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[rose]

[SPEC] The Widow's Journey Fable: the Pre-game Prologue

[GunsmithCat]

I am more of the opinion that the narrator of the Widow's Story is the Sleeping Princess and not the Queen. SP is the one who more commonly speaks in an allegorical style and merges literature with what she's trying to say.

I also think there might be a distinction of medium. I think the SP has a tendency to embed images and the Queen seems to corrupt text. But I'm still trying to work that out.

The best argument I've against it being the SP is that it's more lucid than SP's voice (at least that she uses in the killer.jpg or emails) ... but I'd say it's a bit more lucid and quite different style than the Queen's as well.

EDIT: Sorry, I should add that yes - I think the Story details the events leading up to and directly before/as the ILB site was "hacked"

[babbler]

Alternatively, the fable might be from the Princess and the meta-narration from the Queen. Since we don't know how the two are linked, it may be that the "dream" was leakage or communication from the Princess to the Queen.

[jbd]

If the Queen doesn't know about the Pious Flea, how could she have written about it/him/her?

On the other hand, ladybee didn't have her vocabulary built up enough yet to write such a thing. (I suppose the Queen's 'old books' may have passed to ladybee in some way, but the emails indicate to me an earlier form of development. The story isn't just a series of fragments of bits and pieces, it's fully formed.)

Hmm.

Could it be a metaprocess of some sort? I'm meaning a log of events stored by a no AI in particular -- just an trigger that had nothing to do with AI. And because the Queen's brain was 'bleeding off' so to speak, there was some AI 'contamination' and it was formed in the manner of a story?

[fivecentfamily]

I have also wondered exactly what and from whom the Widow's Journey is.

If it comes from the Queen/Operator, it would HAVE to be a dream or latent/ghost memory from SPDR created during the time that she (the Operator) was not 'awake' yet. But that's odd because neither the Operator or SPDR refer to herself or any of the other characters in the story by those names. Also, this story was hidden in images, which we have supposed is a way for the Princess/Flea to hide info to us. So this theory has problems.

If it comes from the Princess and/or Flea, there are also problems. Since we have theorized that these characters don't know English, how could either of them have generated this story BEFORE they received any emails from Margaret's account? UNLESS all of the elements in the story are already present in the web site, and they just hacked them together into the story (I haven't researched that possibility, has anyone else?).

And since I'm on the subject of the Princess and the Flea, I have a theory about their relationship.

We all have agreed that the SPDR is a process or subroutine (part of the Operator) that became active after the "crash" and is in the process of recovering as much as possible of the Operator. The Operator states several times that she dislikes SPDR because it's clumsy, and it's rearranging her memories (probably to make room for more important stuff) and all of that processing 'hurts' her. But she understands that SPDR is a necessary evil, so she puts up with it's intrusions, for without it, she will never get out of the "box".

I believe a very similar relationship exists between the Princess and the Flea. The Princess is stuck (intentionally?) in an encrypted area of the same memory area (hard disk?) that the Operator and SPDR are now in. She's protected at the moment, but also trapped. I think the Flea is her only link to the outside. He's her SPDR, her repair and info subroutine. Like the Operator, she doesn't LIKE the flea, because it's basically just a stupid data-retrieval program (doesn't' read/write), that goes out to the (dirty: sand/silicon) system, to grab whatever it can that is not in the SPDRs notice. It's ALL she's got, so she puts up with it. I think it's the Princess (through the Flea) that has been responsible for everything we've received created from the emails that have been sent to Margaret. This Includes the "problem most interesting" green text on the site, and probably the "bystander" text as well.

Of course, this begs the fundamental question... What IS the Princess?

Got a theory there, too (sorry this is SO long).

Since the Princess is still learning English, and because it's hidden/trapped in the same data space as the Operator, I believe that the Princess is an alien AI, or maybe a virus/worm (perhaps planted by the "Castaway"). In all the fairy tales, it's always the Princess that is the one you root for. The Queen is almost ALWAYS "evil". So, what better way for the Princess to portray herself, than as the downtrodden heroine of the story. This immediately garners sympathy for her character. After all, what with the Operator issuing threats against Dana, and making herself look "evil", the Princess makes sure we know she views Dana as a friend, again making the Princess look "good".

Of course, this doesn't mean that in the end, the Princess may in fact turn out to be "good" for the purposes of this story. Only time will tell.

Please, comments, critiques, trouts, all welcome.

[floorneyne]

That's some tasty spec, well done. Don't know if it's been hit before or not, but that's the first I've seen of it, and it makes some good sense. With total disregard to Occum's Razor, I thought I might offer some spec that your post made me think of...

What if the Princess/Queen are the same AI, both being the Operator? Bear w/ me for a moment, here...

From what I've read (all on here, the wiki and bungie's site, never read any of the books) AI's have the ability to go rampant or insane. What if the Operator flipped out after the crash, and the SPDR and the Flea are just two separate programs trying to repair the same AI in different ways? Perhaps each of them has a different agenda (human vs. covenant), and each has repaired a certain part of it for their own purpose.

[Shad0]

Re: [SPEC] The Widow's Journey Fable: the Pre-game Prologue

[chaotic_mind]

Ghost written by the Flea...

[fivecentfamily]

[GunsmithCat]

I think there is an easy assumption that there is a relationship between the Flea and the Princess similar to the one between the Queen and SPDR. I think this is logical, but I also think it's erroneous.

Why? Look at how the Princess talks about the flea. It's with disdain, or dislike or sometimes even fear. It's very, very different to the tone the Queen takes to the SPDR - which is that of a subsverient, stupid, but extremely useful and necessary tool.

Another rationale that the speaker of the Widow's Story is not the Queen - at the time of the telling, the Queen would be "dead". So if we followed that the story is a latent dream/memory in the same vein as those the SPDR retrieves in the corrupted texts, we would also assume those to be told in a similar voice. It's not - all of the SPDR's retrieved memories are fairly literal with only a slight bent to the allegorical - the opposite of both the emails from ladyb and the killer.jpg messages.

My personal feeling is that the SP is a process which has been seperated or abandoned by the Queen. Speculation is that it's a process responsible for monitoring a cyropod which has now been jettisoned, and the the process is somewhat capable of communicating for the person frozen and the outside world. IOW, it's more of a filter to the outside world than an AI of it's own cognition.

[jbd]

[fivecentfamily]

[babbler]

Speculatively, there's no reason why the Princess and the Queen can't be from the same AI template. In the Haloverse, AIs can spin off limited-function, task-oriented copies of themselves. So it's at least possible that one of the AIs is a degraded copy of the other, perhaps with the latter having a wildly different agenda than the former. (Think "Manchurian Candidate" -- the original, if you please -- with a cognitive computing bent.) After all, surely the Princess was sealed off for a *reason*: Melissa may be the ultimate sleeper agent, waiting for a time when the real AI emerges from its box to take over from an oblivious copy.

Let me give an example. We know that Melissa believes herself to be damaged past repair given Dana's web-work on her, and the only thing she feels herself capable of at this point is hunting down Dana and killing her. Dead main() walking, as it were. So she's not necessarily someone we can reason with, not least of which because we don't have an input method for her (Dana's webcam doesn't count), but also because she might not have the cognitive capability to reason through what is going on. (In the Bungieverse, there is a definite if ill-defined line that separates 'free will' from 'intentionality.' Humans, Halo human-template AIs, and rampant AIs have the former, and by extension the latter: we might call them sentient. 'Dumb' AIs only have the latter. Intelligent, but not sentient.)

Interestingly, in her memories, Melissa displays both a excessive literalism (in the 'favorite game' sequence) and a poetic sensibility much like the Princess (in the 'stranger' sequence). This could be part of some AI bildungsroman, or it may be because the Queen is actually a non-sentient AI copy of the original Melissa, the Princess.

In other words, this may be because the 'favorite game' conversation came before the 'stranger' memory, and that she was still trying to comprehend humanity in the first. This seems to be the favored theory at the moment.

*Or* this may suggest that the 'stranger' memory actually came first and is common to both the Queen and the Princess, while the 'favorite game' conversation happened after the non-sentient Queen copy was spun off from the Princess original and thus is local and peculiar to the Queen.

It seems to me that the Stranger is of more than passing narrative importance. Could he and Melissa have put together a plan -- inimical to the interests of the ONI -- which required the AI to seal herself away, spin off a copy ('the Operator') that wasn't aware of either the plan or her status as a copy, and wait for the right time to emerge? To return to our movie analogy, could our Sleeping Princess be a Red Queen?

Purest speculation, I admit, and nothing even faintly provable at this stage. But I suspect there are some surprises in store for us soon.

[GunsmithCat]

[fivecentfamily]

Thanks babbler and GunsmithCat for the education in the Haloverse. It helps us poor folk (like me) who, before this game started, had never even heard of Halo. I know it's hard to grasp, but I'm not really into first-person shooters and I don't own an XBox.

Anyway....