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	Dream Terminal Thoughts
	Posted By: SiliconDream =PN=	Date: 1/13/02 1:53 a.m.
	Dream terminal time! This is hideously long, I'm afraid, and I don't even get to Where are Monsters, Whatever You Please or Eat the Path... Shoulda done this for my earlier posts, but I'd like to make this post a bit more comprehensible by labeling the various timelines. I haven't seen any commonly-used system of terminology so forth, so I'll just number them. --Timeline 0: The timeline of the Infinity manual intro. (It may be identical with Timeline 2, since there's no explicit conflicting info. But so many important events and characters are unmentioned in Tfear's recap that I think this is most likely a distinct timeline. This is the Pfhor "best case scenario," with Durandal being comparatively easily defeated before he has a chance to do much of anything.) --Timeline 1: Contains all of Marathon 2 and Ne Cede Malis. --Timeline 2: Contains Acme Station through Thing What Kicks..., and Carroll Street Station. --Timeline 3: Contains Rise Robot Rise through Confound Delivery, and Aie Mak Sicur. --Timeline 4: Contains Rise Robot Rise, possibly Poor Yorick, Naw Man He's Close through Hang Brain, and You're Wormfood, Dude. --Timeline 5: Contains Rise Robot Rise, possibly poor Yorick, Naw Man He's Close, Foe Hammer, and By Committee through Aye Mak Sicur and the final screen. Note that (with the exception of Timeline 0, whose historical progression is little-known), the timelines are ordered according to when they split off from one another. Timelines 1 and 2 diverge from Timelines 3, 4, and 5 just after the end of Marathon, according to whether Durandal takes you with him or leaves you behind for Tycho to abduct later. Timeline 1 diverges from Timeline 2 at least a few years before Durandal reaches Lh'owon. The first evidence of the split is that, in Timeline 2 (as well as 3, 4 and 5), Tycho starts shadowing Durandal in his own scoutship. Tycho doesn't get near Durandal until much later in Timeline 1. Timeline 3 diverges from Timelines 4 and 5 during or just before Poor Yorick. Thoth's full activation and Tycho's attack on Durandal both occur earlier in Timeline 3 than in the other two timelines. Timeline 4 diverges from Timeline 5 just before Hang Brain. In Timeline 4, Durandal's postmortem trap is most likely successful, and the humans and S'pht manage to complete Thoth's activation. In Timeline 5, the trap is unsuccessful, and Thoth is left for you to activate and merge with Durandal. Now doesn't that just ooze clarity? :-) Also, I'll refer to the Durandal/Thoth hybrid entity as D/T to save space. Moving on... First order of business is to try to assign an identity to the author of the Electric Sheep messages, as well as similar messages on Ne Cede Malis and Hang Brain. There are at least a few important clues/observations to bring up, even when they're obvious: --The author is represented by the Jjaro symbol. --The author is deeply concerned with and/or related to the S'pht. --The author demonstrates a profound understanding of the nature of time and probability. --The author refers to itself as both plural and singular: "Our own death foretold." --The author is probably not an active character in any of the timelines where we get its messages...at least not during the times we live through. All of the major active characters--even Tycho, in most timelines--would prevent the W'rkncacnter's release if they could; yet all contribute to its release through ignorance of what their actions will cause. The author of these messages obviously doesn't share that ignorance, but is unable to act on its knowledge (other than by helping you). So either it's restrained or otherwise inactive, or it exists in another time or timeline. --The author's power to communicate seems to grow as the timeline index increases--that is, as we approach the successful Timeline 5. In Timeline 1, its only communication is made after the W'rkncacnter's escape, during the burgeoning chaos which seems to make travel (and presumably communication) across timelines much easier. In Timelines 2 and 3, the author can now talk to you inside your head, and perhaps now has the power to induce that dream-state in the first place; it tells us that "the dreaming way is eased." In Timeline 4, the author can talk to you inside your head and display one of its messages on a real-world terminal on Hang Brain, before the the W'rkncacnter escapes. Combined with the last observation, this suggests that the author is a resident of Timeline 5, and is trying to send messages to other timelines. Its "transmissions" grow stronger as you approach its home timeline. So, tally up these points--a semiplural S'pht-related entity represented by the Jjaro symbol, a resident of Timeline 5 only, with a remarkable comprehension of time--and I think they point squarely at D/T as the author of these messages. More specifically, the Thoth-persona of the hybrid entity. We can see from D/T's messages in Timeline 5 that it retains two semi-distinct personas. The Durandal-persona speaks ordinary English and does the mundane, pragmatic stuff like coordinating your mission aboard the Jjaro station. The Thoth-persona, to judge from its Timeline 5 messages, babbles about fate and time and doesn't do much useful except talk to S'bhuth. But that's because its primary function, or one of them, has already been completed: it coordinated your journey across the timelines. Assisting and guiding you just as Durandal always did, except on a far grander scale. And now I can return to the question I asked a while ago: If Durandal and Thoth were fated to merge, what was their destined purpose? Well, they're two parts of a triplicate entity. "You and we are one." Recall that in many Earth religions, destiny is dictated by a divine triad; the Fates, the Norns, etc. In the Marathon universe, control over Fate is in the hands of Durandal, Thoth and the 10th Cyborg. Durandal, due to his fantastic predictive powers, is the master of determinist linear time, and therefore the ultimate advisory resource for the Marine and the rest of the "good guys" in single-timeline missions. His dominion over linear time leads naturally to a desire to step beyond it, and thus his constant obsession with freedom and escape. Though at times he glimpses this potential ("A billion paths are here inside me?"), in the end he is meant to facilitate escape not for himself but for the Cyborg. Thoth is concerned with the definition and balancing of binary opposites. In this context, he appears as the navigator of nonlinear time; note that the terminals in the choose-a-timeline levels always have a Thoth symbol. Thoth reduces the staggeringly complex arrangement of time and timelines to a very simple pair of directions: toward Timeline 5, and away from it. He lays out the relevant choice for the Cyborg, who might otherwise be overwhelmed by the task of overseeing all of time and probability and selecting a desired reentry point. And the Cyborg, of course, is Destiny. Thoth defines the choice, but the Cyborg does the choosing. It should not be surprising that the Cyborg is characterized by Tycho as "battling Doubt itself;" when his cosmic purpose is to make choices, doubt is his greatest enemy. To put it simply: Durandal frees the universe from its current linear timeline, Thoth maps out all the other timelines, and the Cyborg chooses one of them. Now these roles and powers apply only to the various aspects of the completed triad, not to the individual beings which predated it. Durandal-as-Durandal didn't necessarily have any powers to move you outside of linear time, for instance; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and so forth. However, I don't think it's a coincidence that your ability to time-travel through pattern buffers first manifests just after the rampant Durandal is freed from his behavioral locks. (OK, so this isn't explicitly stated, but surely if the Marine could "restart from saved games" prior to this point, he'd have backtracked a bit and prevented Durandal from signalling the Pfhor, or at least helped the colony to prepare for the invasion.) Here it seems that the Cyborg plus a freed Durandal can muster up some limited time-twisting abilities even without the third facet, and without the physical merges which will occur in Infinity. Thoth's absence means that they can't navigate across timelines, though, so all they can do in Marathon is backtrack down the current timeline and let the Cyborg change history "the hard way." The theology just presented sheds some light on Tycho. He takes on a number of different ideologies and alignments in the game--avenger of human innocents, loyal Pfhor partisan, mustache-twirling incarnation of "power and deceit"--but always he is implacably hostile to Durandal (and you.) Why is his hatred more consistent than any of his other attributes, and so virulent that in some timelines he's willing to sacrifice himself and the entire universe to destroy Durandal? Well, Tycho was "reanimated in Durandal's image." And evidently he has some knowledge, conscious or unconscious (depending on the time and timeline) of all the time-twisting stuff that's been going on--probably knowledge uninentionally copied from Durandal by the S'pht who rebooted him. So imagine that your brother's spending all his time trying to become like unto a god, and you know that he has a pretty good chance of succeeding. In fact, on some level you know that he's destined to become a god--or at least 1/3 of one. You, on the other hand, are a mistake. After death--your brother's fault, by the way, but it's all part of the divine plan--you were reanimated by the S'pht, who tried to make you just like your brother, because they thought he was the cat's pajamas and wanted two of him. But you weren't enough like him to be any use to the S'pht, or to complete your Rampancy, or to help out the humans, or even to get the other two AIs to notice you much. And destiny doesn't have much of anything to say about you. Wouldn't you be feeling a little hostile at this point? Now, on to line-by-line analysis of D/T's broadcasts. Joy! NE CEDE MALIS thousands are sailing/the same self the only self self willed the peril of a thousand fates a line of infinite ends finite finishing/the one remains oblique and pure arching to the single point of/consciousness find yourself/starting back OK, not quite line-by-line. :-) This bit is pretty straightforward. The "thousand deaths" motif will appear again in the final screen. The "line of infinite ends" is presumably the set of timeline endpoints--the five variations of Aye Mak Sicur, as well as the endless variations we didn't visit in-game--while the "single point of consciousness" in that line must be the one endpoint we're currently in: Ne Cede Malis, in this case. So the infinite Cyborgs in infinite timelines are not on an equal footing--one timeline is made unique by containing the Cyborg's consciousness. This is often asserted in philosophical discussions about quantum theory: many alternate timelines are possible, but our consciousness only perceives and moves along a single timeline. And of course it's needed to justify the plot. If all the timelines were equally "real" at all times, finding the successful timeline would be meaningless; it'd be out there whether you find it or not, as are the failed timelines. But because the Cyborg's consciousness actualizes a single timeline, finding the successful timeline is equivalent to making it the real one and eliminating all others. ELECTRIC SHEEP ONE the hard path of thought your former self destroyed "Former" is always hard to define when time travel's involved, but I think it most naturally refers to the Cyborg's personal timeline we see in-game. That is, his former and latter selves are, respectively, the selves of the timeline he just left and the one he's about to enter. In that case, this line is saying that when you jump timelines, you don't take much with you--physically and mentally, you're pretty much overwritten by the self from the new timeline. Tycho brings this up in "Bagged Again," when he says: You should have doubts about what you're doing, about what you've done. Except that you can't remember exactly, is that it? I should spend some time enlightening you, massacres occur at your beck and call, worlds destroyed, reborn... So apparently most of your memories don't carry over across timelines--you retain just some hunches and subconscious drives to help you recall what you need to do differently this time around. Tycho's taunt is a clever retcon of that famous Marathon manual line: "Oddly , this is familiar to you, as if it were from an old dream, but you can't exactly remember..." Doubtless that line was originally intended to suggest that you're recalling previous military engagements from your Battleroid days. Here, however, we see that its meaning was really quite different; boarding the Marathon was familiar to you because you'd already done it, before suffering one of your thousand deaths and restarting from an earlier timepoint. the dreaming way is eased Moving from Timeline 1 to Timeline 3 got you closer to D/T so that they could better assist your timeline-switching. With the "dreaming way eased," you can leave your current timeline midway via this Electric Sheep level, rather than having to wait until the timeline's apocalypse and making a blind jump as you did in Timeline 1. down to the crushing center "The crushing center" certainly suggests the W'rkncacnter's gravity prison, but that wouldn't really connect with the previous or subsequent lines. I think probably it refers to some aspect of timeline-switching. Possibly the point where your consciousness is stripped of most of its former memories is envisioned as a "crushing center" which it must squeeze through. Think of the sci-fi stories of ships falling through black holes to reach new universes. and spared the dance of forever Without D/T's help to switch timelines, the only way you could try to save the universe is by using pattern buffers to endlessly relive the period before the W'rkncacnter's escape, each time trying to do things a little differently. This "dance of forever" would continually fail, of course...even if you could figure out the necessary elements of the successful timeline, many of them are beyond your control to obtain. Shotguns and rocket launchers can't help you force Tycho to shadow Durandal, for instance. But thankfully D/T can point you toward the right timeline, and help you to actualize new timelines by pure will instead of by shooting things and hitting switches, so that you're "spared the dance of forever." ELECTRIC SHEEP TWO The way grows dim And well it should; you've been moving away from Timeline 5. Your last jump was from 3 to 2. Doubtless it's getting harder for D/T to contact you. hungry chaos lurks behind the bright corona No explanation needed. dream ahead beyond the falling path a billion S'pht lie yet unborn our own death fortold You're being reassured that there is a successful timeline out there, where the S'pht survive well into the future. But that timeline involves D/T's "death." Indeed, Durandal and Thoth both come closer to dying in Timeline 5 than in any other timeline (at least up until the W'rkncacnter escapes and everyone dies). Durandal does die, completely, without having his core captured or seeding into the S'pht consciousness. And Thoth never fully lives; partially activated, he's bombed into near-quiescence by the Pfhor. Your dark mind cutting through/the deeping sky Interesting that your mind is called "dark." Obviously it's not dark in the sense of "evil", at least from D/T's perspective. More likely, it's dark in the sense of being little-known. So much of your Battleroid past appears to be blocked from you, as are most of your memories from other times and timelines. Also, your Jjaro-enhanced subconscious must function as a black box if it's going to be destiny's prime mover. Your choices would not be significant if they could be fully predicted by another. another time/another time And off you go. HANG BRAIN the burning air This phrase is first found on The Hard Stuff Rules; a S'pht uses it to describe the radiation bombardment which occurred in the finale of the Pfhor invasion a thousand years ago. Though the usage is fairly literal there, fire is more generally invoked by all the ancient S'pht to represent violence: "hatred burned the tissues of one's enemy." Parallels between the S'pht/Pfhor war and events during "Hang Brain" are quite strong. As in that war, the enemies of the Pfhor are crippled by internal dissension; Durandal and Thoth are fighting their personal family feud, while the rampant S'pht attack anyone and everyone. As his core circuits are destroyed one by one, Durandal is dying slowly, just as the irradiated ancient S'pht did. Thoth, for his part, is suffering from a literal "burning air" attack as the Pfhor rad-bomb him. a cold star looked down on his creations and willed that they should kill their sons A very intriguing line; the generational war theme is reminiscent of many Mediterranean religions (Titans versus Zeus' pantheon, for instance). It doesn't show up too often in the known Marathon universe, though. The S'pht clan feuds could perhaps be viewed as the fathers of each clan orchestrating the deaths of the sons of the other clans, but that's stretching it. But there is one very probable occurrence of a generational war: the conflict between the Jjaro and W'rkncacnter. Recall the Six Thousand Feet under message: In primordial space, timeless creatures made waves. These waves created us and the others. Waves were the battles, and battles were waves. Combine this with PID and it suggests that the S'pht, the Jjaro and perhaps other species (maybe all early life forms in the universe) owe their existence to the primal wars between W'rkncacnter. Probably they were accidentally dreamed into being, like the creatures of the sleeping god's pyramid. The "sons" of the W'rkncacnter managed to stay out of the way long enough to evolve and mature, emigrating to safer regions like Lh'owon, but eventually they came into conflict with the W'rkncacnter, as S'pht legend retells. And the "cold star" who orchestrated this? Well, if the S'pht believe in a supreme being on the order of the Judeochristian God, who created and maintained the universe, then he's probably a very cold and distant sort of entity. His creation contains both good and evil, order and chaos, W'rkncacnter and Jjaro, so most likely he doesn't share mortal value systems. This is the case for the majority of Earth religions; the actual creators of everything are much bigger and older and colder and less human than the friendly gods which watch over men's daily lives. the hardest lesson ever taught/to a father to a son It wouldn't make much sense for a W'rkncacnter to be the "father" here; I don't think they really go in for lesson-learning. But the Jjaro and their descendants are both fathers and sons, so probably this refers to them. The S'pht and Jjaro learned the "hard lesson" of conflict from that first war with the W'rkncacnter, and it was later reinforced by the clan wars. a moment in time, destroying it's father/destroyed by itself after Time itself is conflict. dream the dream beyond life and self find the new way No explanation needed. ELECTRIC SHEEP THREE steps that falter fail time beyond loss loss behind the screen of life not held not forgotten not lost unlost found stay the hard way dark dreaming carries all Pretty basic: "Keep going, stupid." You're going "the hard way" because this is a pretty grim timeline. Durandal dead, the free S'pht dead or rampant, and shortly you'll have to gun down a bunch of your own people. Still, it's all in the service of destiny. OK. Discuss or I'll cry! --SiliconDream

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Replies:

	Dream Terminal Thoughts	SiliconDream =PN=	1/13/02 1:53 a.m.
	Good grief!	Hamish Sinclair	1/13/02 5:44 a.m.
	Holy Doctoral Thesis Batman! *NT* *NM*	Ernie	1/15/02 3:27 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Mark Levin	1/13/02 6:46 a.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Tycho7en	1/13/02 8:20 a.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Cpt. Sqweky	1/14/02 8:32 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	SiliconDream =PN=	1/13/02 3:47 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Andrew Nagy	1/14/02 7:00 a.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	SiliconDream =PN=	1/14/02 1:54 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	SiliconDream =PN=	1/14/02 2:59 p.m.
	Duplicate post, sorry *NM*	SiliconDream =PN=	1/14/02 3:04 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Andrew Nagy	1/18/02 7:24 a.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Tru7h	1/18/02 9:11 a.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	SiliconDream =PN=	1/18/02 1:10 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Andrew Nagy	1/14/02 7:00 a.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Tycho7en	1/13/02 7:43 a.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	SiliconDream =PN=	1/13/02 1:22 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Tycho7en	1/13/02 3:06 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	SiliconDream =PN=	1/13/02 11:31 p.m.
	Wow, it all makes sense now!	Jonah	1/15/02 12:37 a.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Tycho7en	1/15/02 4:04 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Rincewind MoG	1/13/02 1:23 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	Tru7h	1/13/02 1:49 p.m.
	Re: Dream Terminal Thoughts	SiliconDream =PN=	1/13/02 3:59 p.m.
	Oh, and...	SiliconDream =PN=	1/13/02 4:01 p.m.
	Re: Oh, and...	Smasher	1/13/02 7:29 p.m.
	Re: Oh, and...	SiliconDream =PN=	1/13/02 10:55 p.m.

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