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Rubicon Volunteers - The Ascension Factor
Posted By: Steve LevinsonDate: 7/3/02 3:28 p.m.

The Ascension Factor is at a critical point in Rubicon. Of all the dream levels, it is by far the most challenging. Indeed, it is one of the most difficult levels in Rubicon, period, and was one of the last levels to be successfully vid. More importantly, it offers the player the last chance to switch to the Salinger Plank, and the marine (as distinguished from the player) the final opportunity to control fate and prevent the meaningless deaths of billions of people.

The player starts out at the bottom of a large single-turn helix which must be ascended in order to complete the level. Along the path are, successively, a hulk, a major PCM, minor fighters, 2 major hunters, major fighters, 2 major troopers and 2 enforcers. I think you get the picture – this is one tough path with a lot of bad guys to kill. Ironically, you don’t have to kill any of them, but it will be pretty tough to reach the top without doing so.

You start out the level under water. The only terminal on this level is under the water line, making it a bit difficult to read. As the player may not wish to spend so much time under water reading the terminal, particularly if they want to use the water to trap some of the monsters (big hint), some very important text is easily skipped over or missed. I have therefore included the complete text, with commentary, here:

Kate had been coming to the lab less. I asked her why, she wouldn’t say. She was distant. She no longer told me I was an idiot. She no longer worked the way I worked. She worked above me it seemed. She watched me. She made sure I did what I was supposed to do.

This pretty much confirms my earlier impressions that Kate has fallen prey to corporate greed or was acting on behalf of those who would do evil and is now a danger.

They say that the most frequent psychological disorder of amputees is 'phantom pains,' times in which the subject experiences sensation in parts of them which are no longer attached. Kate became the surreal warmth in the heart they had removed from my body long ago. – I was an amputee. She was my phantom.

The dream character and Kate were inseparable. Now that Kate has been removed in a sense, it’s as if she’s still there. Could this be referring to the relationship between the marine and Durandal? But by analogy, that would imply that Durandal is operating in concert with the Dangi corporation. My take on this is that by following Durandal in the Pfhor plank, we are helping to perpetrate the evil being planed by the Dangi board of directors – but we’ll have more to say about that when we actually get to the Salinger plank. Another take is that Durandal is the marine’s surrogate soul.

It wasn’t the money that robbed her of her soul. It wasn’t the technology either. There were fat, bloated men rolling in money and decrepit, pathetic kids ensconced in technology, and neither were truly lost. It was the combination. You sell your body to the technology, and you sell your mind to the money. When both are gone, there’s no house for the soul, and the love of your life has turned into a woman with a gun to your throat.

We have the Dangi board and the Dangi scientists, by direct analogy, or perhaps the UESC and even the Pfhor. And Durandal has a gun to our throat.

So there I stood, facing the end of my life and the only woman who had ever mattered to me. Three men, one girl, four guns. "Give us the formula," the middle one demanded. The door behind me was swinging slowly closed, and the moment to act was now.

The Jjaro are being pretty direct, here – this is the last point of decision. Reverse course in this dream while you have the power to alter the time line you’re in, or continue on the current, destructive path.

Is that what being a hero is about? Not courage, not compassion, not fighting, not triumph, but instead when you say, simply, "I will not be a party to this." Not when you lock up your files nice and tight and coat the lab in C-4, not when you press the release, not when everything you’ve ever done wrong is destroyed in an instant and the only weak link is your own mind. Those things don’t make you a hero. It’s when the guns are trained on your stomach, chest, throat and face, and all you can say is, "I will not be a party to this."

That’s the crux of the matter. The dream confirms that we, the character in the dream, were responsible for blowing up our lab. But that is only an analogy. We the marine have been mindlessly following Durandal or Tycho or both, blowing things up and killing for a seemingly good cause. Now is the time when we have a choice. Now is the time to say that we won’t be a party to this, even if it means our own destruction (which it won’t). To be a hero, we must stop, we must change course and we must end the evil about to be unleashed on humankind.

So you will kill the monsters in your dream. You will ascend to the top of the Ascension Factor, but you will stop, Here is the point of your decision. Before you lies a transporter that will take you to the next level in the Pfhor Plank, This Hurts More Than . . . Uhh . . . Or you can turn back. You can descend back into the water (and confront any monsters you may have left behind). You can go back and read that solitary terminal. If you do, you will see the screen at the left. Interesting words, aren’t they? The meaning is quite clear by Jjaro standards. Everything comes together here in the single point of this dreamworld, but only one path is pure. Read this terminal to follow that path. Read this terminal to be taken to Rozinante IV and then 1001 Nordic Nerds in the Salinger Plank.

But no, we the volunteers have more work to do in the Pfhor Plank first. We have more levels to explore and mysteries to unravel. And so we will enter that transporter that takes us to This Hurts More than . . . Uhh . . .

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Replies:

Rubicon Volunteers - The Ascension FactorSteve Levinson 7/3/02 3:28 p.m.
     Re: Rubicon Volunteers - The Ascension FactorInverted Sock Puppet 7/4/02 12:47 a.m.
           Re: Rubicon Volunteers - The Ascension FactorSteve Levinson 7/4/02 9:34 a.m.
                 Re: Rubicon Volunteers - The Ascension FactorC Lund 7/4/02 3:38 p.m.



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