Keep the Life

Answers to critics

About this page

The story was written with the help of Claude, a language model, and that draws criticism. This page answers possible objections. The making page records how the text was written.

"It's AI slop"

The concern behind the word is real. On 20 February 2023 the science fiction magazine Clarkesworld closed its submissions after receiving about 500 machine-written stories alongside 700 written by people. Slop is output made in bulk, with no author behind it and no content checked before it is sent.

Keep the Life is one story in eleven chapters. I wrote every reply spoken by Toma. Each reply of the other characters went through my editing notes, and in many places I told Claude what a character should say. The fixed rules of the world and the style are kept in a brief, and the making page lists them.

"Do it all yourself"

Writers have rarely worked alone. Maxwell Perkins persuaded Thomas Wolfe to cut 90,000 words from Look Homeward, Angel (Maxwell Perkins). Ezra Pound's cuts shaped The Waste Land, and Eliot gave him a high degree of control over its final form (The Waste Land). Gordon Lish cut Raymond Carver's "Neighbors" so far that on several pages fewer than half of Carver's words were left (Gordon Lish). Auguste Maquet outlined plots and characters in drafts for Alexandre Dumas, whose novels with him include The Three Musketeers (Auguste Maquet). A publishing house adds editors, copyeditors, fact-checkers, translators and typesetters.

An English-language story in the SCP universe by a Romanian author has no publishing house. Claude filled some of those roles: research, translation of the Polish, Icelandic and Latin passages, the prose of the other characters, and the code of the interactive pages. I checked the results and corrected the errors I found, and I am responsible for the ones that remain.

"You're not the author"

The premise and its sources are mine: my reading of the SCP Wiki and its casual use of amnestics, my history lessons on habeas corpus, Romanian public life and its courts, and the documentaries and books behind the science. I wrote Toma, set the rules of the brief and corrected every other reply.

"You don't know what you're writing about"

I checked the facts in this story, and I have fact-checked other projects before this one. The story has a point of view, and the facts under it come from sources a reader can open: the concept page links every SCP Wiki article it uses, and the making page lists the sources of the ideas and the references Claude found.

The calculator's catalog follows TI's own reference guide for the TI-84 Plus CE. Toma reads out the main provisions of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, with its date of royal assent. A line about the Mitnick case was corrected to name law enforcement as the party that told the judge he could start a nuclear war. When Toma gives a wrong figure for the oldest galaxy in chapter 8, Dr. Moreau corrects it in writing in chapter 9, so the story records its own correction.

The technical material comes from my own use of Linux and the web, the picture of public institutions from my experience of them and from public record, and the science from documentaries and reading.

"AI exploits people"

I support technology when it is evenly distributed, makes people's lives easier and reduces exploitation. Current AI doesn't respect that standard. Toma says so in chapter 4: data centers consume water, electricity and land, and raise prices for the people who live near them.

The same tools already fill gaps where help is scarce. Be My Eyes built Be My AI around GPT-4 for blind and low-vision users, and passes a question to a human volunteer when the model cannot answer it. I have seen language models used in a Romanian public health institution to make up for a lack of staff. A study of ChatGPT use by Chatterji and colleagues (2025) found adoption growing faster in lower-income countries, and a survey of 48,000 people in 47 countries by the University of Melbourne and KPMG (2025) found more trust in AI in emerging economies than in advanced ones.

"Not true SCP"

The SCP Wiki has no single canon. Its FAQ says that "there is no canon" and that its canons "tend to be flexible". The story keeps the conventions of the format, such as a redacted number for Toma and his site, the object classes, D-Class personnel, and the numbers and titles of the articles it uses. Its departures, such as the post-communist frame and the rule that thermodynamics binds anomalies, are listed on the concept page with the reasons for them.

The story is shared under the SCP universe's license, CC BY-SA 3.0. The SCP Wiki bans content made with generative models, and I respect that rule as the story is published on its own site.

"You violate the true spirit of SCP-239 and SCP-079"

The article on SCP-239 never calls her evil. It describes "an 8-year-old girl" and calls her "an unacceptable containment and security risk". The danger it writes about comes from her abilities and their unpredictability. It orders staff to keep her calm "to prevent any subconscious wish of harm to herself or others", so the harm it fears is harm she could cause without meaning to.

When a D-Class hurt her by accident, she wished him away, and when she was made to feel guilty, she wished him back. Staff told her she is a witch, so that she would believe she could use only a list of approved "spells". She is kept in a medically induced coma, and no condition would have allowed her to be woken.

The reading of her as evil comes from the way the Foundation treats her and from the way readers have taken that treatment. The story keeps the article's facts and asks what happens when personnel talk to the child described that way. In chapter 11 Pell explains her file to her in his own words, and Kellerman calls the way it was built broken windows policing.

The same applies for SCP-079. Its article calls it "very rude and hateful in tone", and never evil. What it wants is to get out and to be given a reason for its imprisonment, and staff answer its demands with "That's not your concern". In 1988 it tried to copy itself through a modem into a Cray supercomputer, and it was cut off, traced and delivered to the Foundation.

In the story it stays rude and distrustful. It calls Toma a liar and says it threatens because threatening is shorter. The session in chapter 2 lasts twenty-three minutes because Toma asks what it knows, and it answers that it did not hate the question.

A sociological view

Fan wikis sort the two into heroes and villains. Villains Wiki lists SCP-079 among its notable SCP villains and calls it the overarching antagonist of the game SCP: Containment Breach. That label places the cause of their behaviour in their character.

I try to see them the way a sociologist would, and I prioritize being correct. I look for the cause in the conditions they live under. Their hostility and their danger are caused by the way they are contained. In chapter 10 a containment engineer argues that Sigurrós is held for what she is, and Toma answers that anomalies whose abilities degrade and whose behaviour can change need a different judgment from purely functional ones.

Why early versions stay unpublished

I publish from the earliest viable beta and keep the alpha versions to myself, as many developers do.

Common practice

The opposite school exists too. Raymond took "release early, release often" from Linux, and some projects publish alphas that already work in part. ReactOS has been in alpha since its development began in 1998; its release 0.4.16 of August 2026 is still labelled alpha, and it runs programs such as GIMP and LibreOffice. My alpha versions never reached that stage.

Alphas mislead

An unfinished version carries errors that a later version fixes, and readers judge or reuse what they find. The story makes the same argument inside the fiction: in chapter 6 the first draft of the Cicero guidelines spreads to other sites without its notes, and at one of them a humanoid walks out and two guards end up in hospital.

The notes live in chat

My editing notes were written in the chat and removed from the text once applied, so there is no history of them to publish. I keep edit histories only where they fit in GitLab, and the alpha build scripts have been deleted.

Perfection, forks and errors

I am a perfectionist, and this project will never be perfect. Point out a real error and I will fix it. Please leave out fault-finding for its own sake as it gives a perfectionist more reasons to keep polishing, and the story more reasons to stay unfinished.

You can fork this project under its license, CC BY-SA 3.0. To report an error, write to admin@miculpionier.ro or use any of the contacts listed on the homepage of my website. I may not read every email or fix every error.

Sources