View topic - [QUESTION] How Does The Princess Resist the Flea?

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Forum index » Archive » Archive: The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!) » The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!): General/Updates

[QUESTION] How Does The Princess Resist the Flea?

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noideaforausername
Decorated

Joined: 24 Aug 2004
Posts: 185
Location: UK

as with all my posts, i'm probably risking a serious trouting, but i just had an idea. What if the characters aren't all separate, but some kind of "holy trinity", each with a different task to perform?
The "find the truth, seek the truth, reveal the truth" mantra seems somehow relevant..
(i'm trying to form the ideas into sentences, so this is a bit random)
just thinking.. if the Flea is there to 'find' things, the Widow to defend, and the Princess to.. i dunno, communicate it in some way?
maybe the crash damaged and separated them, and instead of working together, they're working against each other.
bah, i'm rambling, i'm gonna go to bed

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 9:53 pm

Platonix
Decorated

Joined: 28 Aug 2004
Posts: 174
Location: Keene, New Hampshire

truegent wrote:

serial wrote:

In the Yellow Brick Road log, the Flea labels itself as "Seeker" and the Proc 0 as "Princess."

emphasis mine
In order to be Proc0 wouldn't you have to be the first process run? This would imply that SP was on the system (or started running on the system) before the Queen, SPDR, or Flea?

I'm pretty sure she's extern proc 0, the first external process. As opposed to something fundamental to Melissa's operation. When SPDR checked for external processes, it found two, SP and PF. It then referred to them as proc 0 and proc 1, the first and second of the external processes it located.

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 10:47 pm

Zemat
Boot

Joined: 30 Aug 2004
Posts: 54

Platonix wrote:

truegent wrote:

serial wrote:

In the Yellow Brick Road log, the Flea labels itself as "Seeker" and the Proc 0 as "Princess."

emphasis mine
In order to be Proc0 wouldn't you have to be the first process run? This would imply that SP was on the system (or started running on the system) before the Queen, SPDR, or Flea?

Hmm, if both PF and SP are extern procs then probably both aren't human in origin. PF is quite probably a Covenant AI (already said, I know) and observing SP playful/curious nature (much like Guilty Spark) I'm starting to speculate she may be a Forerunner AI!! Maybe she came from the strange alien artifact that maybe is also responsible for the outage/shipwreck/time-travel.

EDIT: SP talks too much about being trapped in a small coffin (artifact). Maybe when scientists tried to analize it (connecting it to a mainframe through a twisted cable maybe) they released her also triggering everything else.

_________________
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Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 11:25 pm
Last edited by Zemat on Tue Aug 31, 2004 11:31 pm; edited 1 time in total

Platonix
Decorated

Joined: 28 Aug 2004
Posts: 174
Location: Keene, New Hampshire

Zemat wrote:

Platonix, truegent and serial wrote:

stuff

Hmm...here's an idea. perhaps the Sleeping Princess' glass coffin was the osmium Forerunner artifact? There have been SPECs floating around about Melissa & Co. arriving in this time within a piece of technology rather than just their data appearing in our network...maybe Melissa (and the Flea who was riding her, and the SPDR which is her immune system) somehow wound up in the Forerunner artifact with the Princess? Then the Artifact got flung through time somehow, landed here, and all four of them stumbled from the artifact into our Internet?

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 11:30 pm

Astald
Unfettered

Joined: 01 Aug 2004
Posts: 747
Location: Just outside of Pittsburgh (Go Steelers!)

Quote:

maybe Melissa (and the Flea who was riding her

I dont think Melissa and the Flea have that kind of relationship yet.
(uncontrollable fit of laughter)

Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 12:15 am

TwistedEar
Greenhorn

Joined: 25 Aug 2004
Posts: 5

Platonix wrote:

Zemat wrote:

Platonix, truegent and serial wrote:

stuff

One huge problem with that is that the Princess says that the Queen put her in the coffin. Therefore there is a problem by saying teh SP is a forerunner AI already in teh artifact, because the Operator couldn't have put her in the artifact.

Maybe there si something in this... unless the Operator was in teh artifact, and took over the ship. The SPDR is a non-intelligent response, and cannibalised broken processes to rebuild the Queen.. therefore Melissa gets her identity as the operator from the reconstructions donor memories, not from her own. just a wild theory, that's all...

Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 4:59 am

Zemat
Boot

Joined: 30 Aug 2004
Posts: 54

TwistedEar wrote:

Platonix wrote:

But maybe the coffin is more a reference to some sort of firewall or deal destined to prevent her from getting out from the artifact. Being her an alien AI, the local AI must take precautions against it. She didnt' do that with PF obviously because the PF is a stealth program that only surfaced after the incident.

Another reason to believe SP being alien in origin is her initial difficulty to communicate in our language and the really fast way she picked up our way of speaking. That she only refers to her using fantasy tale analogies may be that her understading of our world is not complex enough to understand the difference between a fantasy and her digital reality the same way we do.

I have been thinking, what if the SP is actually consulting other web pages to get all her fantastical references? Or meaybe she got them from Mellissa's databases. There may be really other webpages associated with the game. Magical-words-as-webapges anyone?

_________________
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Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 1:35 pm
Last edited by Zemat on Wed Sep 01, 2004 1:47 pm; edited 1 time in total

vector
Unfettered

Joined: 28 Aug 2004
Posts: 721
Location: Portland OR

Quote:

I have been thinking on this more and more. I think that the Princess is Genie, Jerseys origional AI. The one that Durga "Killed" or put in a coffin. Princess does not have the abilities of Melissa or Durga but is still there hideing from the Queen who wants to put her back into the coffin. The reason she was put there... because Genie/Princess tried to errase Durga/Queen.

Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 1:41 pm

Platonix
Decorated

Joined: 28 Aug 2004
Posts: 174
Location: Keene, New Hampshire

vector wrote:

There are a lot of theories going back and forth about Genie still being around, but I don't think it's possible. The only real sound we get of Genie being dealt with is half a second of static and then cutoff, but Jersey says "I mean, you didn't just kill her, you killed her!" Why would he react that way to static? He must have seen something on his monitor that would indicate that Genie is thoroughly toast.

Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 3:57 pm

GunsmithCat
Unfettered

Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 459

Platonix wrote:

vector wrote:

And why would Durga keep her around? What would the point be?

Plus, SP seems a lot smarter and more adaptable than Genie was. SP can evade Queen pretty well, Genie never stood a chance.

Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 4:04 pm

Kaziel
Boot

Joined: 24 Aug 2004
Posts: 24
Location: Washington, DC

GunsmithCat wrote:

truegent wrote:

serial wrote:

In the Yellow Brick Road log, the Flea labels itself as "Seeker" and the Proc 0 as "Princess."

emphasis mine
In order to be Proc0 wouldn't you have to be the first process run? This would imply that SP was on the system (or started running on the system) before the Queen, SPDR, or Flea?

Interesting thought. Might also be a priority though, not chronological. Being the zero priority process might be her way of hiding.

Hehehe. Princess is a TSR. Figures.

Another thought might be that she's a FAT-type program. Kinda like one who keeps track of everything and everyone else, and thusly she is walled off, to keep herself safe if something happens to other programs.
I have that idea, b/c a FAT is always sector 0 of a hard drive.

Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 4:26 pm

DarkStorm
Veteran

Joined: 23 Jul 2004
Posts: 76

Re: The flea's not on the inside.

vidstudent wrote:

The flea's speech has all been, for the most part, command code. I really believe he's not an AI, but a straight-up hacker in the Queen's system. From that angle, he can look at names of processes and try to access them. "Ooh, what's this proc0? Maybe I can use it...?"

The Flea only started "talking" in computer code after it claimed to be an upgraded version of SPDR. It's been imitating SPDR's style ever since. Before that, it only "spoke" in one-word fragments, as it still does at the end of the Flea/Princess conversations, except when it was repeating its mantra.

-DS-

Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 4:48 pm

Kaziel
Boot

Joined: 24 Aug 2004
Posts: 24
Location: Washington, DC

Re: The flea's not on the inside.

DarkStorm wrote:

vidstudent wrote:

Maybe, instead of claiming to be the SPDR, it absorbed it's programming, hence how it started talking more consciously.

Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 4:51 pm

Nova
Unfettered

Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 529
Location: Frog blasting the vent core

Re: The flea's not on the inside.

Kaziel wrote:

Maybe, instead of claiming to be the SPDR, it absorbed it's programming, hence how it started talking more consciously.

The Flea is adaptive: it learned that SPDR code talk was the way to get things done. By imitating the SPDR it was able to get the real SPDR deleted and exert some real influence over Melissa. The code worked for it - so now that's what it's using. Presumably, if it found some other way of communicating that was more effective in carrying out its mission it would start using that instead.

We've already seen it try to emulate the Princess' mode of communication; perhaps it will abandon the SPDR code when talking to her as it realises that it won't work. Maybe as it learns more about the Princess it'll start talking in fairytale parables or something.

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Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 5:55 pm

princeofthesword
Boot

Joined: 12 Aug 2004
Posts: 67

Long winded post yet again...

Greetings all, I'm back from my trip and sure glad to be. Heh didn't think there'd be this much change, but a lot has been going on hasn't it? Big thanks to Max Damage for his efforts to compile the .wavs into a coherent story, that's helped a lot.

Well, onto the subject at hand, as this is the only one I feel up to tackling at the moment. It's late, please forgive typos, and while I've read through most of the forum, there may be trout in here anyway, so read at your own risk. This is long, by the way, all my posts usually are. I save up, for some reason.

Pious Flea is parasitic, it seems, with no real ability to "infect." That interests me, and yes this has been mentioned before in other posts, but it bears thinking about. Like most viruses and trojans, he can only work his dirty magic where he is allowed to. Meaning, he must be purposefully activated, or allowed, to do his job. Queen allowed him (quite easily, it seems) to take the place of Spider. I'd like to know why, any spec is appreciated. Yes, I know, we've talked about it before. But keep with me.
-We have the Princess's account of the Flea and the Queen getting together, and the removal of the SPDR. What happened, in progamming terms? Any thoughts? Even though Melissa is in a pretty screwed up state, why would she forget that SPDR was her only version of the repair program? Did she "Hate" the Widow so much as to not really care about her demise? Was "emotion" involved to some strange degree? I'm curious as to the computing and programming background of the Flea taking over the Spider's place. He imitated SPDR, yes, but I, a mere human, know better than to open just any old attachment, no matter how friendly it seems. Might be looking into it more than it requires, I understand that. It just irritates me that the Queen succumbed so easily to the Flea's advances, damaged though she be. But there are questions there, and the answers might shed more light on how the Flea operates, and his apparent adaptability. (Covenant?)

I was reading the post about the Flea not being a Covenant AI, and that's possible. Not probable, but it's possible, and spec is good. The Princess's statement about being older than the Flea and the Queen seems to me that she's definitely a Forerunner AI, which leaves the Flea out in the cold as a Covie virus thingamabob (as well as thoughts that SP is Jan, or pretty much anyone else you want to insert there. Sorry, I just don't see it. She had to learn English, her personality fluctuates despite her friendliness, she's older than seven years? Too many loopholes...). What does this have to do with the topic? Well...

If the Princess is a Forerunner AI, she's a lot more advanced than the Flea by far. She keeps threatening the Flea, and he keeps, well, fleeing. Comes back for more later, but he still seems to know when she's really making threats and he takes off. My question is why doesn't she just kill him?
Possibilities are:
1 She can't, she's just bluffing (leads me to worry about if he ever calls her bluff) and
2: She can, but she's leaving him around for (whatever spec you want here) reason. She's powerful, and getting stronger by the day. She converses with us, with the Flea, but she's still scared of the Queen. There's a link there we need to work on. Where does her power start and end? Plus, she's the most human AI I've seen, even more than Melissa, yet she had to learn to be this way. Heh, more human than we even realize, in that. Like a child growing, learning.

One more Pious Flea topic that I know is troutable somewhere, somehow: He's on the Honey page pretty exclusively now, the one page mentioning arachnids. Varroa mites, misspelled. Cute coincidence? "Mistakes?" I find it odd that SP would feel the need to tell us at this stage in the game that "making a mistake and getting to a 404 lets you play games with me!" unless she's just puppetmastering for newcomers. This has been looked at before, or something similar, in Kahnawake's excellent post topic about the Pious Flea's movements. Programming randomness or intentional mystery? You be the judge. I want to know if there's a mystery in that honey page.

Yes, I tend to ask more questions than I answer. But that is mostly to point out questions I don't always see addressed that may be important to the overall picture. There are a lot of unanswered questions that might be answerable with thought, taking what we do have and thinking critically about it. There ARE puzzles in this game, though they may be unconventional. Spec points out angles to everyone that might not have been looked at, so keep the spec coming. Keep it clean, though, and don't clutter with new topics if possible. Think things through, but know we're all glad to read posts! Farewell.

Posted: Sat Sep 04, 2004 2:24 am

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