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…can I get a minute?
EDIT: Okay, tags up.
But what is truth?
Not easy to define;
We all have truths.
Are yours the same as mine?
—Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ Superstar
I don't get it, it's a memetic 'thing' that makes victims think there is some country that may/may not be in some form of civil/military/political thing? And these victims spread it through idle chit-chat? And victims are somehow dangerous? And the Foundation has engaged in some kind of treaty with the victims rather than terminating them?
*I think I get it a bit better now, it's a gimmick article presenting an article written by infected staff and uninfected staff with neither being clearly written by either side. Personally I dislike this concept (if I understand it correctly) and I also dislike subjects that infect large portions of the Foundation (in this case it's a justification for the gimmick, I'm not sure if that makes it worse or not.)
1. Mostly right. It's clear that each document was written by researchers that believed they were uninfected, writing about researchers they believed were infected. The key point is that there is no hard-and-fast way of knowing which one is actually correct.
2. In this case, there's no reason why the infection rate among the Foundation would be different than among the rest of the world. I mean, is the Foundation unusually resistant to water cooler chat?
I mean, all in all, eh. I understand if it's not everyone's cup of tea.
I get that but how did it go unchecked for so long? This thing has literally infected pretty much every level of Foundation personnel (including O5 I assume, otherwise they'd note which document was the 'correct' one.) I can buy that it would spread among researchers, agents, doctors, etc but the O5 aren't chit-chat type of people and I imagine that goes for the higher level staff in general.
I had actually imagined that this had started a long time ago. It's generally not the sort of thing one notices, and most of the people who heard people talking about this country that they had never heard of before suddenly began hearing about it everywhere. I didn't see it as the sort of things that would set off your internal alarms, really. I imagine the current O5s, along with most of the infected Senior Staff, became infected before the phenomenon was understood.
1. send a researcher out to the location the country supposedly exists in, with a live feed video camera, and determine if it does in fact, exist.
Seems to me that an Islamic republic located in Turkey should have an Orthodox Christian minority rather than a Coptic one, since the Copts are mainly located in Egypt and Anatolia is where the Orthodox church originated.
Other than that, +1.
I honestly picked the Copts sort of randomly. I didn't want to go with a bigger sect, since I wanted it to be a small, very easily persecuted minority, an easy target for ethnic cleansing.
According to Wikipedia, Christians of all stripes comprise about 0.6% of the Turkish population today, so Orthodox would work just as well as Copts and make more sense from a historical standpoint.
Okay, it's now Syriac Orthodoxy, the largest Orthodox minority in Turkey. I imagine Samothrace was organized after World War I into a LoN trust under French trusteeship and portions of the Christian population of Turkey moved into the nation voluntarily, slightly increasing the population of Christians in the country above the average for the region.
So, it's the twist from 046, but done right? I like. +1
Although I do feel like there should be Document 1173-λ, approved by O5-1 and describing how both halves of the Foundation are wrong and what 1173 really is.
I did wonder what O5-1 was doing about all of this, other than being the tiebreaker that prevented the total destruction of the Foundation through the only possible compromise. Ultimately, I decided it would be better just to let others wonder the same thing. Either way, one of the things I liked about the idea is that literally nobody knows what the right answer is.
I'm not making this a thing, but literally, think about it. Most of what most of us know about the world, we read or see secondhand. If some unknown force was thoroughly preventing us from learning about some portion of the world through these means, what would we do? You or I aren't going to fly to Turkey and drive to the coast to see if there's a country there, and if we do, I imagine you still wouldn't see whatever you weren't supposed to see, regardless of which side you were on.
I hadn't consciously realized the connection to 046, but now that you mention it, sort of. That was more social commentary on the relationship between the Foundation and the anomalies it protects, though, while this is more of philosophical fuckery. In the classical tradition of Descartes, this is a phenomenon that eliminates any source of information you can trust to know what the truth is. It's two groups of people walking amongst one another, living their lives, yet existing in two completely different worlds—one in which the IDAS exists, one where it doesn't.
I see what you're saying, but I agree with anqxyr. The 2 articles are very similar, so the differences don't really jump out at you that quickly—like they probably do for you, since you wrote it.
That's my only real criticism though. Nice work overall.
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
-Kurt Vonnegut
Not really - the only similarity is that the object is ambiguous. 046 concerns the odd behaviour of a single researcher, and is more of an conflict of interpretation - much like the =][= in 40k has its puritan and its radical factions, there are those within the Foundation who have a tendency to see things as more dangerous than they are.. or than they appear.
With this one, there's a pervasive memetic contagion, and noone knows their head from their arse anymore. Does Samothrace exist? You might well flip a coin and decide whether to take the Class-O.
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page revision: 3, last edited: 22 Sep 2018 03:57
