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	Re: Durandal and Thoth
	Posted By: David Curry	Date: 12/8/01 6:44 p.m.
	In Response To: Re: Durandal and Thoth (CharlesS) : 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. ...Yeah, or any number of other possibilities. That's why I said my theory was one that actually tied the endings of M2 and Mi together (instead of just saying "M2 never happened," or "Mi happened in another timeline." Continuity = Good. : 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! The difference between the Mac OS and Unix (or the Powerbook virus and the alien computer) and Durandal and Thoth is that Durandal and Thoth are Artificial _Intelligence_ personality constructs. They have the ability to learn and adapt on their own, unlike the other pairings which would need to be programmed by a human (or alien in the Independence Day example) operator. It's reasonable to assume that Durandal and Thoth actually communicated during the merging process and agreed on it, much in the same way Durandal came to "an understanding" with the S'pht in M1. : 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. While it's quite possible that Durandal was developed with Jjaro technology, it would only be after several iterations (he came from Traxus IV, which may have come from a combination of human and Jjaro technology); the water would be so muddied from human involvement it seems unlikely that he would have any outward Jjaro characteristics. And I think the first terminal of Infinity makes it quite clear that Durandal didn't know about the W'rkncacnter until after it was freed. : Now, I'm going to start really stretching things... Heavy emphasis on "really stretching." : 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? This seems unlikely. As I stated earlier, it's pretty clear that Durandal (and Leela and Tycho) were offshoots of Traxus IV, which wasn't developed until Thoth had been dormant for some time (if he had ever been turned on at all, which is questionable because he certainly would have made an effort to keep the S'pht clans from going to war as well as keep the Pfhor from enslaving the S'pht). : We know that Thoth's primary purpose is to keep : balance. Thoth, however, never really seems to grasp what is going on : around him. Again, because he was quite possibly never activated until we do so in M2. : 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. Except that Strauss was keeping Durandal in check while on the Marathon, and by the time he escapes from Tycho's grasp in M2 he is no longer Rampant. : 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. That may be referring to (Durandal/)Thoth being in contact ("whole") with the Jjaro again. : 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. Remember that Durandal just kept the symbol from the Marathon (which was also used by Leela and Tycho, with only the colors changing). : 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. It was said that Yrro was angry when he trapped the W'rkncacnter in the sun. When he divided the S'pht into clans it was so that they would have order to guide them, and he set them free before fleeing in despair. Doesn't sound to me like something an "angry master" would do. : 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. I'm pretty sure one of the folks from Bungie said that was the Jjaro symbol. Since the merged AI is at least half based on a Jjaro-created AI and has (seemingly) been in contact with the Jjaro, it may be that the Jjaro is just using the terminal to speak to the marine directly, using the symbol of the Jjaro and not specifically the Durandal/Thoth entity. : 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. Again, the terminal says that Yrro was in despair when he fled, I doubt he was seeking vengeance. More likely he was seeking a nice quiet corner of the universe to wallow in misery, but came upon Earth and found the W'rkncacnter buried there. Feeling he couldn't shirk his duty, he warned Earth and came to permanently seal the W'rkncacnter, perhaps leaving behind some technology when he did so (though there are some intriguing conversations with the dead in PiD that might imply that the player is already influenced by Jjaro technology, but I digress). Assuming he did, it would be natural to think that the human scientists would tinker around with it, trying either to adapt it to a certain use or improve it. I sincerely doubt they would just copy it exactly. :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... Hey, that's my line! ;-) : 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... Durandal called the Pfhor to take their ship (and all the cool new toys thereon). Recognizing that the S'pht were the ones controlling the Pfhor ship, he naturally played against their desire for freedom in order to commandeer the ship for his own purpose (escaping the closure of the universe). My guess is he first goes poking around Lh'owon either for more info/technology to aid him in his goal, or he discovers that Tycho has aligned himself with the Pfhor (a bit of info he shares with the marine early in M2) and wants to find a weapon to use against Tycho. After all, we can't have too many meta-stable personality constructs galivanting about the universe in Pfhor attack ships, can we?

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Replies:

	Volunteers: Bagged Again	Mark Levin	12/3/01 11:01 a.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	Tycho7en	12/3/01 2:47 p.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	David Curry	12/4/01 9:50 a.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	[Tycho?]	12/4/01 11:34 a.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	Mark Levin	12/4/01 1:00 p.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	Ahruman	12/5/01 9:49 a.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	Tru7h	12/5/01 12:48 p.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	Dan Aris	12/4/01 11:57 a.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	David Curry	12/4/01 10:02 a.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	Mark Levin	12/4/01 10:21 a.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	SiliconDream =PN=	12/8/01 3:12 a.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	archon	12/8/01 10:28 a.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	David Curry	12/8/01 2:24 p.m.
	Re: Durandal and Thoth	CharlesS	12/8/01 5:00 p.m.
	Re: Durandal and Thoth	David Curry	12/8/01 6:44 p.m.
	Re: Durandal and Thoth	CharlesS	12/8/01 9:11 p.m.
	Re: Durandal and Thoth	Shnu	12/10/01 7:58 p.m.
	Re: Volunteers: Bagged Again	SiliconDream =PN=	12/8/01 9:47 p.m.
	"Bagged Again," again	Callie21V	12/10/01 11:01 a.m.
	Re: "Bagged Again," again	Mark Levin	12/10/01 11:08 a.m.
	Re: "Bagged Again," again	SiliconDream =PN=	12/10/01 4:01 p.m.
	Re: "Bagged Again," again	Mark Levin	12/10/01 5:26 p.m.
	Re: "Bagged Again," again	SiliconDream =PN=	12/10/01 6:33 p.m.
	Re: "Bagged Again," again	CharlesS	12/11/01 12:06 a.m.
	Re: "Bagged Again," again	SiliconDream =PN=	12/11/01 2:06 a.m.
	Re: "Bagged Again," again	Hamish Sinclair	12/11/01 3:04 a.m.
	Re: "Bagged Again," again	SiliconDream =PN=	12/11/01 11:42 a.m.

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