"Testing with RPC-040 requires the approval by of less than 2 personnel with security clearance of Level 3 or higher."
This sentence is pretty confusing.
RPC-040 / Discussion
Forum
» Hidden / Per page discussions
» RPC-040
This is the discussion related to the wiki page RPC-040.
The picture used is a Wikimedia commons picture of a Bell & Howell Filmo 129 projector. Here's the link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_%26_Howell#/media/File:Bell_Howell_Filmo.jpg
I pronounce "pineapples" like I do "Minneapolis."
Almost too goofy to be taken seriously at all but it does have a bit of tongue-in-cheek development in the test logs which gives a glimmer of redemption.
Such is life in the Soviet Union
The premise is basic, there is no buildup from it, and even the end incident was frustrating to read. There is no context to the breach provided, so I'm flooded with questions that should have been answered in some way:
Why would the team leave the anomaly on? Why would they leave the testing room unlocked? Why would a researcher enter a testing room? Why would she walk in front of an object that is obviously on and in a room defined by the characteristics of being THE room where there should be active, dangerous anomalies? This wasn't even a new anomaly, there were logs about testing it beforehand and they walked a chimp through the facility as one of the tests.
Everything relating to the end requires for every participant to actively stop thinking - it is just what the author needed to happen, and not a believable portrayal of such an incident.
I am going to go off on a limb here and say that this article should be combined with 049, one that was crosslinked at the end. I'll jump ahead of the sequence and read it to confirm it.
This concept has a really cool start, but loses the magic in the execution. A film projector that turns things into projections is fascinating, but it's too bad the projections don't do anything of interest. The addition of remote commands attempts to spice things up, but the commands are too rigid and don't interact with the phenomena in a meaningful way, save for "KILL" and potentially "RESET" (never demonstrated).
Most of the remainder is just filler. The recovery log posits a mental connection to "ghosts", which is something, but it's not a connection the reader couldn't have made already. It also suggests a tangible connection to Nucorp by way of a nameless character with no distinguishing traits who is killed without saying anything and Nucorp themselves wouldn't even acknowledge. The paragraph is completely superfluous; the author could've only tacked on "RPC-040 might have a connection to Nucorp" and it would mean about as much.
The test logs give me even less to say, besides potentially clearing up confusion and offering unsatisfying insight into the [DATA EXPUNGED] command that didn't really need to be elaborated on. Honestly, I really wish these old articles that didn't have a lot of substance would be forthcoming and embrace shortness instead of padding with repetitive discovery and test logs, but I suppose that's how you bandage a lack of real content.
The final addendum is the most significant of them all, answering the question of what would happen if a human being entered RPC-040's light and linking this article into RPC-049. Honestly, I do like this. The prominent connection is bold (I wish for more substantial crosslinks like this), and it makes use of perhaps the only worthwhile possibility the article had left after exhausting the rest of its goodwill.
Saying this on a Hellsverg article is like inviting in a vampire, but there's a hint of missed potential here. The effect is kind of interesting, but, through uncreativity, it becomes dull to the point of dissatisfaction. This is a memento from when RPC was trying wholeheartedly to replicate classic SCP, and… kind of succeeding? Depending on how high or low you set your standards. 3/5
(8ismo has a point about the final addendum being contrived, by the way. I might've been too disheartened by the misuse of a cool idea to have noticed.)
/forum/t-8255396/rpc-040#post-