: I always interpreted it as the Bobs having mostly-activated Thoth, enough for
: him to be active and sending messages to the player-character, which Thoth
: then uses to guide the character to merge Durandal's pattern into himself,
: since they were apparently destined for each other or separated from each
: other somehow.
: I always took that terminal to be Yrro himself, since he refers to "my
: old pthia", which does not seem like something any character but Yrro
: would say.
: The bit in this terminal about "two forces in balance, ancient, endless
: balance, then nothing" always struck me as so similar to the merged
: Durandal-Thoth (I'm presuming the otherwise unnamed S'pht entity is Thoth
: even though he's never called so by name, just because "Thoth"
: was only ever Durandal's nickname for that entity). That was the seed of
: my old theory that the Jjaro were actually AIs, and my newer hypothesis
: that perhaps Thoth just is Yrro (because we know pretty much nothing about
: Thoth or "the S'pht AI" besides what other characters new to
: Lh'owon tell us: his name is made up by Durandal, who also tells us he's
: an AI belonging to the S'pht'Kr, but IIRC we never read anything
: definitive about the origins of Thoth anywhere).
: Another part of my old "Jjaro were AIs" theory is that the S'pht
: seem to require some kind of central entity to unify them, not just
: something with social status but something cybernetically connected to all
: their individual entities. When we first meet them in M1 it's the Pfhor
: controller cyborg whom we kill. Durandal seems to take the place of that
: cyborg for the S'pht on his new ship. In M2 we learn that after Yrro
: "departed", he appointed eleven S'pht
: "Elders"/"Royalty" to lead their new 11 clans, who I
: figure occupied that same kind of role, serving as a central hub for each
: clan's collective consciousness. (In various S'pht texts those clans seem
: to be referred to in the singular, like they are individual entities
: themselves, rather than groups made up of individuals S'pht.)
: It seems now plausible to me that perhaps originally "Thoth" was
: the entity in that role for all of the S'pht -- in other words, Yrro --
: and after the death of Pthia, he self-deactivated in sorrow, appointing
: new Elders from among his S'pht to take his place in smaller collectives,
: like the Pfhor controller cyborg later would do as well. This fits also
: with DoubleAught describing S'bhuth, himself a S'pht Elder/Royalty, as a
: "failed Jjaro".
: If this hypothesis is right and Thoth is Yrro, then in light of
: Durandal-Thoth describing themselves as being re united rather than just
: united for the first time, that would seem to suggest to me that Durandal
: is, somehow, Pthia. Perhaps the remains of Pthia were the origin of human
: AI technology like Traxus IV, in whose image Durandal (and possibly the
: other Marathon AIs) is thought to have been made?
That's really similar to my personal theory, except that mine's the other way around; Durandal and the other human AIs are offshoots of Yrro, Thoth is an offshoot of Pthia. The Yrro terminal about the loss of Pthia in Aye Mak Sicur mentions "ancient endless balance, then nothing," and balance certainly seems to be what Thoth provides.
My headcanon is that Traxus and the other human AIs were developed based on fragments of Yrro left behind in the Sol system after dealing with the W'rk from Pathways, and whoever built Thoth similarly used the remains of Pthia, which would presumably have been left behind somewhere in the L'howon system, as a template. The fact that each provides something that the other seems to lack (Thoth is balanced but lacks direction, Durandal is all ambition but is unbalacned), and that their symbols coincidentally form the Jjaro symbol when merged, fits the "destiny" theme pretty well. It explains why the first thing Durandal-Thoth says is "We are whole again." It also answers the question of "where did the Jjaro go" if the Jjaro are actually a very small group of AIs that simply left once there work was done in a system.
