23 KiB
[Discussion] [FF] Spoilers: All canon Animorphs and r!Animorphs: The Reckoning through chapter 44. Questions, Wild Theories, Speculation & c.
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Author: u/daytodave an altruistic conversion of calories to hedons*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/7yapxb/discussion_ff_spoilers_all_canon_animorphs_and/
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Score: 25
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Created: 2018-02-18T00:27:02
Post:
Hello! I discovered r!Animorphs last week via this thread, binged it, and holy shit. First off, this is amazing and I want to say thank you so much to /u/TK17Studios for bringing this into the world. It's everything my childhood ever wanted from an Animorphs story.
Second, the whole way through I was really sad that I was so behind, because there was no one to talk about theories with. I read HPMOR after it was complete, so this is my first chance to follow along with an in-progress rational fic. I know the next update is coming out soon, and like a lot of people I bet, I've been desperately scouring the chapters for signs of hope.
Since everything looks so bleak, my best guess at where to look for hope is in anything that doesn't quite add up. Anything that could potentially introduce a new variable. Below is a fairly disorganized, incomplete brain-dump of my thoughts on things that haven't totally been explained or understood by the characters. I would absolutely love if anyone would take the time to tear these apart, point out things I missed, or just talk about the story before the next chapter comes out.
- The Chee
- What is up with their naming conventions? Between Interlude 4 and Interlude 7, they went from calling Ax "Ax" to "Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill", and yet Rachel is still "the female." The end of Interlude 2 implies that Rachel's existence wasn't accounted for by either the Ellimist or Crayak, or both's, simulations, and I guessed that the Chee not using her name is somehow related to that. But what source of information could they be using that would have given them Ax's full name between interludes 4 and 7, but not Rachel's? Erek says, "If one of us sees something, the rest of us can remember it, unless there’s a reason to forget" Is it possible that Erek is intentionally forgetting about Rachel to keep her identity secret from the other Chee? Or that the Chee have reason to believe one of the gods doesn't know about Rachel's existence and/or whereabouts, and for some reason think the gods can eavesdrop on their communications but not their memories?
- How does their refresh cycle work, and what are their exact rules about violence?
The refresh cycle sweeps past once more, and we yield to it like grass beneath a mower’s blade, handing ourselves to the Chee two-forward and receiving ourselves back a moment later.
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Hypothesis: This is how they share memories, each Chee number N passes its mind to Chee number (N - 2) % 139,321 and back. In that case, Erek could hide memories from the other Chee by thinking about intentional violence so that the censor wipes his mind before the next cycle. But in that case, the Chee are split into even numbered and odd numbered groups, which never refresh with each other. They could be designed that way to preserve diversity of viewpoints so they get the most out of debating each other, but something still doesn't feel right.
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In Chapter 43, why did the Chee freeze and shut down?
- Hypothesis: Visser 3 ordered them to, using the promise to save/threat to destroy the dogs as leverage
- Hypothesis: They "handed themselves" to other Chee far away from the island when they detected the Leeran approaching, to keep secrets from the others
- Hypothesis: Visser 3 has some kind of anti-Chee weapon
- Hypothesis: In canon, there's a Pemalite ship deep under the ocean that the Chee shuts off out of the blue one day. The kids acquire first sperm whales, then giant squid to go down there and flip a reset switch. Maybe Visser 3 found that ship?
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Morphing
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I notice I am confused: When you're in morph your mind in running on the simulator, your real body is in stasis in Z-space, and the construct body is just a receiver, right? So you shouldn't need the construct to demorph, confirmed by Interlude 4. You should be able to demorph even if the construct body is unconscious, dead, or controlled by a Yeerk.
- Why couldn't Cassie just wait till after the meteor hit to emerge from Z-Space? Would the whole area be so actively on fire an hour after impact that she couldn't survive the ~3 minutes to get into morph again and wait for things to cool down?
- When characters feel light-headed because their construct body is losing blood, or get knocked unconscious in morph and can't demorph, is this a sign of Ellimist/Crayak meddling?
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Now that we know the morph-mind simulator is the same computer used by the gods in their game (do we know that?), there's no reason to think your mind dies when your morph time runs out; it could just keep going on the simulator and interact with E/C in other ways. If that was the Ellimist at the pool, maybe his plan was actually to extract Cassie for some other purpose, by getting her to stay in morph too long. If that's true, it means there's also a version of Jake out there somewhere.
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The fact that morphed-minds run on the cosmic playstation rather than an Andalite computer means that everything a character does while or remembers from being in morph needs to be re-checked for meddling by the gods, while things that happen IRL are probably safer. Are there examples of things that happened while a character was in morph that make more sense in this light?
- Possibly related to the Chapter 7 author's note, "Sometimes a continuity error is a continuity error, and sometimes it's plot."? A lot of that chapter happens in morph.
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Theories about Jake's vision of Crayak when Erek burns away the Yeerk tissue in Chapter 16? It's very similar to canon book #6, when Temrash dies in his head, Jake has the same vision. It's definitely Jake-2 who sees it, so it happens in his meat body, not the simulator. And just like in canon, it happens as a Yeerk is dying in his head.
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You know who else had a Yeerk die in his head? David. Right before Marco morph-checked him and had that weird moment of mind trickery
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The Gods
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This is kind of meta, but in canon the Ellimist plays some way less subtle tricks with the rules of the game at the Yeerk pool. He freezes time and tells the kids humanity is going to lose the war, but offers to teleport them, their friends and families, and breeding populations of humans and a few other earth species to a sanctuary planet far away from the conflict, to live under his protection, and when they say no, he shows them a vision of future earth where the Yeerks have won. They realize the trick when they notice that in both cases the Ellimist's messing with time also just happened to give the kids a chance to look around (at the Yeerk pool and future earth) and gather some specific and useful intel, which they use to destroy the only source of kandrona on earth. I bring this up because this story has been amazing with the subtle nods and parallels to canon. Even though obvious tricks like that are forbidden by the rules in Reckoning, it seems worth considering that the Yeerk pool was the start of a much subtler plot by the Ellimist.
- Hypothesis: The Ellimist's goal was to save Temrash and Essak, to get one of them to join with Ax. Come to think of it, creating the Ax-and-Temrash hybrid, and giving Visser 3 the missing pieces to his cosmos-domination plan are the most plausible goals I can think of for the Ellimist and Crayak respectively, that explain why they've contrived so hard to make this crippled version of the Yeerk invasion happen the way it did. Saving Peter and Tom (and therefore Temrash and Essak) may have actually been Cassie's role in the prophecy, assuming the Ellimist incurs less debt in the game by saving people the kids choose, instead of choosing himself.
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Any theories on the last 3 lines of Interlude 2?
An alien speaks a word as it dies. The word is heard only by its enemies—they do not speak the language, and they pay it no mind.
A lump of rock falls into a star. The star explodes, as it would have anyway—the fire peaks a tenth of a degree hotter on a scale measured in the hundreds of billions.
On Earth, a girl is born. Her name is Rachel, and she is not supposed to be there.
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Who's the alien speaking the word as it dies? Maybe a Pemalite speaking to the Howlers? (In canon, the Howlers' collective memory turned out to be their undoing, when Jake morphed one and poisoned all their minds with The Power of Love) Can we think of other events from either the fic or canon that make sense here?
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Visser 3
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This line:
A PROPHECY, YOU SAY? IT DID NOT DO MUCH FOR CASSIE WITHERS, I SEE.
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Feels a little off. Like, Visser 3 knows about resurrecting people from morph, and he knows the morph-computer is actually the gods-computer, and he should know that E&C are likely to be more steps ahead of him than he can count. So writing off Cassie like that feels like a tiny twinge of Gloating Bond Villain got mixed in with his Evil Calculating Mastermind. Maybe he's a little blinded by all these epiphanies, a little bit biased toward concluding that everything is coming together?
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Visser 3 obviously has some kind of "unbreakable vow" that he's using to commit to future actions for Leeran Hypersight deals. Do we have any insight into this, other than just willing himself really hard to not change his mind? Given that anyone he's made a hypersight deal with knows about his plan to live forever, it seems unlikely that they would trust a promise alone without some kind of enforcement mechanism, given that even if he genuinely tries to resist changing his mind, after billions of years go by there's a possibility he could fail.
I apologize for how disorganized this is, but I have a bad habit of nit-picking things until they either don't get finished, or finish way late, and I really wanted to get some of these ideas straight before the next chapter comes out. Thank you!
Comments:
u/LieGroupE8 [+11] ** (2 hours later)
I share your enthusiasm! If you haven't already, there is some pretty good hypothesizing on the reddit threads for previous r!Animorphs chapters. Sometimes TK17 himself provides answers. But many of the points you just raised have not yet been answered, I think.
I notice I am confused: When you're in morph your mind in running on the simulator, your real body is in stasis in Z-space, and the construct body is just a receiver, right? So you shouldn't need the construct to demorph, confirmed by Interlude 4. You should be able to demorph even if the construct body is unconscious, dead, or controlled by a Yeerk.
Why couldn't Cassie just wait till after the meteor hit to emerge from Z-Space? Would the whole area be so actively on fire an hour after impact that she couldn't survive the ~3 minutes to get into morph again and wait for things to cool down?
This always confused me too. We know that you can demorph without a construct body: that's what happened when the Ellimist (or whoever) rescued the Animorphs from the meteor. The Ellimist did not want to move their morph bodies, so it moved the emulation-construct gates and they demorphed without construct bodies. We also know that you can remain conscious without being linked to your construct body, which is what I think happened when Garrett and Ax were inside Rachel's morph.
What I think is going on is that the morphing technology naturally tries to replicate the experiences of your construct body as realistically as possible. So if your construct goes unconscious or dies, your emulated mind goes unconscious for realism. However, if there is an artificial intervention that does not tamper directly with the construct, then this is averted and you can remain conscious.
I also think that Cassie was close enough to the impact zone that even if she had remained conscious, she would have demorphed into molten lava and fiery debris raining from the sky. Or perhaps whatever technology links the construct with the mind emulation was directly destroyed by the blast.
(As a side note, the one glaring continuity error that I've noticed is that when Cassie is returns to the real world from the Ellimist's vision in chapter 18, Jake and Marco are gone, even though we know the Ellimist didn't move the construct bodies. Their Hork-Bajir bodies should just be lifeless on the ground. Unless either 1. the bodies were moved after all, 2. the Ellimist interfered with Cassie's perception to show her what she expected to see even after the vision, 3. something else is going on, or 4. TK17 made a mistake.)
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 days later)
Or perhaps whatever technology links the construct with the mind emulation was directly destroyed by the blast.
This. There's a small amount of nanotech that handles the "gating" of your body's material into and out of Z-space. If you shoot the morphed body in the head, most of the tiny machines are going to be unaffected, and they'll still be able to handle pulling the matter back out of the pocket dimension and putting it back where it belongs. But if you are a few meters away from where an asteroid hits at like 30,000 mph, that tech is Not Going To Be Okay. Even nanites can be destroyed by heat equivalent to the inside of a thermonuclear explosion.
There's a hint in there about your (side note) which I won't spell out explicitly unless you ask me to.
u/daytodave [+2] an altruistic conversion of calories to hedons (9 days later)
The most efficient move there would be to only teleport the nanites, and either pop the construct bodies back into z-space, or delete them from Cassie's simulated environment so she doesn't waste time stopping to check on them.
That implies that it's pretty efficient in game resources to teleport the gate of anyone in morph. With the debt incurred by moving Peter, Tom, and Ax, the opposing god should be able to move any of the thousands of morph-capable humans now running around pretty much arbitrarily, no?
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (9 days later)
u/daytodave [+1] an altruistic conversion of calories to hedons (6 years later)
What was this comment??
u/tjhance [+5] (6 hours later)
I'll take this opportunity to ask a question I had recently --
In chapter 43 we learn that "There never was any chance the Andalites could blow up the planet". Is it supposed to be clear why this is, at this point? I thought that the ability to blow up a planet was supposed to be pretty easy.
u/Silver_Swift [+5] (6 hours later)
Earth is trapped in some kind of weird time bubble that you can only enter through one particular path. The andalites don't know about this, so their ramship will never reach earth.
u/CapnQwerty [+2] (17 hours later)
Well, no, it will, it'll just take way longer than they expect. Remember, the rest of the Yeerk invasion fleet got caught in this thing too, and V3 talks about them being slowed by months, not stuck indefinitely (if I'm remembering correctly).
u/Silver_Swift [+1] (a day later)
Right, yes, fair point. In that case I don't know either, maybe the time bubble will knock the ramship off course or something?
u/daytodave [+1] an altruistic conversion of calories to hedons (a day later)
I'm guessing it's because the gods want the events on Earth to play out. They're not going to allow the Andalites to interfere until this little corner of their chess game has been decided.
u/Frommerman [+5] (16 hours later)
Something I just noticed, but who made the time bubble around Earth? We see from E&C that their game usually involves making tiny moves calculated to have big effects down the line. The prophecy came to the Andalites because a piece of toast was burned in a specific pattern, which precipitated all of the events thus far. The abstruse line about an alien speaking and a star exploding a little hotter for Rachel to be born is tiny for the effect of creating an entire person not included in at least one of the Gods' plans. We know that whoever teleported the kids out of the meteor strike really just changed where they should have come out of morph, and didn't stop time so much as insert a memory into people stored on a computer he has direct physical access to.
How the hell, then, does the creation of a sphere of accelerated time that encompasses an entire solar system square with any of this? That's not a small move. E or C had to cheat to even appear to be stopping time in a tiny area, much less accelerate time sufficiently to block FTL transport. By the rules of the game we have seen thus far, this shield might be big enough to straight lose the game for the player which did it by giving the other a massive amount of leeway to carry out their usual small tricks.
This suggests one or more of the following:
There are rules we do not know. This is already a given, but it'd have to be a pretty big rule to counteract all of our observations thus far.
Slowing (but not stopping) time requires near-zero effort somehow.
All of Earth is being simulated. This would be lame storytelling, so there'd have to be something insanely epic to go along to make up for that.
Visser 3's sensors are being tricked. This has the advantage of requiring a small amount of effort, but that effort would be over a sustained period. Furthermore, they would have to do something about everyone else's sensors as well.
Visser 3 himself is being modified by E or C to make him think there is a bubble. If that were the case he's about to find out about the deception when he never morphs again. Would also require that someone do something about the rest of the Yeerks' sensors, who can't be manipulated this way.
It's a joint effort by E & C. We don't know the rules, but I would suspect that the players working together is allowed just by the general texture of the gameplay we've seen. If that is the case, the tiny pathway could be one or the other defecting, or it could play into both of their plans.
It's the work of a third actor who isn't beholden to the same rules. The only such actor we know of is the game engine, and it's very unclear whether it is allowed to take actions like this.
Catch-all for things I don't know or didn't imagine.
Of these, only 1, 6, and 8 seem particularly plausible. Those all have the disadvantage of raising far more questions than they answer, so they aren't very helpful.
u/redstonerodent [+2] High Council of Gallifrey (16 hours later)
The sphere is the only reason Serenity can detect locations, so they can't just be messing with Visser 3's sensors.
u/Frommerman [+1] (16 hours later)
Hmm, true.
u/infomaton [+2] (a day later)
6 makes sense to me. I think Visser even considers it during the chapter when he's thinking about possible explanations.
u/LucidityWaver [+1] (a day later)
I, like /u/infomaton, think it would be #6. The game may be galactic or universal in scale, but Earth, and the Sol system is an agreed upon stage. The agreement includes general isolation and Crayak and Ellimist both have bargained for ways to use it to their own benefit (e.g the pathway and Serenity).
u/daytodave [+2] an altruistic conversion of calories to hedons (a day later)
Agree that this is the only thing that makes sense based on what we know. Also,
The creature smiled, the sparks of light in its deep, black eyes glittering like the inside of a geode. “Yes, Jake Berenson. One of us is wrong, and only time will tell which. I have my own opinions, of course, which I’ll keep private. But in the meantime—it’s my turn, and events have conspired to give me unusual freedom of movement.”
My guess is handing the bridge to Visser 3 was Crayak's counter move to the Ellimist saving the kids from the pool, and glitching Marco's memory of the David morph was C's counter move to E telling them about it via the frozen time vision, which had the side effect of saving the Chee.
u/tjhance [+1] (4 days later)
I wonder if Ellimist messing with their memories even counts as his "turn"?
He says that "events have conspired to give me unusual freedom of movement" and this could mean that when Seerow used Ellimist's computer to make the morphing tech, it gave Ellimist a huuuuge unfair--but valid--advantage.
So maybe Ellimist actually just has lots of freedom to act now within the rules of the game just by messing with his own computer?
u/earnestadmission [+1] Singular "they" user (4 days later)
I don't remember when morphing was revealed as Ellimist* tech
*Or Cryak tech
u/daytodave [+2] an altruistic conversion of calories to hedons (4 days later)
Chapter 43, when Marco through Visser 3 realizes that an Andalite could never have invented the morphing computer, and the Ellimist/Crayak must have been using computer simulations of their consciousnesses to appear to stop time.
u/earnestadmission [+1] Singular "they" user (4 days later)
thanks!
I really like your interpretation-- it didn't occur to me that !Ellimist could have access to the simulation while !Cryak does not. (Or even just asymmetric access between the two players)
u/tjhance [+1] (4 days later)
Actually now that I think about it more, it seems like if what I said is true, it would be way too overpowered for the Ellimist and he would just insta-win probably. So they probably do have some rules for how often they can screw with people's memories.
I guess. Who knows?
u/daytodave [+1] an altruistic conversion of calories to hedons (6 days later)
It could be that Crayak spent all of his z-space manipulation credits for this turn on handing the bridge to Visser 3, while the Ellimist is spending them in smaller chunks to tweak the morphing simulations.
But actually, the pro-Visser 3 god has made at least one big move on the morphing computer: sabotaging Marco's morph-check, to get David into the group.
u/daytodave [+1] an altruistic conversion of calories to hedons (4 days later)
A #8:
This is the result of one of them making tiny moves calculated to have big effects down the line. A star burns a tenth of a degree hotter, one extra atom is tripped over its fusion point and emits a particle, that particle disrupts the quantum z-space interface, and ten billion years later a timewave 4-D spherical in shape and 1day:6month in intensity flows around the z-space area corresponding to earth's star's orbit.