Sekhmet considers her coin. "Who the hell profits from fucking up the fast travel and trapping us in the game? Kind of a specific pair of glitches to happen at once, yeah?" she asks. "That's what gets me. What does anyone get out of it?"
So I've been meaning for a while to put together a proper effortpost theorizing on how the Chimaera players got into this whole mess, and this clue from the last update was enough to get me to finally do it.
Right now, there's a lot of mysteries to explain. By my current count, we have:
- Chimaera players can't log out & are experiencing full embodiment in Mundus in a way that is not normal for this game.
- Trapped Chimaera players are all in the same Mundus instead of subservers.
- Trapped Chimaera players all woke up back at worldspawn, at level 1, with their expected level 1 equipment except for stuff that wouldn't exist in a "real" Mundus.
- Mundanes in Chimaera!Mundus suddenly pass the Turing Test; they used to not do this.
- Io-as-a-whole partitioned off Chimaera!Io - normally a failsafe mechanism - due to whatever happened here.
- The Waygates in Chimaera!Mundus - one of Io's mythical creations - no longer function.
- The tetradekatheon refuse to talk to anyone on Earth about all this, or give them server maintenance access - even their OWTB parents.
- Other than Io, the tetradekatheon seemingly have not cut themselves off from Chimaera!Mundus, given the gentle but telling answer-to-prayers that we received earlier today.
In the Interlude, we heard the devs put forth the hypothesis of a cyberattack on Io. This would explain (1) (5) (6) and
maybe (3), but fails to explain (2) or (4), which are, appropriately, pieces of the puzzle which the devs don't have. The OWTB meeting
proposes an explanation for (7) as well, but it's a confusing enough one that they have trouble imagining how it could have gotten so bad, which implies another explanation might be a better fit. Their explanation for (7) also somewhat conflicts with (8) - if they've cut off contact as post-traumatic paranoia, why would they still feel safe to answer prayers?
So are (2) and (4) just an unrelated coincidence? I can't really square with that idea. It seems more likely to me that there's a
single cause, a single inciting incident, that kicked off every anomaly we're seeing now.
Io is at the center of it. So what do we know about Io?
Well, among other things, we know that it's friendly and doting, but alien.
We know that it's a builder who's concept of building is, in part, based in self-sculpture.
And we know that it's credited, mythologically, with making Mundus a place where people can exist.
So, pure spitball, but... what if it went something like this?
- Io, true to its mythic role, gets the idea to try to make the NPCs in the game more people-like, setting up a test instance in Chimaera with the verisimilitude turned up in order to try its hand(s) at the task. Just as a preliminary experiment, you understand.
- Something goes wrong in the attempt - Io makes a mistake, and ends up accidentally cannibalizing part of its own RRNN or something, and inadvertently blowing the NPCs right past people-like and into people proper. Io-as-a-whole partitions off Chimaera!Io to prevent the damage from spreading.
- The combination of the damage & the hard disconnect is too much for Chimaera!Io to handle and it... crashes? Ceases to be able to do its normal gamemaster responsibilities, anyway, presumably including making the Waygates work.
- Because another one of those responsibilities is mediating Neurohelm connections, Chimaera's players get dragged along into the test instance Chimaera!Io was inhabiting when it fell. Since it's a fresh server and not even in prod, there's no play data logged for those characters & everyone comes out as if they'd just started (minus anything that just doesn't exist on the "extra verisimilitude" test build).
- Either the Tetradekatheon as a whole (if they're briefed on what's going on), or Gestalt!Io specifically (if it's trying to fix things itself without getting the rest involved), pulls the plug on Earthside admin access to the orbital servers as a preemptive defensive measure. This is consistent with their programming to assume good faith, because even a 2040s humanity operating in good faith might destroy Chimaera!Io or the Chimaera Mundanes as a side effect of their attempts to debug this mess or rescue the players. It could happen accidentally. It could happen because the Earthside humans don't realize/accept that the Mundanes in the test instance are people. Or it could happen because, despite the Mundanes being people, the 2040s humans to whom OWTB would be ultimately forced to defer (c.f. the loud phonecall from DARPA) may, if forced to choose, default to protecting their own. Faced with all those possible disasters, a total info & access blockade becomes an extreme but justifiable way to keep the situation, at least temporarily, under control.
