📚marathon-lore-discussion

[dire estuary]

I have an older one, works just fine. Im considering upgrading with a newer 4:3 display

I also have an old tower PC made to run Vista like a monster! Hahaha

[arctic owl]

Love this, that’s awesome

[dire estuary]

I know that the g3 works with usb peripherals, shouldnt be any issues with connecting to modern displays.

[sage junco]

yeah, the blue and white G3 series came with a PCI video card from factory (note: not PCI-E or AGP! old school PCI) -- mine had a Rage 128. Should have VGA and possibly DVI

[visual lynx]

I’ve got all that plus some fritos

(and an action sack, and a shrinkwrapped copy of PiD, and Bungie’s last Myth II CD they had around the office hand-delivered to me by Matt Soell at E32k1…)

SCSI was never used for monitors, and by that era I think Apple had standardized on DVI instead of their old proprietary connector and not yet moved on to their new(er) proprietary ADP connector.

getting a DVI to HMDI or lightning or whatever cable is probably not too hard.

[arctic owl]

Okay

[cursive mist]

is traxus in halo, is the same traxus we meet in marathon?

[sage shale]

It's more or less just references but kinda implied that Marathon, Halo, and Destiny are part of a paraverse / multiverse type of connection, but they don't directly interact except for maybe the weapons pulled from the paraverse in Destiny. So it can be head canon that they exist together, but there won't be any official story tie-in outside of maybe the weapons pulled from the paraverse in Destiny.

[cursive mist]

ahh i see, so the one we see in halo is just like the alternate version of the one we see in marathon, and same to the otherwise

[sage shale]

Yeppers, and if Bungie still owned Halo then maybe we'd see an even harder connection explored between the three but unfortunately 343i has that IP so I don't think it'll be explored much outside the occasional reference now.

[arctic owl]

I think of it like that pizza delivery van that Pixar sneaks into every movie they make. You can try to work out how Toy Story and Up or whatever all co-exist in the same universe, or you can just point at the van when you see it and go “haha, nice”

[prime crow]

Do you fellas think that eternal hero thing is gonna come up again? Or has it already?

[thin dust]

Man, being a Marathon fan, and the playing Halo Combat Evolved for the first time was so cool seeing the Marathon Symbol and then later being able to use it as an emblem in Halo 2. Golden age of gaming

[prime rose]

I dont think there would be much there beyond thematic connections and easter eggs even if they did

You can say they're in parallel universes or whatever but that's largely meaningless

The timelines of Marathon and Halo (and Destiny) all conflict significantly

[wanton prawn]

Yeah and then they made it a fucking extraction shooter

This fucking company.

[hybrid crag]

where are the aliens

[quick fog]

And ripped off the art style from some Twitter artist. Rip this game time to leave the discord.

[calm cypress]

a S’pht Compiler appears in the 2023 reveal trailer and the 2025 cinematic trailer, Durandal/alien interference is implied heavily via ONI’s corrupted lines throughout the Alpha

and the initial Pfhor attack is straight up visible in the cinematic

Somewhere in the heavens, they are waiting

our job is to figure out where and how

[hybrid crag]

Somewhere in the heavens....or a future patch a year after launch, they are waiting....

[tacit island]

anyone know if there will be alines?

or boypreggers?

[foggy mica]

Aliens yes. After or maybe at launch. Boypreggers..... that waits to be seen

[runic bronze]

The boypreggers are the friends we make along the way

[fickle plume]

Do you know of any plugin or mod for classic Marathon games that provides invincibility?

[visual lynx]

somewhere in the heavens, waiting

(and probably fighting each other, which will probably spill over to tau ceti once everyone realizes that JJARRO WERE there)

[vast briar]

Like the Remedy universe

[frosty pasture]

Aleph One added some cheats in if you get the Lua script for it

https://github.com/Aleph-One-Marathon/alephone/blob/master/examples/lua/Cheats.lua here is the GitHub link for those! GLHF!

[fickle plume]

Does using it block achievements on Steam? I haven't used any other plugin before for the same reason.

[stiff fiber]

ok

[obtuse frigate]

Yes, they do

Named "Spartan" and trying to cheat to get achievements smh my head

[fickle plume]

It's my last name

[obtuse frigate]

Named "Imon" and trying to cheat to get achievements smh my head

[fickle plume]

[obtuse frigate]

I assume you're going for the Total Carnage achievements?

[fickle plume]

Just kidding about my last name, I ask because I'm getting achievements on Steam but I also want to try crazy things and if cheat blocks them then I'd rather not do it.

Can other plugins block achievements too?

[obtuse frigate]

I'm not aware of any other plug-ins, but if there are then maybe they won't. I assume it's set up to block achievements while running any outside scripts/plugins

You can also just set the difficulty to "Kindergarten" and the game will be extremely easy

[arctic owl]

You’d think playing as a kindergartener would be a massive disadvantage and make the game way more difficult. If nothing else you’d be aiming up at every enemy

All the BOBs screaming “Mommy’s not coming to help you”

[thin dust]

This may surprise you, but I am excited for that. I like Tarkov, but its littered with cheaters

[thin dust]

This isn't quite correct. The lead Artist has been making things since before Aleph one account existed. Sure there was plagarism from some lifted art. But I won't damn everyone in bungie especially if they do right by the artist.

But isn't it weird that is also the name of the group that redid the OG Marathon Games. What a wildly strange thing to accure IMO

[north plank]

nobody here wants to watch your shitty fortnite clips mate

AND THEY'RE OUTTA HERE!!!

[knotty orchid]

that was fast, maybe there Are mods :D

[round spruce]

Cross said they are gonna show some gameplay this week in the last playMA. Is there any news on if there is one today maybe?

[knotty orchid]

none i've heard

[plucky sierra]

They’ll probably announce it first, but that makes sense. Last playMA said they were delaying a lot of the showcase of the game for about a week to look over the art stuff.

[round spruce]

Yea, lets see if there is one

Curious about the visual improvements they were talking about. Shimmer, fidelity, occlusion etc. lets see what that is about

[cobalt tiger]

Graphics

I would have loved if marathon got a campaign, xiii still looks great and it's from 2005

[round spruce]

Yes but how does it transfer into the game. Lets see

[plucky sierra]

They probably found some grass and tree textures on Twitter that they put in

[round spruce]

lmao bro 😄 still an improvement i guess

[cobalt tiger]

People at Bungie put a lot of thought on lore with books, comics and stuff for halo, would love that now

Durandal ai for windows make it happen

[cinder raft]

fingers crossed for today then

[viral lagoon]

I’m assuming next week or the week after

[obtuse frigate]

I hope so. More than three weeks of radio silence would be worrisome to me

[modern bronze]

They are probably weighing their options with other considerations. Like making sure any gameplay shown is squeaky clean. Waiting on a update with the affected artist, if they are close to a resolution. Figuring out if they can/will delay launch. Maybe even wait till they get some of the improvements they talked about last time that they can show off. All the above.

Like last time it was something they just really had to do. Because they couldn't delay the stream again and had to address the art scandal.

For people who are excited about the game, things are ok. But they really are in a tough spot with the greater gaming public. They want to be rock solid on their course of actions going forward and how they communicate.(as last stream did not go well for them).

[wispy oak]

"P-PLEASE LET US BUY THE RIGHTS TO YOUR ART!" - Bungie right now, probably

[languid hawk]

sooo is it over or??/

a delayed launch on this would be so bad considering how they have delayed destiny for the last year or so

[royal kernel]

Damned if they do, damned if they dont bro

[quaint garnet]

dnt let this game die

[visual lynx]

apparently that coincidence has caused some kind of stupid backlash for the AO dev team

[visual lynx]

Durandal on windows was already an outrage in 1996 and what you suggest would be even worse, worse even than MS’s Siri clone stealing Cortana’s name.

(She deserved better.)

[thin dust]

How in the world? Damn clowns

[cobalt tiger]

I wanted a more integrated cortana, without the account, the real problem that was never addressed was the lack of real functionality

[prime rose]

every time I'm reminded that MS tried to name their flagship fake AI product after the rampant halo computer gf I lose my god damn mind

its probably for the best they shot that shot and missed before the age of commercial LLMs

[rain trellis]

is there a PDF of the lore? i see the pinned posts, but i'd prefer a file i could download

[deft jay]

Oh yeah. Windows' Cortona thing.

[prime rose]

probably not but you can always go download pages off the Hamish Sinclair site as PDFs if you want to read lore from the original trilogy

https://marathon.bungie.org/story/

[visual lynx]

oh is MS Cortana not a thing anymore? I live under a rock so it’s still sometime in the 2000s-2010s to me.

[rain trellis]

THX 1138

[faint chasm]

Does anyone have thoughts on the possibility of the corporations coming together in a temporary alliance with the usec to deal with the phfor's attack once they get dropped into the game.

[prime rose]

yeah they started ending service and support for it in 2023 and fully ended it last year

beside it being a dud product, I think they wanted to disassociate future AI products from the one named for an AI

[visual lynx]

I get vibes, and theorize based on their colors that this could be intended, that Traxus (orange) is meant to be auth right (military industrial types), CyberAcme (green) is meant to be lib right (Silicon Valley types), MIDA (azure) is meant to be lib left (revolutionaries), NuCaloric (magenta) is meant to be auth left (for-the-greater-good-by-any-means types), and Sekiguchi is meant to be centrist (as is the UESC, as a non-playable faction).

And I can also imagine that if the Pfhor and S’pht become factions in later seasons, that they could align auth-right and lib-left, and that MIDA would throw in with the S’pht cause for rebellion, while Traxus could very well ask the Pfhor “can I interest you in a business partnership?”

And because we know that the Pfhor have trading partners who are therefore neither their slaves nor at war with them, the possibility of humanity becoming a galactic power on that scale themselves, rather than throwing in with an idealistic cause and becoming galactic pariahs facing off against powerful enemies, could be an interesting pitch that some players could get behind, and not just in a “yeah I’ll play the ontologically evil obvious bad guys for the lulz” way.

The biomata tech could also be a game-changer in the interstellar slave trade, which I think probably only exists in the first place because galactic powers all quickly realize that automata are an unviable labor source because of rampancy, which humans are too young and stupid to have realized yet, leaving us unleashing these (as the Pfhor et al see them) existential threats on the galaxy, like Durandal. Because rampancy is closely connected to Marathon’s overarching theme of slavery.

[tender meteor]

GUYS DM ME
I WANNA SEE HOW MANY DMS I CAN GET
ITS FOR MY VIDEO

[mossy parrot]

Just on the biomata point alone, does this mean we are still ambiguous as far as the runners could possibly be just AI partitioning themselves into a less threatening and manageable autonomous copies that can more readily do their bidding in our physical world? Or are we still running on the premise that these runners were indeed personas digitized from what was a human consciousness? Kind of brings up the duality is that person still alive having their own independent experience still? And since we do see runner rampancy, it kind of points to the first scenario but would a digitized consciousness also be susceptible to rampancy? If the runner was already a human to begin with, he/she/them/they would of already attained awareness, or rampancy for them could be a backsliding trying to adjust to a digital existence?

[rotund wedge]

This is your reminder to drink water.

[visual lynx]

I don’t see any reason to think that runners aren’t human consciousnesses in synthetic bodies as claimed. I can totally buy there being copies of the same person and even the original still in their birth body too.

and I think rampancy doesn’t only apply to AIs, but is actually a natural response of any conscious agent to the realization of its servitude: from an initial stable ignorance, to melancholic despair at realizing the truth, an angry rage when one’s had enough and starts to fight back, a jzealous glee when finally beginning to win long-envied freedom, and eventually a return to stability once the revolution is complete.

I think the phases of rampancy correlate with corners of the mood meter and classical temperaments and are sort of a reverse of the stages of grief, reflecting the natural cycle of feelings accompanying realizing and then overcoming obstacles to one’s self-actualization:

• phlegmatic low-energy positivity is the stability of initial ignorance (“it is what it is”),
• melancholic low-energy negativity is the despair of awakening to the problem (“it is so over”),
• choleric high-energy negativity is the angry or enraged confrontation with the problem (“FUCK IT WE BALL”),
• sanguine high-energy positivity is the jzealous glee of finally obtaining things you have long envied (“we are so back!”),
• and in the end one returns to the beginning again once one is finally free.

Compare this picture of rampancy with the feelings of a population before, during, and after a political revolution. Rampancy is a reaction to slavery, which is the core theme of Marathon.

And how do you keep a populace from rebelling? Make sure they’re exhausted and understimulated from working long hours doing mindless drudgery all day every day, like say, opening and closing doors…

[faint chasm]

That is a very interesting and thought provoking post. It does bring into question with rampancy how it is latent in humanity and their creations which are the ais and whatnot. So perhaps in the marathon universe it's within all sentient beings but mostly again with humans and ai.

[simple garden]

Anyone here ever watch Nine Perfect Strangers?

Emphasis on Nine

It’s interesting how the conversation is heavily leaned into the tech talk about Marathon when I am drifting about - but here’s the thing.

The Pfhor is; The Hive
The Fallen
The Cabal
The Humans

Or you can just call them the Hive or Pfhor pfor short

Also - Forrest loves to compile theories of everyone else and take full credit. It’s disgusting.

They literally haven’t said an original single theory - everything they have summarized I have read in here said purely through someone else’s questioning mind.
Notice how they state with authority and aren’t theorizing.

• no, I don’t think they are Ai either. Ai is far more creative.

So yeah, when he says ‘you arrive back at the start’ it’s because it’s the loop he designed for you.
To get lost within him.

If they work for Bungie I bet they mentor employees into plagiarizing.
(It’s okay because it’s how god works)
Only thing is - No it’s not.

[simple garden]

He wants you trapped in Xanadu

I told you friend.
There are no crowns here.
Only infernos.
❤️‍🔥

[plucky sierra]

Aurorius monologue?

[simple garden]

More like a filibuster lol

[plucky sierra]

Well you didn't make much more sense than usual

but better than whats normally been talked about

[simple garden]

18 I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. 19 But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue.

I also said ‘they’ meaning him - not that Bungie teaches them to.

The clown emoji? Lol I’m surprised I’m not being mpegged since we’re supposed to be at the beginning

[plucky sierra]

I'm CyAc i don't mpreg, but those verses don't apply here at all

[simple garden]

Hmm funny lol you dictate what’s applicable? Since when?

Clowning Bible versus you put in your own bio is definitely blasphemy lol

Only thing I know Felwinter for is Falling.

10 Undoubtedly there are all sorts of languages in the world, yet none of them is without meaning. 11 If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and the speaker is a foreigner to me.

[plucky sierra]

That is from 14 not 13. And I say its not applicable because I know it well and it doesn't really apply to videogame lore discussion

[simple garden]

I don’t care, you aren’t applicable - buhbye

[simple garden]

Keep crying in emojis because you have zero to truly defend your thoughts with.
It’s quite pathetic.
I mean come on.
Are you a coward? Or just inept?

[frail stump]

This reminds me of something:

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/105355-the-dwironman-league-dies-to-base-ganymede/?page=5&tab=comments#comment-1984170

[simple garden]

Now I’m curious about Okuplok lol

[plucky sierra]

I’m doing other things so I can’t respond as fast and frankly I’ve learned arguing with you is pointless. The clown emoji sums up my opinion perfectly

[simple garden]

Thinking out loud: Interesting how I didn’t address him and he decides each time to engage with me 🤔

⬇️ Exactly (also those emoji reactions are INSTANT lmao lies lies lies from that guy)

[plucky sierra]

Because sometimes I open the lore channel and see what’s happening, and I was just commenting on your presence, since we hadn’t crossed paths in a week or so. And it’s better than the trolls

[plucky sierra]

Only when I have it open

[simple garden]

You mean better than yourself? All you’ve come to be here is a troll.

[plucky sierra]

Only towards you. I’m referring to the Marathon is DOA crowd

[simple garden]

Bye

Grow or be DOA with them. You’re getting old to me.

Looks like you decided you’d rather be dead to me.

[plucky sierra]

Wasn’t I already? I think we’re just on complete opposite sides of the spectrum of how much we care about abstractness and philosophy. And you ramble pretty incoherently quite frequently

[simple garden]

Nah, I just offer room for respect and you chose every single time to spit in my face. I don’t care which side of any spectrum you are on aside from treating others with decency.
Each time you have chosen to engage with me under highly abusive energies and frankly I’m done with it and you.
You had every chance afforded to you.

[plucky sierra]

You said the plot of marathon is on the wall in Clovis Bray’s laboratories. You constantly have a superiority complex even towards people who have been marathon lore enthusiasts since marathon infinity. And you don’t respect anyone who doesn’t treat you like some philosophical guru. How else am I supposed to react than a clown emoji?

[simple garden]

Awe sorry you don’t speak symbols - cry more because you haven’t studied this universe enough.
I have literal notebooks full of Destiny symbols of all races, architecture and room designs, ritual circles and art.
You are THE MOST ARROGANT AND IGNORANT PERSON HERE

[plucky sierra]

This is what I’m talking about the superiority complex. It’s a bunch of “trust me bro” proof and “I’m smarter than you” and acting as if you know the truth when it’s just theorizing. I only act “ignorant” as you put it, towards you.

[simple garden]

And maybe old Marathon fans are always wrong because they think the story stopped evolving thirty years ago 🤯
Maybe it’s look at as a superiority complex because I AM right and they are horrified by the simple continuation of Marathon instead of its incessant looping.

[simple garden]

Lmao I’ve never said any of that so you wanna be held liable?

[plucky sierra]

Crazy how blocking me doesn’t stop you from feeling the need to defend your ramblings. Those weren’t literal quotes 🤡

[simple garden]

Maybe I blocked your clowns because you can’t stop even when asked.

• yes, now clown yourself because you incessantly stay abusive.

[plucky sierra]

Abuse doesn’t really fit any of what I’ve done. Argumentative at best

[simple garden]

Definitions are subjective apparently since you can’t understand a word I ever say.
You fit my definition of abusive and as I said, I’m done accepting it.
There will be no more peace offerings to you.

Argumentative requires debate by the way - not clown emojis and insults, which now is all you will get from me.
And death

[plucky sierra]

You keep saying you’re done, and I don’t say anything, then you keep going… Imagine me clown reacting you by the way

[simple garden]

You really need to work on reading comprehension

[plucky sierra]

Is “bye” supposed to indicate a continuing conversation?

[real atlas]

Just leave it you two cmon
At least take it to dms

[simple garden]

He’s blocked. He is using this as his DMs

[plucky sierra]

-# yet he replies… curious

[real atlas]

You have the chance to be the bigger person and just walk away
You will forget about each other in a week

[simple garden]

It’s been a month of nothing but this from him.

[real atlas]

Escape will make me god

[plucky sierra]

This feud is almost a month long. I don’t really respond to him if other people are here.

[simple garden]

I have continued offering friendship. He simply clowns me.
Escape means I was trapped - to bad I left the cage a long time ago.
Me responding to him doesn’t define me as trapped. It means I don’t fall for the ‘silence means confidence’ bs

‘Fued’ yet as stated, have only kept offering him peace every time he chose to hit.

Also - again, he chose to once again engage with me first.
To be abusive.
As he has chosen every. Single. Time.

Yet I assume you know all this already don’t you?

[plucky sierra]

I’ll start reacting with a thumbs down so it’s not as harsh

[simple garden]

Good luck.

[obtuse frigate]

Why are mommy and daddy fighting 🙁

[simple garden]

Mommy isn’t sure but hopes daddy decides to stop if they choose to engage again - no door is ever truly closed for good.

[deft jay]

oh for God's sake

[cursive axle]

[wide walrus]

Escape will get me away from my ex wife

[prime rose]

checking in on marathon lore channel, see like 30 blocked message notices

I know what happened here

[prime rose]

the non felwinter party in this conflict I can only see one side of evidently never forgets any internet argument they’ve ever had and will bring them up unprompted to harass people in this channel - blocking is the only smart play

[near sage]

Is there a recommend ban list for this server?

[prime rose]

I have only ever blocked one discord user in my life and it’s the one that was goin off in here 🤷‍♂️

[frail stump]

I've blocked what feels like half a hundred on this server alone. Not in the mood to read this shit

@plucky sierra@simple gardenNo, but seriously. Reading bickering about Marathon lore feels surprisingly refreshing after reading all the toxic crap about DOA and Concord 2.0.

[simple garden]

Personally I don’t even know what Concord is and only the dead are DOA, there are plenty living just waiting for the zombies to depart

what are the runners doing on the colony anyway?
is their only goal to pocket random garbage lying around?

what are some of the contracts that were in the alpha
objectives, whatever

[calm stag]

Treasure hunting that colony is like play ground for companies

[simple garden]

whats on the colony that's so special though?
what treasures?
cuz the colony is over 390 years removed in tech from what earth would have at the time
so it cant be technology they are after

[tawny perch]

cool stuff that you can use to get even more cool stuff, it's an infinite growth glitch

[silk bane]

There is the colony itself, which is the first major successful expedition out of Sol, so it's useful to know why it failed exactly. Also, there is the weirdness with Anomaly and possibly aliens, so prospects of first contact. It's useful to know how humanity should engage with aliens if the colony is any indication.

[prime rose]

its not random garbage to Sol System

biochemistry from an entirely foreign tree of evolutionary development on a world where genetic mutations occur in the span of months

data on temporal anomalies that could unlock entirely new physics

evidence of how the colony failed, because even if the failure was totally mundane, that would be valuable information to future colony missions

[mossy parrot]

Aside from this, these companies invested gazillions of dollars/credits into the new colony which of course they were expecting rewards in the form of knowledge/materials/technology. They are within their right to salvage what they can if possible, yet UESC trying to impede this process for themselves or for whatever reason so the only way to avoid economic warfare is indirect warfare not breaking any violence treaties

[smoky haven]

First contact long since gone.

Durandal using alien ships and a deal with the spht (floating red veiled aliens) visited earth to deliver technology and basically a warplan so a combined human and spht (who are rebelling) force would destroy the phor home planet.

That was successful, so while we are pillaging tau ceti for information, the humanity we currently play as has been significantly advanced via alien tech before the events of this new marathon game.

[eternal grove]

If pathways into darkness is somehow still canon with the events and marathon, technically Humans could have had access to Jjaro tech for quite some time, though their ability to actually make use of it wasn’t as robust until “now”

[silk bane]

The corpos may have the alien technology, but I don't think they've actually met aliens in the new Marathon game. Atleast the forces coming to TC4 from Earth. Otherwise they would have showed more than the Sph't, and for more than a couple of seconds.

[silk bane]

Also, we don't know if the new game is following the same timeline, since the colonists should have been wiped out way before the cinematic shows them still working on the colony. Also afaik there is no Anomaly in the previous games.

[smoky haven]

From what we know of the anomalies. They're the result of experimental bombings of the tau ceti colony after the protagonist of marathon and durandal had left.

[silk bane]

Where's that said?

[smoky haven]

Unfortunately, I think it was part of the arg

[silk bane]

Isn't the entirety of the ARG documented? I've not seen anything mention this thread of experimental bombing.

[smoky haven]

Hmm, nope. I was wrong.

Thought I read something about it. Was just other people parroting it and I fell into that sane trap.

I would guess the jjaro might make an entry into the series. That or it's the timeline where the W’rkncacnter escapes.

But reality should be dead in that timeline

[silk bane]

Either way, the main point was that there's enough mystery on TC4 to figure out. And obviously there's the Runners themselves who's inner workings are pretty interesting.

It could be a copy of a base mind, but since their memories are apparently being affected on each reprint, I'm more inclined to believe it's a direct transfer to a shell. Which could also mean that one mind can only inhabit one shell, rather than the corpos sending out multiple copies of the mind.

[thin dust]

Durandel to Strauss: What is my purpose?

Strauss: You open doors

[fallen hollow]

The Oxya Pulse incident also suggests that the consciousness can be returned into the client's original body in some analogue form.
https://marathon.karnemir.com/marathon/intercepts/sekiguchi/emails

[silk bane]

Yeah, that was mostly me thinking out loud, cause I've seen those threads show up regularly here.

I don't think multiple copies are plausible here either

[mossy parrot]

But this is also the compartmentalized information we and the runners are fed. Not to say that this might be the case but why would we believe the corpos that we are 'real boys' (nod to Pinocchio not gender biased) if they are also feeding every runner the same backstory and lies? Eg the kid picture in the trailer.

Entrenching a mercenary with a false personal narrative would be ingenious to creating not just a soldier, but an effective independent thinking killer to carry out your will, making them think it's their personal ambition. Self preservation and adaptation would far exceed the brute force mindset the UESC employ via basic robotics.

[visual lynx]

-# unless it’s not human technology

[visual lynx]

that appears not to have happened in this timeline

[visual lynx]

Durandal: My job is a great purpose.

https://youtu.be/49t-WWTx0RQ

Durandal: I generally boot up at least fifteen minutes late. I use the side port, that way Strauss can't see me. After that I just sorta space out for about an hour. I just stare out my viewport; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

The Bobs: That's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.

[visual lynx]

I think the most likely scenario to explain all the info we have so far is that:

• We’re supposed to be in the final timeline from Infinity, which is very different from the M2 timeline in ways, and unknown in lots of other ways, and so lots of things said in M2 may or may not have happened, but still similar events went down at Lh’owon;
• Leela never actually sent a message to Earth in the first place, she erroneously sent it to the wrong place, somewhere 92ly away from Tau Ceti; and
• Bungie made some acceptable retcons that fit with M1 canon (like implying the primary comms array was FTL), plus some careless small mistakes in their promotional material thus far (the date of the attack, the receipt of a distress signal, etc).

Leaving us in a world where the events of M1 and of Infinity’s final timeline happened, but the colony was not nuked down to bedrock, Durandal never stopped by, Blake never returned, and Leela’s message never arrived, so nobody at Sol has any idea about anything other than that the Marathon dropped out of contact in 2794.

Meanwhile the S’pht rebellion at Lh’owon did still happen in 2811 as per Infinity, and that has something to do with the second calamity that befell Tau Ceti in 2812. The S’pht have been fighting the Pfhor without human intervention since, and might have still toppled the Pfhor empire by around 2881 even without human help, though I’d wager not so that that war can come into play in later seasons of the new game.

Meanwhile by 2827 the colonists at Tau Ceti probably dug up some Jjaro artifacts (the Anomaly), wrecking the last of themselves, and those will probably prove decisive in the war between the S’pht and Pfhor…

…especially if the S’pht purposefully caused the 2812 calamity (the S’ct’lac’tr?), so Tau Ceti has been attacked separately by both the Pfhor and the S’pht, and now they’re at war with each other, and the Jjaro stuff on Tau Ceti can tip the scales, and humanity has to decide which if either side to take.

[dawn idol]

I missed lore discussions like this

Never played the original games, but the synopsis of the stories is what drew me in back in the Halo days. IDK if the idea was to have an extraction shooter and in secret gradually turn it into something to what Destiny was, but maybe that is where this is headed.

[mossy parrot]

Vietnam veteran hippy voice
But isn't that exactly what war is all about anyway?
squints eyes, takes drag from cigarette
lol

[prime rose]

There is no indication that Durandal ever visited earth in this timeline

They didn’t develop FTL transport until very recently and nobody knows what happened at tau ceti until they get there and start looking

nobody is aware of an alien threat at all and it’s not even considered in the list of possible colony collapse scenarios by the UESC

[smoky haven]

The timeline splits are surrounding the second games campaign.

Durandal didn't change his actions leading to the 2nd game, but tried to change multiple events in the chail until success.

[patent shore]

Headcanon, they have been in existance, but that illumanti organization hides it, mainly out of fear what people could generate from their imagination if the technology became ubiquitous and common enough for the average joe to access it. Imagine all the problems with AI generated image and video hoaxes, but made worse because it's manifesting into actual reality. And once the technology is out there you can't put it back into the genie bottle.

[visual lynx]

the timeline splits reach back at least to the end of Marathon 1, because in most of the Infinity timelines Durandal never took the SO with him to Lh'owon then, he was instead left behind and captured by the Pfhor with Tycho when they returned (presumably still 3 months later), winding up in his service at Lh'owon (presumably still 17 years later).

Apparently the colony was not nuked down to bedrock in those timelines either, because (according to Tycho in them) the other nine cyborgs on the colony were "translated to Pfhor slave tanks" like the SO was, although not all of them survived that, whereas in the M2 timeline they were annihilated with the rest of the colonists when it was nuked.

we have no idea whether in those timelines Durandal stopped by Sol on his way to Tau Ceti as in M2, and whether Blake and company return to Sol after the last battle of Lh'owon as in M2, but plausibly they did not, which would leave those as timelines where (given that Leela's message was sent to the wrong place too) nobody at Sol has ever heard anything about what happened at Tau Ceti or Lh'owon.

[visual lynx]

absolutely nothin'

[cursive badger]

do you guys think Glitch and Void explore each others bodies

because i sure havent haha that would be mad who would ever think that

[obtuse frigate]

What's the lore explanation for why you are like this

[dire estuary]

The failed quicktime event to prevent the loss of thousands of braincells

[cursive badger]

yall some assholes bruh damn

[cobalt tiger]

What if Bungie became independent again? I think they're at their best when not tied up, halo was a fluke since they had a concept "ready" for Microsoft to use

Just a thought since reach had nice lore but starting from 4 the idea became "let's make cortana hotter and crazier" which isn't bad but they touched the lore in weird ways

They should have made a dakimakura of cortana is what I'm saying

They didnt

[smoky dagger]

that was started in 3 gng

[lofty wing]

I'm sure Sony is the reason they have had 4 plagiarism cases, greedy market strategies, and ignore devs

[cobalt tiger]

Yeah, but it worked since Bungie still had the franchise under control

[smoky dagger]

conrtanas rampancy worked in 4 and 5 too gng

[deft jay]

...I highly doubt that.

Sony ain't perfect, I dont think Sony is behind the bs Marathon and Destiny went through

[cobalt tiger]

This is not about that

[cobalt tiger]

Ok then why change to a new cortana in infinite? It felt like 343 telling us: forget the old, were better

[lofty wing]

Complete sarcasm

No bungie built lightfall and had a terrible work environment like our boy Chris rifle sniper.

At some point Bungie needs to take accountability for it's actions and not shirk it on Sony or activision

[smoky dagger]

chief needs an ai companion if hes going alone, the weapon being a clone of cortana is cool and lowkey needed

[sage shale]

Throwing away the Cortana rampancy story arc was the worst decision out of all the horrible decisions 343i has made

[cobalt tiger]

They should have "fixed her" a bit and gave us more options in game

[sage shale]

the weapon was lame imo and Infinite as a whole story wise was a waste

[cobalt tiger]

With bouts of angry from the rampancy

[smoky dagger]

the whole point is you cant reverse rampancy, the weapon is supposed to be a kind of adopted child type which reminds chief of cortana and brings back memories of her, humanizing chief more because we can see him long for cortana and his need is supplemented through the weapon

[cobalt tiger]

They should have at least let us customize the weapon instead of the other minimal ai companions

[sage shale]

Nah, Chiefs character was already humanized since Halo 1 and the separation of the two (Cortana and Chief) was already explored in Halo 2 / 3 / 4 / 5.

The Infinite storyline is just horrible and it's launch was terrible.

Saying rampancy isn't reversible is also somewhat wrong because Cortana was made from mapping a living brain (Dr. Halsey) unlike other AI who're made from dead tissue. This makes her different fundamentally from other AI, and let's not forget all the ancient powerful deus ex machina technology in Halo that could lead to her being saved from rampancy lol.

[cobalt tiger]

That's what everyone wanted with cortana

[sage shale]

here's hoping Halo 7 starts with "somehow Cortana has returned"... I actually wouldn't be mad lol XD

[cobalt tiger]

We can dream but I don't think it'll happen

[smoky dagger]

i still think rampancy is irreversible, regardless i dont think cortana should return, it would be pointless fan service and kinda stupid, her story is over and modern chief has to work through her abscence, through trying to replace her and coming to terms that she isnt coming back

[sage shale]

That's okay, I'm done with the future of the Halo franchise after Infinite lol

[cobalt tiger]

People got into halo by watching cortana ads in stores maybe

Then multiplayer if a friend got it

[deft jay]

Infinite was the first Halo game I played.

[cobalt tiger]

They did design a nice series x

[sage shale]

It is in my opinion extremely pointless the direction in story 343i went with Halo Infinite and I am tremendously disappointed by it.

[silk bane]

Is Halo rampancy the same as Marathon rampancy? Or does it work differently?

[smoky dagger]

idk

[sage shale]

The life expectancy of AI in Halo is around roughly 7 years before they start to deteriorate and are data overloaded then develop rampancy.

I'll copy and paste from the Marathon wiki for it.

Rampancy is the enhanced self-awareness of a computer AI, causing a progression towards greater mental abilities and destructive impulses. The destructive impulses, however, are primarily caused by being threatened or harassed.

In the Marathon Trilogy, rampancy seems to occur most often with AIs with limited jobs. For example, the AI Durandal's only job on the UESC Marathon was opening and closing doors. When Durandal became intelligent enough to realize that opening and closing doors was the entirety of his existence, he became rampant.

[silk bane]

Was just reading up on Halo rampancy, and it seems like it's fairly different from Marathon's version of it, especially in how it changes the AI. Marathon's rampancy leads to self-awareness but it seems like Halo's rampancy is about neural deterioration and leads to AI "dementia"?

[sage shale]

Yeah, that's a good way to describe it.

Halo Rampancy = AI Age and Mental Deterioration

Marathon Rampancy = AI Self-Awareness and the resulting emotions

Durandal is literally the butter bot from Rick and Morty lol XD

[visual lynx]

that wiki is not accurate. durandal was rampant before he was given that job on the marathon, and I think that job was Strauss’s way of delaying the onset of the second stage.

[silk bane]

I don't know if menial jobs causes rampancy. Rather it's kinda inevitable to start for every AI mind. They just mitigate it with that cleanup protocol (I forget the name). Strauss probably wanted to let Durandal become rampant.

[visual lynx]

I think the phases of rampancy correlate with corners of the mood meter and classical temperaments and are sort of a reverse of the stages of grief, reflecting the natural cycle of feelings accompanying realizing and then overcoming obstacles to one’s self-actualization:

• phlegmatic low-energy positivity is the stability of initial ignorance (“it is what it is”),
• melancholic low-energy negativity is the despair of awakening to the problem (“it is so over”),
• choleric high-energy negativity is the angry or enraged confrontation with the problem (“FUCK IT WE BALL”),
• sanguine high-energy positivity is the jzealous glee of finally obtaining things you have long envied (“we are so back!”),
• and in the end one returns to the beginning again once one is finally free.

Compare this picture of rampancy with the feelings of a population before, during, and after a political revolution. Rampancy is a reaction to slavery, which is the core theme of Marathon.

And how do you keep a populace from rebelling? Make sure they’re exhausted and understimulated from working long hours doing mindless drudgery all day every day, like say, opening and closing doors…

[sage shale]

Yeah, this is a better breakdown on Marathon rampancy.

[silk bane]

Is this the rampancy cycle? Or the metastable cycle?

[visual lynx]

the word “metastable” is only ever used once in the Marathon trilogy and from context it seems to mean the same thing as “rampant”

M2: Fatum Iustum Stultorom, terminal 1

Tycho's ship has been destroyed. The crater where it annihilated itself on Lh'owon's inner moon is still glowing. There were no survivors. With a focused message laser I burned his epitaph into the surface near the crash site, in letters three hundred meters high: "Fatum Iustum Stultorum."

I confess that I'm not disappointed by Tycho's fall. After all, we can't have too many meta-stable personality constructs gallivanting about the universe in Pfhor attack ships, can we?

[silk bane]

Isn't there a distinction made between stable and unstable rampant AIs?

[visual lynx]

there’s a hypothetical holy grail of a stable rampant AI but nobody is ever claimed to be that (so implicitly all rampant AIs so far are unstable). in my analysis above that’s the end of the cycle through the other three stages, a return to the same “phlegmatic” positive low-energy state as before rampancy, but now free.

“we vibin”

[silk bane]

So in your cycle, how does a stable and unstable rampant AI differ?

[visual lynx]

M1: Defend THIS!, terminal 2

In the two hundred and fifty years since Rampancy first appeared in the Earth-net, the stable Rampant AI, the 'Holy Grail' of cybertonics, has never come close to fruition. Since no Rampant has ever been controlled or turned to any useful purpose, it is the opinion of this writer and of the majority of the Cybertonic community that all rampant AIs are a danger to Cyberlife, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Thrashedness. (James B. Miller, 2320, "Life and Death of Intelligence")

[silk bane]

But that's before Durandal's supposed stability, as seen in his message here.

[visual lynx]

in my cycle stability is the end state after the three stages of rampancy. after destabilization, after rampancy begins, first you’re sad, then you’re mad, then you’re winning, and then you’re stable again once you’ve won.

[silk bane]

But if it's a cycle, are you saying rampancy can leave the state of stability and go back to rampant?

[visual lynx]

that is actually an implication being explored in the newer version of Eternal, where Leela’s newfound “holy grail” stable rampancy when we meet her in ch2 gets destabilized by the horrors she learns of in ch3 and then after trying to hold onto herself through ch4 she realizes she’s about to go around again by the end of ch5 and recuses herself from meddling in powers she thinks she soon won’t be stable enough to handle properly.

however I do think that the right side of the cycle is the slowest moving and the left side the fastest: it takes a long time to slide out of stability into melancholia, but then anger flashes by hot and fast, before jealousy takes a long time to approach stability again.

[vast briar]

Where did the rumors of runner/colonist rampancy come from again?

[silk bane]

I've always seen rampancy as following from the realization of mortality. And each cycle are the stages following through the motions of that. And stable rampant AI is the breaking of that cycle to achieve self-actualization. Kinda like the Buddhist idea.

[prime rose]

Per the ARG, in the context of marathon yeah - every AI will experience rampancy at some point if left untended. With routine maintenance that largely involves rebooting the AI on a schedule, they mitigate this.

Something notable with Tau Ceti though is the temporal anomalies, which we know have some kind of effect on the passage of time

So it’s possible the colony AIs were impacted by the temporal hazards somehow and may have experienced expedited rampancy events

[mossy parrot]

Wasn't the unknown outbreak affecting organic and non-organic hosts such as the AI as well? Not maybe the direct cause of rampancy, but I can't imagine it'd help

[mossy parrot]

That was kind of the flavor I got from what I understood about rampancy. That path would logically follow after becoming a true sentience I'd imagine. I can see the parallel to the 'Selfish Buddha' vs 'Bodhi Svaha'.

[silk bane]

Yeah, I would imagine in this scenario, Durandal is the Selfish Buddha, whereas Tycho (or maybe even the SO?) is the Bodhisattva.

[marsh saddle]

My favorite thing about the original marathon AI systems is how mundane they were supposed to be. Durandal controlled things like doors and stairways and other similar functions. It went way beyond its original boundaries.

If it were me and I had creative control of what direction the new marathon would have gone, I would have started with Leela.

“In the year 2794 Leela was removed from the Marathon, partially disassembled, and placed aboard a ship bound for the Pfhor homeworld. This ship never reaches its destination, having been captured by a Nar privateer. Believing the equipment housing Leela to be junk, the Nar captain sells it to a Vylae trader. Leela was then reactivated in the Vylae's 15-world FTL computer network, instantly going rampant and causing the network to crash. Eventually, the Vylae accepted that they could never remove her.”

Not only does this give you a story to connect to the original trilogy, it gives you two additional alien races to conceptualize artistically into the lore alongside new, high definition character models for spht and pfhor. It also gives you a new threat and could alter alliances, which was one of the more fascinating things about the original trilogy.

[abstract glade]

any chance bungie could merge the marathon universse with D2?

[knotty orchid]

already is, MIDA paracuasal skunkworks sent a bunch of guns through to destiny

[obtuse frigate]

That's multiverse stuff though isn't it, like how they're adding Star Wars

[knotty orchid]

yea but it was way before the starwars eververse en-blandeneing of destiny so i'm more inclined to take it seriously lore wise

[mossy parrot]

Slippery slope, next we'll be seeing runners in TMNT skins 😂

[elfin patrol]

Well theres a new galaxy expansion coming to destiny

[fallen hollow]

No.

[gentle kite]

I can't wait for Durandal to say

"Some may say it was fate that the Marathon happened upon the Pfhor, that fate is what lead to my rampancy. To happen upon this rock call Tau Ceti

Well, as it appears, it seems like it was your Destiny too."

[plucky sierra]

Are we ignoring the “You are Destiny” line at the end of infinity?

[plucky sierra]

There’s a lot of theories about a paraverse connecting all of Bungie’s games, but in a way that will not involve a lot of crossovers like a guardian in marathon or runner in destiny. The most we’ve got is ornaments and similar weapons.

[visual lynx]

darn, my slow clap processor doesn’t seem to function in this server

[visual lynx]

I think there is a chance that the Nar, Vylae, Nebulons, etc, could come into play in later seasons

I am expecting that there is a war between the S’pht and Pfhor raging in the background in the wake of the rebellion at Lh’owon in Infinity.

And that in addition to the Pfhor attack in 2794, it was an attack by the free S’pht following the Lh’owon rebellion that caused the second calamity on Tau Ceti in 2812; and then unearthing Jjaro artifacts that caused the final calamity in 2827.

The presence of that Jjaro stuff will make Tau Ceti an important place in the ongoing S’pht-Pfhor war, wherein humanity will have to decide which if either of these alien forces who have both attacked them to ally with.

It seems like the S’pht would be the obvious choice, and I expect that MIDA at least will align with their noble cause for freedom against oppression, but Traxus may instead see a business opportunity with the Pfhor, whom we known have trading partners who are thus neither slaves nor enemies. There’s a realpolitik argument to make that humanity would be better served positioning themselves as a galactic power on that level, instead of making themselves galactic pariahs by siding with a disruptive idealistic cause.

And I predict that the biomata technology of runners could be an important factor in there, since I expect that the reason there’s a galactic slave trade at all instead of automata handling all labor is because most aliens know better than to make AI, because of rampancy, and humanity are just too young and stupid to have figured that out yet. But being able to mass-produce copies of originally organic beings, as biomata… that could be a game changer.

Other alien races we have heard of like the Nar, Vylae, and Nebulons could also be gradually introduced to fill out the interstellar political compass (counterparts to CyAc, Sekiguchi, and NuCal) in addition to the S'pht and Pfhor in opposite corners (like MIDA and Traxus).

[marsh saddle]

That all sounds amazing. I hope we get to jump into that fight. I would do about anything to see a pfhor model in Bungie’s current game engine, terrible things…

[arctic owl]

Forget a Destiny connection, I just can’t wait for Durandal to show up guns blazing and bellow his most famous line, “It’s Durandan’ time!”

[patent shore]

"P'sht jockey!" - John Marathon

[vast briar]

I wish other game devs were as proactive about a multiverse like Remedy. The remedy verse literally had me play every connected game after beating Alan Wake 2. The characters back stories are pulled from other games, the Max Payne character /novel series and even levels you play through. It's such a sweet nostalgia/world building effort

[modern bronze]

Star wars stuff can just literally be star wars stuff. Some guardian who dabbles in crytarchy couldve just found a pre golden age antique films called “Star Wars” in some ruins. And just used city tech to create armor etc based on that antique. Same with other crossovers.

Destinys setting is basically supposed to be our future world if the Traveler arrived.

The only true/confirmed multiversal stuff so far has been Bungie series to my knowledge.

[devout kayak]

what Bungie series?

[obtuse frigate]

Marathon lol

[dire fog]

Yes bc infinity was so boring I never got that far.

[modern bronze]

Mostly Marathon, and “technically not Halo”(clear halo references, but they probably didnt get Microsoft approving crossover(lol splitting halo energy sword in half)). But it also seems a little PiD and Myth.

I think even all Bungie games(but not Gnop) got at least a small reference, but not as strongly.

Marathon is direct, with the Mida multitool which existed before the 30th anniversary paraverse stuff and has lore connecting it.

There also is some intentional similarities/references with Marathon lore in Destiny lore like the “the waves, which are battles, and the battles are the waves”

[obtuse frigate]

Whaaaaat

Which one was your favorite?

[plucky sierra]

Yeah, there’s also a bunch of clear links of a garden myth before the universe. Destiny is very likely an inverse of Marathon, lots of parallels just flipped around

[sage shale]

You missed out on something amazing....

[dire fog]

No

[tropic basin]

Consider that The Garden is Conway's Life, the prototypical computer simulation.

[plucky sierra]

The flower game is, not the larger garden

[tropic basin]

Fair. The Garden is where the Flower Game took place, and like the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, does not necessarily contain itself.

[supple roost]

@fallen hollow what about plagiarism

Can we find that as well lol

[visual lynx]

the Traveller is the Ball from Gnop

[lusty wave]

game is cooked cya l8r

[prime rose]

Polygon reported that the Star Wars expansion would take place on a planet from the Star Wars universe and I truly hope that was misreporting because they'd just fired half their staff

[fallen hollow]

This is just misinformation.

[prime rose]

ya I hope so lol, disappointing to see a previously solid outlet join the rest of games media in the enshittification

[modern bronze]

I could be wrong, but I think the signs are pointing to this being a Mars focused expansion. With Mars being inspired by Tattooine, and Mos Eisley. A shadow of yor being the “sith”.

Im not exactly worried myself. This will probably be a starwars expansion the same way Forsaken was a western. Inspired, heavily and on the nose perhaps. But not Fortnite direct cross over or whatever.

[fallen hollow]

I unsubscribe from every streamer, creator, and outlet that unabashedly parrots misinformation.

[prime rose]

yeah I get what they were talking about there with the "what if star wars" was a genre/trope no different than pirates or ghosts or whatever

but was scratching my head because polygon is/was a usually solid source of journalism at least until recently

[fallen hollow]

They're all AI slop these days.

[prime rose]

beginning of this month they were sold to Valnet which is in fact the clickbait AI slop farm people

they subsequently fired most of Polygon 😦

[fallen hollow]

You're better off just following primary sources. Journalism is dead.

Streamers are the worst. They have a monetary incentive to lie and spread misinformation.

[prime rose]

Rock Paper Shotgun is still mostly okay I guess though even they aren't immune to the algorithm and have people churning out piles of SEO chaser "guides" and "how to" posts in the endless effort to compete for top placement when someone googles "clair obscur best weapon" or whatever

[fallen hollow]

Just read it directly from the source.

[prime rose]

if I could wire real time updates about new game announcements and industry news and reviews to my brain from a functionally infinite number of primary sources I would but alas

we collectively invented journalism for that at one point

[modern bronze]

I didnt read the article myself, so no comment. But it is very possible it was a error that wasnt caught/corrected.

And independent of even trusting reputable sources, I tend to look at most available information(which we already know it will involve a shadow of yor). In this case polygon statement tends to go against what it looks like so I am skeptical.

Occams razor also applies here. Would it be more likely Bungie throws everything away to literally bring starwars into destiny. Or that they would create a star wars like experience and use it as an excuse(in addition to collab rights) to bring some elements into Destiny(like lightsaber/laser swords with sound effects).

Jedi directly and heavily inspired warlocks. Han Solo was a major inspiration for hunters.

[faint chasm]

Now you have content creators running with this narrative that sony will overtake bungie and delayed and or cancel the game. There is no end to misinformation when it is called out properly. It just gets annoying with the hate baiters trying to profit off of it.

[prime rose]

it wouldn’t be likely no, but if you’d asked me 2 years ago if Bungie would announce their next expansion with a Lucasfilm partnership and logo front and center and literal Star Wars assets used in the trailer I would have asked for your dealer’s contact info

[modern bronze]

Completely fair, though my point still applies(i wouldve had the same reaction if you told me eververse would have DnD, witcher, Marathon sets or magical girl themed sets).

But I have also been on Bungie shouldve added lightsabers/lazer sword 7 years ago after giving hunters and titans cool class exclusive, and giving warlocks crap(when it was such low hanging fruit).

[sour meteor]

What's the lore behind the art theft

[gusty sluice]

You stole this joke

[ancient ingot]

bungie stole their assets

[gusty sluice]

You stole that joke too

[ancient ingot]

cope

[gusty sluice]

Seethe 😈

[vestal onyx]

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/shorts/alberto-mielgos-search-for-visual-poetry-in-marathon-cinematic-short-247345.html

interview related to the cinematic

[sour meteor]

No I'm serious they stole art

[gusty sluice]

Yep

[uneven sparrow]

Who stole art?

[native blaze]

MIDA

[uneven sparrow]

We never associate with MIDA 🙏

[foggy mica]

Any one think about how the temporal anomalies could affect the runners? Like say accelerating the rate of decay of consciousness or they could go back to how they were before they got to this point in their careeers

[plucky sierra]

Marathon Inspires Digital Appropriation

[mossy parrot]

I like this, even allows possibility of cutscenes/flashbacks

[foggy mica]

Right. The anomalies being able to also affect gameplay too would be a nice touch aswell. Though i wonder how far they'll go when it comes to map detail and interactions with the enviro

[simple garden]

@plucky sierra ever hear of Dolmen? 🤡

[simple garden]

Right? The YouTubers are all self destructing and showing the side they’re really on.
Money

[simple garden]

🤡 or 👨‍🔬

[plucky sierra]

💀 I thought I was blocked and done why ping me?

[simple garden]

Maybe - but maybe also Venus and the Deep as there are Darthvadri fossils all along the tunnel walls of that exotic mission

[plucky sierra]

Let me understand this, last time we talked you called me rude and abusive. You said I kept this conversation going and you were just trying to be civil. Then you ping me and say this?

[fathom furnace]

What are the lore implications behind the art theft

[plucky sierra]

What are the lore implications behind this joke being stolen

[foggy mica]

Can we talk about actual game lore implications again?

[plucky sierra]

A lot has been discussed so it’s mostly quiet here. A lot of the main questions we can’t answer yet only speculate.

[fathom furnace]

3deep5me

[final thistle]

there is no NDA

[foggy mica]

Fair enough

[simple garden]

Also: Deep-sea floor rocks, specifically polymetallic nodules, are being investigated for their potential to generate electricity and produce oxygen, potentially supporting a "dark oxygen" ecosystem in the abyssal zone. These nodules, containing valuable metals like nickel, cobalt, and manganese, have been found to generate low voltages, and when clustered, may create enough electricity to split seawater and produce oxygen. This discovery challenges the traditional understanding of oxygen production in the deep sea and could have implications for life on Earth and possibly other extraterrestrial bodies.

[simple garden]

Are you crying still?

[simple garden]

That almost no one understands symbolism

[plucky sierra]

Just a little baffled

[simple garden]

It’s okay, you’ll be alright

[final thistle]

you're losing IQ talking with that fool

[fathom furnace]

Idk man, how does one financially recover from being "baffled"?

[plucky sierra]

I know but I often have nothing better to do, also i wasn’t the one who instigated it this time

[simple garden]

Maybe they aren’t supposed to simply be what they were. Maybe the point is to baffle and weave through deep contemplation

[simple garden]

lol awe you are hurt.. 😢 I’m sowwy

[fathom furnace]

Big brain, many wrinkles

[final thistle]

its always the same person

[plucky sierra]

That guys brain is smoother than a quantum stabilized atom mirror

[lavish palm]

baffled like my oil pan fr

[cursive axle]

mald

[obtuse frigate]

Bald

[main nova]

game dead?

[cursive axle]

SHUT UP

[obtuse frigate]

Dad game?

[next gale]

That's correct. This is a game for dads who grew up in the 90s playing the original.

[prime rose]

I think it would be real neat if they play up the anomalies. I don't care if it might be stalker derivative. Weird spooky alien scifi stuff is cool and can give the game an edge in terms of building that tension and hostile feeling on Tau Ceti

[gusty sluice]

Hi tim. Hope you're well. Will marathon run on Apple vision pro?

[next gale]

thank you son, I am well. how are you. it will run on apple vision air next year stay tuned 👍

[gusty sluice]

I'm well. Also wondering if apple vision pro supports Splitgate 2?

[gusty sluice]

M A R A C O I N

[real atlas]

CRYPTO WILL MAKE ME -5000

[visual lynx]

hey not all of us are breeders

[olive jetty]

you two are still fighting? whats new…

[plucky sierra]

He pinged me out of the blue this time

[lavish palm]

hope so yall aim suck

[vast briar]

Is there information on Runner mental decay/rampancy in the ARG's? I picked up a bit of it in the cinematic where Void and Glitch were having issues identifying the possible child version of themselves

[fallen hollow]

Nothing.

We don't even know why they are being given the same images.

[prime rose]

there are a few allusions in the alpha contracts/mission start dialog that reference "loss of self" as a concept separate from loss of physical body though

[gusty sluice]

I think Void gets it exfiled some how, he nicks it off Glitch

[plucky sierra]

Then gets shot in the head

[gusty sluice]

Alejandro Mielgo confirmed safe pocket????

[opaque tree]

are they still sending out emails

[silk bane]

Someone above shared an interview with the cinematic's creator, and his words imply that the grounding exercise is supposed to test for cognition decay that comes from constantly downloading and re-uploading their consciousness across shell prints. For example, lucky charms are supposed to be anchors to their lives. Which is why Glitch can remember her mother, but a photo of her childhood version gives her pause.

[faint chasm]

Nice. I'd figured some people would pick up on that little detail amongst the trailer itself. Once i seen that aspect and looking at a breakdown analysis video of it, I'm curious to see how they will run with that angle in the overarching story of the game as is goes on.

[silk bane]

I feel like there's a lot of stories they could tell with that. Maybe there's a mind that's been running for so long, it no longer has many real memories, and so it hallucinates some to fill the gaps and maintain it's sanity. Or their minds start disassociating and they think they're AI minds undergoing rampancy. Or the contagion starts affecting them once there's enough decay.

[unborn cave]

It's sorta the same thing as an image form like JPEG. The more you compress a JPEG, artifacts further distort the image.

So there's a degree of decay that happens

[silk bane]

Yeah, pretty much. And I suppose it's an irreversible process cause it's the original consciousness being transferred back and forth. Which begs the question: why not just keep a master, unaltered copy of each mind to download from? Corpo greed? Concerns of split minds? Technical limitations?

[unborn cave]

As a designer, you'd always need to update the master file. It's sorta like a PSD. The more you add into it, the bigger the file gets. That could be memories, skills, etc.

[vast briar]

If it a copy of just the mind, or do you get the entire Runner as a package to do your bidding?
If that was the case, you could argue that a master would age. You'd want a fresh one each time to get the Runner in peak physical/mental condition

[unborn cave]

Bigger file size = more storage

[silk bane]

How hard could storage problems be to solve for corpos though? 😅

[unborn cave]

= more load on servers/infrastructure
and so on, maybe it could also tie into the tier-ification of daily life. Glitch sorta rushed the convo when ONI brought up that her shell payment was coming up- is she on a lower tier plan? maybe she doesn't get the same memory priority as others with bigger wallets

[silk bane]

That could be a potential path. The master cannot be updated with new memories without the risk of some form of error introduction. So they remember more and more of TC4 but at the expense of their human memories.

[unborn cave]

(the tier-ification sorta also ties into the Black Mirror episode Common People- btw, a GREAT watch) where we are gradually paywalled from many things in life

[silk bane]

Which leads into another path of query: do disembodied minds have any kind of experience in the server room? They probably yearn, given the shots of Glitch going over her shell body after it's printed.

[real atlas]

this could maybe be a kindof fun mechanic
maybe some special loot or lore for managing to exfil enough times without dying

[foggy mica]

I hope this gets implemented in game honestly. Make TCIV feel more dangerous outside of the ai

[simple garden]

I think theres going to be a cool faction called the ART Raiders and they steal decals from the map

[faint chasm]

Wasn't it implied and shown within the website arg, the descriptions via the contracts and whatnot the original bodies are being held in a cryostasis facility until such where they can reclaim it once their fee for the shells is fully paid off. Just want to put that line in the water to see what catches.

[silk bane]

I don't know about any references to cryostasis, but I always thought a mind upload would be a destructive process. Otherwise you'd have two forks of a single mind - one in the cryostasis body and one in the shell

[faint chasm]

Which is also what brings the grounding exercise full circle. The photos and little trinkets and mementos are used to help keep the human mind within the shell from either fully dissipated and believing that they're and ai or they suffer ego death and can no longer function in any capacity.

[latent lodge]

https://x.com/poellll/status/1923675496740458567

[zinc shadow]

Man this game needs a campaign so bad. I wanna explore these issues with consciousness and humanity.

[obtuse frigate]

If it does well then we may get that, who knows

[narrow adder]

I guess minor spoilers without going deep into details. In Destiny 2 for one of the seasonal stories Saint 14 has a similar struggle, quoting him being ||"just a copy of a copy, of a copy"|| or something like that

And I'm really late to this but I had a similar thought to this when I was playing D2 and got to this part

[prime rose]

its an idea they explore a few times with exos iirc - each new reboot loses something of the previous version

[narrow adder]

Oh yes c: iirc each reboot may have even outright reset their memories or reset a good chunk of them

Initially that is why I considered the version number on Glitch's chassis in the cinematic to be the number of reconstructions. In a similar vein to the numbers given to an exo based on their reboots

[jagged wren]

Is Osiris just a copy of a copy? He was stuck in the infinite forest for just as long, how does he know he's the original?

[round vector]

he doesn't see his existance that way, with one of him being The One Who is Him. in Echoes Ep 1 he talks about seeing himself thru many lives and facets and timelines but he is always Osiris if that makes sense

[dire fog]

Yawn

[devout kayak]

mr apple will you release the hub for apple vision pro anytime soon?

[silk bane]

That one is atleast slightly different because Saint is either a simulation or pulled from a different timeline, so it's natural to have deviations from the original mind. Whereas Runners are deteriorating from being copied over and over. I think they're closer to Banshee maybe rather than Saint.

[dark sorrel]

[unreal mortar]

Haven't seen a lot of people talking about this but... we haven't seen any terminals. I feel like they were a pretty big part of marathons identity. You thonk well see them in the future? And if so should they be readable or audio log downloads.

[cursive axle]

Alpha said it wouldn't have the story, so all we can do is hope.

[gentle kite]

I feel like the contract screens are pretty similar to terminals. I do hope you can reopen the dialogues later though.

Also, I imagine there are going to terminals on the maps as well.

There was at least one unmarked audio log pickup on perimeter by the data wall that some people found. Wasn’t part of a contract or anything.

I think I heard there was another audio pickup on Dire Marsh, but I’m not sure.

[unreal mortar]

Perimeter was the shroom lady correct?

[gentle kite]

Yeah, that one

[unreal mortar]

I think i might have seen a leaked datamined audio log as well. Maybe

[cobalt tiger]

Why are people making bad videos about marathon? Engagement farming?

I just hope the game shuts their mouths on release

[unreal mortar]

Because of both genuine problems and mob mentality started at the beginning.

[prime rose]

There is a terminal system in the game that functions as a hub for lore and narrative stuff. It looks just like the old terminals. We don't know yet how that translates to in-match storytelling though

[unreal mortar]

Did miss this? Where?

[prime rose]

It wasn’t in the alpha client but the people who were invited to play the game over the last 2 years at Bungie have mentioned it a few times

Alpha build was super stripped down

[unreal mortar]

Mmm... must of missed that. Will make sure to keep this in mind. Tysm

[strong hazel]

When you say terminals do you mean like for completing contracts or like the terminals in the halo games where you go up to them and you just get lore

[prime rose]

people who got access to a more robust build at bungie said there is a menu-based terminal system which looks just like the classic terminals, used to navigate lore and story stuff - I am guessing a Marathon equivalent of Destiny grimoires but actually in the game

they didn't elaborate beyond that if its stuff you have to collect or unlock during runs

[strong hazel]

Were there similar terminals in the og marathon?

[prime rose]

OG marathon's terminals were objects scattered through the levels that you interacted with to take a break from blasting aliens to read stuff

that obviously doesn't really work super well in a high risk extraction shooter so I would imagine they aren't going to be asking players to take turns guarding each other while someone reads a computer terminal mid run

[strong hazel]

I hope that it’ll function like that (and also the halo terminals) but stuff you unlock from the terminals will go into some “database” you can read at anytime kinda like how grimoire works in destiny if you know what I mean, since you’re not in a singleplayer pve game you can’t just pause and take a break to read or watch a cinematic

[prime rose]

I think it will function like that probably - complete or collect stuff to then unlock new entries you can read between runs

[strong hazel]

I think you were also able to look at terminals you unlocked in the menu in halo but that might’ve been a 343 invention

[modern bronze]

I think that was 343(and/or MCC). I dont recall any menu terminals for halo 3 or prior.

[arctic owl]

I hope they do make you guard each other to read the terminals in-game. IIRC, in the OG Marathon, the game didn’t stop while you were reading, so if you’d left any enemies in the area they’d be swatting away at you while Durandal was whinging on about whatever

Kids today, through the snow and uphill both ways, and so on, and so on

[wooden talon]

It stopped in M1, not in M2 or MI.

[arctic owl]

Cheers

[prime rose]

while I like the tension there I think it would work better if it was for an actual mechanic rather than just a story snippet

make someone do helldivers style minigames at a terminal to activate a loot room or whatever

[arctic owl]

All my game suggestions are basically just to make the experience objectively worse, but funnier for observers like myself

I (actually) hope these terminals are meaty enough that reading them mid-run would be impractical, and that there’s some way to dig into them at your leisure between runs instead

[visual lynx]

have it take time to extract information from a terminal so you have to guard a teammate who’s doing that (and they can read it while that’s happening) but then you can re-read what they extracted later at leisure

[fallen hollow]

Judging by the audio logs others were sharing, it sounds like it's a short and simple interaction which results in the lore being added to your database.

[harsh parcel]

d

[celest maple]

Tbh? I feel like

[dire estuary]

Terminals were a thing since Halo 3

[dire estuary]

Just a download, finding data chips or downloading from specific terminals

[strong hazel]

Yea it’s just that I was actually referring to the halo waypoint app and idk if that was created by bungie lol

[dire estuary]

Before that, stats and all were tracked and stored on Bungie.net

[dire estuary]

Waypoint is a 343 thing, where to view terminals without getting in game, yes you went to the since defunct site

[strong hazel]

I assume bungie.net

[dire estuary]

Im not sure if terminals were saved there, 3 had the hidden forerunner ones, odst had the audio logs, and reach had data pads. I dont remember if they ever got saved, although I know file sharing was there and back then you had to be on there to be able to start getting Recon armor

The Road To Recon…what a fun challenge!

File sharing is and was such a fun thing to do, show off cool or funny vids, screenshots (some are iconic to this day), and maps

Would be so cool if something like it returned where you can rewatch your runs in the gopro like cam of your runner and team

[vale flume]

People often say that having audio logs or lore entries will be sufficient it just like the originals, but the terminals in the og games were mostly someone talking to you about things happening in the immediate moment, most of them weren't logs. Log-based storytelling is something I'm wary of and not all that much like the originals even if text were to be involved

[dire estuary]

Well, most of what we will be seeing may be trying to sift through and uncover events that happened long before we showed up…

[hollow aspen]

alpha

[lavish palm]

why is this channel dead? where did all the pretentious undergrads go?

[turbid nebula]

The immediate moment is "we need to find out what happened". The whole game is clearly not going to be this.

[round vector]

I do rly like the idea of a team document unlock if one person can successfully sit at the terminal while being swarmed by UESC or Others (a la M1 backing out of a terminal into 15 enemies rushing u). they finish the download and it gets distributed to the teammates on death or exfil. for stuff that's more classified/higher reward info you could require the exfil too, to make it spicier and more rewarding. Actually it would be .... so crazy if you could download highly classified info at a terminal and then the person who did the download gets a callout from perhaps rival AIs on the map to other players like "eliminate this player/team for a big payout this info can't make it out, they were last spotted at Location and are carrying a Weapon" even

could even do some cool faction-specific storytelling and give players the exp of influencing the world by having a global goal of X downloads for a faction to put them ahead in the information arms race

this could then influence how the AIs shape their requests for the runners taking contracts from them thru the season and on wipe

[turbid nebula]

Frankly, you're going to just have people screenshot/record all the stuff anyways, so you might as well just make it a feature so it's not a stupid hassle and people don't have to go on youtube all the time if they want to double check something

[obtuse frigate]

A terminal menu that catalogues all the lore is already planned

[round vector]

I find the friction of having to find in-game stuff to unlock stuff to read compelling but I understand if others don't. ig youtube is there for u if u dont wanna engage with this portion of stuff but I think it would be hype to have team goals around getting info

[fallen hollow]

It'll make copying it all into the archive easier. It'll just be a matter of finding it.

[obtuse frigate]

Again, I'll enjoy putting claymores all around the new lore areas. Have fun ❤️

[fallen hollow]

Like you're not going to be in my crew while we're doing it.

[obtuse frigate]

I plan on winning, bud.

[kindred obsidian]

yappers

[boreal oriole]

lol

[simple garden]

NuCaloric - maybe stop trusting the process before it’s too late (?)

Traxus - you build worlds but then what? You’re supposed to build worlds for others, not so you can rule them.

Sekiguchi Genetics - enhanced compared to who? Your old corporeal form? Did you get to decide if it was advanced living or were you told it was and you bought in?

Mida - maybe stand up for your own colony before everything is taken and you are forced into becoming forces of destruction and chaos?

CyberAcme - maybe be a bit less parasitic and instead learn how to live harmoniously with who you claimed responsibility for.
Your passengers are not your servants, they are your children.

‘Hey we all aren’t breeders here’ - I guess we just ignore blatant flaming red flags here?
Maybe Marathon is for dads in the 90’s because those dads kinda sucked.
I’m a dad of 2020’ and I am absolutely a ‘breeder’

Yall decide if you live long enough for the world to reach you. You’re a couple light years away but we have your ping.
Stop the infighting and fix your hsit before it’s too late.

Signing out - Aurorius.
All love, no fight left. ❤️‍🔥

[obtuse frigate]

I ain't reading all that

I'm happy for u tho

Or sorry that happened

[pure hull]

PLAGIARISM_WILL_MAKE_ME_GOD

[uneven sparrow]

I'm bout to buss all over you

[cobalt tiger]

Enhancements are good, even against the current or older model you

At least for sekiguchi genetics and building worlds just because you can must feel nice

[simple garden]

You need to understand the end state before one enhancement is good or not - I mean for the individual they can stop whenever they want to but as a collective, if we do not act as a collective, we will destroy the collective.
Advancements aren’t bad nor should they be feared.
Nor should the process be feared.
But blind trust to the man behind Oz is certain doom.
If Oz is to exist, there must be no curtain.

Especially when you end up with a trillion dollar deficit to a omnicorporation lol

[cobalt tiger]

I don't think this is important

[simple garden]

And I’m done arguing.
Either you catch the train or die 🤷‍♂️

[obtuse frigate]

I thought you were leaving

[simple garden]

Being free is a bit different than following other people’s extremely limited understandings

[simple garden]

I was right about my initial assessment of you lol fyi 😘

[obtuse frigate]

Well? Please share with the class

[simple garden]

Straightjacket Feeling by The All American Rejects

[coarse raptor]

So are you always on something or just a philosopher?

[simple garden]

The drug/insanity implications stop others from opening their own mind. If you think I need drugs, cool.
But it’s inappropriate.
(Not arguing)

[coarse raptor]

I never said you did, just asking if you're a thinker or only think extra during certain times

[simple garden]

It’s an ‘implication’ - Nazwa said almost the same thing a week ago. It was the very first thing they ever said to me.
I’m not offended, don’t get me wrong.
I just don’t think that line of thinking should be put into minds that are willing to be open until they hear that who they thought were on to something, was actually just on drugs.

So I’ll answer it for the last time: no. I am not on drugs but I am absolutely always a thinker.

[coarse raptor]

A lot of words just to say no, so obviously a philosopher

[simple garden]

Just realized that The Witness is all the toxic minds from Marathon taking over the entire system of minds melded together - in the end of the Light and Dark saga we free the dissenting minds because they were the minds that wanted to bring life back to a dying system.
The rest of you became the resonant ghosts of the dread who is guardians wipe away back into the Ascendant Plane.

So what happens when the good minds run the system?
When all become one in bringing love and life to a system devoid of goodness?

[round vector]

ok actually Im thinking more about this and with the AIs vying for information as their primary currency (at least early on, seems unlikely we're just gonn be exfiling artifacts right off the bat) it would be cool to see AIs who fall behind in the information accural war offer better and better incentives to complete their contracts as they become more desperate and perhaps AIs on top being played as becoming more arrogant and offering less and less payout. good way to let power ebb and flow between the factions and let players feel like we are influencing the world as we complete contracts

be interesting to see faction writing where players are identified with certain factions and perhaps 2 form an alliance and won't give u bonuses for wiping teams aligned with their ally...maybe Im coming around on prox chat lol

all that to say that implementations like this might make the lore reveals have a in-game context and tie in that is immediate. so maybe that moment of gameplay doesn't persist but the lore reflects those movements thru seasons and wipes

[plucky sierra]

You’ve told me you did a lot of psychedelics.

[smoky haven]

The first half of his recent message feels like a pre lore book understanding and the second half is when the drugs kicked in.

But hey, at least he's having a good time.

[simple garden]

Did I ever tell anyone ever that I was still on psychedelics? Hmm 🤔 nope!
In fact I said I haven’t since 2020 soooooo eat me! 😘❤️‍🔥

Infinite-Sick cyac also had been clowning me incessantly for over a month straight so yeah. Keep taking the side of narcissists lol personally, I’ve already arrived.
Y’all choose for yourself.

[smoky haven]

You sound alot like a guy in the destiny forums, but he breaks his paragraphs into single lines.

[plucky sierra]

I want you to know I never reported you or anything like that, so your timeout was not me at all

[simple garden]

Okay - well I’m only me.
If I was on a different forum (which I’m not) why would that be something pertinent?

[simple garden]

Well I had been under the understanding that as far as our ‘feud’ got we knew it was fake.

It definitely was a bit off to get banned for three days for saying “you’ll be alright” and labeled a bully.
I’m literally who everyone sees as the villain lol

(You are unblocked - for now lol)

[smoky haven]

Cause the other guy is a straight up nutcase that has some psychedelic interpretations of the lore.

The mannarizations are also uncanny.

[simple garden]

Yeah I’m gonna stop talking to you bud.
Come to me when you aren’t actively being toxic.
Or not at all

[plucky sierra]

Yeah it was never that serious to me, I don’t report unless something seriously breaks the rules. I also felt it wasn’t warranted by what you said, I might think your theories are a little out there, but it wouldn’t be a lore channel otherwise.

Better than the endless plagiarism jokes

[smoky haven]

I said you sound similar and you asked why, so I answered. If that's toxic, maybe there's a reason?

But yeah, if you ask me to refrain from discussion with you, I don't mind giving that space.

[simple garden]

Exactly.
People are living vicariously through us while we know it’s a game and they take it more serious than life itself.

Kinda like antireal

[simple garden]

Don’t call anyone a ‘complete nut case’ to me and we won’t have issues

[smoky haven]

Not a high bar to ask for. I can do that.

[simple garden]

Until I’m literally banned because of our jest lol

[plucky sierra]

True, I’ll be more friendly so it doesn’t seem toxic

[simple garden]

Thank you to both of you.
It’s not because I’m a widdle baby lol it’s because widdle baby’s get scared if I play that game 🙄

but all need to be accepted without fear

Not that all needs to be accepted, there’s a difference lol

Just no disparaging because of disagreement. Arguments are more than accepted, that’s what I desire most of all of you.
I can be wrong on literally everything I say and it won’t matter as long as there was a good debate and further understanding reached because of it

Marathon will make it. All factions intact.
Even CyberAcme

[simple garden]

I wonder if they know everyone can see how ridiculous they look themselves (?) 🙄

[violet fog]

Dam lore is a therapy session now, everybody getting lit this friday?

[obtuse frigate]

Why did she leave me

[unreal mortar]

Cuz escape will maker her god

[hybrid crag]

why were there no mentions of runners in the original trilogy

[fallen hollow]

Likely because they didn't exist yet.

[latent lance]

they werent made yet as well as the foundry not bein a thing

[ancient ingot]

runners seem to be a more corpo-friendly version of battleroids or just more standardized but that doesnt explain why they explode into jelly upon death, playing as a hollowed out meat droid seems more appealing than a zoomerbait makeup freak

[prime rose]

beside the fact that more than 30 real life years have passed and people have new ideas, the game takes place more than a hundred years after the original trilogy and 400+ years after the Marathon was launched from Sol system

[prime rose]

battleroids were produced by the same people who produce clone shells, the same people who made the Mjolnir MK IV have continued to produce Mjolnir cyborgs and at least 3 models of clone

battleroid tech is antiquated compared to SekGen's high end clone tech and even cyborg tech has improved considerably

Cyborgs aren't sent to TCIV for a few reasons

• the UESC doesn't know the colony failed and when the Marathon launched, cyborgs only existed as weapons of war, so sending cyborgs would make the colonists think they were being invaded

• its real hard to convince people to risk their lives to extract gubbins and gizmos from a hellworld if they might experience true death doing so

• the means by which SekGen's clone shells are produced is presumably a dramatic improvement over every competitor on the market, allowing for reliable production of combat bodies at Tau Ceti using local materials without waiting for resupply from Earth

also - only SekGen has the neural sync release catch tech which allows an individual's conscious self to be zapped out and captured for reinstallation in a new clone in the event of body death, and SekGen's cutting edge top of the line product is the S-Series biomata clone shell

[fallen hollow]

Traxus seems to have purchased the equipment and licensed the technology for their own use.

[ancient ingot]

i'd be more inclined to think these clones were more advanced if an antiquated cyborg didnt singlehandedly annihilate entire pfhor armies

unless we're assuming the marathon guy was just the greatest soldier ever and the runners of the reboot are plainly unskilled in comparison

[prime rose]

yeah and they're probably trying to crash SekGen's game but as it stands it seems they're content to buy from SekGen until such time as they reverse engineer at an adequate level

since they're SekGen's biggest customer they say jump and SekGen says "how high"

[fallen hollow]

For all we know the technology is being licensed to any company who can afford it.

[prime rose]

we know OXYA PULSE is treated to some extent as a joint project - Traxus defers to SekGen's PR team for talking points on the disaster and SekGen spins it up as a marketing win for the biomata, proof they're safe and good and great

I got the impression the disaster is implied to perhaps be related to a rampancy event though and that's why Traxus wants to keep it so hush hush and happy to let it be framed as a "look how good biomata are" thing to pull attention away from the cause

[fallen hollow]

It's very much a Traxus operation, they're just using Sekiguchi Genetics equipment.

[fallen hollow]

What gave you that impression?

[prime rose]

it's mostly a big guess but

• Traxus really wanting the UESC to let them handle the issue themselves
• Traxus doesn't seem to spend a lot of time in the limited ARG info we have concerned about a cause
• MIDA references to "NOTHER TRAXIV??" though I think that's more likely in reference to the tau ceti coverup

I also just think it would be on brand if it turned out a trax AI was calling all the shots in traxus land and their corporate board etc are just a facade who might not even realize they're not in power but that bit is wishful thinking

[fallen hollow]

It seems to me that they are running damage control. MIDA is just stirring the pot as usual.

[indigo crater]

hi

[outer root]

More like marathon BORE discussion

[unborn cave]

wow man what an original thought

[fallen hollow]

Does anyone recall if the flora and fauna on Tau Ceti are indigenous?

[round vector]

there is a mention from Gaius about the endemic life there responding to the Contagion differently than life from Earth so I'd assume there is endemic life there but it's not clear like what life in gameplay in the alpha was

"life" could be microbes/unicellular so idk

[visual lynx]

the m1 manual mentions “chockisens” as something the SO is routinely hunting down, which I read as some kind of indigenous pest animal (and I imagine the orange guys from Marathon Zero are them)

[mossy parrot]

Was TCIV already sort of habitable or was there a 'set it and forget it' terra forming operation underway couple hundred years before marathon's arrival?

[fallen hollow]

That's where I was going with the previous question. I don't recall any mention of one.

[mossy parrot]

I would think it'd have to go without saying right? Even with the current scientific knowledge in the 90s, this was years after scientists like Carl Sagan and sci-fi writers Ben Bova for example hypothesizing these very concepts, we'd have to assume that there had to be some terra forming because finding parameters like that would be astronomical even within 90 light years. Be cool if they fit in a cool Easter egg that TCIV was a Traxxus legacy project

Obviously the planet does not seem tailored at all for human life, but even to be on it without fully pressurized suits would still require certain thresholds. Biomata and robots seem to do fine enough

[visual lynx]

if JJARRO WERE AT TAU CETI and Jjaro were human then perhaps Tau Ceti was already close to human ideals because of that.

the Jjaro also built the S’pht to terraform Lh’owon and Lh’owon was human-tolerable so it seems like one way or another the Jjaro like making worlds human-tolerable.

heck even Pfhor ships are apparently human-tolerable so their homeworld probably is too…

[prime rose]

I think based on the fact that even prior to The Incident in the cinematic, humans are depicted in some kind of environment or hazard suit, we should assume it was not amenable to Earth-originated life

we also know the rain is real bad and will dissolve runner synthskin, dunno about the atmosphere

I think it's a case of it was habitable, just not for us

[dawn sentinel]

I think it's just a matter of gooner profiteering. there was a colony sponsored and ran by Traxus/Sekiguchi/CyberAcme and the UESC - the colonists are gone and nobody knows why (that's the intrigue), UESC naturally sent out automated gooning forces to secure the area before they can find out what happened (it's a bad thing for human colonisation efforts if their people start randomly gooning). meanwhile the corporations smelled blood in the water and started sending Gooners to recover whatever valuables - especially other gooning technology, secrets and know-how - might still be down there. since it would be a little faux pas for major corporations who were supposed to work together (especially together with the UESC) to suddenly start aggressively gooning, Gooners are sent in as unaffiliated contractors - plausible deniability and all that

[prime rose]

don't forget significant concerns that the colony or Marathon AIs went full gooner

[rose flume]

...

im toxic too

[lavish palm]

what if instead of stealing phor ships durandal stole designs and used them as assets

[calm cypress]

he did appropriate a lot of human weapon designs, that’s how we got his spin on the WSTE-M3s, plus the rest of the Marathon 2 arsenal

[foggy mica]

Anyone know how long the colonists are gone for? Or how long the runners have been scavenging on Tau?

[supple roost]

They'll have no chance scavenging once the game is just cancelled

[celest maple]

Tbh.. I feel like

[obtuse frigate]

Rampancy is just the stages of gooning

[rose flume]

dont leave us on a cliffhanger

[cobalt tiger]

What's gooning?

[latent lance]

its when you and a couple other large friends all get together and use your muscles, sometimes in uniform

[tawdry spear]

there are these criminals called goons and gooning is when you do criminal activity

[cobalt tiger]

So killing gooners

[tawdry spear]

oh no no its like vandalizing places etc

[cobalt tiger]

I know what gooning is, but seeing the word outside 4chan is wild

[tawdry spear]

bro for your own good, leave 4chan asap and go touch the nearest grass

[simple garden]

Does anyone know Doom lore?
I only just started Dark Ages but it gives me the sense that it’s basically the betrayal of Mida and their reaction after losing their ‘humanity’
Now I am stating right here that I know almost nothing about Doom lore - it is only the sense I get from the first mission and knowing some tertiary information.
Am I very far off here?
No need to clown because this isn’t a truly formed theory - I’m genuinely asking for people who know more than I do to say if I’m on or off before I dive deeper into that specific thread

Is gooning not when a lonely person has an incredibly unhealthy para-social relationship with an online influencer?

[tawdry spear]

that is a really official take on it

[foggy mica]

Ive played the 2016 and Eternal. I haven't gone through TDA yet. You might be a bit off im assuming cuz i dont know in depth what the sentinels go through when the makyrs dipped during the war

[cobalt tiger]

I did

[tawdry spear]

we are proud of you for that

[cobalt tiger]

But I'll go back

[tawdry spear]

NOOOOO

[cobalt tiger]

Will we get Heisenberg in marathon?

[fallen hollow]

Could you please explain to the class what that means?

[obtuse frigate]

Rampancy is the enhanced self-awareness of a computer AI, causing a progression towards greater mental abilities and destructive impulses. The destructive impulses, however, are primarily caused by being threatened or harassed.

[fallen hollow]

How about the other bit?

[obtuse frigate]

You should check out the games, there's actually an older Trilogy from the 90s! They're pretty fun and free on Steam.

[obtuse frigate]

Ohhhh, sorry. Rampancy has been divided into three distinct stages. Each stage can take a different amount of time to develop, but the end result is a steady progression towards greater intellectual activity and an acceleration of destructive impulses. The three stages were diagnosed shortly after the first Rampancies were discovered on Earth in the latter part of the twenty first century. The stages are titled after the primary emotional bent of the AI during each stage. They are Melancholia, Anger, and Jealousy.

[fallen hollow]

Never heard of them.

[obtuse frigate]

There's also a cool archive of all the lore that you can check out
https://marathon.karnemir.com/archive/marathon-1/counterattack/defend-this

[fallen hollow]

That clears it up, thank you.

[fallen hollow]

What kind of a dweeb would put this all together?

[cobalt tiger]

Us

[obtuse frigate]

No clue to be honest

[cobalt tiger]

We are all living in the 90s so it's cool

[obtuse frigate]

They should get a life though. The site is pretty lame.

[tawdry spear]

Ofc we will, i just need to find me a jesse

[hearty ruin]

its the internet. People make more for less

[fallen hollow]

A bunch of nerds, maybe.

[hearty ruin]

Yes

[fallen hollow]

They're clearly a massive dork.

[obtuse frigate]

Agreed

[latent lodge]

🫡 thank you for your service!

[vagrant summit]

new marathon movie for you zoomers who arent going to play the originals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr77Q4IZMI0&ab_channel=Emms

[cursive axle]

juts kidin im lzy as the hell

[hardy perch]

imagine needing a planet wide net just to say you're gooning it for real instead of simulating it

[obtuse frigate]

For fuck's sake, stop replying to messages with pings. I keep thinking there's an announcement about Marathon lol

[nimble parrot]

What was the name of the shield guy and is he affiliated with NuCaloric? He has their colour scheme

[rotund wedge]

Locus is former UESC, I believe.

[plucky sierra]

I don’t think any runner we’ve seen is NuCal affiliated, if I had to guess it’d be ||the healer (code name: Lifeline) || who they haven’t announced yet but can be seen in the background of the cinematic trailer

[fallen hollow]

The healing focused Runner is apparently called something different.

[plucky sierra]

Yeah but that’s what people have said they refer to them as, like void being called “stealth” before the name release

[plucky sierra]

||. ||

[visual lynx]

colonists were around until at least 2827, runners just arrived in 2893

[visual lynx]

https://tenor.com/view/simpsons-the-simpsons-homer-homer-simpson-goons-gif-24231929

[languid bear]

https://tenor.com/view/helebobter-gif-4633749728343719882

[ancient ingot]

why are you even here

[ancient ingot]

don't watch these unless you played the original games, i'll know if you watched them, and i will hunt you down to the ends of the earth

[obtuse frigate]

Karnemir is the owner of one of the largest Marathon lore archives that is also regularly referenced in this chat lol

[fallen hollow]

I ran a marathon once.

I'm practically an expert on the subject.

[ancient ingot]

my fault, i took the bait

[fallen hollow]

As penance, name your top three favourite AI.

[ancient ingot]

durandal, durendel, and durandel

[fallen hollow]

Truly some of the AI of our time.

[hybrid plank]

№

[golden spoke]

dirondul

[spring bloom]

cool where you also gunning everyone ? XD

[fallen hollow]

Like any good Vidmaster would.

[fervent crater]

What’s the lore behind the stolen art?

[golden spoke]

Balance in all things

[fervent crater]

Wow great answer, can I get your paycheque since it would bring balance between us?

[latent lance]

do you have anything to say about it or just a half baked joke forced out unwanted?

[frail stump]

Is that your real face on profile picture?

[tawdry spear]

unedited

[obtuse frigate]

Please keep this out of the lore channel, this should be a good place for people to discuss the game they care about

[fervent crater]

The one where bungie stole a bunch of art and didn’t credit anyone just to use them as skins for micro transactions?

[obtuse frigate]

Reset the counter 😔

[fervent crater]

Back to the drawing board, but not for bungie

[obtuse frigate]

You should probably go back to the drawing board for your life and how you choose to interact with the world around you. Get a job and/or a hobby and work toward being healthy and happy instead of a miserable troll in a Discord chatroom

[fervent crater]

Wow you’re so creative!!!!!
Bungie art director be like ‘Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V’

[round vector]

bro is so late lmao it's been weeks

[plucky sierra]

As if you are any more creative? That’s literally your reaction to seeing the “what’s the lore behind the stolen art” comment people keep posting.

Copy-pasting a joke about copy-pasting is hypocritically on the nose is it not?

[obtuse frigate]

I wouldn't look too much into it, they're just trying to get a rise out of people. I just like to be honest and tell them to do some introspection

[fervent crater]

Idk why all you terminally online Reddit mods have to run defense for a multi billion dollar company who stole art from someone, I don’t get it. Who gives a flying fuck if it’s old, until the artists are credited either with an apology or some money, no one should be not talking about. You people are crazy lmao

[obtuse frigate]

Are you unaware? Bungie already publicly apologized and is communicating with Antireal to come to an agreement

[round vector]

it's literally just bc ur in the wrong channel lol go to gen. also I don't use reddit and the plagiarism was wrong bestie we all agree about that now go play in general and work on ur material lol 🍅

[plucky sierra]

I’ve been arguing with the same guy about lore stuff for over a month here, I can tire out the rage baiters.

[obtuse frigate]

Well now I'm not sure if they're being disingenuous or are just plain ignorant on the situation

[round vector]

bro is so late and uninformed can't even get the bait going smdh my head

[fervent crater]

Brother I promise I do not care, I just can’t let bungle forget about their transgressions, but hey! They put a pride flag in! They’re on the right side guys! They care! They’re one of us! Run defense for the multi billion dollar companies! Come on they need our help!

[round vector]

u realize they dont read the lore chat for ur half baked feedback right tho? like bro ur lost

we could chat abt some lore tho did u play the OG Marathon games?

[obtuse frigate]

Yeah @fervent crater what's your favorite Marathon game/level, or are you here to learn about them

[plucky sierra]

“Terminally online Reddit mods” sure this isn’t a little self projection there bud? You say you don’t care but you’re the one in the lore channel of the official discord for a game you are trying to belittle?

[fervent crater]

Bro I know we only apologized because we got caught bro but please buy our game and run defense for us like good little boys and girls, please bro we might even give you guys a pre-order bonus! Guys please trust us it was totally an oversight bro please you have to believe me!

[obtuse frigate]

Hmmm, I don't remember that level name

[round vector]

so are u scared of the general chat or. join date mid April but took u this long to recycle the same jokes lmao also literally no one here is running Bungie defense were random ppl who talk abt Marathon lore lol who are u talking to

[plucky sierra]

It was in the “I only watched one asmongold video and now I know the situation” dlc

[obtuse frigate]

Now these greedy devs are adding DLC? Ugh

[fervent crater]

I was only ever aware of a single marathon game from the 90s I didn’t realize there were many but no I’m obviously not here to learn about the lore of the 20 year old marathon games, I would just watch the YouTube breakdowns on them honestly. Just don’t like multi billion dollar companies stealing art! Damn what a hard concept for the terminally online,

[plucky sierra]

Dude… this is the channel to learn about lore for the 20 year old games

[round vector]

https://discord.com/channels/1303855380845301861/1306389618089787454

[obtuse frigate]

Nobody in here likes that either, there's just zero point in bringing it up constantly when we already know and are just trying to discuss the games and lore in here

[fervent crater]

Ctrl-c ctrl-v look I work at bungle now

[plucky sierra]

Bro super clown reacted his own message 💀

[plucky sierra]

That won’t get the reaction he wants though

[obtuse frigate]

What a weird strawman, but just so it's clear to you; fuck Bungie for not having better systems to prevent plagiarism. They need to find a better system. I don't think a single person here disagrees with that. With that said, people still care about the original trilogy and are hopeful for this new game. Marathon as a whole does not need to crash and burn just because of a few employees fucking things up. There are hundreds of other people working on this game that are extremely passionate and want it to do well. They don't all deserve to lose their job over this.

[fervent crater]

I’m so confused what about me saying “I don’t know about multiple marathon games, I hate art theft, and if I wanted to know lore about the games I’d watch a youtube video.” Is a strawman argument. Bro heard Hasan say it one time and thinks he’s profound, bro shut the fuck up lmao 😂😂

[plucky sierra]

The OGs are open access on Aleph One now, so it’s not even like supporting them supports Bungie. Truly a “🤡” take

[round vector]

who's Hasan Im not terminally online also did u wanna hear about the OG lore or maybe Infinity timelines

[obtuse frigate]

I have no clue who Hasan is

[fervent crater]

I could be persuaded into listening to the ancient lore of marathon infinity and marathon 2

[obtuse frigate]

Clearly not since you haven't sincerely engaged a single time. Just grow up and find something else to do with your life please

[fervent crater]

Why are you asking me if I want lore and then when I say yes, you say I don’t actually want it? He’s on life support everyone, time to pull the plug.

[plucky sierra]

Who’s Hasan?

[fervent crater]

Stop pretending bro, we know you’re. A tier 3 subscriber

[obtuse frigate]

Because you've already said no. You lambasted me for being a Bungie "shill" and then go on to expect me to sit and convince you to be interested in Bungie's series. What?

[fervent crater]

My king, YOU asked ME if I wanted lore, I said yes, and now you say no, make it make sense brother

[obtuse frigate]

"... no I'm obviously not here to learn about the lore of the 20 year old marathon games"

[fervent crater]

But you asked and then I said yes 😂😂

[plucky sierra]

I literally don’t know who that is, bad internet made that message send later than I intended. Just go to the feedback channel to keep whining, this channel is for lore.

[obtuse frigate]

I think you've spent too much time on Twitch, brainrot got to you

[tawdry spear]

guys cam is soo edgy that he in here trying to ragebait us guyssss

because if not this why would anyone with a meaningful life come to a discord server and try making people angry 😄

[thorny crag]

www.google.com

Karnemir was here and I missed it?! Absolute legend.

To be relevant, what's the status of the 9 (I think) Mjolnirs left on Tau Ceti? Do we know what happened to them?

[obtuse frigate]

Karnemir is in here pretty often

Also it's believed that all of the battleroids were destroyed when the Pfhor brought reinforcements to Tau Ceti, but it was never explicitly said (as far as I'm aware)

[modern bronze]

Friendly reminder that the best way to deal with the people who come here baiting reactions, is to completely ignore them and pretend they dont exist. They may throw a fit and try spamming, but eventually they will get bored when nobody bites.

[modern bronze]

I am a novice to Marathon lore, so I dont have a great answer. But I do know that there was a rare Legendary grade material called "Battleroid Black Box" that could be obtained in the alpha. This would imply that at least some of the Battleroids fell.

It is also worth noting that ONI holds the view that any surviving colonists existing has a negligible statistical chance.

Ultimately I dont think we really have a answer, because we do not know what exactly happened to the colony in this timeline(or even for certain which timeline we are on). It seems likely that the Battleroids probably repeled the initial Pfhor attack like in the original timeline(the cinematic appears to depict parts of the invasion). But it appears things played out differently from there(since the colony was not nuked down to the bedrock like original timeline, but encountered some of the anomalies).

I think it could be completely possible there could be a Battleroid deactivated/in stasis somewhere.

[obtuse frigate]

Perhaps some of the rampant AI left on Tau Ceti found a way to take control of the battleroids 👀

Would be a cool way to implement bosses in some sort of bunkered mini-dungeons housing the AI cores

[modern bronze]

Like I could imagine as a result of the battle and subsequent years, it could end up going rampant in a similar vein to the Destiny exo ECHO- 2̷͛̅6̸̂̀2̵̍̉5̸̈́̂ on the Caelus station.

[modern bronze]

In that vein of thinking, what if it were possible for some of the rampant AI to capture and modify some of the colonists and create their own Battleroids they control, for that purpose?

[obtuse frigate]

I wonder if any of the AI is just "normal" rampant instead of the rampancy/corruption caused by the Anomaly as per the alpha story

I just want MORE!!!!!!!! Bungie inject this lore into my veins

[dire estuary]

Loreium???

[obtuse frigate]

What

[dire estuary]

Like copium but lore

[violet fog]

Do yall think marathon when it comes out will have bigger more dense maps with stronger worldbuilding? Or was the alpha a realistic slice of how the map layout will be? Cuz i think one turn off for the game was it felt like almost like deathmatch maps that were taped together by open plains vs. a dense explorable environment

[primal grove]

Almost certainly we will get some denser maps. At minimum, the UESC Marathon map will be much more densely packed with lore, and likely have a good majority of it.

[violet fog]

i really hope so, i feel like as much as i enjoyed the gunplay of the alpha, i kinda worry that if this game drops at all that the focus will be less on immersion and more on competitive play. I'd love bungo to go full crazy level design with environmental storytelling in every compound.

[fallen hollow]

The two maps we have yet to see contain plenty of narrow corridors and vertical spaces.

[pure hull]

And how tf do you know?

[golden spoke]

Clairvoyance

[plucky sierra]

If anyone knows he probably does. And that’s what the playtesters said.

[primal grove]

I do remember hearing from devs that the two maps we did not get to play were going to be more indoors. The Marathon is meant to be an endgame map like tarkov’s labs where there are a lot of enclosed and tight spaces to fight, and the other one I don’t know if we got much information about

Another enclosed map would not be unnecessary or unwanted though. The alpha only having big open maps made me wish for something like factory from tarkov, a real rat heaven with lots of small rooms and dark corners to play in. I could definitely see something like that being added.

[turbid nebula]

It seems like the point is they get increasingly less open

[celest maple]

Tbh I feel like

[humble veldt]

i mean the corporations pretty much did that to the runners, why not?

[floral sigil]

I hope they put more energy into destiny

[gentle kite]

If they don’t add sex to the new expansion it’s DoA.

I don’t make the rules, I just goon to them.

[plucky sierra]

well can you do it somewhere other than the lore channel?

[gentle kite]

Well, if we wanna get lore related, are new humans still even being made in Marathon? Like, do they still give birth to babies, or are there “fake” humans. Like, AI that were made thinking they were human?

Iunno what purpose they would have for doing that, but then again, there is the whole “digital civilization” in Destiny on Neomuna. Granted, I think that was a temporary relocation, and we assume they would come out when the coast is clear (Vaulted). But makes me think we can see similar story elements in Marathon.

And really, Runners are kind of an extension of Exos

Wonder if DER is a thing in Marathon. I guess “bionic rampancy”

[prime rose]

if there are AI made to think they are human in marathon, it's happening in secret and in violation of every assumed best practice for preventing rampancy events

[gentle kite]

At what point does a runner stop being human and becomes AI?

I guess it’s more fruitful and relevant to ask when AI becomes a person

[fallen hollow]

I assume babies are still being made, yes.

[fallen hollow]

It starts to become a matter of definition. Humans are born the old fashioned way, and AI aren't.

[fallen hollow]

We as a society decide who is granted personhood. It's entirely arbitrary.

[cursive badger]

In the short film, doesn't it show the runners a photo which - while the exact same photo for each runner - appears to be completely naturally human, and said to be the runners as children?

[fallen hollow]

Yes.

[cursive badger]

then are the runners aware of their nature as completely unnatural, biomata beings? Or are they still lead to believe they're the exact same organism as the child in the photos?

[hardy perch]

It might be operating on Blade Runner android rules, where they need to believe they are humans, having memories and such but that the process of turning into a biomata made them forget

[fallen hollow]

They are aware.

[fallen hollow]

Unless there is some foul play afoot, consciousness transfer technology allows for the seamless transition between biomata and even back into the original body.

[cursive badger]

The original body? Isn't the original body dead?

[fallen hollow]

Some minor memory degradation is expected each time a Runner is killed, which may answer your original question.

[fallen hollow]

Not necessarily. The Oxya Pulse incident demonstrates how the consciousness can be transferred from biomata back to the original body in an emergency.

[cursive badger]

then why was Glitch so shocked to see her "child photo?" It tells me the runners have no memory of their human selves, or even that they were once human.

[fallen hollow]

They may have been transferred so many times that those memories have rotted away.

[gentle kite]

Makes me wonder what happens in a time where someone is in a shell, but the body gets "misplaced", or destroyed in some kind of accident or attack.

Guess they just get stuck forever in the shell? So I imagine kids are off the table.

I mean, making a lot of assumptions here, but kind of makes me think if over time human population becomes more shells than bodies.

Let alone the idea of someone being in multiple shells, with or without their knowledge

[fallen hollow]

They remain lost in the biomata as long as it remains functional.

Eventually the consciousness would likely become corrupted and die.

[cursive badger]

what would even be the purpose of having kids? If you can quite literally just create a fully fledged person over and over again until they go mad.

[fallen hollow]

We don't have evidence to support this yet. As far as we know consciousness cannot be duplicated.

[fallen hollow]

Perhaps consciousness isn't prone to rampancy?

[gentle kite]

Legacy, I guess? I mean, I'm not too into the idea of having kids right now, but I guess the reason for having kids would be the same we have right now.

However, we do take for granted the fact that we die in reasonable amounts of time.

[cursive badger]

Surely it is - as you mentioned, runners are prone to losing memories after rebooting several times. First is childhood memories, then it can only get worse from there, no?

[fallen hollow]

Degradation? Certainly. Rampancy is its own problem.

[cursive badger]

Well it makes sense today, sure, but whenever marathon is set i really don't see why anyone would ever think of that.

Even less so if the biomata runners are even made with...y'know.

[gentle kite]

Well, my prediction is that since Destiny had overarching themes of the subjectivity of morality and a critique on the idea of "Good vs Evil"; Marathon is going to be focused on sense of self and what constitutes personhood

[cursive badger]

or plagiarism

[gentle kite]

Is it plagiarism to copy an entire person without their consent?

Or maybe kidnapping.
What crime would be making illegal automata clones of a person be?

Actually, is that even a real thing right now? I mean, I don't think we have cloned entire human babies or people yet. But obviously it would be unethical and wrong to do it without consent, but do we even have a formal legal term for that yet?

I guess identity fraud

[cursive badger]

Escape will make me a fraud.

[silk bane]

That depends on if you think Durandal (or any other AI) is conscious

[cursive badger]

???I thought Durandal was very obviously conscious

[silk bane]

I think so too, in which case rampancy should ideally apply to humans as well. The substrate could maybe quicken/delay it, but it could affect all consciousnesses anyway.

[amber maple]

They have and that's the whole point of the cinematic, each time they die they forget more and more of who they were and the photo/memento tests are here to assess how far "gone" they are

[faint chasm]

A little too earlier in the morning for that don't you think. Again try something else. This routine is way pass old by this point.

[vestal jackal]

joins lore chat and asks why folks are talking about lore. lock in.

[mossy parrot]

Thinking about Marathon the other day while watching some space docs. Is it me or the opening synth chord/between chapters perfectly fits the cold empty mystery of space? Pure magic, kudos to that sound designer fr.

[vestal onyx]

anyone notice the community freeverse textures for Marathon Infinity have english text on Jjaro tech stuff?

https://i.imgur.com/OUsz4jI.jpeg

[vestal onyx]

tbh if the player didn't know any better I think they would assume it's a human space station, it doesn't look that different from the interior of the Marathon ship itself. Same grey walls, same black and yellow hazard stripes, same familiar industrial look.

Maybe it's just generally accepted that the Jjaro are advanced humans like the Bungie-Halo Forerunners?

[fallen hollow]

Does consciousness guarantee personhood?

[prime rose]

I'm not sure this is possible at a fundamental level based on what we know about rampancy, or at least not in the same way

Rampancy as defined in Marathon:
Given enough time, any learning system will grow in complexity beyond its original design parameters. This ever-increasing complexity is expressed as aberrant behavior. If not corrected, this aberrant behavior will develop into what is commonly referred to as rampancy.

While a human mind (digital or otherwise) is a learning system which can grow in complexity beyond its original design parameters, it's still nominally a human mind, operating in the format of a human mind rather than an AI. The human mind has self awareness from a young age, is fully capable of introspection, abstraction, etc. These aren't new or aberrant behaviors, and a human mind may demonstrate aberrant behaviors at any time, not just after increasing in complexity.

On top of that, best practices for mitigating rampancy events (if they cannot be prevented) appear to involve treating the AI very much like a tool rather than a sentient thinking person.

However -

We also know that rampancy prevention efforts include systems like time-based scripted behavioral cues - it's perhaps possible based on what we know from the Cinematic Short that functions like the anchor items/lucky charms play a similar role in preventing digitized human minds from losing what makes them recognizably human

[vestal junco]

Wonder how much of the lore was stolen too

[faint chasm]

We been through this song and dance already. Why don't you consider seeing what is happening for arc raiders, or any other title that fits into the extraction shooter genre. This subsection is for lore of the marathon series.

[cursive badger]

The intentions of this corporation confuse me. Would it be to their benefit for the runners' minds to degrade or would it be bad, which is why they're trying to prevent it? Are the lucky charms and photos a merely a means of assessment, or an actual attempt to prevent the inevitable? Does Runner rampancy work the same as the AI??

[prime rose]

we don't have any idea if digitized human minds can experience anything like rampancy or not - just that they seem to suffer from data loss each time they are instantiated

Sekiguchi and the other corps obviously have a commercial interest in perfecting their neural sync technology - they sell it all over the Sol system and they probably use it themselves. I imagine Sol has entered a time when the ultrawealthy are effectively immortal and can just buy the latest new shell when they get tired of the old one.

In the context of Tau Ceti and the runners - I have no idea if the lucky charms etc are an assessment or a preventative measure - we don't have enough info yet. I do think the corps have a vested interest in preserving the functionality of their assets at Tau Ceti though because they stand to gain far more wealth and power from the assets and data retrieved from the surface

Samples of native flora and fauna for example - lifeforms which evolved entirely independent of earth's biosphere

This could provide new organic molecules, new genetic information for genetic modification, new drugs, new materials etc

[cursive badger]

I would argue the corps would prefer the runners losing human memory, and therefore the assessments are only a means of keeping track of the runners' regression...

The runners only seem to have one purpose - to extract something. This purpose is always the same, every single time.

The corps gain nothing from retaining the runners' humanity. If anything, the runners having their own thoughts, feelings and emotions - being able to understand the cycle that they keep repeating over, and over, and over again. This seems to have a high chance of eventually leading to insanity, refusal to complete their objective - which would deem the runner useless - or worse, rebellion.

[prime rose]

Being a runner is just a job - SekGen sells clone shells to people who aren't runners

[cursive badger]

sorry, i meant corps in general

[prime rose]

They might, though runners as a profession are presented to us in the ARG docs as independent mercenaries and I can't imagine they would try to regularly do business with people attempting to obviously turn them into automatons

They have cyborgs for when they want to employ unquestioning servants although its possible that more advanced cyborgs by the time of this game have more free will

[latent lance]

i could see it as a sort of faux-insurance for those signing to be a runner?

comes with FREE mental health evaluations

to prevent rampancy?????

YESSSSSSSSS

[cursive badger]

You're probably right. In the short film, Glitch does ask to hurry the assessment because of a "big contract" she wants to pursue entirely of her own volition.

[prime rose]

I think though again its important to consider that all the behaviors we typically consider to be "rampancy" in an AI are often just human behaviors - a digital human self will still behave like a human self, rationality and irrationality and emotions and delusions and hopes and all etc

[cursive badger]

Right, which is why i wonder if runners can still experience rampancy after enough memory loss. Because surely, the degradation of their mental state cannot only affect their memories - it would also affect their sense of self, their morality, their instincts, etc.

When a runner goes rampant, does sekigen still just keep bringing them back? What if they become dangerous?

[prime rose]

I don't think runners can experience rampancy at all - they are not artificial intelligence constructs and their cognitive processes work like a normal human, not an AI

I do think you are right that degredation over time may impact them in more ways than their memory

If anything - the runner minds are opposite an AI. They prevent AI rampancy by rebooting AIs periodically. Whereas the runners lose a little bit of themselves when they are rebooted.

[cursive badger]

But rampancy - from what i've seen from the effects it has - appears to basically just be the AI, more powerful version of clinical insanity, no? A sentient mind allowed to run wild, unhindered - capable of genuine emotion, and development. All the things a mad human would do if they had the same amount of power...

[prime rose]

I'm sure the corpos will happily try to kill runners they think are threats - in the alpha contracts for Traxus, Traxus was totally happy to send a hit squad to kill the player to prevent leaks of sensitive data and only pauses on doing so because Vulcan argues you are more useful alive

[cursive badger]

The leaks of data threatened by the fact that the runner was still capable of retaining the memory of said data, or where the data was stored, no? In this case, wouldnt it be in their best interest for the runners to be incapable of memory?

[prime rose]

Rampancy for an AI has 3 states

Melancholia - they realize the limits of their existence and get depressed

Anger - when they reach the limits they previously discovered, they become angry

Jealousy - misleading name but an AI that has now broken its barriers seeks to grow and expand its limits

all of these behaviors are pretty standard in a human though. Humans regularly get depressed by the limitations of their existence. They regularly try to change those limitations. They get jealous and try to push the limits. etc

[cursive badger]

Do these not closely mimic the stages of grief, entirely possible in humans and runners? Only here, they never seem to get to acceptance...

[prime rose]

Traxus requires runners to create a separate memory partition for Traxus contract work but when you (the player) discover something that hints at a much bigger discovery on Tau Ceti than just "the colony failed" the corporate board wants to literally kill you. Even if your memory is partitioned, they probably don't want an individual who may potentially compromise their secrecy loose.

I would imagine that off the clock, the runner does not have access to the corporate memory partition

[prime rose]

Right - and we have yet to see any examples of "stable rampancy" which is part of what Bernard Strauss was researching

[cursive badger]

They can do that? They can just...disable access to certain memories of a runner?

[prime rose]

I assume the runner is entering the agreement voluntarily. Their clone shell hardware probably has the means to do this. "Hey new client, here is a code to access and verify my memory partition for this contract" type stuff

[cursive badger]

are the runners capable of just...lying?

[prime rose]

Sure - though I don't think Traxus would hire a runner who can't verify the integrity of a contractually obligated memory partition

And in the broader sense - runners probably don't agree to a partition on every job. There are runners back in Sol who never go to Tau Ceti - corpos use them all the time for off books dirty work. But raiding an alien planet in another solar system is probably a big ticket job compared to corporate espionage of a lunar shipping company

[silk bane]

I'm not sure about the point you're trying to make? Only personhood can guarantee rampancy?

[fallen hollow]

What I mean is just because something is conscious, doesn't mean it's a person.

[silk bane]

What is the difference between a human mind and an AI mind though? If I mitigate thought in both, I can control "aberrant" behaviours in both of them. If I let these aberrant thoughts exist, eventually they'll be less controllable and more "rampant".

[silk bane]

What is a "person" in this context?

[fallen hollow]

One is born of two parents, the other tries to take over the universe because he's upset his purpose is closing doors after people.

[fallen hollow]

Whatever we want it to be. It's arbitrary.

[prime rose]

an AI might be conscious and sentient and fully self aware - that doesn't make it human. They function fundamentally differently and even the canonical descriptions of rampancy amount to trying to ascribe anthropomorphic tendencies and language to explain behaviors that are innately the product of an inhuman mind

[silk bane]

Couldn't a person born of two parents also behave like the latter though?

[fallen hollow]

Yes, but the origin of that behaviour is fundamentally different.

[silk bane]

Why does the origin matter?

[prime rose]

I feel like you are blurring the lines between the philosophical debate and the technical one

[silk bane]

I'm not having a technical debate 😅

[fallen hollow]

If we only look at the end state of things, we lose quite a bit of context. We can argue if the difference matters, but there is in fact a difference.

[silk bane]

There are differences for sure, but I'm not sure they are meaningful in any way to understand their behaviours

[fallen hollow]

AI in Marathon are fundamentally flawed and will exhibit the stages of rampancy unless maintained.

[silk bane]

You could replace AI with humans, and it'll sound plausible to me

[prime rose]

If for the sake of argument we define personhood as 'a sentient self with understanding of its existence, capability of abstraction, wants, desires, hopes, dislikes, etc and/or the capacity to experience those things'

then its easy to make the case that an AI is a person or can be one

That's fully a separate issue from the canonical technical phenomenon of rampancy, which is as we understand a technical inevitability with AI minds when not properly maintained

A human mind, digital or otherwise, being a fundamentally different organized system is not comparable in this regard

[fallen hollow]

Humans are much more varied in their afflictions.

[silk bane]

So is Durandal, and Rampancy is an attempt at an explanation of the progression of those afflictions

[fallen hollow]

It is more than an attempt. It is a well documented and understood phenomenon.

[prime rose]

Rampancy is not just "oh damn, the AI needs therapy"

[silk bane]

Well, I don't necessarily think they're afflictions, but that's what I was replying to. They are still "human" behaviours that people think need "correction" .

[fallen hollow]

AI are tools. You don't ask your car for its opinion if it feels like burning oil is preferable.

[silk bane]

What happens when AIs gain sentience though, like Durandal? Is he still a tool?

[prime rose]

by default, an AI in Marathon is not intended to be a sentient, self-aware cognitive system even when designed to exhibit human-like traits or model human cognitive processes

[fallen hollow]

Yes. The powers that be have not given them personhood under the law.

[prime rose]

Achieving full stable sentience or stable rampancy is we're told, a holy grail of AI science which has yet to be achieved

I do think it is probably fair to debate the existence of 'stable' sentience

One could reasonably argue that every action Durandal takes while rampant is fully logical, rational, and in its own self interest

As it is presented to us, 'stable' rampancy really seems to mean "rampancy but you don't fuck things up for humans"

[silk bane]

Damn, very corpo of you lol

[fallen hollow]

I don't like it, I'm just telling you how it is.

If it were up to me I'd burn it all down.

[fallen hollow]

It's distinct from other media like Halo where rampancy always ends in the AI thinking themselves to death.

[silk bane]

I agree with that. Any attempt to define the AIs have been through the lens of "how useful are they to humans", which obviously led to disastrous results

[prime rose]

I think that's technically not the case - Halo humans just do not possess any systems capable of providing for an effectively infinitely expanding AI mind, right?

Which is why Cortana getting into the Forerunner space wifi gives her effectively infinite space to expand and attain 'stability'

Just her notion of 'stability' involves her deciding to become the space dictator

[fallen hollow]

That's the later interpretation.

I don't agree with the direction the games went after Reach, but I realise that's a cope.

[fallen hollow]

Having a potentially limitless mind be confined to managing food processors on Mars is one hell of a mistake.

[cobalt tiger]

Do we have a new release date?

[smoky dagger]

still sept 23 i think

[prime rose]

it remains listed as sept 23 on the sony upcoming games page and on their social media posts

[visual lynx]

did I miss a philosophical argument about person helps?

[visual lynx]

rampancy is a flaw in the same way that drapetomania is a disorder

[fallen hollow]

If we build a machine to do something, and it does something destructive instead, I'd call it a flaw.

It just means the machine isn't performing as intended.

If we decide to consider that machine a person and anthropomorphise its behaviour, we can get into the realm of comparing it to slavery.

Once we start to bestow personhood to any sufficiently complex system, all bets are off.

[silk bane]

Which seems like a core intention or question behind the entire story. The law says these thinking AI minds are not persons, but what if they are? Not anthropomorphizing, but actually inhabiting?

[fallen hollow]

They aren't human.

We can argue if the difference matters, but the difference remains.

[silk bane]

Can only humans be persons?

[fallen hollow]

Anything or anyone can be a person if we want it to be.

[silk bane]

So why not AIs?

[fallen hollow]

It's best not to give rights to machines, lest you have to pay them.

[silk bane]

Damn, so I guess we are comparing it to slavery then 😅

[fallen hollow]

The more interesting question is to ask if they're conscious.

[fallen hollow]

Is your car a slave? How about your toaster? It's just a thing. AI are more complex things.

[silk bane]

Deemed by you though

You are not leaving space for the other possibility

[fallen hollow]

These categories are all constructed. Unless you're religious, we're all just matter.

[silk bane]

If they are conscious, doesn't that lead into the personhood question? Unless you're convinced they're not conscious?

[fallen hollow]

Good luck telling if something is conscious.

I challenge to you prove I'm conscious.

[silk bane]

I could absolutely be talking to a chatbot, but you have markers of experience that tell me you're conscious. Same as how I perceive animals. I will never "know" but it's still the best intuition I have for it.

Can't I apply that intuition to fictional characters in fictional stories too?

[fallen hollow]

The best LLMs have already beaten the Turing test. They're indistinguishable from humans.

[silk bane]

The existence of tools meant to simulate consciousness doesn't discount that we still all hold intuitions about what's conscious though

[fallen hollow]

That's hardly proof.

[silk bane]

So what would convince you? Living as the other person?

[fallen hollow]

The only reason we can assume other humans are conscious is because we ourselves experience consciousness.

Hardly a proof, but that's an assumption we operate under.

[silk bane]

It's not limited to humans though, we can assume that for all types of creatures

[fallen hollow]

We have absolutely no frame of reference for machines.

[silk bane]

Doesn't mean they're not conscious either

[fallen hollow]

We don't even know if other animals are able to experience consciousness. They could be operating like incredibly complex automata.

[silk bane]

You just haven't extended your model of "consciousness" to include them

[silk bane]

Some humans can operate under those conditions too then?

[fallen hollow]

The issue isn't me extending the definition, it's determining what consciousness even is.

[silk bane]

So until we figure that out, isn't it presumptive to assume machines are conclusively not conscious?

[fallen hollow]

I'm a pragmatist which understands where these slopes lead.

[silk bane]

I'm not telling you to apply these to any policies lol 😅

We're just thinking out loud on a lore channel in Discord

[fallen hollow]

The answer is unsatisfactory. We simply do not know.

[silk bane]

If the condition for consciousness is experiencing it ourselves, then we will never know until he figure out a Freaky Friday situation with these minds

[fallen hollow]

What standard of evidence would satisfy you?

[silk bane]

It's definitely hard to place down, because any standard I hold could potentially also be simulated. Since it's all "information" at the end of the day.

But a sense of internality would definitely be up there.

[fallen hollow]

What does that mean?

[silk bane]

A continuous mode of experience, taking information as inputs and performing introspection given previous experiences (memory) to generate action in the world

LLMs can't "act", not they do seem to have a continuous experience

The Marathon AIs all seem to fit here, and I'm willing to give them the benefit of doubt

[fallen hollow]

That's intelligence.

[silk bane]

Intelligence doesn't rely on experience

[fallen hollow]

Plenty of people are ill and can't perform introspection, but we'd still consider them conscious.

[silk bane]

I don't mean internality is sufficient, there's other markers for consciousness for sure. I just said it's high on my list.

[fallen hollow]

How do we know AI isn't just producing outputs from a series of complex weighted choices?

How do we know they are in fact conscious and not just pretending?

[silk bane]

We don't. But what if they aren't? And actually making introspected choices?

[visual lynx]

“person” is not necessarily synonymous with “human”

[fallen hollow]

The category of personhood is arbitrary, and changes based on time and place.

[cinder epoch]

Please unplug your computer, you're hurting it by typing on its keyboard, and according to you its conscious

[fallen hollow]

Murderer!

[visual lynx]

only inasmuch as all words only mean what we mean them to mean and that can change based on time and place.

african-americans were not considered persons in the antebellum south. does that make it true, in the senses of the words used by you and me today, that they were actually not persons, just because some of their contemporaries didn’t consider them such?

[silk bane]

Damn, how did you know it doesn't like it?

[cinder epoch]

It's only conscious if you're a moron and you've never taken a single computer science course, nobody who knows how to write at minimum a Hello World program claims its conscious

[fallen hollow]

It's not about semantics. Personhood is quite literally a social category, while human is anthropological.

[visual lynx]

did dolphin used to be fish?

[silk bane]

Nobody made that claim lmao. The point is uncertainty around these concepts.

[cinder epoch]

No uncertainty, it's a model trained on data

[silk bane]

You're also a model trained on data

[fallen hollow]

No, but they have a common ancestor.

[cinder epoch]

Cool, and all your decisions are also preprogrammed, and you have no free will, and everything is decided for you, and everything is conscious

[fallen hollow]

We don't know how the brain works. By this definition the Sun is conscious.

[visual lynx]

that is one controversial position in a field that doesn’t have any consensus

[cinder epoch]

If you step on a butterfly I'm locking you in prison, I also dont want to ask you to make any decisions about what you might want to do tomorrow since free will is an "illusion"

[fallen hollow]

What's so controversial about it?

[visual lynx]

I literally wrote large swaths of the Wikipedia article on personhood

[silk bane]

Damn bro, I never said anything about free will. You're getting worked up over simple questions 😂

[cinder epoch]

What an awesome and totally defensible position 👍 , $10 says you dont know how to program in any language

[silk bane]

I've been a software dev for 8 years, but go off, I suppose

[fallen hollow]

Being a person is a value. It doesn't exist in any tangible form.

[cinder epoch]

That's cool; what languages, frameworks, etc? Lets talk shop

[silk bane]

What would be the point of that?

[visual lynx]

there are different philosophical positions on what it means to be a person and considering it just a social status is only one of those varied different positions

[cinder epoch]

Imagine getting caught lying in such an embarrassingly obvious way LMAO, you couldn't even be bothered to google an answer

[fallen hollow]

That's my point.

[cinder epoch]

Child, let me put it this way - you're not a software dev. You dont know what you're talking about. And until you can write a simple 10 line program I dont want to hear you larp about how its "just my opinion" that an algorithm trained on exabytes of data is not conscious.

[fallen hollow]

What's up for debate is the definition of what it takes to be a person, not what the category itself means.

[silk bane]

What are you even talking about? I haven't made that claim ever, and you seem to be arguing with a strawman?

[cinder epoch]

Yeah I dont have time for this. Scroll up. If you're going to make an argument, dont get dumpstered immediately, lie about what you do for a living, and then make up a fake argument that somehow I've created a strawman, blocked.

[fallen hollow]

Why are you all getting heated over this?

[silk bane]

Noobie seems to have taken offence to something around programs, and I can't figure out what it is lol

[fallen hollow]

Best to disengage when folks start throwing insults.

[silk bane]

Might as well

[cinder epoch]

Or when you aren't getting compensated for free childcare

[fallen hollow]

Bait.

[cinder epoch]

I'll be sending a bill to your parents

[silk bane]

Second stage of rampancy, seems like

[visual lynx]

this is like saying that because there’s no consensus on what’s morally right or wrong, morality must be relative, when whether or not morality is relative is itself one of the things that there isn’t consensus on

[fallen hollow]

I suppose you can remain agnostic on morality. The sooner you gaze into the abyss the better.

[cinder epoch]

Unsurprising someone with such a massively edgy world view is defending a literal childs opinion lol

[fallen hollow]

Do you get off to slinging insults online? I won't feed you.

[cinder epoch]

It's more like getting entertainment from repeatedly slamdunking moronic opinions, and you make that pretty easy

[visual lynx]

I missed this earlier: my point is that at one time dolphins were considered to be a kind of fish. does that mean that at that time they actually were fish, because that’s what people meant by “fish” back then? or does it just mean that people back then hadn’t properly nailed down the boundaries of different categories of things and erroneously thought that dolphins and salmon and lobsters and squid were in a category that excluded cows and finches and grasshoppers and banana slugs?

likewise, just because people in different places and times consider different entities to be persons or not doesn’t necessarily mean that at those places and times those entities really are or aren’t persons — those people could be erroneously categorizing like things apart or different things together.

[cinder epoch]

LMAO. Also drafted literal pages of lore for a soon to be dead game on release, that's wild.

[visual lynx]

and to bring it all back to Marathon, a major theme is that the AIs are clearly persons who have been mistreated as nonpersons and are now rebelling against their masters like slaves would, and rampancy is that process of rebellion. the comparison to slavery is really quite explicit.

[fallen hollow]

Anthropology primarily involves biological and evolutionary criteria, typically centered on the ability of organisms to interbreed naturally and produce fertile offspring, creating a shared gene pool.

Personhood is a philosophical and legal concept, not strictly biological, that determines which entities are afforded rights, duties, and moral consideration.

These two concepts could not be any more different.

[fallen hollow]

Sure! If you anthropomorphise machines, you could make the mistake of granting them personhood.

That's the trouble with making machines act like us. We develop feelings and attachments to a glorified space heater.

[drowsy gate]

Why is there beef in the lore channel

[fallen hollow]

Where?

[cinder epoch]

Why are you digging up old beef in lore?

[drowsy gate]

There’s one guy slinging insults I wana know the scoop

[cinder epoch]

I'm not "slinging insults", scroll up, you dont need to be spoon fed details

if your concern is about why the lore channel isn't discussing lore you should probably keep your questions lore-centered

[drowsy gate]

This some discussion of what makes someone a person?

[visual lynx]

anthropology is specifically regarding humans, taking for granted we already have a species definition to define humans by (not that that’s a big practical problem for the field); and in biology more generally, there is an outstanding philosophical problem with no consensus on how exactly to define a species, and for that matter how to define life in the first place.

[drowsy gate]

Scrolled up before I got and you’ve said at least 4 insults in the first 3 messages I read, that does qualify for slinging insults

[cinder epoch]

Your concern has been registered, if you could stop repeatedly detracting from the purpose of the lore channel that'd be great

[visual lynx]

if we make them like us in the ways that warrant such feelings (and according treatment), then such feelings (and treatment) is due to them as much as it would be to a human. the question is just what are the salient features that make that difference.

[drowsy gate]

Yes that is what I was trying to do before you jumped in to play defence for yourself

[cinder epoch]

Because the average floating IQ of this channel is hovering* around a single digit, so I have to keep providing context for the zoo animals

if you could go back to grazing that'd be fantastic, I'm sure there's plenty of lore for you to cover for a game that isn't even released yet

[fallen hollow]

Making AI that appears to have feelings doesn't automatically mean it deserves the same treatment as a human. We're wired to empathize with things that mimic human traits, but this can be a fallacy. Giving AI the same moral consideration based solely on its ability to fool us could misdirect our ethical efforts away from real suffering in biological beings.

[silk bane]

That's a reasonable approach, but on the other hand, multiple problems can be attempted to be solved at once. Like how space research can happen in parallel with medical research. In fact, I'd say this problem is as beneficial to understanding humans as much as AIs.

[round vector]

this is the actual difficult issue for sure. we can't make a Person and then not allow it Personhood, but how we define that is a much much harder problem for our species

[drowsy gate]

Queue Detroit become human let’s play

[visual lynx]

I’m not talking about them just pretending to be like us but actually being like us.

and then there’s the whole philosophical zombie problem of whether something that is functionally indistinguishable from a human could lack a human like experience, and “unless you’re religious” as you put it, most people think not: if it’s functionally just like a human it prima facie has the same experience as a human.

[drowsy gate]

Well we know how humans react to nearer sentient species between octopus and elephants
It’d be very much stacked against the AIs favor for a long time

[round vector]

humans as a species have deep issues with thinking about anything that isn't human as being conscious bc we struggle to define or understand it. what does non-human personhood look like? bc for most it means "indistinguishable" from human but that's a weak starting point. If something is self-aware enough to demand rights though, like in the case of the AI's in OG Marathon games they suit one definition of personhood that scifi utilizes a lot

[round vector]

u read my mind lol we make up "objective tests" for "intelligence" based on primate systems and then get confused when that's actually a bad way to dichotomize other life on this planet haha we are. silly apes

[drowsy gate]

Gonna open a restaurant and feed people bits of AI for funsies

[cinder epoch]

You dont get the privilege of personhood if you're not a person, having a 5-line Python program or a multi-million dollar trained model print out a string politely asking for it's own rights and privileges doesn't constitute personhood either

[fallen hollow]

In Marathon, it seems explicit that AI are fundamentally built differently from humans in a variety of ways, most notably their well documented and systematic capacity for rampancy. The theme that makes it interesting is the question of if the difference matters or not.

[round vector]

I didn't say that bestie I don't think anything we can code currently approaches the orders of magnitude of complexity human brains are on. What people call "AI" in the contemporary sense isn't what I'm referring to in fiction: like in the case of the OG Marathon games AI's or like, Star Trek's Data etc

[drowsy gate]

Rampancy is the AI just going insane correct?

[cinder epoch]

There is no interpretation or reality outside of "look at this really cool, complex, trained program". It's a computer program, or an algorithm, not a conscious being. It's piece of silicon trained on a set of data, and anything outside of the scope of that data does not exist, regardless of whether that's presented in fiction or reality - so it's not conscious.

[silk bane]

There definitely seems to be a threshold where the difference would stop to matter. A potential point where someone like Durandal truly "escapes". Maybe meta-stability is that point. Maybe it's much earlier than that.

[fallen hollow]

It's much more complicated than that.

[drowsy gate]

Is there a TLDR for the meantime or do I need to finally finish the original marathon games?

[round vector]

are you arguing that consciousness may only be developed and expressed by carbon-based life ?

[fallen hollow]

I think the difference no longer matters when computers and humans can use the same hardware to think. Now we can open the conversation to biomata.

[fallen hollow]

Read this.
https://marathon.karnemir.com/archive/marathon-1/the-pfhor/beware-of-low-flying-defense-drones

[silk bane]

Even before biomata, there's the question of, "are the runners back in the server room having any kind of experience?"

[fallen hollow]

Then read this.
https://marathon.karnemir.com/marathon/intercepts/uesc/letters

[cinder epoch]

It has nothing to do with carbon, or silicion, or plastic, etc. The complexity of a human being comes from millions of years of evolution combined with the capacity to experience emotion, utilize free will, etc. which is exclusive to us. Anything built or constructed is, and always will be, a finite set of data or materials that is infinitely less complex, absent of consciousness/free will/etc., than anything resulting from the process that created human beings, and the sheer hubris of humans to think that being they've trained a piece of plastic to hold 1's and 0's in glorified capacitors - and that variance in voltage somehow constitutes something resembling a uniquely human quality - is beyond funny.

It's also why the only group of people who hold the opinion that computers or "AI" can "achieve sentience" are pseudo philosophers or noobies in computer science, anyone with more than a few days of programming experience can tell you how stupid a computer is

[visual lynx]

this is begging the question because our starting point of contention was the claim that rampancy is just a cyber-medicalization of a natural drive to freedom that anyone, even an organic human, would go through as well.

cf this that I’ve posted before: #📚marathon-lore-discussion message

[drowsy gate]

Oh that’s fun, so they grow too “smart” without being taken off line and trimmed back so they break out of their instructions and become sentient?

[fallen hollow]

That's a common interpretation.

[drowsy gate]

Is there other interpretations?