SCP Foundation

The purpose is to explain from an in-universe perspective where Project Heimdall was coming from, nothing else. Accordingly, in my view as author at least, it fulfills its purpose. There is a conversation, in which an O5 tells a subordinate to do something (write up a document); this conversation reveals some of the internal organizational politics of the Foundation. This subordinate is set up as the individual overseeing Project Heimdall, providing a character for optional use in related tales, since Heimdall (the semicanon) was opened up as a collab. There is then the aforementioned document, drawn up in bureaucratese. Again, this reveals an aspect of the Foundation occasionally alluded to but seldom seen: the day-to-day official paper trail. As someone who works in a bureaucracy, I can attest to how that sort of thing goes (though the papers I shuffle don't generally have to do with alien invasions). The supplement ends with a reply (which is the only part of this in and of itself to appear on the main Heimdall page). In essence, this acts as a "how we got here" prologue to the main Heimdall page.

It's not trying to do anything other than set up Heimdall.

I've taken some flak for the dialogue, with people claiming that it "doesn't sound like anything an actual human being would say", and that it's unrealistic to expect someone to know a report number off the top of their head.

To the former, which is a critique I get on a regular basis on this wiki, I cannot but wonder what exposure those offering that viewpoint have had to conversations in which the interlocutors had a vocabulary and syntax separate from that of the typical American high school student. While I will admit that not every individual I have met speaks in such a manner, I know a great many individuals who do - a sufficient cross-section of the population that I have some skepticism that a worldly individual would have never been exposed to such conversations. In the end, I will continue to write the dialogue of characters as I believe to be realistic, earning downvotes from those who disagree strongly enough, while I in turn shall continue to reciprocate as appropriate - "agreeing to disagree", if you will.

To the latter critique, yes, it is unusual for an individual to have a command of a large set of apparently random numbers at will. There are several explanations, all hinted at in the text, as to why Pendergast would be able to do so. First, it is suggested that his memory is unusually good (O5-7 all but states as much). There are people with, if not eidetic memories (given skepticism by some researchers that such a thing actually exists), then very good memories. Second, when one is working with the same set of arcane information day-in-and-day-out, one tends to remember said same information better than someone who uses the information far less frequently. For example, when I had been working in the same theatre as a lighting designer and programmer for four years, I could remember the numerical designations of nearly every lighting instrument, how it was patched into the control board, how it was focused, the gel (color filter), and so on. I used the body of knowledge daily, so remembering any given discrete piece of information was simpler for me than for the techs who worked less frequently. I had a chemistry professor who worked as an industrial chemist before teaching - she had no difficulty remembering all the various chemical details of the organic compounds she was working with daily, while her students (myself included) kept having problems keeping our compounds straight. Pendergast, as the Deputy Director of Foundation Contingency Planning Operations, would be dealing with numbered files all the time. So while this may be implausible, it is by no means impossible.