2007年のコンテストで削除された提言のリメイク。
Woedenazや
djkaktusとの共著だったらしい
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/forum/t-15046483/scp-7005#post-5546667
The Neon God is essentially a skip about the search for identity, meaning and narrative in the face of a reality that - so it appears - is entirely devoid of intrinsic anything. The central narrative follows Rosie as she travels between various points in the multiverse, and meets different people trying to create their own forms of narrative, their own stories about what the world is when faced with the infinity of possibilities about who they could be.
Any one of them could have been anything; the possibilities of reality are so endless that all the small-scale, everyday things we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives feel arbitrary to them. They need to search for a story to tell themselves about their everyday existence. But as Rosie goesdown the line, they get closer and closer to nihilism. Rameau is searching for God, for an absolute around which the subjective turns. Quaker, who has seen his reality shift around him constantly, does not believe in any kind of absolute but simply tries to cling on to arbitrary subjectivities, deeming the possibilities of experiencing different possible lives as "depravity". He is very cynical, clinging to subjectivities as if they were certainties while aware of their artificiality.
The violinist, meanwhile, has largely given up; he simply exists, out in the wilderness, playing games of chance and tearing down what he sees as the delusions of others because it gives him a kind of petty fun. But the foglight prophet has turned such an attitude into a religion; seeing the Neon God as a negation of everything, the destruction of all meaning, he seeks to bring this to the masses, to convince them to explode their lives, identities, all trace of meaning.
Rosie passes through all these as she approaches the end of the line, while Kells gradually sinks to the same point as the prophet through being stuck at home, trying to cling on to his own certainties. Not even the Foundation, with its supposed viewpoint of rational objectivity, is immune to the problem. A few people have criticised the hammy O5 dialogue, but - while not really intentional - I kinda like that it's come out like that. The O5 is spewing forth a lot of pretentious crap about nothing meaning anything. It's very self-indulgent of him. So he naturally sounds a little hammy; he takes himself very seriously.
But the Neon God itself is not a pure nihilistic negation of all attempts to find meaning in things. It appears to be that, but it isn't. The original 2017 NG was that - it was my attempt to write a horror story under the "write what scares you" principle. The idea was that the Foundation would do all the usual things to Solve The Mystery, but it just - wouldn't be solved. No meaning, no hint of a meaning, was given. It was just slow, inexorable, random, an apocalypse that couldn't be fitted into any narrative. The negation of all things.
But that's not really that interesting an idea, and others have done it better. The NG is meant to evoke a lot of stuff that's not easily articulatable - the strange feeling of being surrounded by systems and architecture that is too big to understand, a huge complex ecosystem that's manmade but not really controlled or understood by people. All those steel and glass buildings you see in big cities, which seem to exist for the sole purpose of existing without contributing anything tangible to the reality of people's lives, even though they often do.
At its core, though, these are all images more than they are meanings. I asked myself this a lot across the various times I've tried to rewrite this over the years - what exactly is the NG trying to evoke? Why a city? What could I use this idea, of the ever-expanding city, to do? Most of my answers just came back to stuff I'd done before.
But here, that's the entire point - the neon city is striving to be something, but it isn't. It's trying to be real. It may not be getting there, it may evoke more than it actually presents a purpose, but it still strives. It can't help itself.
And this is the fundamental point of the thing - narrative and meaning worm their way into everything. The very fact that a slow sink into despair and nihilism can be categorised as a slow sink into despair and nihilism means that it's not really nihilistic. Trying to reject the idea of meaning and identity just creates its own identity and meaning. Even the blank meaninglessness strives towards meaning. It's just shit at it.
Rosie realises at the end that Lampeter is an escape route. Everyone she's met is recontextualised for her - not individuals waiting out their lives, but people who've found a way to escape, or at least deal with in some fashion, the apparent shitty luck and chance of their personal existences. Lampeter is decaying, is dying, but is still an attempt at beating the Neon God, at finding a way to survive that's more whole, more real, actually succeeding in having meaning and identity. Even the forghorn preacher kind of does this - the Neon God means something different to him than what it actually is.
Lampeter has thus allowed generations to live their lives, even as it dies. It cannot defeat despair, but it can keep one step ahead of it enough for people to at least be able to live. And Rosie, too, is able to create identity and meaning for herself - the death of her sister seemed to shatter all the stories she told herself about what life was and how to live, but she was able to find a way out of the despair and create herself as Rosie Hartlepool. She was able to create meaning and identity out of her own experience of life, even as her world appeared to break apart.
So, essentially, the Neon God is a skip about searching for or creating identity and meaning in the face of randomness, of unfairness, of the arbitrariness of life and our opportunities. It's not necessarily existentially nihilistic- being religious myself, I'm not a nihilist - but it's definitely existentialist in some way, or trying to be so. Basically a pseudo-philosophical take on existentialism by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about.
But regardless, I hope you liked reading it. It is, again, deliberately ambiguous; in keeping with the whole "individual need to find one's own identity and purpose" thing, it's meant to be malleable. There's also some more stuff I was trying to do in there as well, I think, but this is the general gist of things. It's very late and I don't think I'm making much sense :P.
