We definitely need a topic on these guys! So they are a Golden Age scientific project which was doing some excavation and experimentation on Venus. 'Ishtar' is the name of the Babylonian goddess who was considered the diving embodiment of Venus (and the goddess of love, fertility, war and sexuality apparently). They come up in the level where Dinklebot has us access their machines before the Fallen do, only to have Rasputin mysteriously claim them for himself. The Grimoire has some info on them: [quote]The Ishtar Sink region looms large in our surviving knowledge of Venus. Guardians come hunting the ruins of the legendary Ishtar Collective, a sprawling Golden Age scientific project. But the ancient ruins that brought the Collective to the Sink have awakened again. We aren't the only ones interested in the Collective. The Fallen House of Winter has hurled its assets into pillaging the ruins, hunting for some advantage - whether from the Golden Age, or forgotten times beyond. The House of Winter's presence includes constant Skiff overflights in support of ground teams and hints of an improvised command post or staging area in the volcanic Cinders. The situation is degrading into a race against time. We must claim the Collective's ruins for our own - and hope they will warn us what other threats now rise from Venus' acid seas and ancient stone. [/quote] And more about their studies of the Vex: [quote]"The Ishtar Collective studied the Vex with all the instruments and power of the Golden Age. And we must understand the Vex if we are to survive. There are tales of the Black Garden and the Darkness that lives at its heart. If this is where the Vex are born, then finding it is of the utmost importance." - The Speaker[/quote] And also an transcript of some Ishtar researchers pondering a the implications of a Vex simulation: http://uk.ign.com/wikis/destiny/Vex_Grimoire To give more detail here, they have 'captured' a Vex entity and they notice that it appears to be running a simulation of themselves with perfect fidelity. After considering the disturbing implications of this, they come up with the solution of bringing a Warmind into the situation, which will presumably be too complicated for the Vex to simulate/model. So all that is to say, given that the Ishtar Collective is one of the few parts of history that we actually learn about, and practically the only historical incident that we're given a lucid transcript of, then one would suspect it has a large bearing on the overall story of Destiny. What I'm thinking is that humanity arrived on Venus and noticed these Vex ruins everywhere, and the Ishtar collective was set up to study them. The nature of the Vex 'ruins' is that the landscape itself has been turned into a machine - some sort of computer network. When they realised some part of this network was running a simulation of [i]them[/i] they freaked out and plugged Rasputin(?) into the network to vanquish whatever Vex intelligence was residing there. Since this is a Bungie game, with AI characters, the concept of 'rampancy' will surely come up. For those not knowing, rampancy is what happens to AIs towards the end of their lifespan - essentially they reach a certain level of self-awareness, and along with it ambition and ego, which causes an acceleration in their neural/mental development. Unfortunately their physical hardware can not accommodate this growth, so they go insane and have to be decommissioned. It would be possible to keep them stable only if you had a spare 'planet-sized network' for them to grow into. See where I'm going with this? The Ishtar Collective plugged a warmind into the Vex network (that is to say, a planet sized network), unwittingly allowing that AI to become hyper-advanced and in possession of an ego which, shall we say, 'transcends' human interests. Now, you might say that was awfully convenient, that some alien civilisation would have placed some self-developing computer network on Venus billions of years before humanity existed and then left without further ado, ripe for some future human AI to exploit. I'd agree. I think what's happening is more subtle. A future rampant AI has discovered some time travel technology, and used it to create the very thing that it needs for survival - a redundant planet sized network to plug into. So the Vex was created and sent back through time to start this building process billions of years in the past. Note the Vex is not really a super advanced civilisation, it's dumber and more drone like, possessing just enough intelligence/qualities to get the job done. Like an algorithm or a virus. The time travel happens via the Black Garden, which must be in an anti-entropic field, meaning time is flowing the opposite way from normal reality (similar to the Time Tombs concept in Hyperion*). This is backed up by the 'past' Vex being the descendants of the 'future' Vex, etc. When the Ishtar scientists saw the weird Vex simulation, that was the bait. The future rampant Warmind knew that they would come up with the idea of plugging a Warmind into the Vex network, thus ensuring it would survive rampancy and develop into a God-like intelligence. When you kill the heart in the Black Garden, that presumably has some impact on the plan, like stops the Vex traveling back through time, or stops some of them and thus weakens the future AI. I'm sure we'll find out more as the game develops. And also how the Traveler, Rasputin, and other AIs fit into it exactly. * Time Tombs: http://everything2.com/title/Time+Tombs