Ioannes - SCP Foundation

Humankind is incapable of grasping omniscient, objective truth.

Every human has only one perspective, no more, no less – the box that they are born in, live in, die in, beyond which they cannot think nor realise the truth. It is the lens through which they see, tinted and warped to feign equilibrium between the inner mind and outer world; through this, an unspoken theme of humanity is spawned – the fallacy that everything can be understood (based upon the assumption one inherently understands themself completely), the inane belief that the entire cosmos and its workings can be extrapolated from within the miniscule box of perspective.

The unison of minds together enables a broader understanding of the truth, but such also comes with a greater self-deception. Numerous perspectives working in tandem may reveal facts otherwise impossible to discern, but so too will those minds encourage themselves to believe their united perspectives enable them to see the objective, complete nature of reality; this is false. Even if a hundred flawed lenses could unite to form one that is flawless, it could not be aimed everywhere at once – the human mind will extrapolate those unseen regions, pretending everything beyond its box can be found within.

There was one who vainly sought to accomplish this, believing that the amassment of impossible things together into boxes would enable humankind to comprehend all; they recruited thirteen others – each with a mastery over their spheres of knowledge – to assist them. For many years their efforts seemed in vain, stumbling about as they desperately tried to bring chaos to order, until a discussion on a specific oddity unveiled a horrifying idea that the One sought to suppress, but the Thirteen wished to investigate. The answers sought lay beyond human sight, so a vessel was built and sent into the unknown – some of which came back with the ship and the knowledge it held.

The Thirteen were unsettled by the information, but more pleased to have their prediction confirmed – they pridefully affirmed to each-other that their efforts would one day grant omniscient comprehension, and in their arrogance assumed that since they could deduce nothing further about the oddity, there was nothing further to learn. But objective truth doesn’t care about its subjective interpretation: the sun does not orbit the Earth; the stars are not candles in a dome. Not every room is visible.

There was another who sought to discern the unknown, though they instead looked for the predictable and possible, being mostly ignorant of the oddities the Thirteen sought; he collected the ideas of his predecessors and synthesised them, amalgamated them, and in doing so unveiled many a monumental discovery. One revelation was that space and time were intertwined, that physical things could – predictably – influence the passage of time itself. A trivial notion to many now, but a revolutionary idea at the time; a long-lost answer that could explain everything that yet evaded human comprehension.

But the strange realm of waves and particles defied this answer, and still does to this day. One attempt at reconciliation drew a physicist’s ire, who mocked it by showing it implied a cat could be both alive and dead simultaneously: another countered that this was correct, facilitated by time diverging to create a room for every possible outcome, the world duplicating to pass through each – humans, being limited in sight and understanding, could see only the box they were in, and so assumed there was only one room, no more.

To the known world this idea is unproven and probably unprovable, but it is posited and debated over regardless. To the Thirteen – and others with them, in the shadows they upheld – it is well-known as correct, with many an oddity being a doorway between timelines, allowing humans to pass from one to the other.

There are innumerable timelines – all imperfect replicas of the one they spawned from – where one immune to the delusion of omniscience arose amongst the Thirteen, looked upon the oddity with unassuming eyes, and investigated its abilities without assuming limits could be found. Often they were led astray by other circumstance or by their own decision – often did reality become so warped by the flaws of its duplication that it simply crumbled to nothingness before they could succeed. But there was one outcome – only one – where that person succeeded, unwaveringly seeking to appease their human desire to explore the unknown, pursuing their driving question until, finally, it yielded a little more of its omniscient truth to them:

If time and space are intertwined, why would the Architect duplicate only space?

It doesn’t.