Hello and welcome Guardians this is your friendly neighborhood AnonPig and I'm back here once again to bring you a theory on the Destiny lore. I've been busy recently, moving, communing with the Darkness, getting a second job; you know, the usual, but last night while playing with a friend I realized something interesting and down the rabbit hole went. Before we get into the details of Lakshmi let me bring you back to a time before the Collapse, a Golden Age out on Venus, and more importantly at the Ishtar Collective. [quote]From the Records of the Ishtar Collective ESI: Maya, I need your help. I don't know how to fix this. SUNDARESH: What is it? Chioma. Sit. Tell me. ESI: I've figured out what's happening inside the specimen. SUNDARESH: Twelve? The operational Vex platform? That's incredible! You must know what this means - ah, so. It's not good, or you'd be on my side of the desk. And it's not urgent, or you'd already have evacuated the site. Which means... ESI: I have a working interface with the specimen's internal environment. I can see what it's thinking. SUNDARESH: In metaphorical terms, of course. The cognitive architectures are so - ESI: No. I don't need any kind of epistemology bridge. SUNDARESH: Are you telling me it's human? A human merkwelt? Human qualia? ESI: I'm telling you it's full of humans. It's thinking about us. SUNDARESH: About - oh no. ESI: It's simulating us. Vividly. Elaborately. It's running a spectacularly high-fidelity model of a Collective research team studying a captive Vex entity. SUNDARESH:...how deep does it go? ESI: Right now the simulated Maya Sundaresh is meeting with the simulated Chioma Esi to discuss an unexpected problem. [indistinct sounds] SUNDARESH: There's no divergence? That's impossible. It doesn't have enough information. ESI: It inferred. It works from what it sees and it infers the rest. I know that feels unlikely. But it obviously has capabilities we don't. It may have breached our shared virtual workspace...the neural links could have given it data... SUNDARESH: The simulations have interiority? Subjectivity? ESI: I can't know that until I look more closely. But they act like us. SUNDARESH: We're inside it. By any reasonable philosophical standard, we are inside that Vex. ESI: Unless you take a particularly ruthless approach to the problem of causal forks: yes. They are us. SUNDARESH: Call a team meeting. ESI: The other you has too.[/quote] That is the first of the Ghost Fragment Vex cards, here we see two very important people, Maya Sundaresh and Chioma Esi. We also see their project, specimen Twelve, a living Vex was captured and studied to see what the capabilities of the Vex were. It was simulating the Ishtar Collective team, near perfectly. This is incredibly worrying we find out in later Ghost Fragment Vex cards because it means there can be only one [i]real[/i] Maya and one [i]real[/i] Chioma, the rest, and possibly these two in the card are just simulations made by the Vex. The possibility of this is terrifying because if they are the simulation then that means the Vex is equivalent to God, and can do as it pleases to torture them with it's own wishes. To prove that they are real the decide to bring in a Warmind, something the Vex couldn't predict or simulate, but this is dangerous because if they aren't real... that Vex won't be happy. Two hundred and twenty seven simulations escaped, and all unanimously voted to be written into the Vex language and explore their gates, two hundred and twenty seven Chioma Esi's Maya Sundaresh's Duane-Michnida's and Dr. Shim's went to explore the future. Shim believes time is consistent, and that going back in time couldn't change the present because that's what was always meant to happen. Maya suggests different, that they could go into the future and learn something, something vital and bring it back to their present, and change the future. [quote]RECORD 0-CHASM-0 My love. I’ve opened this log as an apology. As a scientist, I believe in record-keeping. I believe in protocols, peer review, and ethical conduct. I believe in the importance of disbelief — you know: let’s run that one more time. What I’m doing here in Lhasa isn’t science. It’s unethical, secret, and shameful. And after what happened in Ishtar, dearest Chioma, I know you’d be furious with me for getting involved. Forty years isn’t far enough to forget a day like that. But I believe it’s important. The least I can do is keep a few notes for you. RECORD 0-CHASM-01 Trial one. Subject one. It was an act of stupid loneliness. I used the device on myself because I... [silence: 0:08] I missed you. We hadn’t been apart for more than a year since we met. I’m not a very good wife, am I? You write me every week, even with all Hyperion’s work and all Hyperion’s distance keeping you from me. And I act like it’s not enough. We built the device in mimicry of the Vex gateway systems from Ishtar. An observatory, yes, but I think of it as a mind-ship. Capable of displacing its payload across space and time. The lab is cold and isolated. We are quarantined from the world, physically and mentally. We can’t send messages out. If we breach the Vex manifolds, even our words might transmit contagion. One night last month I missed you and so I — I thought that I could look inside the device, and find one of the other Chiomas. I thought I could call out to one of the forks we sent out there to explore. I just wanted to send my love. RECORD 0-CHASM-02 Zakharik Gilmanovich Bekhterev. May he rest in peace. When our probes continued to fail, when my report remained our only positive finding, he volunteered to use the device. One minute of subjective experience inside. We took precautions. They worked. Bekhterev’s experience left no physical damage. After we extracted him, he said that he felt determined. I asked him what he meant and he said that he meant it, he had been determined, he could feel all his choices set out before him like a railroad. Deviation was impossible. He died by suicide. I wonder if he was trying to make a point. RECORD 0-CHASM-03 We’ve decided not to abort. It’s insane, isn’t it? There are pressures on us I can’t tell you about until I see you again. The purpose of the system is intelligence, you see. It’s stenciled right on the hull: SxISR. Special asset. We would very much like to make it work reliably. Our supervisory warmind has devised a drug it says will protect and prepare us. I am beginning to wonder if we were wrong about the merchant and the alchemist. Or if that explanation of time was incomplete. RECORD 0-CHASM-09 Kind Lakpha. He meditated before he went in. Nothing but deja'vu and three seconds of screams. The screaming passed and he remembers nothing. The deja'vu hasn’t. He says it’s getting better — he feels that we’ve had this conversation only ten times before, not a thousand. I’ve suggested that we attempt mind forking. We need more sane people to work with. Please forgive me, my love. We are all growing superstitious. The behavior of the device is inconsistent. Impossible to replicate. We turn to ritual behavior to appease it. RECORD 0-CHASM-31 Rajesh. When he reached a displacement of eight he told us he was dead. I believed him. He was dead. He spoke to us. It was true. Whatever he saw, it was his own future. He’s fine, afterwards. When I look into his eyes I wonder what came back wearing his skin. But that thought is unscientific. We speak of nothing but the device. We talk about it like a demigod. When I get out of here I know the whole world will look like a fraying veil. I think it’s clear that part of the problem is substrate. We need more than flesh and drug to survive this. RECORD 0-CHASM-52 I heard you, my love. I was at six, oscillating on the event axis, coordinated with a known manifold. I heard you. You were talking to me — not me, but another me, another Maya Sundaresh. You said, my love, so many strange things have happened, and it’s been so long. We’ve come so far. Do you ever want to go home? And I said, not me but the other me, I said, my love, I am always home. I’m resigning, my love. I’m done with this work and I’m done with being apart from you. I’ll see you again soon. I can’t take this journal out with me, so I’ve left it for the others, and asked them to continue the log. Maybe it’ll become a tradition. The gospel of our little cult.[/quote] This card is the last that we currently have, it is after the events of sending their proxy bodies into the Vex networks, we learn that Chioma and Maya have separated from each other for their own projects for a time, and that Maya concludes she wants to be back with Chioma. But there are a few very important things within this card as well. The notation of the entries for one, the fact that they are using a device that could see into an alternate timeline, and also that at the end Maya asks those who stayed on the project to keep it in that format, but also called them a cult. When you look at the Future War Cult's armor you'll notice the same format is used. When you look at their grimoire you'll notice they use a device from the Golden Age that shows various futures. These are examples of such in no particular order. [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/198353259/0/0]Next[/url]