Return to Unfiction unforum
 a.r.g.b.b 
FAQ FAQ   Search Search 
 
Welcome!
New users, PLEASE read these forum guidelines. New posters, SEARCH before posting and read these rules before posting your killer new campaign. New players may also wish to peruse the ARG Player Tutorial.

All users must abide by the Terms of Service.
Website Restoration Project
This archiving project is a collaboration between Unfiction and Sean Stacey (SpaceBass), Brian Enigma (BrianEnigma), and Laura E. Hall (lehall) with
the Center for Immersive Arts.
Announcements
This is a static snapshot of the
Unfiction forums, as of
July 23, 2017.
This site is intended as an archive to chronicle the history of Alternate Reality Games.
  

The time now is Tue Nov 19, 2024 7:50 pm
All times are UTC - 4 (DST in action)		 View posts in this forum since last visit
View unanswered posts in this forum
Calendar
 Forum index » Archive » Archive: The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!) » The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!): General/Updates
[SPEC] The Durga<->Melissa connection through time
View previous topicView next topic
Page 3 of 14 [197 Posts]   Goto page: Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ..., 12, 13, 14  Next
Author Message
raw19
Boot

Joined: 16 Aug 2004
Posts: 61

 		Re: Sources and Voices
Quote:
I think that the easier flow to swim with is that Melissa is RECIEVING (in an as yet unexplained fashion) from SOURCE Durga, and TRANSMITTING to us (the supposed crew). Her desire to influence to source is, to me, manifested more in Durgas preoccupations than with our pavlovian pay phone parades.


agreed.
And by Durga's preoccupations you mean her thoughts about bees right?

The question I'm concerned with now is while Melissa is attempting to influence the source, is it really her, or the Pious flea that is doing the influencing? Is Durga's investigating Kamal due to the mission Melissa was on, or is it the Flea's objective? Perhaps neither. I think at this point it's still too early to tell exactly what kind of influencing is going on, and who is influencing who.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 8:59 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
GunsmithCat
Unfettered


Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 459

 		Few thoughts on this:

1) Nearly every physical thing Princess describes seems like it could relate to some computer metaphor. Silicon, data, LEDs, CD-Rom drives, twisted pair cables. This fits with how Queen describes her surroundings as well.

Somehow it's hard to imagine a Forerunner crystal embedded on a motherboard.

2) Flea is trying to get Queen to transmit the truth. Queen admits she has seen the truth before. This would suggest Queen is tapping her past to get to what Flea wants. There doesn't seem the need for her to be tapping the future to get something she has already seen.

3) "Axons firing" to me says "remembering" or maybe "thinking", but it doesn't really say "intercept broadcasts from future self".

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 9:14 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
rose
...and then Magic happens


Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 4117

 		I agree with the connection
1. I agree that the two are connected: Durga thinking about bees is clearly related to her relationship with Melissa/ the Operator and, as others have pointed out, that Durga's inexplicable (to it) interest in Kamal is from Melissa's influence.

2. We don't know how either of them got to the places where they are but we do speculate that a connection between Jersey and his father exists, that his father is the Castaway so a connection between Jersey's father and Melissa exists, so we can use as a working theory that a connection between Jersey and Melissa exists. I think that either Jersey's father or Melissa itself may have sent Durga to Jersey - possibly as an emergency measure.

3. We know that according to the Sleeping Princess, who seems to be a reliable witness, that the Pious Flea told Melissa/the Operator to construct certain secret road. The wave files from those roads gives us two things: the evacuation of Troy and the ship called the Apocalypso dropping into the sublunar orbit. As the mission of the Flea is to seek and reveal the truth we need to consider these waves as being uncovered at its' instigation.

4. We connect all the .wav stories through a power interruption, the cause of which has yet to be identified. In particular, the appearance of Durga is somehow connected to a power interruption. I don't recall Dana mentioning any similar power interruption affecting her computer or the ilovebees site. Given the visible, tangible changes to that site, Dana would have been immediately aware of them. She would have noted that a power interruption occured before the AI ended up on her computer ( or wherever they are.) So the appearance of Melissa here and Durga there do not correlate in that respect.
_________________
I love this site for being free, in every sense of the word~Spacebass

Mankind was my business, the common good was my business.~ Dickens

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 9:36 am
 View user's profile Visit poster's website
 Back to top 
TheHulk
Boot

Joined: 10 Aug 2004
Posts: 45
raw19 wrote:


how about a multiple personality AI? split between Durga, SP and Melissa?


That is what I think.

http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6106


Also, the voices intercepted weekly are the voices in the wav files. There is NO way it is "us", otherwise it would say DAILY, not weekly. The new wavs come out just about every week.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 9:56 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
raw19
Boot

Joined: 16 Aug 2004
Posts: 61
GunsmithCat wrote:

3) "Axons firing" to me says "remembering" or maybe "thinking", but it doesn't really say "intercept broadcasts from future self".


I understood the axons firing as her reaching out over the payphone system to communicate with us.
Admittedly there's isn't anything concrete saying she's getting these transmissions from her future self, but she is receiving them.
Quote:
Inbound:
The voices are of unknown origin
-she's hearing the transmissions, doesn't know where they're coming from.

Quote:
By broadcasting the voices to my crew, they will be able to assess the damage.

She's sending out the voices to her crew. She thinks we are her crew. What she is sending us are the wav files. Therefore voices = wav files. The wav files are being transmitted to her.

see my P.S. post on page 2 for why I think these are recent transmissions instead of rebuilt memories.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 10:04 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
raw19
Boot

Joined: 16 Aug 2004
Posts: 61

 		Re: I agree with the connection
rose wrote:

4. We connect all the .wav stories through a power interruption, the cause of which has yet to be identified. In particular, the appearance of Durga is somehow connected to a power interruption. I don't recall Dana mentioning any similar power interruption affecting her computer or the ilovebees site. Given the visible, tangible changes to that site, Dana would have been immediately aware of them. She would have noted that a power interruption occured before the AI ended up on her computer ( or wherever they are.) So the appearance of Melissa here and Durga there do not correlate in that respect.


Not a power inturruption. A communications inturruption. While it doesn't seem like it was quite as widespread as in Jersey's time, Margret's e-mail was hijacked. Many people got strange e-mails from ladybee777.
In Jersey's time the communications grid is probably a lot more interconnected, therefore Durga's arrival would have a more widespread effect. When Melissa landed on ilovebees.com, the ladybee777 hotmail account was the only comm connection she had.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 10:18 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
johnny5
Entrenched

Joined: 17 Aug 2004
Posts: 995
Location: Elysian Fields

 		Well, Melissa (SP?) did describe email as a primitive chatter protocol.

--john--

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 2:10 pm
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
MeKiwi
Decorated


Joined: 30 Aug 2004
Posts: 260
Location: San Francisco
raw19 wrote:
She's sending out the voices to her crew. She thinks we are her crew. What she is sending us are the wav files. Therefore voices = wav files. The wav files are being transmitted to her.


Yeah, I agree with raw except for one small (or maybe not so small) point which just came to me... I'm not so sure I beleive the WAV files are being transmitted TO her. Melissa says that new voices are intercepted weekly. Doesn't "intercepted" imply that she was not the intended recipient??

Hmm... so who is the intended recipient, then? Pious Flea? Sleeping Beauty? Someone else in the future-time that Melissa somehow intercepted through time? Interesting...

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 3:48 pm
 View user's profile AIM Address
 Back to top 
raw19
Boot

Joined: 16 Aug 2004
Posts: 61
MeKiwi wrote:


Yeah, I agree with raw except for one small (or maybe not so small) point which just came to me... I'm not so sure I beleive the WAV files are being transmitted TO her. Melissa says that new voices are intercepted weekly. Doesn't "intercepted" imply that she was not the intended recipient??

Hmm... so who is the intended recipient, then? Pious Flea? Sleeping Beauty? Someone else in the future-time that Melissa somehow intercepted through time? Interesting...


hm. good point. Not only do we not know who the intended recipient is, we don't know who is sending them in the first place.

[SPEC] I can't help but picture the Pious Flea establishing this connection to his brother Flea sitting on Durga's shoulder, but I've got no proof.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 4:12 pm
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
johnny5
Entrenched

Joined: 17 Aug 2004
Posts: 995
Location: Elysian Fields

 		Shared memory?
If Durga and Melissa share a common memory or storage medium, then the "voices" would just show up on Melissa's side without her knowing how they got there.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 4:26 pm
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
xnbomb
Unfettered


Joined: 13 Oct 2003
Posts: 660
Location: J302B S8JDC

 		The Operator, Durga, and the Queen
I have some more speculation I'd like to share. This one is kind of a biggie ... it ties together a lot of pieces that we have. It concerns the nature of the Operator, the Queen, and Durga, and The Operator's arrival at www.ilovebees.com (amongst other things). It is a long read, but I think you'll enjoy it Smile .

To begin with, I want to propose some ideas about the nature of the Operator. She's some sort of digital entity whose purpose is to collect data by subverting other networked systems and intercepting communications. She seems to have immense processing speed, has never found data security that she cannot simply breeze by, and is more than likely multi-threading. What I mean by the last statement is that she can certainly do more than one thing at a time. Even today's digital technology can do more than one thing at a time, so I bet a digital entity like the Operator can do lots of things at once.

But I'm thinking that the Operator can be multi-threaded to an even greater extent; I suspect that she can 'be' in more than one place at a time. It's difficult to conceive of the Operator existing in any one place in particular. After all, she's constantly reaching through networks to find information, and apparently using the resources of the systems she visits to 'run' herself and power her processes. Durga is running in Jersey's system, the Operator in her vessel, and the Queen in the www.ilovebees.com server.

So how can we imagine the Operator? Is she a singular entity, or many interlinked processes (perhaps best thought of as several instances of herself)? I think the way to disentangle this is through the lens of networking limitations. I imagine the Operator as fairly well contained in her vessel at the beginning of our story. The vessel is somewhat incommunicado as it is on a intelligence-gathering mission, and for that sort of thing, usually you don't want to give away your position, so you don't do a lot of transmitting, and your allies don't transmit to you very often because you don't want enemies to intercept an incoming communication that gives away your position.

But the Operator's vessel does phone home occasionally, apparently making use of slipstream communication to overcome the extreme time lag that would otherwise be incurred if they used electromagnetic methods limited by the speed of light:

the Operator wrote:
I was checking the slipstream packets. I do that before I send them out. You knew that, right?

I think that's one piece of the puzzle. The Operator could potentially move across the vast expanse of space to access distant systems by slipstream communication. But if she did so, the part of herself that she sent would be cut off from the rest of her. It would be an asynchronous and disconnected instance of herself until it was able to reestablish contact with the rest of her.

This leads to the question of why she would do this. To answer that, I'll again quote one of the Operator's conversations with Capt. Greene:

the Operator and Capt. Greene wrote:

"Captain Greene," I said. "Things arent quite right."

She waited for me to explain.

"I have the sense that things are being... moved around."

"Like a virus?" she asked.

I shook my head no, I didnt feel sick. Then nodded, yes. An intruder, something inhabiting the system.

"What do you think, Melissa?"

"I might be compromised," I said to her.

"I still want to know what you think. When could it have been introduced?"

"The Covenant transmission?"

"Maybe they suspect were monitoring them."

"A virus piggybacking," she said. "Could they do that? Their systems are so much different than ours."

"Weve reversed engineered their systems," I said. "And they have clearly reverse engineered some of ours."

"Have you done anything out of character?" she asked.

"Not yet," I said. I hoped it was true.

At this point, we're told that something is crawling around in the Operator's mind, potentially influencing her behavior. We're given the distinct impression that it is a virus that entered the Operator when she intercepted a Covenant transmission.

At this point, we should theorize a little about what a Covenant virus of this sort would be designed to do. My suspicion is that it's chief mission would be counter-intelligence: To find out what the enemy knows and get that information back to the Covenant. Also, I get the impression from reading the writings of various Halo sages on this forum that the Covenant is trying hard to locate Earth, which is one reason why humanity has to be so careful about their communications.

So we have a situation where a Covenant counter-intelligence bug is lurking around in the shadows trying to see what it can find out and influencing the Operator's behavior. Does this sounds like anyone we know ... the Pious Flea perhaps? "Seek the truth, behold the truth, reveal the truth" is what he does. And his influence has managed to get the Queen to switch from resisting to revealing, something that an entity in her line of work would otherwise not do willingly.

So what I've suggested so far is that the Pious Flea was on board as far back as on the spacecraft. I'm going to proceed to suggest that the Pious Flea probably hitched a ride with the Operator from her ship to Earth. Here's how I come to this idea: The Operator enjoys the time she spends with the Castaway. Here's what she says about him:

the Operator wrote:
He wasn't regular crew, just along for the ride. We picked him up in deep space, where he deployed Buoys, sending out waves of sound to confuse the Enemy.

We also know that he liked jazz and swing music. This sounds an awful lot like Jersey Morelli's dad, Jason. Here's a quote from Jersey, from the_human_heart.wav:

Jersey wrote:
My dad loves this stuff. He says ... Well, he's away a lot, like, years at a time, it drives him crazy.

Earlier, in jersey.wav, Durga states:

Durga wrote:
Father Jason is a Corporal in the Signal Corps, attached to Naval intelligence. Radio beacon deployment program. He left you the material currently playing over this rooms audio server's.

It's a fairly airtight supposition that Jersey's dad, Jason Morelli, is the Castaway ... they have too much in common for this to be a coincidence. We also know that the Operator enjoyed listening to his music, she said the experience made her feel real.

At this point, I need to present a conjecture that is anything but airtight: The Covenant bug is present already, lurking in the shadows of her mind and influencing the Operator.

EDIT: Extrasonic's useful criticism has demonstrated that how I previously stated this next portion of my idea was unclear and unnecessarily specific. Below is an improved version that is more in line with how I was thinking of it.

The Operator is interested in the Castaway because of her encounter with him, but to find out more about him, she needs to access data on Earth, and the only practical way to do so in a reasonable time frame is to make use of slipstream packets to network with those systems and make those inquiries. Normally, she wouldn't do this sort of thing because it has the potential to comprimise her mission's security, but the Covenant virus influences her judgement to cause her to make a decision she would normally not make otherwise.

Thus we have Durga suddenly appearing on Jersey's system. Furthermore, Durga doesn't know who she is or why she is there because she is cut off from the rest of her Operator self by virtue of the fact that they are not in continuous networked contact. Durga is an instance of the Operator that is separated from the rest of herself by the vast reach of space, a limitation that can only be overcome in a synchronous fashion by the use of slipstream communication, which naturally is only used occasionally. Until Durga can get back in touch with the Operator instance, she won't know who she is.

Now, you may be asking yourself how this leads to the Operator finding herself at www.ilovebees.com. This is where it gets a little more interesting. We also know that the Operator's ship has some kind of strange object in its hold. From what the Halo sages on our forum have provided, it seems likely it is a Forerunner artifact. Apparently, one such artifact of which we have previous knowledge is (or perhaps was) a crystal can warp space and time. What we know about this new object is that it is something encased in a metallic cylinder made of osmium, likely designed to contain whatever electromagnetic field the object inside emits. However, the container doesn't totally isolate its effect because it could still be sensed, albeit faintly:

the Operator wrote:
Very faint magnetic fields in complex tracery. Not an object, then. A device.

Time for some what ifs: What if the spacecraft's slipstream communications array is located somewhere near the cargo hold where the artifact is being stored? What if the slipstream packets that the Operator uses to send herself to Jersey get distorted by the artifact's effect and also cause another part of her to be sent back in time, arriving also on Earth, just much, much earlier. This would be the mechanism by which the Queen finds herself marooned on the www.ilovebees.com server. Somehow, the slipstream packets travel through space and time (because of the alien object's faint field which perhaps interacts with slipstream radiation, or whatever it is) and arrive at present day Earth, depositing the Queen (and others that were along for the ride) in a web server.

There are a lot of leaps in what I've written that may or may not be justified, depending on your point of view. At the very least, I've presented some ideas that are possible given the information we have. Whether or not they turn out to be right, we'll find out later as more is revealed ... that's what speculation is all about Smile . I've certainly leaned on information and ideas gleaned from other players on the forum and in chat here. I don't suggest these are my ideas exclusively. But that's what community and discussion is all about Smile .

One last set of ideas: Durga's inexplicable mentioning of bees in recent .wav files suggest that a connection remains between her and the Queen, perhaps by virtue of the same alien artifact voodoo that caused them to get split in time in the first place. Durga mentions that she finds Kamal very interesting, but she doesn't know why. One reason may be because Kamal, Hiro, and Aidan live in the Bay Area. We can guess this because of the repeated mention of the Berkeley police in shock_sticks.wav. It could be another Berkeley I suppose, but I'll use Occam's Razor and suggest that it might as well be that Berkeley. We know that the Queen is very interested in San Francisco, since she's looking for Dana. Perhaps Durga is very interested in happenings at the same location in her time because of this mysterious connection between her and the Queen that could be a result of the weird time mirroring effect that split them in the first place.

EDIT: Because Extrasonic's useful criticism demonstrated some ways in which how I wrote up my ideas were not entirely true to how I had conceived them
_________________
My location is a little tricky, but sooner or later, you'll get the knack.

{J302B S8JDC, 8996N M8L4W, 92D40 Q1JX5, 4PPRN R2B97, 8DC7C NZJNV, 8CH7V Q891H}

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 4:28 pm
Last edited by xnbomb on Thu Sep 02, 2004 11:44 pm; edited 1 time in total
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
MeKiwi
Decorated


Joined: 30 Aug 2004
Posts: 260
Location: San Francisco
raw19 wrote:
hm. good point. Not only do we not know who the intended recipient is, we don't know who is sending them in the first place.

[SPEC] I can't help but picture the Pious Flea establishing this connection to his brother Flea sitting on Durga's shoulder, but I've got no proof.


Hmm, interesting picture.

Up until just now, I was thinking of something along the same lines... and I was thinking that the "Brother Flea" was using Durga to send the record and send the transmissions... HOWEVER, there's something VERY INTERESTING I just noticed in the Jersey/Durga story-arc...

In curious_girl @ 18 seconds, Jersey gets up and walks around the room. If the WAV file was being recorded by Durga, I'd expect Jersey's voice to pan while he walks around the room... BUT, listen carefully and you'll notice it's Durga's voice which pans! This leads me to believe that the recording device is actually ON JERSEY and not on Durga!

This same panning of Durga's voice occurs on exclusive_license at 20 seconds when Jersey gets up and on awful_fast when Jersey stands up at 27 seconds. Again, Jersey's voice doesn't pan but Durga's does (at 38 secs).

Listening to creepy again, I wonder if Jersey *knows* other people are listening to him because *he* is recording the messages and sending them out. Maybe he's just saying the whole "creepy" stuff to Durga to see if she detects his recording/transmissions or not.

What do you all think?

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 4:37 pm
 View user's profile AIM Address
 Back to top 
johnny5
Entrenched

Joined: 17 Aug 2004
Posts: 995
Location: Elysian Fields

 		OK, well reasoned spec. So where does the SP fit in?

--john--

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 4:42 pm
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
Dorkmaster
Unfictologist


Joined: 27 Jul 2004
Posts: 1328
Location: The People's Republic of Dork

 		xnbomb, I congratulate you on another well thought, well constructed pice of monumental spec.

And I tend to follow you except for one little point. How do we explain the rest of the gang at ILB? SPDR, the Sleeping Princess, etc... How do they fit into your slipstream/forerunner artifact theory? I don't think this point breaks your spec in any way, just tweaks it or makes it bend greatly... I curiously await your response...
-DM
_________________
"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet." -William Gibson
"Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." - PJ O'Rourke
"ACADEMY, n. A modern school where football is taught." - Ambrose Bierce

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 4:43 pm
 View user's profile Visit poster's website AIM Address
 Back to top 
Mazian
Unfettered

Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 529
Location: San Francisco, CA
MeKiwi wrote:
raw19 wrote:
hm. good point. Not only do we not know who the intended recipient is, we don't know who is sending them in the first place.

[SPEC] I can't help but picture the Pious Flea establishing this connection to his brother Flea sitting on Durga's shoulder, but I've got no proof.


Hmm, interesting picture.

Up until just now, I was thinking of something along the same lines... and I was thinking that the "Brother Flea" was using Durga to send the record and send the transmissions... HOWEVER, there's something VERY INTERESTING I just noticed in the Jersey/Durga story-arc...

In curious_girl @ 18 seconds, Jersey gets up and walks around the room. If the WAV file was being recorded by Durga, I'd expect Jersey's voice to pan while he walks around the room... BUT, listen carefully and you'll notice it's Durga's voice which pans! This leads me to believe that the recording device is actually ON JERSEY and not on Durga!

This same panning of Durga's voice occurs on exclusive_license at 20 seconds when Jersey gets up and on awful_fast when Jersey stands up at 27 seconds. Again, Jersey's voice doesn't pan but Durga's does (at 38 secs).

Listening to creepy again, I wonder if Jersey *knows* other people are listening to him because *he* is recording the messages and sending them out. Maybe he's just saying the whole "creepy" stuff to Durga to see if she detects his recording/transmissions or not.

What do you all think?


Checked all waves. Hot Axon, you're right! Shocked Durga's voice pans, when Jersey moves around the room.

Jersey is the central point of focus.

Something I mentioned in another thread that seems relevant to restate here. The other interesting thing to note is that the Jersey/Durga thread are the only clips that do not have the wind/rewind sounds except for the very beginning of the act, and the very end. (For both the original axon's and the hivekuts axons)

Good find MeKiwi! Cool

PostPosted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 4:45 pm
 View user's profile Yahoo Messenger
 Back to top 
Display posts from previous:   Sort by:   
Page 3 of 14 [197 Posts]   Goto page: Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ..., 12, 13, 14  Next
View previous topicView next topic
 Forum index » Archive » Archive: The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!) » The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!): General/Updates
Jump to:  


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You can download files in this forum
You cannot post calendar events in this forum



Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group