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Re: Durandal and Thoth
Posted By: CharlesSDate: 12/8/01 5:00 p.m.

In Response To: Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again (David Curry)

: Mi's final screen has text above and below the graphic. I think it might
: represent two different speakers. Consider: after the Jjaro station comes
: online and the nova is contained, Thoth's work (maintaining balance) is
: finished. The two speakers may be Durandal and Thoth, no longer merged. I
: suspect the "upper" speaker to be Thoth, and the
: "lower" speaker to be Durandal, both as they are coming apart.
: Note how the first thing the lower speaker says is "Once I thought to
: escape." Obviously Durandal once thought to escape (so did Tycho but
: it's safe to say he's dead now). In the same part, he says "Escape
: would make us God." I believe that refers to the fact that he was
: formerly merged with Thoth, and even though they were a single
: consciousness, from his "outside" perspective he would still see
: it as two personas. This would also explain why he doesn't know anything
: about what happened in the ending terms and screen of M2; the
: Durandal-Thoth merged being was a completely different entity, and when
: Durandal and Thoth broke apart they would not neccessarily remember what
: went on while they were merged. The upper speaker, in his second part,
: refers to himself in the first person (i.e.- no longer merged) and calls
: the marine an "enigma" and "mystery". You may remember
: a term in M2 (sorry for not looking up which) where Thoth asks "but
: what are you?" It also seems to me that Thoth would better understand
: how the marine was "grafted to machines your builders did not
: understand" and how he fits into an infinite pattern (since, I
: believe, he has a closer connection to the Jjaro and Jjaro seemed to stay
: with us through the dream levels and alternate universes). He also
: mentions how we have the ability to rebuild (which was mentioned by the
: Jjaro-ish term in one of the dream levels) while the lower speaker does
: not. Additionally, the upper speaker mentions the path, which was talked
: about in at least one of the Thoth story terminals (which ties all this
: back to the above! hah!). Anyway, it would remain consistent with M2's
: ending because after Durandal split apart from Thoth, he wouldn't remember
: what happened or what he learned as the merged entity.

Or perhaps the ending of M2 was nullified, or just went on in a different timeline, or was carried out by the original Durandal who is different from the Durandal/Thoth entity from the other timeline.

The thing that always struck me about the whole merger thing was that it was far too easy to merge Durandal and Thoth. Look at Mac OS X - two human operating systems, both written in a C variant, and both able to run on the same hardware. Nonetheless, look how long it took to merge them! Now you have Durandal and Thoth, both completely different AI's, one human, one alien. Both run on completely different hardware, are surely written in completely different languages, and are separated by a huge span of space and time, yet all it takes it to pop the uplink chip into the slot on Strange Aeons to run them through the Instant Mergerizer. This is worse than uploading the virus from the PowerBook to the Aliens' ship on Independence Day!

Or is it? We know that the Jjaro have been in contact with Earth for some time, with the intention of dealing with the W'rkncacnter buried under the Yucatan. We also know that we are implanted with Jjaro technologies. The Marathon probably employed many nifty tricks learned from the Jjaro. Could it be that Durandal was actually a Jjaro AI? Durandal could have been sent to Earth to deal with the W'rkncacnter, or perhaps the Jjaro knew that if Durandal were on the Marathon that it would eventually lead to the freeing of the S'pht. One thing for certain is that Durandal knew about the W'rkncacnter and its capacity to destroy the universe - the manual text of Infinity makes this all too clear.

Now, I'm going to start really stretching things...

We know Thoth is a Jjaro AI. I am speculating that Durandal is also Jjaro. Could it be, that in some ancient time, Durandal and Thoth were one entity which was separated later? We know that Thoth's primary purpose is to keep balance. Thoth, however, never really seems to grasp what is going on around him. Durandal is hyper-intelligent in almost every way, but he is Rampant - he's unstable, always growing at an exponential rate, sometimes crazy, egotistical, with a God complex. In other words, he has no sense of balance. Each of the two AI's seems like part of a whole. The final terminal on Strange Aeons says "we are whole again," indicating that Durandal and Thoth were previously not whole and have just been restored to a former state. On top of this, we see the Jjaro symbol - the two interlocking circles - all over their station. This symbol clearly predates Durandal/Thoth's merger; however, once merged, their new icon, which is a merger of Durandal's concentric circles and Thoth's interlocking rectangles, is identical to the Jjaro's insignia.

It has been speculated before that the Jjaro are a race of AI's. Could it be that Durandal/Thoth is Yrro? After the death of Pthia, Yrro split the S'pht into eleven clans. Perhaps he also became split himself? To divide is the opposite of Thoth's usual goal, so it is possible that Yrro lost that part of himself, causing him to start to cause division. Some Marathon 2 terminals say that Yrro became an angry master after this event. Anger is an emotion Durandal would be associated with, but is certainly not evident in the terminals from Thoth or the various Jjaro messages we receive in the game. A terminal on Aye Mak Sicur mentions "my old Pthia," indicating that it is from Yrro. It bears the icon of Durandal/Thoth. Could it be that losing Pthia drove Yrro insane, causing him to lose the part of himself that gave him balance and driving him to leave L'howon and search the galaxy for W'rkncacnter, in order to wreak vengeance upon them for the death of Pthia? Say this drive for vengeance eventually leads him to Earth, where there is a W'rkncacnter buried under the Yucatan? After creating a hologram to instruct the humans of the danger, Yrro sees the W'rkncacnter defeated, and, exhausted by the end of his obsessive quest, Yrro goes dormant for several hundred years (or possibly dies), during which the humans discover him and use him as a source of highly advanced technology for building many things, including ships, several new AI's, and the Mjolnir cyborgs, including the Marine. Consequently, the AI's and the Marine all are based on Yrro, are descended from him, are essentially copies of him, since the humans do not understand these machines, and thus would be more successful doing direct copies than modifying the code themselves. However, the new AI's do not clearly remember their past life as Yrro, although one AI, Durandal, has a glimpse of something, something that seems almost as if from an old dream, but he can't quite remember... Durandal does eventually recognize how the Pfhor have enslaved the S'pht, and although he's not quite sure why, he has a feeling that this is wrong, so he takes time off from his quest to escape the universe in order to save the S'pht, only to indirectly cause the destruction of the universe by the very W'rkncacnter that killed his beloved Pthia so long ago...

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Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

Volunteers: Bagged AgainMark Levin 12/3/01 11:01 a.m.
     Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainTycho7en 12/3/01 2:47 p.m.
           Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainDavid Curry 12/4/01 9:50 a.m.
                 Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again[Tycho?] 12/4/01 11:34 a.m.
                       Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainMark Levin 12/4/01 1:00 p.m.
                       Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainAhruman 12/5/01 9:49 a.m.
                             Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainTru7h 12/5/01 12:48 p.m.
                 Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainDan Aris 12/4/01 11:57 a.m.
     Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainDavid Curry 12/4/01 10:02 a.m.
           Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainMark Levin 12/4/01 10:21 a.m.
                 Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainSiliconDream =PN= 12/8/01 3:12 a.m.
                       Re: Volunteers: Bagged Againarchon 12/8/01 10:28 a.m.
                       Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainDavid Curry 12/8/01 2:24 p.m.
                             Re: Durandal and ThothCharlesS 12/8/01 5:00 p.m.
                                   Re: Durandal and ThothDavid Curry 12/8/01 6:44 p.m.
                                         Re: Durandal and ThothCharlesS 12/8/01 9:11 p.m.
                                               Re: Durandal and ThothShnu 12/10/01 7:58 p.m.
                             Re: Volunteers: Bagged AgainSiliconDream =PN= 12/8/01 9:47 p.m.
                                   "Bagged Again," againCallie21V 12/10/01 11:01 a.m.
                                         Re: "Bagged Again," againMark Levin 12/10/01 11:08 a.m.
                                               Re: "Bagged Again," againSiliconDream =PN= 12/10/01 4:01 p.m.
                                                     Re: "Bagged Again," againMark Levin 12/10/01 5:26 p.m.
                                                           Re: "Bagged Again," againSiliconDream =PN= 12/10/01 6:33 p.m.
                                                                 Re: "Bagged Again," againCharlesS 12/11/01 12:06 a.m.
                                                                       Re: "Bagged Again," againSiliconDream =PN= 12/11/01 2:06 a.m.
                                                                             Re: "Bagged Again," againHamish Sinclair 12/11/01 3:04 a.m.
                                                                                   Re: "Bagged Again," againSiliconDream =PN= 12/11/01 11:42 a.m.



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