/-/S'pht-Translator-Active/-/

	you
	Posted By: John Denton	Date: 7/23/01 9:26 p.m.
	One thing I think people need to realize is that the AIs are not omniscient. They don't always no everything. A lot of the evidence presented on whether the player is a cyborg comes from things said by the AIs. However, we should not assume that they know your origins or even your potential. Just because Tycho calls us human in the first game does not mean that we truly are. My guess is that the final screen of Infinity is a message from Durandal after he has become one with the S'pht collective. The end that he refers to may be just the closure of the plot and not the actual end of the universe. Saying that all become one is probably a reference to the merging of the S'pht and himself that takes place. The final screen is his realization of what you are. I also think that it may be folly to attempt to incorporate the pattern buffers into the plot. This is a game, after all, and save points of some kind were necessary. At various points throughout the games, AIs refer to storing the player in suspended animation (cryogenics or some such). Why would it be necessary to do this if they could simply spawn us from a pattern buffer? Also, what prevents them from simply making copies of us if they can respawn us whenever they want. Pattern buffers are not really consistent with the plot, so I don't think they should be regarded as more than a necessary element of the game. Now, as to the "thousand deaths" from the Infinity final screen, this could be just a joke about the buffers. It might also refer to different lives the player has lead. What is the origin of the terminals in the Electric Sheep levels that tell a story about some guy and a knife? Or the terminal in M2 that talks about the guy who is hallucinating and his hands are melting? Perhaps these are memories of the player. Being a weapon of various factions and such, the player may have had his memory wiped many times. This could be what the thousand deaths refers to. The player may not have written them out himself. Being a cyborg, perhaps the AIs interface directly with your brain when they communicate through the terminals. Maybe images from your subconscious drift into the AIs somehow. Perhaps you were a regular person before you were a cyborg. Just to speculate, you were killed by the suited men referred to in the Infinity terminals. Then they used your corpse as an experiment, grafting your remains to ancient Jjaro technology that they dug up somewhere. At some point, you fell in with the rest of the Mjolnir cyborgs.

Problems? Suggestions? Comments? Email maintainer@bungie.org Marathon's Story Forum is maintained with WebBBS 5.12.