Anybody remembers this old Disney movie, The Black Hole? I saw a rerun on cable recently and noticed a few things that raised my eyebrows: there's this robot called Old B.O.B and the name of one of characters is Alex Durant (Durandal = Alex Seropian alter ego??) Also, the scene when the astronauts land on the Cygnus' dock and take a look around the eerie ship is very, but very similar to M1's intro. Maybe the phrase "Oddly, this is familiar to you, as if it were from an old dream, but you can’t exactly remember..." is a reference to The Black Hole: if you saw the movie when you were a little kid (1979) and then played Marathon fifteen years later, you're going to have a Déjà Vu experience. Rent the DVD, you'll see what I mean.
But something that's definitely based on this movie is the S'pht compiler. Take a look at this b&w still from the funeral scene. These are supposed to be robots made by Dr. Reinhardt when the crew abandoned the Cygnus after the ship was trapped by the black hole's gravity pull (the ship wasn't swallowed thanks to an invention by the Dr.) Later on we find out that the Dr's real intention is to pass through the black hole, and when the ship crew wanted to escape, he took control of the ships and turned them into slave cyborgs. This other shot is a close up of one of the slave cyborg's face. I rest my case.
Could it be that Bernard Strauss loaded the 10 cyborgs into The Marathon in case his experiment with Durandal was ever discovered? You know, Strauss used Durandal to achieve a stable Rampant AI. What if the crew of the Marathon tried to stop him? He would "wake up" the 10 cyborgs and use them to take control of the ship. This rises the question of why Strauss didn't used the cyborgs when the Pfhor attacked the ship. Maybe he did, after all, 9 of them repelled the Pfhor from the colony and the tent and more powerful defended the ship. Maybe Strauss plan was to control them through Durandal, but things didn't go as planned and Durandal turned against him, instead of acting as his protector. Strauss run for his life and was killed by the Pfhor. What would have happened if the experiment was ever completed? I think we know: Durandal became a stable Rampant AI when he merges himself with Thoth, but it's the player who escapes to the closure of the universe. Which bring us back to The Black Hole: Dr. Reinhardt wanted to pass through the black hole because in that time it was a general belief that by doing so you'll end up in another universe. Maybe Strauss wanted to create a stable Rampant AI because he believed it will know how to send him to another universe; Durandal, left alone with his madness, become obsessed with the idea; when he become stable, he's healed from his insanity and send the player to another universe in replacement of Bernard Strauss. The player become a god on the other universe and starts a new race, the Jjaro, who travel through time and space back to our universe to help his ancestors with the W'rkncacnter, and after visiting other places in our galaxy, they return to their home universe.
