Keep the Life

The SCP canon and its gaps

The starting point was my reading of SCP Wiki articles. Two questions came first: what would happen if staff fell in love with an anomaly naturally, and how could a person retain memories even when amnestics are used. Amnestics are used casually in many articles, and many containment procedures order a dose without stating an amount or a limit. I also noted claims in files that appear with no documented method, such as the "any" in SCP-500 and SCP-294, and older files with weak fact-checking, such as the file on SCP-239. The consumer amnestics come from the Updated Amnestics Guide of SCP Orientation.

Post-communist Romania and its institutions

The inner life of the Foundation draws on my experience of Romanian public institutions and on public record. A member of my family is a mid-level director in a public health institution. The parallels in the story:

• The 1990 protest in University Square in Bucharest, and Ion Iliescu's line about "hooligans", which the reformist working group takes as its motto.
• The case opened after the protest of 10 August 2018, moved to another prosecutor's office.
• Cases allowed to run out of time under the statute of limitations, and the fight between reformist and counter-reformist groups in the Romanian justice system.
• Appointments obtained through alliances, and the remark about relatives placed at the top of the Financial Supervision Authority.
• Clearance levels compared with party cards, and dissent compared with what the militia and the Securitate once punished.
• Informational wars fought with a public that lacks the education to judge what it reads.
• Reghin, Toma's town in Mureș County.

Dr. Pryce and Robert Negoiță

Dr. Pryce, the acting director who suspends every exception on Toma's file in the name of fairness of procedure, is inspired by Robert Negoiță, mayor of Sector 3 of Bucharest. On 2 August 2021 an earth embankment collapsed on workers digging a trench near the National Library in Bucharest. Two workers died and four were taken to hospital. The works had no construction permit and were carried out by two companies owned by Sector 3 city hall, on land belonging to the Ministry of Culture. Negoiță cancelled a meeting with the local councillors shortly before it was due, citing the ongoing investigation. In 2024 prosecutors dropped the manslaughter charge against him and sent four individuals and one company to court.

Law and history

• Habeas corpus, from my history lessons on the English conception of it. Toma reads the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 in chapter 10.
• Descartes, cited by Toma as "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am".
• The secrecy around the breaking of Enigma, kept to protect the people who would otherwise be forced to reveal it.
• The Marshall Plan read as conditional aid, an example of how fact-checking changes with the study of economic imperialism.
• The Mitnick case, broken windows policing and the two equal groups of Law and Order, set against a justice system made of many competing groups.
• Los Alamos, the model for a site that tells its staff what they guard.

Physics, cosmology and geology

Most of the science comes from documentaries I watched, with some from my own reading:

• Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, argued to be more fundamental than the conventional two-way speed of light.
• The end of the universe in cold, the decay of protons and dark energy.
• The search for dark matter with a liquid xenon detector in a former gold mine in South Dakota.
• UY Scuti and Stephenson 2 DFK 1, white and black dwarfs, and old light from objects that may no longer exist.
• Wormholes, exotic matter, white holes and the Casimir effect, and the magnets of the Large Hadron Collider.
• Campi Flegrei and bradyseism.

I read and watched some geology, and the Precambrian interested me the most. Toma's remark that rhetoric should be treated like geology, a science that is not fully exact, comes from there, as does the comparison of Sigurrós's energy with a cut forest that absorbs less CO2 (although it relates more to ecology than geology).

One figure in Toma's account of old light was wrong, the lifetime of the oldest galaxy. I corrected it inside the fiction: in chapter 9 Dr. Moreau from physical sciences sends Toma a written correction through the screening office.

Rhetoric and teaching

These come from my own reading, as well as some documentaries and videos:

• Cicero, known to Toma at first only as the source of "lorem ipsum", and the criticism of him (the Catilinarian executions and his self-praise).
• Socrates as an alternative to Cicero, and the crisis negotiation stairway, a method built to be taught to ordinary staff, which I first saw in a video where the FBI teaches Michelle Khare hostage negotiation (YouTube).
• Phonics against whole language in reading instruction, which also names the method Toma used to rewire Peachy's weights.
• Pasi Sahlberg on standardized teaching and testing.
• Compassion and empathy, and the arguments for adopting compassion.
• Forecasting, which differs by field, as weather can be forecast without changing it, and an economic forecast changes the behavior of the states and firms it describes.

Software and hardware

The technical material comes from my work as a power user of Linux and the web:

• Decompiling in Ghidra, which I know from watching others use it, and debugging with x64dbg, which I used to have; local models in Ollama, virtual machines in QEMU/KVM, safetensors and XZ archives.
• An SQL injection that works because only the client sanitizes its input.
• The GPL warranty line, GitLab and KiCad, coreboot and a payload, NAND behavior, and the wiping standards DBAN and DoD 5220.22-M.
• Unix semantics, mount, umount, fuser and a file system check, and a deprecated unmount function in GLib's GIO.
• A watermark on an Android phone traced through ADB to an app the manufacturer reinstalled.
• Fairphone and spare parts sold freely only in Western Europe.
• The cost of data centers in water, electricity and land.

Games and internet culture

• The Backrooms series by Kane Pixels: A-Space, the Threshold, the Null Zones, Project KV-31 and the Lighting Tile Survey.
• The G-Man's line from Half-Life 2.
• Casual Games for Protesters, the source of Human Chain.
• Cicada 3301, used by Toma as an expression for a chain of holes left by uneven standards.

I modeled the characters other than Toma on an ideal or on realist literature.

The cast follows the realist habit of building characters as social types. Each person has a position inside an institution, a clearance level, a department or a shift, and speaks from it. The plot moves when these positions collide.

Dr. Iris Kellerman

Kellerman is the ideal of the cast: the reformist inside the institution. She is competent and honest with Toma, and she pays for both. Realist detail ties the ideal to the ground: a repair-shop background and a habit of keeping what she found in customers' devices to herself, a contract that forbids friendship with an anomaly, six years of service that make leaving with her memories impossible, a relationship lost to secrecy and a man who followed her at university. In the dialogue she takes Toma's statements and draws out their consequences and their feeling, which makes her the reader's way into his arguments.

Pell

Pell is plain and honest, likes steam trains and knows little science. He is the ordinary person the Cicero guidelines have to work for, and chapter 8 shows their limit: a speaker who knows little science cannot answer many questions. His growth from note-taker to the one who explains Sigurrós's file to her in chapter 11 follows the line of a realist minor character who rises through what he does.

The night guard

The guard brings the outside world into the wing. Two years on the rotation of SCP-035 taught him what an anomaly working on a person looks like, and an estranged sister who abused Class A and B amnestics puts the public health problem of the drugs into his own family. He carries Kellerman's letters past the screening office and refuses to sign anything. It represents the informal network that keeps working while the top changes.

Dr. Pryce, Corwin and the officials

Pryce stands for fairness of procedure used as a cover. Corwin came up through security and signs exceptions without being a reformist. Haas and Pryce are counter-reformists of different temperaments, Ferreira and Voss are reformists who test before they decide, and Lindqvist chairs a committee that writes decisions in numbered points. Together they map the competing groups that the story compares with the Romanian justice system.

Sigurrós Stefánsdóttir

SCP-239 is a character from the SCP Wiki, read here as a child who is spoken to. The story ranks her own account above her file and lets her powers decay under the same thermodynamics as everything else.