Wow. Thank you very much for this, Rarebit!
2 things:
1. OMGWTFBBQ MAUSER WAS WRIGHT?
2. Wasn't Mauser a freeborn with no jacks? How did Wright get in there in the first place? Plot hole?
Cervacius wrote:
Mauser having jacks was the largest continuity error I made that I'm aware of to date. I assumed he had jacks when I wrote up the part about Wright getting into him, and in the Merv crit where Merv operatives investigate the sack of Zion, in which Mauser was caught on Sentinel cam sneaking through the rubble with Lock, Flood described the footage as showing a man with jacks in his skin, and both Flood and Malphas referred to Mauser as an "operative."
Later, when I was re-watching the Colt/Mauser/Roland scenes in preparation for bringing Mauser (actually Wright) in as an actual game character, I finally noticed that he didn't have jacks in his film scenes. :o I don't think anyone had pointed it out on the forums. I did a stealth edit of the archived version of the mission, Merv 8.3.1, "Among the Missing," in May 2008, changing three lines:
Flood 1, original:Ugh, now the General is uploading his dirty pictures to me... Yes, well... All I can make out from this is a tall, muscular, dark-skinned, and disgracefully dressed man with jacks in him stumbling through debris. I've certainly never seen him before; he can't be that important.Flood 1, revised:Ugh, now the General is uploading his dirty pictures to me... Yes, well... All I can make out from this is a tall, muscular, dark-skinned, and disgracefully dressed man stumbling through debris. I've certainly never seen him before; he can't be that important.Flood 2, original:It seems I can't count on competence from anyone; no, not you, [playername]--I gave up on you long ago. But usually Zion's systems work well enough to run a decent data query after you've hacked them. It's a sad state of affairs...Very well, I can see the way the wind is blowing. We'll try for what we need from the Machines; the jacks in his skin indicate that the man was an operative, and the Machines will have surveillance records of which Zionite ships were around the old city when they sacked it. That should narrow things down considerably.Flood 2, revised:It seems I can't count on competence from anyone; no, not you, [playername]--I gave up on you long ago. But usually Zion's systems work well enough to run a decent data query after you've hacked them. It's a sad state of affairs...Very well, I can see the way the wind is blowing. We'll try for what we need from the Machines; they'll have surveillance records of which Zionite ships were around the old city when they sacked it. That should narrow things down considerably.Malphas, original:... Machine records of ship movements around Zion at the time of its destruction were minutely precise. The human with Zion's Commander was a crew member of the Mjolnir II, also known as "The Hammer": a large hovercraft that crashed near the main gate of the city's dock, although the Machines do not record having inflicted significant damage on it themselves. According to our records, his operative name is "Mauser."Malphas, revised:... Machine records of ship movements around Zion at the time of its destruction were minutely precise. The human with Zion's Commander was a crew member of the Mjolnir II, also known as "The Hammer": a large hovercraft that crashed near the main gate of the city's dock, although the Machines do not record having inflicted significant damage on it themselves. According to our records, his name is "Mauser."
After that fix, Mauser showed up in the Matrix, and a lot of the story characters took great enjoyment in pointing out that he didn't have jacks. In the initial shock of realizing that he didn't have jacks, after I'd thought he had and included it in that one chapter 8 Merv crit, I was worried that it ruined the Wright-in-Mauser story. But a jack is merely a physical interface that facilitates an electrical current, and in the massive short in the Mjolnir II's jack-in systems caused by the simultaneous viral destruction of Zion's systems, to which the Mjolnir II was connected, and the entry of Wright's consciousness into their ship, the intensity of current involved could have just as well have conducted through human flesh, which isn't all that bad a conductor anyway. Whew. >_> While I'm not at all pleased that I made the error initially and had to revise the mission text, in the end I think I like her going into someone without holes better, since it's more unexpected...at least, it certainly isn't something I'd have thought of if I hadn't made that mistake and then had to fix it.
The way that Wright's end came about ended up making it more difficult to have someone in the story give the full explanation for the Wright/Mauser sequences; Wright ended up being a much more secretive character than I'd imagined initially, and she wasn't about to offer up the explanation, so I would have had to have found ways to have people find clues that would eventually piece it together--could have been very long running as a backstory puzzle, if I'd ended up doing it that way. Wright had covered her tracks by completely incinerating Mauser's body when she (still in Mauser's body) hoverjacked Carlyne, rode his Oligarch interface into the Matrix, and let his ship crash on the surface.
You sly devil, you.
Wow, her complete disregard for Mauser's life is pretty creepy. Makes her a much darker character than I'd imagined.
Couldnt've been fun being ol' Mauser, forcefully overwritten then discarded like a play thing when he'd outlived his usefullness. Wonder if he regained control before the end as the hovercraft plummited to his death? Not nice.
*frantically writes fan fiction where he regains control of the craft and lives happily ever after with Android Wright*
Rarebit wrote:
"???" = Actually Danielle Wright in "Oligarch"-style shell, but I'm not going to positively ID her here, just leave hints like her behavior, and the alphadecimal code found in Zion 11.1.5.
Computer24810219.>
Though I can't seem to crack it.
Vesuveus wrote:
Rarebit wrote:"???" = Actually Danielle Wright in "Oligarch"-style shell, but I'm not going to positively ID her here, just leave hints like her behavior, and the alphadecimal code found in Zion 11.1.5. Computer24810219.>Though I can't seem to crack it.
I don't think there's anything to crack. The link is simply that it's the same kind of code that was used by Wright in the creation of the new red pill. As far as I remember.
Dudes, that one isn't any tougher than the others.
"error," convert from base 10 to base 36.
Fascinating. The planning for what was to happen and my memories of what actually did happen, plus the ideas behind the story which some people got close to stumbling on fairly accurately but not quite.
I am both very pleased about being able to see the thoughts behind each crit and event, but at the same time saddened at the very real possibility that we won't experience anything quite like this again. The scope, imagination and frankly all of the official storyline related posts by everyone on the boards, I will miss very much.
Just realised I totally called some stuff in my various speculations, huzzah!
"Question the machines ability to have 'evolved' to their current intelligent state by themselves and suggests an early realiance on human beings."
"-Each Oligarch works on a purely self contained basis, able to operate individually within the substructure of the group as a whole.- Each could be a physically dead bio-mort like Halborn, controlling everything at the colony by their thoughts and suspended counciousness alone. They would be the very first creators of the machine AI, a sort of immortal elder-council.- The self containment of individual Oligarch members may result in more internal conflict within the Oligarchy than we suspect, there could be internal power struggles going on all the time behind the scenes (See Carlyne wanting to get rid of Halborn)."
"In the intial character outlines before MxO's launch they made the point of the mind still managing to survive moments after the death of the physical body (specifically speculating the return of Trinity). Well, lets say for instance the experimental device the Assassin witnessed on her body (specifically on the cortex jack) was making a digital "backup" of her mind."
Rarebit, what was your ideas about Operation Dark Storm? During chapter 10, it seemed that neither the humans nor the Machines knew how it worked. And if I remember correctly, CAR80N said that the pre-Matrix human civilization didn't have access to nanotechnology. It seemed like you were going to make some kind of revelation concerning Dark Storm.
Othinn1 wrote:
Hm... I don't think I was going to try going into it in detail. After the Merv seeded the storm you pointed out that...I think it was the director's commentary for the Next Renaissance said it was nanomachines or something, which I hadn't been aware of, but it's all just some flavor of sci-fi magic anyway since as far as I know there's no currently known or even theoretical way that something like a perpetual Dark Storm would be possible. As far as that kind of thing goes--how is the Earth not frozen, what's this crazy fusion power with humans, etc--it's usually the less said, the better.
So much information, soooo much to read . . . . arghhh! Overload.
With all thoughts of the original 2-year storyline, circa Jan 2005, put to the side, did YOU, Rarebit, invisage an ending for all this?
Othinn1 wrote: Rarebit, what was your ideas about Operation Dark Storm? During chapter 10, it seemed that neither the humans nor the Machines knew how it worked. And if I remember correctly, CAR80N said that the pre-Matrix human civilization didn't have access to nanotechnology. It seemed like you were going to make some kind of revelation concerning Dark Storm.Hm... I don't think I was going to try going into it in detail. After the Merv seeded the storm you pointed out that...I think it was the director's commentary for the Next Renaissance said it was nanomachines or something, which I hadn't been aware of, but it's all just some flavor of sci-fi magic anyway since as far as I know there's no currently known or even theoretical way that something like a perpetual Dark Storm would be possible. As far as that kind of thing goes--how is the Earth not frozen, what's this crazy fusion power with humans, etc--it's usually the less said, the better.
Ah, okay. I thought you were going to reveal that Dark Storm was something else, or created by someone else like the Oligarchs or something.
Mach: (after Zion event) Cypherites, Cryptos, and the Morph sim; Morph sim eventually agrees to listen when Cryptos offers to tell him why Morpheus was so obsessed with obtaining the One's remains--they go off for a little private chat [note that players are *not* going to be told what they talk about...and actually I still have to figure that out at some point, but it can wait for a later subchapter]
Was this ever "figured out"?
