Obsolescence - SCP Foundation

The guard blushed. “I’m sorry, sir. I mean, ma’am. I mean, doctor,” he said miserably. “It’s just… it’s been six months since my girlfriend left me, and I’ve been working really long hours, and all the good sites are blocked from the network here, and –”

Dr. Gruber closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose, and waved her other hand to cut him off. “For fuck’s sake, please stop trying to justify yourself.”

“Yes, sir. Doctor. I’m sorry, doctor.”

“When I asked ‘what were you thinking?!’, that was rhetorical. I don’t need all these details about your… private habits.”

“No, sir. I’m sorry.”

She squinted at him. “Are you… are you crying?!”

“No! No. … M-m-maybe a little. I’m… I’m sorry!” His voice went up into a squeak, and tears were streaming down his cheeks.

She sighed, and held out a box of tissues. His eyes widened in horror, and she suddenly realized what else he might have intended using a box of tissues for. She winced.

“Blow your nose,” she said flatly. “Wipe your face.”

“Oh!” He blushed again, but took the tissues from her.

Gruber drummed her fingers on her desk impatiently, watching as the guard cleaned himself up. “Are you always this emotionally fragile?” she asked him.

“Well, I mean… not in a crisis situation. If the site was on fire, or if some monster had gotten loose, I’d be totally calm.”

“I want you to understand that the only reason you are not in worse trouble is that you recognized this as a change in the anomaly, and reported it immediately.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am. Sir.”

“You are still in trouble, though.”

“… yes, ma’am.”

“Oh, relax. You’re not fired.”

The guard sat up straight.

“First offense,” Gruber went on. “Report to Nancy McDougall in HR tomorrow afternoon. Your pay will be docked for… probably a year, you’ll have to take some training courses, you might be reassigned to a different site.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

Gruber paused as a thought struck her.

“This is your first offense, right?”

She hadn’t thought it was possible for the guard to blush any harder. “Well, uh, last year, my girlfriend, my ex-girlfriend, I guess, she would, uh, call me while I was, uh, on duty, and we would, uh –”

Gruber held up a hand.

“I meant, have you used the SCP before.”

“Oh! No, never.”

She indicated the CD-ROM sitting in its plastic case on her desk. “How did you even find out about it?”

The guard shrugged. “There were rumors? I mean… people talk. Especially about things like this.”

Gruber slumped. “You never heard of infosec?”

“Yeah, but… we all have clearance, right?”

“After you’ve been to HR, you need to have a long talk with the people at RAISA.”

Dr. Mancini knocked at the open door to Gruber’s office. “Good afternoon, Vera. You wanted to see me?”

“Hey, Pasquale. Come in. Before I explain what this is about, I need to tell you that I am not propositioning you. This is not any kind of flirtation.”

Mancini’s eyebrows went up. “I would hope not,” he said. “I’m sure my husband would be very upset.”

“Last night, a guard reported a substantial change to a contained artifact. I had a quick glance afterward – enough to confirm that he wasn’t just making shit up. But I think… I think it needs to have more than one person look into it.”

“And you thought I’d perceive that as flirting?”

Gruber gave a thin smile. “It’s SCP-1004, so I figured I’d be on the safe side.”

“One zero zero four. Hm. Not ringing a bell…”

Mancini pulled his tablet out of his pocket and tapped rapidly on the screen, then read the first few paragraphs of the results. “Uh… wow.”

“Yeah, ‘wow’ is right.”

“Why did he even have it out of its containment locker?”

Gruber looked at him. “Why do you think?”

“Ah. Right. Where is he now? Fired?”

“No, I sent him to talk to HR. He did report the change to me immediately, and I suppose there are worse ways he could have abused artifacts. Poor dumbass was mortified. He actually started crying.”

“You’re too nice. Wait, holy shit, someone actually suggested we use 1004 to blackmail people?!”

“Yep. Assuming we could record its output, anyway. Which we can’t.”

Mancini shook his head. “What kind of idiot would actually write that down in a formal document with their name attached to it?”

“Yeah, I wondered about that. You’ll never guess who it was.”

Mancini looked puzzled. “Should I know?”

At her desk, Gruber clicked the option to show the document’s history. “Adam Dale,” she said, indicating the screen.

Mancini blinked. “As in, Incident 1004-Dale? That Adam Dale?”

“Yep. His fingerprints are all over this. All over the document, I mean. The actual artifact looks… reasonably clean.”

Mancini raised his index finger. “Y’know –”

Gruber cut him off. “Whatever joke you were about to make, assume I’ve already thought of it and decided it was disgusting, okay?”

Mancini sighed and nodded. “So, what’s the change?”

“Apparently, it used to be just a command prompt.”

“‘What would you like to see’, right. But now?”

Instead of answering, Gruber pressed the button to open her desktop’s CD drive, and inserted the disk. A window popped up on the screen, with one file in it.

“Ready?” she asked.

Mancini leaned on the desk so he could get a better view.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

Gruber moused over the icon for TheFactory.exe, and double-clicked on it.

The screen went blank, then filled with a rendering of the Factory’s logo in ASCII art. It slowly faded away, and a text box appeared.

THANK YOU FOR CONTINUING TO USE FACTORY P.O.R.N., THE PORNOMANTIC OMNIVERSAL RETRIEVAL NEXUS, DESPITE THE INTRODUCTION OF GENERATIVE A.I. TOOLS. <press any key to continue>

Mancini shook his head. “Good god, that’s a terrible backronym. What happens next?”

“Don’t know, that’s as far as I got before I shut it down.”

“If that’s the only change, I’m going to be making fun of you.”

Gruber pressed the spacebar. The screen blanked again, then presented them with three options.

1: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (F.A.Q.)

2: CHANGELOG AND COMMUNITY NOTES

3: get to the good stuff!

<press ‘1’, ‘2’, or ‘3’ to select your option, or use your computer’s mouse>

“Yeah, here we go,” she said. “The guard said first it bitched about AI art, then it offered to answer his questions, and mentioned a community, and that’s when he realized something was wrong.”

“Let’s be methodical,” Mancini said, and reached out and pressed ‘1’ on the keyboard.

The screen blanked again, then presented them with text.

FACTORY P.O.R.N. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (F.A.Q.), VERSION 28.6.5.5.2

LAST UPDATE.

USE THE UP AND DOWN ARROW KEYS ON YOUR KEYBOARD TO SCROLL, OR PRESS THE <ESC> KEY TO RETURN TO THE MAIN MENU

Q: Why are you shutting down?

A: Honestly, it’s a business decision. Over our heads. No, we’re not happy about it either.

Q: Will my copy of TheFactory.exe still function after shutdown?

A: Yes. The cantrip requires no external infrastructure aside from magic and the omniverse. However, you will no longer be able to upgrade to Premium Factory P.O.R.N. If you have already upgraded, your Premium Factory P.O.R.N. will remain available until November 1, 2023. A stickied thread in the tech support subforum has instructions for converting your saved videos into other formats.

Q: What about the forums?

A: The Factory P.O.R.N. User Forums will be shutting down on December 31, 2023. Posts will still be available to read until January 31, 2024, after which all posts and accounts will be deleted. A stickied thread in the admin subforum has instructions for downloading your private messages, post history, and friend list. It’s been wonderful having those of you who stayed around for so long. We genuinely built a community here.

“Well, it presents as a piece of consumer software, so I suppose it makes sense that there’d be user forums,” Mancini said. “Do you think they were on the regular human internet, or…?”

“Hmmm,” Gruber said. She returned to the main menu, then clicked on the ‘get to the good stuff!’ link.

Mancini side-eyed her. “Vera, please, I don’t want my friend to turn into a sex monster.”

She waved that off. “One, the file says upwards of a hundred hours of exposure. Two, I’m pretty sure we’ll be okay as long as we don’t actually go digging through the omniverse for porn.”

Mancini’s brow furrowed. “Well, what else can we ask for?”

At the What would you like to see? prompt, Gruber typed in “Factory Porn User Forums”.

The screen blanked, and filled itself with an old-style webforums interface. Mancini swore.

FACTORY P.O.R.N. USER FORUMS

0 posts in 0 active threads.

0 posts in 0 archived threads.

0 users logged in

2 guests browsing: VERA GRUBER, PASQUALE MANCINI

Use the arrow keys or your mouse to browse the forums, or press the <ESC> key to return to the search prompt.

Remember to be polite to other users – after all, we’re all here to have fun!

Gruber sighed. “I bet this was always here.”

“I do not like that it knows our names,” Mancini said.

There were a dozen subforums, from Admin and Tech Support to Politics and TV Shows, but they were all empty. Gruber shook her head. “They did say they’d be deleting all the posts, I guess.”

“Let’s see the FAQ?”

Q: I want to share Factory P.O.R.N with my friends. Why can’t I send them copies of the application?

A: It’s proprietary! Plus, for obvious reasons, we’d rather be able to control how many copies of the Nexus are open at any given time, so saving the file to your hard drive, or including it as an attachment in an e-mail message or an IM, will result in an unactivatable bitstring. Don’t worry, you can give us your friends’ mailing addresses, and we’ll send them their own copies of Factory P.O.R.N. on floppy diskette or CD-ROM! <wink>

Update: As of January 1, 2005, we will no longer be providing Factory P.O.R.N. on floppy diskette.

Update: As of January 1, 2011, we will no longer be providing Factory P.O.R.N. on CD-ROM; however, we will be providing it on USB drives.

Update: Due to issues with our USB drive supplier, we will continue providing Factory P.O.R.N. on CD-ROM until July 1, 2011.

Update: Factory P.O.R.N. on USB drives will not be available until January 1, 2013.

Update: We’re hoping for 2014.

Update: 2017.

Update: Don't ask. We'll let you know.

Q: I want to share Factory P.O.R.N with my friends. Why can’t I send them copies of the videos, or save them to my computer’s hard drive and watch them again afterward?

A: You can, if you upgrade to Premium Factory P.O.R.N. for $499.95 US! Premium Factory P.O.R.N. also includes the ability to make more detailed requests (maximum 1500 words instead of 300), and the ability to request variations on a specific video instead of doing an entire new search. Send a check or postal money order to The Factory.

Update: We’ve joined PayPal! It’s a new service for processing online payments!

Q: How does Factory P.O.R.N. work?

“Oh wait,” Mancini said. “What’s this one?”

A: The details are proprietary, but here’s a simplified version:

TheFactory.exe is a 17-layered recursively self-casting compressed cantrip. Each layer casts the next, until the final layer generates the Retrieval Agent and opens the Pornomantic Omniversal Retrieval Nexus.

The Retrieval Agent then searches the omniverse until it has located no less than 50 videos that meet your description, produces “thumbnail” images for you to choose from, and then plays them on the occipital lobe of your brain.

The search algorithm functions in a time dimension that’s perpendicular to the one we live in, so even if it takes a centillion years to find what you’ve asked for, your results will be presented to you instantly!

“Ah!” Gruber said. “That explains a lot.”

Mancini glared at her. “No it doesn’t.”

She shrugged. “Agree to disagree. How about Community Notes?”

Here are the winners of the “Top Ten Reasons Factory P.O.R.N. is Better than Generative AI” essay contest! Because only six people submitted entries, all six of you win!

1: USING FACTORY PORN IS BETTER THEN USING GENERATION A.I. BECAUSE, ITS WHAT I WAS DOING FIRST. - by [ACCOUNT DELETED]

2: Using Factory Porn is more intellectually honest than generative AI, because nobody really knows how generative AI works. It’s a “black box” that could do anything! With Factory Porn, we know it’s just the Retrieval Agent searching and finding. - by [ACCOUNT DELETED]

3: Generative AI is trained on a corpus of pre-existing content, but all of that has its own copyright, which the generative AI is inherently breaching because everything it makes is a derived work. But alternate universes are not party to the Berne Convention, so their copyright doesn’t apply. Trust me on this, I’m a lawyer. And even if it did, the Retrieval Agent can only contact a given universe once. Trust me on this, I’m also a physicist. So that means that we can’t transact with them except acausally, and that doesn’t work. Trust me on this, I’m also an economist. So we might as well just copy anything and everything from any alternate universe, because it won’t matter. Trust me on this, I’m also a philosopher. - by [ACCOUNT DELETED]

4: Using the Pornomantic Omniversal Retrieval Nexus is more ethical than generative AI. Generative AI is trained on the faces and bodies of millions of people, some of whom may not have wanted their images to be used in this way. The Pornomantic Omniversal Retrieval Nexus reaches out to a reality where your specific porn has already been made, so there are no consent issues! - by [ACCOUNT DELETED]

5: The Pornomatic Omniversal Retrieval Nexus is esthetically superior to using generative AI. Generative AI just puts pixels together until it produces an image – but there was never any actual person involved. Every single video the Nexus retrieves was made by, with, and for real people. - by [ACCOUNT DELETED]

6: The use of generative AI for the real-time bespoke production of high-resolution full-length videos would have an unacceptably high carbon footprint.

Each of the cantrip’s 16 cycles of expansion uses approximately 17 picojoules. The final cantrip opens the Pornomantic Omniversal Retrieval Nexus, and uses approximately 84 000 picojoules. By contrast, using a 40-watt lightbulb for 1 second uses 40 000 000 000 000 picojoules. That’s 474 billion times more, every single second. The entire population of the Earth is less than 12 billion. Just to surpass that one 40-watt bulb burning for 1 second, every single one of us would have to be opening TheFactory.exe 35 times a second. - by [ACCOUNT DELETED]

Mancini frowned. “There’s a hole in the logic for number four.”

“Hm?”

“The idea that, just because the porn exists, that means everyone involved was consenting?”

Gruber winced. “Christ, you had to remind me. I skimmed the test logs earlier – just the metadata. Just to see what kind of stuff people were looking for. It is some serious nightmare shit.”

Mancini raised an eyebrow.

"Hold on, I’ll give you access.” Gruber typed a few commands on her keyboard, and Mancini tapped the fresh link that appeared on his tablet.

His gaze flickered across the screen. “This seems… pretty abstract?”

“No, starting on page 8.”

Mancini scrolled down to page 8. His face paled. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“It’d be bad enough if it was just generating them. If someone out there in the multiverse actually made these videos, for real?”

“What kind of sick bastard would ask for – oh shit, don’t tell me it was –”

“Adam fucking Dale,” Gruber said. “Yep.”

Mancini scrolled down, and down, and down. “There’s nine hundred and eighty-five pages of this?!”

“I say again: Adam fucking Dale.”

Mancini turned off his tablet, put it in his pocket, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. “Purely out of idle curiosity,” he said, “where is Researcher Adam Dale working these days?”

Gruber smirked. “I wondered about that too. Expected I’d have access to his personnel file, but it’s sealed until 59 years from now.”

“Ah,” Mancini said. “That means he’s dead, right?”

“I can’t confirm or deny that,” Gruber said, nodding.

Mancini sighed. “Okay,” he said. “What else is there?”

Update: Make sure to take regular breaks from using Factory P.O.R.N., so as to avoid chafing, which can lead to blisters and skin infections! [ACCOUNT DELETED], get well soon! And remember to stay hydrated!

“That’s weird,” Gruber said.

“What?”

“Is that the only health warning?”

They examined the rest of the changelog and community notes, then checked the FAQ again. Other than a mention of pandemic safety protocols from 2020, there was nothing.

Gruber frowned. “Hmm.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking… they don’t mention the cognitohazard.”

Mancini scratched his head. “Does anybody use that word besides us?”

Gruber made an impatient gesture. “Not my point. This thing’s been around for – how old is PayPal?”

“Uh, from the mid nineties, I think? I could look it up?”

“Don’t bother. This thing’s older than PayPal, is my point. And our file says that the threshold for turning into a sex monster is around a hundred hours of use.”

Mancini nodded slowly. “And if you’re the sort of person who joins the official forums for it, you’re probably a heavy user.” He checked his tablet again. “Says a hundred hours straight, but…”

“Yeah, no, I don’t believe that either. Let me check something.” She typed rapidly on her keyboard; the window with TheFactory.exe was replaced with the Foundation’s standard UI, and she opened the directory of test logs.

They both swore.

“Fuck. Look at those timestamps,” Mancini said. “None of these tests lasted more than four hours.”

Gruber’s eyes were wide. “… Did we accept that this was a cognitohazard just because Adam Dale said it was?!?”

“Looks like. But… wait, if he was that bad all along, why did the O5s go along with it?”

She gazed at him for a long moment. “Pasquale, are you really asking why an organization would say that one of their people was the victim of psychic contamination by an anomaly instead of admit that they’d let a sex monster hold a position of authority for over six years?”

He bit his lip. “Well, when you put it that way…”

She closed her eyes and stretched her arms above her head, and cracked her knuckles. “You know what the real shame of it is?”

“What?”

“Look at the dates on the access log. We’ve had this thing in custody for almost thirty years, and that guard was the first one to touch it in almost twenty years, because we were all too scared of a bullshit cognitohazard that a sex monster made up to protect his own reputation. Think what we could have learned if we’d gone on their forums and talked to people.”

Mancini shook his head. “You think we would’ve realized they even had forums?”

“I dunno. They obviously upgraded their UI a few times…”

“Lost opportunities.”

“Mm.” Gruber shook her head. “Well, we do still have the program, and the FAQ does give us some hints that could be useful in actual research… I guess I’ll update the containment file.”

“Yeah, fine.” Mancini sat down in the office chair and slumped backwards, looking up at the ceiling. He grumbled.

“What is it?” Gruber asked.

“It’s just… we spend all this time and effort researching the anomalies, trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and… it just bothers me that now we have one that comes with a detailed explanation of how it works, and the first step is ‘it’s literally magic’.”