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	Message: : This may not be what you were looking for in responses - I haven't any more : data that what you have gathered, but you have a lot of good data I was : aware of in forming this theory - but here's why my take on the Royalty : has been. : The S'pht are naturally (as natural as a designed being can be) structured : into a collective consciousness. What the Pfhor had going when we met them : was a Pfhor-based cyborg controller at the center of the S'pht : consciousness. The Pfhor controller commanded the S'pht to act in a : certain way and the S'pht did so, but against each of their individual : wills. This makes me think that there is something like a government of : the mind going on, with a central dictator that can forcibly control all : of his subjects, but the subjects still have wills of their own and can : resist to a limited degree, but not much. : When Durandal had us kill the Pfhor controller in Marathon 1, he became the : new hub of the S'pht collective. But unlike the controller, he coordinated : things in a way that the S'pht collectively approved of. They worked : together. Durandal was a benevolent dictator, loved by his people. : Durandal and the Pfhor controller were both serving the role of the S'pht : Royalty. Before the S'pht's enslavement, they had something else serving : that central, coordinating function. I imagine that these things were : probably biologically S'pht, but perhaps with different cybernetics. In : Eternal I've kind of fudged this, having S'bhuth (the Royalty of S'pht'Kr) : appearing to us more like an AI; but I'm careful never to deny that he has : a physical body, which I imagine he really must have. : With regards to the breaking of the clans, I imagine that originally the : overmind of the S'pht was Yrro himself, seeing as they were created as his : servants and all. Then when he left he entrusted lesser beings (suped-up : S'pht) each to a small portion of the S'pht collective, creating the : eleven clans. : The "failed Jjaro" bit I took in context of the : Jjaro-as-humans-who-became-AIs-and-later-ascended story. (As I've : mentioned before, an ex-Bungie person who shall rename nameless once : related to me Jason Jones' story of the Jjaro, as it factored into an : early Halo plot at least). S'bhuth would be a failed Jjaro inasmuch as he : is a living organism, bonded to machines, mentally far beyond any other : organic beings, but he's not a full-fledged Jjaro yet. He's a cyborg with : AI-like mental properties; imagine if Durandal were running in the : player's mind, that the two of them shared one mind, and in addition to : controlling a physical, cyborg body, he/it/they could still interface with : other computer systems exactly as Durandal does - existing in cyberspace : and meatspace simultaneously. That is how I imagine S'bhuth, and the other : S'pht Royalty. : (Another interpretation of the "failed Jjaro" bit is in the context : of Jjaro-and-W'rk-are-the-same-kind-of-beings, which is not something that : I was told but something I invented. S'bhuth, upon coming to the point : where he could have been a Jjaro, "joined the chaos he had sought to : evade" and became a W'rkncacnter instead). : The one bit that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense is this "we : know the mind must exist because the body exists" bit. And the fact : that the S'pht clans reform after the return of the S'pht'Kr. Is it : possible that somewhere out there in the Pfhor empire, the Olders still : exist, themselves enslaved by the Pfhor, or somehow repressed, to let the : Pfhor controllers order around their local groups? And why does the return : of the S'pht'Kr suddenly allow the clans to reform? Is that happening just : at Lh'owon, or all over the Pfhor empire? I could understand the local : S'pht joining under S'bhuth's rule as their local controllers were : destroyed, but... where are the other other Olders? : Maybe the Royalty do not have physical bodies at all, but are distributed AIs : running across the network of individual S'pht minds? An emergent : collective consciousness. But in what way do some S'pht unite into one : collective and other S'pht unite into another - why wouldn't all S'pht : have a singular collective consciousness emergent from them all? There has : to be some sort of focal points for individual S'pht to rally around into : distinct collectives, otherwise all S'pht would just be of one collective : mind, and no Clans would exist. : I think this is a good topic you raise, and worth further discussion.
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