: This has always been my assumption. Durandal folds out of Tau Ceti, explores
: the galaxy, finds Lh'owon and thinks, say, that cyborg could be useful
: here, folds back to Tau Ceti, and nabs you.
The problem here is that in Marathon 2 it's directly implied that Durandal brought you with him at the same time he left. For instance, on "If I Had a Rocket Launcher," the first terminal from Durandal states, "It may only seem like a matter of hours since your last battle here, but remember that seventeen years have passed for those of us who did not spend the voyage from Tau Ceti in a stasis chamber." It's pretty evident that we've been along for essentially the whole ride. Also the manual reads, "When it turned out that Durandal had brought me here, instead of leaving me to be the hero on Tau Ceti like I deserved, I wasn't surprised." This insinuates that we didn't stay at Tau Ceti for any significant amount of time in the Marathon 2 timeline. I think it's safe to say the Security Officer was put into stasis shortly after M1 would have ended, and remained in that state while Durandal went about exploring the galaxy.
Also as far as I know, while Durandal did stop by Earth at one point, there isn't any text that directly suggests Durandal returned to Tau Ceti after M1. In the terminal General-RADIX referenced, Durandal states that "the colony was about to be destroyed," but that doesn't necessarily mean he returned later to witness its destruction -- as far as we can ascertain, he could mean it was going to be destroyed momentarily or several months down the road; Durandal is, after all, supposedly capable of assessing things well enough that he can reasonably predict future events. And even if he did in fact return to the colony later on at the time it was destroyed, that still doesn't explain why for the Security Officer, it only feels like a "matter of hours" since he was last on the P'fhor ship when the Tau Ceti colony was destroyed months afterward.
: As for the M2 - M∞ jump, I've always understood "Robert Blake and
: his men... were the only human survivors of the original Tau Ceti
: colony" to imply that you do not survive the Trih Xeem event. Whether
: it's because Durandal leaves you to work on your tan, or because the
: Wrkncacnter escapes doesn't matter: you die, and so you keep looping in
: pattern buffer timelines until you wind up on Ne Cede Malis.
That seems like a pretty fair interpretation. The way I interpret it is that the end screen is a sort of history log from humanity's point of view -- hence why Durandal's activity after Lh'owon is largely undisclosed, and therefore why the Security Officer's existence past this point is unknown to the rest of humankind. Robert Blake et al could assume he died for all they know. Plus it seems to be a recurring trend where the Security Officer is rarely addressed as a human (http://marathon.bungie.org/story/you.html).
