SCP Foundation

Hello everyone,
this is my new draft: just as the thread description says, it is about a pathogen that makes infected subjects literally explode if someone calls them on their phone (and that's not the only way, actually).

You can find it in my sandbox, the tab is "SCP-X - Smaller Than A Virus".

Please give me your critiques on it, and help me make it mainlist-ready.

Hmm. I told you in chat I'd take a look at this, so here we go, quick review:

I feel like there are parts here that are too science-heavy, and parts that aren't clinical enough. For example:

SCP-XXXX is able to change the conformation of normal human PrP^C, effectively turning each PrP^C into a molecular instance of SCP-XXXX; this, in turn, alters the way the proteins interconnect, by exposing a high-affinity binding site on the molecule, and thus facilitating protein-protein interconnections.

Not only is this one sentence that can be split into two sentences, it touches on a few aspects of biology (cell signalling?) that the average reader might not know too much about. What does normal PrP^C do, aside from be located on cell membranes? You could actually remove the part about "thus facilitating protein-protein interconnections", since it doesn't really contribute to the plot or a reader's understanding at that point.

And quick question, is there a reason the footnote text from ROWSANNAH kind of goes off on tangents? It's cute I guess, but seems distracting and not a function that someone would want when reading SCP documentation.

If a subject gets into contact with even a single molecule of SCP-XXXX,

Remember, don't refer to an individual as a "subject" unless you've established the experimental protocol they're being subjected to. If there's no research design or observation ongoing, they're not a subject of anything and shouldn't be called such. In this context, it almost looks like the anomaly only manifests when there's an experiment going on.

Also, the phrases "gets into contact" and "even a single molecule" aren't particularly professional. I would use, "Should SCP-XXXX come into contact with [whatever suffices to trigger effect]…"

Overall… I feel like there's some good stuff towards the end, but the description is a little too science jargon-y to figure out or visualize well on the first read. If you hadn't stated that the "draft is about a disease that makes infected subjects detonate if someone calls them on their phone" in the thread summary, I probably wouldn't have been able to figure that out from the description, which is a little problematic since usually the description orients the reader to what they're about to learn about next.

Personally, I think the logs have some good content (if you wanted to go the SCP route I might have trimmed out the extraneous dialogue and actions in the incident/camera log), but the work on the whole seems to be much better suited to a tale than an SCP article.

I think you should try to alter it from "explodes because cellphones" to "explodes sometimes all on its own (probably to spread itself) but because cellphones exist, sometimes that affects them", I kinda got this feel but a virus dependent solely on human technology for transmission seems a little far fetched.

As aside, I wonder why you use the term 'VI' when it is quite similar to 'AI' and the latter would be more recognisable of a concept than VI. The two feel highly similar that I fail to see the distinction.

Overall, the anomaly is simple and rather satisfactory. A merit is the strong character development of the AI involved. The footnotes with the AI quipping feels slightly off-putting. I know it's framed as the AI interacting with you, but I am not fully sure about it. Perhaps it adds flavour to the AI's character, or a distraction from the story at hand.

While the anomaly is stated to be tied to cellphones, not much is really done on that front. While your current story is good, perhaps room can be set aside for the actual anomaly. Currently, the SCP feels like a setup for your AI character to shine through.

I had some reservations going into your draft, as reading through the comments I caught sight of PrP^C. Having read through many drafts involving prions, I expected another poorly written draft that completely misunderstands the nature/function of prions. You can imagine how surprised I was when that turned out not to be the case.

This draft does a number of things well, the most precipitous being that it doesn't try to overexplain the biology, and actually takes the time to explain how the prion interacts with other proteins in the body (by exposing a binding site and not attempting to refold proteins that are completely different from the base iteration). The body horror here is rather understated until the interviews, where it really ramps up.

I concur with MrWrong here in that I felt like the focus was less so on the anomaly in the logs, and more as a facilitation to introduce and establish your AI. I think this would be better served in a tale, as the core concept you have (a prion which causes a persons body to explode) is fairly untested waters and really interesting. By hamfisting your AI into the picture, you are detracting from the core concept, and I feel it weakens the piece. I'm less bothered by the cellphone aspect than others here as the background is horrifically plausible, but I do wish you had done a little more with it.

I'm interested to see where you take this, and would like to make a small suggestion in encouraging you to associate containment with Site-234, which I have been attempting to build as a centralized location for anomalies similar to this.

This is my first critique but I liked it. I just have a few points to raise, one which has already been pointed out is that the additional logs feels a lot like a tale for the AI you made. I'm not sure if the SCP is strong enough to stand without any added logs, but what's there feels like it takes away from the SCP itself. Some details about the original discovery of its interaction with cellphones would help, since that seems important to your story but feels like it is glossed over.

The second point is very nitpicky but would be with your third footnote. You say a smaller p value is better, when a smaller p value represent the chance the null hypothesis isn't true. Better seems wrong to me, because neither result is better, then just say different things. Maybe change it to the smaller the p value the more likely something is happening? But besides that I really liked this, and I hope to see the AI gets fleshed out in future peices.