely traumatizing the rest. Even Samsara will need some time to recover from this, and I'm not just talking about fixing their heavily damaged bodies.