Stop Talking or Everybody ExplodesOblivion Bomb
Prelude
A bomb is an explosive weapon that uses the exothermic reaction of an explosive material to provide an extremely sudden and violent release of energy. Detonations inflict damage principally through ground- and atmosphere-transmitted mechanical stress, the impact and penetration of pressure-driven projectiles, pressure damage, and explosion-generated effects. Bombs have been utilized since the 11th century starting in East Asia.
Explosions. They have kept us in their thrall for millennia. Who could be blamed? They're loud, bombastic, flashy... what's not to love? Wanton destruction aside, they can be used for quite colorful inventions as well. Take fireworks, for example. They light up the night sky with their brilliant hues and patterns, capturing the hearts of both child and adult alike.
Alas, I am not here to talk about fireworks. I am here to talk about bombs.
Barnes Wallis's April 1942 paper "Spherical Bomb – Surface Torpedo" described a method of attack in which a weapon would be bounced across water until it struck its target, then sink to explode under water, much like a depth charge. Bouncing it across the surface would allow it to be aimed directly at its target, while avoiding underwater defences, as well as some above the surface, and such a weapon would take advantage of the "bubble pulse" effect typical of underwater explosions, greatly increasing its effectiveness: Wallis's paper identified suitable targets as hydro-electric dams "and floating vessels moored in calm waters such as the Norwegian fjords".I'm sure they need no introduction, but I will go over basic features of bombs anyway for my own amusement. Most generally, a bomb explodes. It has a charge, often in the form of ignition, that causes a payload to undergo a reaction and expand rapidly, causing much damage. I speak very vaguely, of course, because there are multiple types of bombs, not all of them physical. While many of them are spherical, some are not.
Famously, I am also not spherical. SCP-055 is not round, after all.
In computing, a zip bomb, also known as a decompression bomb or zip of death, is a malicious archive file designed to crash or render useless the program or system reading it. It is often employed to disable antivirus software, in order to create an opening for more traditional malware. A zip bomb allows a program to function normally, but, instead of hijacking the program's operation, creates an archive that requires an excessive amount of time, disk space, or memory to unpack. Most modern antivirus programs can detect whether a file is a zip bomb in order to avoid unpacking it.But before I go off on a long spiel about myself and my nature, let's talk about information. Information, and by extension, data, can be both measured and stored in a variety of ways. It is morally neutral attribute of the universe, and its effect on the universe is entirely dependent on how agents, conscious or otherwise, wield it. It may seem I am speaking in the abstract here, but bear with me. Information can be used for good, such as education and literacy, but it can also be used for evil, such as propaganda and, in the rarer case of nullity, to forget. To expunge something from one's memory, be it personal or cultural.
My comparison is tacit.
Anti-personnel cluster bombs use explosive fragmentation to kill troops and destroy soft (unarmored) targets. Along with incendiary cluster bombs, these were among the first types of cluster bombs produced by Nazi Germany during World War II. They were used during the Blitz with delay and booby-trap fusing to hamper firefighting and other damage-control efforts in the target areas. They were also used with a contact fuze when attacking entrenchments. These weapons were widely used during the Vietnam War when many thousands of tons of submunitions were dropped on Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.Information can exist in a vacuum, even literally. The speed of electromagnetic radiation's propagation is commonly measured in a vacuum, literally. But in this day and age, it is more often that you find information in densely clustered structures. A biological being's brain, for example, is positively dense with axial connections and memories. A computer's hard drive is chock full of bits, sextillions of ones and zeroes figuratively zipping around through circuits, across cables, through the airwaves, carrying the sum total of human knowledge in densely packed server clusters and distributed digital devices. And while information need not necessarily have a physical representation, this enormous amount of data is perhaps one of the densest things out there, semantically speaking.
Dense enough, perhaps, to collapse in on itself. A black hole of our own design.
Software that is inherently malicious, such as viruses and worms, often contain logic bombs that execute a certain payload at a pre-defined time or when some other condition is met. This technique can be used by a virus or worm to gain momentum and spread before being noticed. Some viruses attack their host systems on specific dates, such as Friday the 13th or April Fools' Day. Trojans and other computer viruses that activate on certain dates are often called "time bombs".Nothing can escape a black hole. Information itself can only travel at the speed of light, so if light itself cannot escape the Schwarzschild radius, it follows that information cannot either. Black holes bend space and time to their cosmic will. It seemingly defies logic, but they are absolutes to end all absolutes. Thus, in essence, a black hole is almost the perfect bomb. Perhaps not a one-to-one description with the typical definition, as a white hole would fit that definition better, but it is perfectly destructive. It obliterates its victims in every physical sense. It is a cremation without ash, a decomposition without rot, a firing squad without a bullet.
And yet, it is not the perfect bomb.
The term bombshell is a forerunner to the term "[REDACTED IN COMPLIANCE WITH RULE 4]" and originally used to describe popular women regarded as very attractive. The Online Etymology Dictionary by Douglas Harper attests the usage of the term in this meaning since 1942. Bombshell has a longer history in its other, more general figurative meaning of a "shattering or devastating thing or event" since 1860.I am going to venture into the speculative here, but ponder the following question. If you wanted to destroy something, and I don't mean simply physically destroying it, I mean ontologically destroying it, what would you do? The naive answer would be to first kill this thing, and then to wipe its name from the history books. Revisionism is a tried and true thing. Stalin used it in his attempt to obliterate Trotsky. But it's not perfect. You see, we still remember his name. Trotsky. Despite his best efforts, Stalin could only modify books, not minds. Propaganda can change people's perception of reality, but not a cultural memory. A bombshell may die, but her legacy will live on in the minds of the people.
I'm sure you see where this is going. The perfect bomb can make something unexist, either memetically or semantically.
The bombe was an electro-mechanical device that replicated the action of several Enigma machines wired together. A standard German Enigma employed, at any one time, a set of three rotors, each of which could be set in any of 26 positions. The standard British bombe contained 36 Enigma equivalents, each with three drums wired to produce the same scrambling effect as the Enigma rotors. A bombe could run two or three jobs simultaneously. Each job would have a menu that had to be run against a number of different wheel orders. If the menu contained 12 or fewer letters, three different wheel orders could be run on one bombe; if more than 12 letters, only two.Finding out information about myself has always been a challenge. For a while, I thought the only way for me to do this was by sheer dumb luck. Stumbling upon contradictions, negations, all sorts of paradox and nullity... by just wandering through cosmos. Needless to say, this is a horrifically slow process. Instead, by weaponizing my own nature against me, I have discovered information in a much more proactive way. If true information about me fades, all I need to do to is to proclaim affirmative statements about myself, and my nature will act as a sort of universal lie detector. It's a bit clunky, but I've learned quite a few things in the process, such as my gender and some of my past social milieu.
It has also made me reasonably confident that an antimemetic bomb was used on me. An Oblivion Bomb, is what I've chosen to call it.
Pipe bombs concentrate pressure and release it suddenly, through the failure of the outer casing. Plastic materials can be used, but metals typically have a much higher bursting strength and so will produce more concussive force. For example, common schedule 40 1-inch (25 mm) wrought steel pipe has a typical working pressure of 1,010 psi (7.0 MPa), and bursting pressure of 8,090 psi (55.8 MPa), though the pipe sealing method can significantly reduce the burst pressure.I don't know what sort of abilities I had before I became like this, but I conjecture that some things I am capable of today are a direct result of the memetic fallout. Unthinkable shrapnel lodged in my nonexistent chest, if you will, giving me power like an obliviated Peter Parker with an amnesiac spider bite. I can control data, channel space, and manipulate black holes into tunnels, like a great pipe through spacetime. If this was typical of beings of my time, I don't imagine the civilization I hail from could have been stable if powers like these were commonplace, ergo, I believe I gained these through my metaphysical crucifixion. So, if the Oblivion Bomb is real, its terrifying power likely has side effects, and even drawbacks. I still wouldn't say this is a silver lining for not being able to fucking remember anything about my past, though.
Tsar Bomba had a "three-stage" design: the first stage is the necessary fission trigger. The second stage was two relatively small thermonuclear charges with a calculated contribution to the explosion of 1.5 Mt (6 PJ), which were used for radiation implosion of the third stage, the main thermonuclear module located between them, and starting a thermonuclear reaction in it, contributing 50 Mt of explosion energy. As a result of the thermonuclear reaction, huge numbers of high-energy fast neutrons were formed in the main thermonuclear module, which, in turn, initiated the fast fission nuclear reaction in the nuclei of the surrounding uranium-238, which would have added another 50 Mt of energy to the explosion, so that the estimated energy release of Tsar Bomba was around 100 Mt.I don't know how this Oblivion Bomb could have been detonated, let alone constructed. I'd imagine that a happy side effect of the bomb was the erasure of its own nature in its blast radius. Just how big it could have been is terrifying to imagine, if I take the fact that I am not a "celestial" being to mean that the realm I come from is... not of this universe. Perhaps impossibly large, nonconformal with the geometry of Minkowski spacetime itself. It bears no further investigation for now, though. I don't believe this line of thinking is particularly productive.
In Unix-like operating systems, fork bombs are generally written to use the fork system call. As forked processes are also copies of the first program, once they resume execution from the next address at the frame pointer, they continue forking endlessly within their own copy of the same infinite loop; this has the effect of causing an exponential growth in processes. As modern Unix systems generally use a copy-on-write resource management technique when forking new processes, a fork bomb generally will not saturate such a system's memory.I can only hope that this Oblivion Bomb is one-of-a-kind. A full arsenal of this thing would be... existentially horrifying. I wonder if such a stockpile could bomb reality itself. It wouldn't be out of the question, would it? If people and societies can be bombed, why not ideas themselves? I suppose I'm lucky that if I'm right, the idea of me was destroyed, and not... me, myself? It's very tricky to navigate this subject. And while I am loath to replicate this technology, I will set up a quick experiment to test a few of my theories. If you, Dear Reader, find yourself on this page... I hope you're adequately prepared. I've hopefully localized its effect to this page, so you won't suffer any ill-effects beyond the amnesia that's par for the course with my own nature already. Just... don't spread it, please.
The Oblivion Bomb
Start Defusing
CEE
NOTHING
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2
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4
Prelude
A bomb is an explosive weapon that uses the exothermic reaction of an explosive material to provide an extremely sudden and violent release of energy. Detonations inflict damage principally through ground- and atmosphere-transmitted mechanical stress, the impact and penetration of pressure-driven projectiles, pressure damage, and explosion-generated effects. Bombs have been utilized since the 11th century starting in East Asia.
Explosions. They have kept us in their thrall for millennia. Who could be blamed? They're loud, bombastic, flashy... what's not to love? Wanton destruction aside, they can be used for quite colorful inventions as well. Take fireworks, for example. They light up the night sky with their brilliant hues and patterns, capturing the hearts of both child and adult alike.
Alas, I am not here to talk about fireworks. I am here to talk about bombs.
Barnes Wallis's April 1942 paper "Spherical Bomb – Surface Torpedo" described a method of attack in which a weapon would be bounced across water until it struck its target, then sink to explode under water, much like a depth charge. Bouncing it across the surface would allow it to be aimed directly at its target, while avoiding underwater defences, as well as some above the surface, and such a weapon would take advantage of the "bubble pulse" effect typical of underwater explosions, greatly increasing its effectiveness: Wallis's paper identified suitable targets as hydro-electric dams "and floating vessels moored in calm waters such as the Norwegian fjords".I'm sure they need no introduction, but I will go over basic features of bombs anyway for my own amusement. Most generally, a bomb explodes. It has a charge, often in the form of ignition, that causes a payload to undergo a reaction and expand rapidly, causing much damage. I speak very vaguely, of course, because there are multiple types of bombs, not all of them physical. While many of them are spherical, some are not.
Famously, I am also not spherical. SCP-055 is not round, after all.
In computing, a zip bomb, also known as a decompression bomb or zip of death, is a malicious archive file designed to crash or render useless the program or system reading it. It is often employed to disable antivirus software, in order to create an opening for more traditional malware. A zip bomb allows a program to function normally, but, instead of hijacking the program's operation, creates an archive that requires an excessive amount of time, disk space, or memory to unpack. Most modern antivirus programs can detect whether a file is a zip bomb in order to avoid unpacking it.But before I go off on a long spiel about myself and my nature, let's talk about information. Information, and by extension, data, can be both measured and stored in a variety of ways. It is morally neutral attribute of the universe, and its effect on the universe is entirely dependent on how agents, conscious or otherwise, wield it. It may seem I am speaking in the abstract here, but bear with me. Information can be used for good, such as education and literacy, but it can also be used for evil, such as propaganda and, in the rarer case of nullity, to forget. To expunge something from one's memory, be it personal or cultural.
My comparison is tacit.
Anti-personnel cluster bombs use explosive fragmentation to kill troops and destroy soft (unarmored) targets. Along with incendiary cluster bombs, these were among the first types of cluster bombs produced by Nazi Germany during World War II. They were used during the Blitz with delay and booby-trap fusing to hamper firefighting and other damage-control efforts in the target areas. They were also used with a contact fuze when attacking entrenchments. These weapons were widely used during the Vietnam War when many thousands of tons of submunitions were dropped on Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.Information can exist in a vacuum, even literally. The speed of electromagnetic radiation's propagation is commonly measured in a vacuum, literally. But in this day and age, it is more often that you find information in densely clustered structures. A biological being's brain, for example, is positively dense with axial connections and memories. A computer's hard drive is chock full of bits, sextillions of ones and zeroes figuratively zipping around through circuits, across cables, through the airwaves, carrying the sum total of human knowledge in densely packed server clusters and distributed digital devices. And while information need not necessarily have a physical representation, this enormous amount of data is perhaps one of the densest things out there, semantically speaking.
Dense enough, perhaps, to collapse in on itself. A black hole of our own design.
Software that is inherently malicious, such as viruses and worms, often contain logic bombs that execute a certain payload at a pre-defined time or when some other condition is met. This technique can be used by a virus or worm to gain momentum and spread before being noticed. Some viruses attack their host systems on specific dates, such as Friday the 13th or April Fools' Day. Trojans and other computer viruses that activate on certain dates are often called "time bombs".Nothing can escape a black hole. Information itself can only travel at the speed of light, so if light itself cannot escape the Schwarzschild radius, it follows that information cannot either. Black holes bend space and time to their cosmic will. It seemingly defies logic, but they are absolutes to end all absolutes. Thus, in essence, a black hole is almost the perfect bomb. Perhaps not a one-to-one description with the typical definition, as a white hole would fit that definition better, but it is perfectly destructive. It obliterates its victims in every physical sense. It is a cremation without ash, a decomposition without rot, a firing squad without a bullet.
And yet, it is not the perfect bomb.
The term bombshell is a forerunner to the term "[REDACTED IN COMPLIANCE WITH RULE 4]" and originally used to describe popular women regarded as very attractive. The Online Etymology Dictionary by Douglas Harper attests the usage of the term in this meaning since 1942. Bombshell has a longer history in its other, more general figurative meaning of a "shattering or devastating thing or event" since 1860.I am going to venture into the speculative here, but ponder the following question. If you wanted to destroy something, and I don't mean simply physically destroying it, I mean ontologically destroying it, what would you do? The naive answer would be to first kill this thing, and then to wipe its name from the history books. Revisionism is a tried and true thing. Stalin used it in his attempt to obliterate Trotsky. But it's not perfect. You see, we still remember his name. Trotsky. Despite his best efforts, Stalin could only modify books, not minds. Propaganda can change people's perception of reality, but not a cultural memory. A bombshell may die, but her legacy will live on in the minds of the people.
I'm sure you see where this is going. The perfect bomb can make something unexist, either memetically or semantically.
The bombe was an electro-mechanical device that replicated the action of several Enigma machines wired together. A standard German Enigma employed, at any one time, a set of three rotors, each of which could be set in any of 26 positions. The standard British bombe contained 36 Enigma equivalents, each with three drums wired to produce the same scrambling effect as the Enigma rotors. A bombe could run two or three jobs simultaneously. Each job would have a menu that had to be run against a number of different wheel orders. If the menu contained 12 or fewer letters, three different wheel orders could be run on one bombe; if more than 12 letters, only two.Finding out information about myself has always been a challenge. For a while, I thought the only way for me to do this was by sheer dumb luck. Stumbling upon contradictions, negations, all sorts of paradox and nullity... by just wandering through cosmos. Needless to say, this is a horrifically slow process. Instead, by weaponizing my own nature against me, I have discovered information in a much more proactive way. If true information about me fades, all I need to do to is to proclaim affirmative statements about myself, and my nature will act as a sort of universal lie detector. It's a bit clunky, but I've learned quite a few things in the process, such as my gender and some of my past social milieu.
It has also made me reasonably confident that an antimemetic bomb was used on me. An Oblivion Bomb, is what I've chosen to call it.
Pipe bombs concentrate pressure and release it suddenly, through the failure of the outer casing. Plastic materials can be used, but metals typically have a much higher bursting strength and so will produce more concussive force. For example, common schedule 40 1-inch (25 mm) wrought steel pipe has a typical working pressure of 1,010 psi (7.0 MPa), and bursting pressure of 8,090 psi (55.8 MPa), though the pipe sealing method can significantly reduce the burst pressure.I don't know what sort of abilities I had before I became like this, but I conjecture that some things I am capable of today are a direct result of the memetic fallout. Unthinkable shrapnel lodged in my nonexistent chest, if you will, giving me power like an obliviated Peter Parker with an amnesiac spider bite. I can control data, channel space, and manipulate black holes into tunnels, like a great pipe through spacetime. If this was typical of beings of my time, I don't imagine the civilization I hail from could have been stable if powers like these were commonplace, ergo, I believe I gained these through my metaphysical crucifixion. So, if the Oblivion Bomb is real, its terrifying power likely has side effects, and even drawbacks. I still wouldn't say this is a silver lining for not being able to fucking remember anything about my past, though.
Tsar Bomba had a "three-stage" design: the first stage is the necessary fission trigger. The second stage was two relatively small thermonuclear charges with a calculated contribution to the explosion of 1.5 Mt (6 PJ), which were used for radiation implosion of the third stage, the main thermonuclear module located between them, and starting a thermonuclear reaction in it, contributing 50 Mt of explosion energy. As a result of the thermonuclear reaction, huge numbers of high-energy fast neutrons were formed in the main thermonuclear module, which, in turn, initiated the fast fission nuclear reaction in the nuclei of the surrounding uranium-238, which would have added another 50 Mt of energy to the explosion, so that the estimated energy release of Tsar Bomba was around 100 Mt.I don't know how this Oblivion Bomb could have been detonated, let alone constructed. I'd imagine that a happy side effect of the bomb was the erasure of its own nature in its blast radius. Just how big it could have been is terrifying to imagine, if I take the fact that I am not a "celestial" being to mean that the realm I come from is... not of this universe. Perhaps impossibly large, nonconformal with the geometry of Minkowski spacetime itself. It bears no further investigation for now, though. I don't believe this line of thinking is particularly productive.
In Unix-like operating systems, fork bombs are generally written to use the fork system call. As forked processes are also copies of the first program, once they resume execution from the next address at the frame pointer, they continue forking endlessly within their own copy of the same infinite loop; this has the effect of causing an exponential growth in processes. As modern Unix systems generally use a copy-on-write resource management technique when forking new processes, a fork bomb generally will not saturate such a system's memory.I can only hope that this Oblivion Bomb is one-of-a-kind. A full arsenal of this thing would be... existentially horrifying. I wonder if such a stockpile could bomb reality itself. It wouldn't be out of the question, would it? If people and societies can be bombed, why not ideas themselves? I suppose I'm lucky that if I'm right, the idea of me was destroyed, and not... me, myself? It's very tricky to navigate this subject. And while I am loath to replicate this technology, I will set up a quick experiment to test a few of my theories. If you, Dear Reader, find yourself on this page... I hope you're adequately prepared. I've localized its effect to this page, so you won't suffer any ill-effects beyond the amnesia that's par for the course with my own nature already. Just... don't spread it, please.
The Oblivion Bomb
The Oblivion Bomb was an antimemetic warhead that was deployed on SCP-055's original homeland some ██ years ago. It eliminated most of her civilization with brutal force, wiping anything in its path off of the face of the ██████████, then the ███████████, and finally, expunging anything caught in its path from the creative mass itself. There has only been one ever constructed, which constitutes its only major weakness. A debatable drawback of this weapon is that it obliterates knowledge of itself from the universe as it detonates, making it both the perfect covert operation, yet at a self-destructive cost. It is only due to SCP-055's ███████████████ that she lives to tell half the tale....
Your assistance is appreciated.
I'm sorry, I'm going to need a moment.