So I was reading through the terminals for a side writing project, and I came across something interesting and was wondering if anyone else had noticed it. Whenever we access a Marathon terminal, the initial splash page contains the following text at the top:
"Opening Connection to ß.4.5-23"
Out of my own mathematically nerdy ways seen the character beta from the greek alphabet. I decided to cut and paste it into Google to figure out if there might have been a second meaning or anything, and come to find out it is not Greek at all but rather "eszett" or a "sharp s" from the German alphabet. I searched for any kind of hidden meaning I could find regarding a letter of a foreign alphabet, and ended up only finding one fact of note:
ß is the 233rd Unicode character.
Since the target of the opening connection system points for the entirety of the game towards ß.4.5-23, it would follow that there is no special significance to the character being used here but is instead just a standard query script of terminal software. However....
I believe it holds an explanation of the terminal messages returning the year 2337 instead of 2794 - the 233 is in fact a static numerical term, and the year (7) is tied not to the Sol calender but instead to the Tau Ceti calender. The colony was established in 2787, and the Marathon was attacked in 2794 - 7 years later. This year does not change as the games move forward, I would assume due to the date/time code being damaged in the original attack on the Marathon.
Then again, it seems like the Security Officer can manipulate time in the strangest of ways, so who knows.
