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	Re: Eternal Volunteers - The Manipulated Dead
	Posted By: Forrest of B.org	Date: 2/14/05 2:24 a.m.
	In Response To: Eternal Volunteers - The Manipulated Dead (Steve Levinson) : We start out in the usual place and read a terminal from Hathor. How can this : be? We followed her again? But she makes it clear that it doesn't matter : anymore. She's had her revenge and has become a God, as she herself puts : it. Humanity is no more. She's even destroyed the Wr'kr in our Sun. She : has her realm and it's hers alone. But if she has her Jjaro dreadnaught, : what is she doing on this station? And how could she become more powerful : than the Jjaro when they have far surpassed their own technology? In any : case, you're free to go back in time and create another reality - as she : puts it, she has what she wants and there is nothing you can do that will : change it. The Jjaro have not surpassed their own technology. The Cybernetic Junction is the ultimate technology, it's just a matter of fully comprehending what it is capable of. I've already revised these terminals to make it a bit more clear. The Cybernetic Junction, and the ability to use it fully, is tantamount to magic - it makes the impossible possible, allows you to select for yourself a reality that normally would not have existed (such as one where you magically travelled back in time, which is not possible by the normal laws of physics), or one where a gravity field suddenly appears where you happen to want it - the Cybernetic Junction makes that possible. Technology equivilent to it is what gives the W'rkncacnter their power in material space - the Jjaro too would have such power, but have not much need to use it, because in the infinite multiverse there really is no point. They can send you back in time to create another timeline - so what? Hathor's realm still exists. The only difference between Jjaro and W'rkncacnter is that the W'rk have some vendetta that they want in the "real" universe - the Jjaro don't care. They're beyond that. They have higher goals, explained in Meta Omega. Basically, Hathor has become a W'rkncacnter. She has defeated the other one here at Sol and anyone else who might have challenged her, and established herself as the indisputable God of this timeline. And it doesn't really matter to us, or to the Jjaro, except as to teach us a lesson and guide in the creation of the causal tautology, the "one true timeline". And Hathor isn't really "on this station" - she is anywhere and everywhere she wants to be. You just happen to be here. : Next we hear from Leela/S'buth. Now this gets a bit complicated, but when you : were thrown from the dreadnaught, Leela used your cybernetic junction to : escape back to the future, but was surprised when you weren't there! I : think the implication is that you cannot physically travel in time through : your cybernetic junction, even though it may seem as such. You can only : travel to your own self in another time, but how then did you go so far : back in the past? Forrest, I need some help with this. In any case, Leela : returned to Blake's ship and helped the UESC destroy S'buth before his : madness could spread to all the S'pht. In the end she escaped to the : "Outside" - a concept similar to subspace in Star Trek - a realm : outside of the space-time continuum that is inhabited by the Jjaro. Most : enlightening of all, she explains the importance of failure. You need to : fail in order to set things right. Each failure branch is not in vain - it : is a necessity in order to create the one true path. Ok, this gets a little bit complex, and your disagreement about the way timelines work may make it a bit hard to grok in this temporal idiom. It is possible to physically transport yourself, because your body is the Junction's "percieved host". (Every Junction has an advanced but nonsentient AI function which serves to integrate it into it's host - you, K'lia, the Dreadnaught, whatever it happens to be interfaced with). The Junction tracks and maintains it's "percieved host" in 'reality', and thus can shift where and when and in which reality that host is, or even take it outside of reality entirely (which is where you find yourself when 'dreaming', travelling Outside between one time/place and another, and projecting your own pocket reality around you while you do so). This is how Hathor can transport the entire Dreadnaught - is is her "body" now, and the Junction in there can move the whole thing. K'lia too could theoretically make whole jumps like this, which is how it folds across space in fact. Every failure timeline ends with someone transporting you via your Junction. Durandal takes you to wherever he's going in Ch1, Tycho takes you to Lh'owon in Ch2, Thoth just sends you straight Outside in Ch3, and Leela is taking you back to the future in Ch4. To those entities, THEY arrive wherever they send themselves through you, but you never wind up there, because you are intercepted in transit Outside by the Jjaro and send elsewhere to witness or correct the error of your ways. Most of the continuations of these failure timelines we never witness any more of, so we never get to hear Tycho complain that you never arrived on Lh'owon with him, or see anything that might have become of that timeline. But Hathor's transport back to the future of Ch2 is a part of the history that you already know from the prologue. Leela's arrest of S'bhuth and the subsequent death of both of them when that Cybernetic Junction was destroyed is exactly what lead to the future that started this whole thing. We are now in the future of that future, to which Hathor has returned to seek her revenge. Leela escaped Outside before the Junction was destroyed, and thus now can speak to you from beyond the grave. (BTW, can anyone name where the titles of this level and the previous two failure dreams come from? I'll give you a hint - Mad World is getting the title of this level in X, and this one is being renamed "The Philosophy of Time Travel"). So the reason you never arrived back in "the future" with Leela is because you were diverted even further into the future, to this time and this station again. It's not like it would have made any difference if you had arrived with her anyway - Hathor still had this ship. The point of going back to create another isn't to save the future you came from. That whole timeline is ultimately doomed one way or another. As a note, the Outside isn't really so much like subspace. It's more like, imagine somehow if Marathon were a far more complex game, with actual AIs behind the characters of Leela, Durandal, etc - and one of them figured out a way to escape from the game-world and become an independant AI running on your computer separate from the game, which was then capable of playing the game itself and coming to any number of different conclusions. "Marathon" is a [crudely] simulated universe inside the informational device that is my computer; in the Eternal take of "the Marathon universe", "reality" is a far more elaborate "simulation" running on a infinitely more powerful informational system - the Outside. By escaping, you cease to be just a character in the story and instead become an author capable of writing your own revision(s) and reading those of others as you please. Extending the analogy, then of course it becomes obvious that this is only possible if the author of the informational system that reality runs on designed (or accidentally implemented) some function which could be called upon to exit the simulation, which is all the Cybernetic Junction does.

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Replies:

	Eternal Volunteers - The Manipulated Dead	Steve Levinson	2/13/05 10:00 p.m.
	Re: Eternal Volunteers - The Manipulated Dead	Forrest of B.org	2/14/05 2:24 a.m.
	Re: Eternal Volunteers - The Manipulated Dead	Blayne	2/14/05 5:39 a.m.
	Re: Eternal Volunteers - The Manipulated Dead	Forrest of B.org	2/14/05 10:00 a.m.
	Haha I was waiting to mention this *NM*	Dave	2/15/05 3:46 a.m.

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