Particle origin? (Probably spoilers)

[Ovalcircle]

Can someone explain if the particulate and creeper are related?

[planetfall]

How much of the story campaign have you played?

[Ovalcircle]

I finished it.

[planetfall]

Then you have as much knowledge of the Particulate as any of us do, except Virgil - and he tends to not explain lore beyond what's presented in the game.

[Ovalcircle]

Ok thanks. I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything important.

[Karsten75]

It is quite conceivable that some experimentation, or the need for information gathering, caused scientists in Redacted Space to  "accidentally" discover the Creeper entity or at least the guiding force behind it.

A simile would be if humans were to develop Artificial Intelligence and gave it a mission to explore distant  galaxies. In that case we could conceivably unleash an entity that would colonize distant systems as forward bases without adequate guidance on how to deal with alien life forms and intelligence they might encounter.

This is a theme often covered in Science fiction, both literature and movies.

[Relli]

Can someone explain if the particulate and creeper are related?

I'm gonna echo what the Codex says a bit, in case you overlooked something that answered this question. If it's irrelevant, I apologize. I think I'll also spoiler-tag it just in case.

Spoiler

The Creeper's purpose is to collect enough information to uncover the Arc Eternal and allow for time-travel shenanigans and the power that comes with it. A human race known as the Seloi (also the Precursors, by our people) managed to learn of this, and their entire civilization became devoted to uncovering the Arc for themselves before the Loki/Creeper could manage it. To do that, they created a system similar to the Creeper that would learn a great many things, but preferably without destroying the entire universe in the process. This became the Particulate. It was released on the Origin World in Redacted Space, the area around it evacuated and sealed off, so that it may do its job without hurting humans. So the answer to your question is that yes, the Creeper and Particulate are related. They share the same purpose of learning for the sake of creating/uncovering the Arc Eternal.

[close]

[Sorrontis]

Then you have as much knowledge of the Particulate as any of us do, except Virgil - and he tends to not explain lore beyond what's presented in the game.

Well, he has too keep something for the next sequel  ::)

[GoodMorning]

Yep, still just as much open-ended lore. As a side note, based on an idle thought:

Spoiler

Skars and Lia are nonfinite entities, save by choice. And we know that they have time travel at their disposal. Conclusion: Either a reincarnation-esque strategy, or being puppeteers could explain the prevalence of their names.

Why do the Seloi halt their project? Where did the Thor design originate? What is the source of the Imperator? Why do we bother to speculate? (We know the answer to that: Because 1. we can and 2. it's amusing.)

And we still don't haven't necessarily met the source civ. of the Forge, although it's unlikely to have been one of the first 143. So, does Ticon's civilisation name itself after him, and have warning time to prepare for the Creeper?

[close]

Lore-expansion is a recurrent problem, and when we throw in time travel and multiple universes...

[Xeneonic]

Lore-expansion is a recurrent problem, and when we throw in time travel and multiple universes...

This is because of the common misconception, in that most people believe that time is linear and generally can only flow in one direction (Forward).

Such as the party made by Professor Stephen Hawking. On a lot of news media, it was interpreted that Stephen Hawking proved that travelling back in time is impossible. But the only conclusion we can draw is that, if time travel will exist, they simply didn't show up at the party, or did in a different timeline. No other fair conclusion can you draw from that. For all we know, a super bomb explodes in 10 years and kills everyone on the planet, but that doesn't mean that time travel is impossible, it just means that we weren't alive long enough to invent it.

However much I'd like to prove that a god doesn't exist, me simply hosting a party for him/it/her and him/it/her not showing up, of course doesn't prove anything other than that a god didn't show up.

This is also why time can never be stuck in a loop, because it is relative and external forces influence it. Compare it with Einstein's famous quote: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results". Only using the exact same environment will "doing the same thing over and over again" produce identical results. To give an example of this, let us use gravity. You hold an apple at X height and let go, the apple lands after letting it go after exactly Y.ZYX seconds. You can do this for 10 years straight and the outcome will be the same. But now consider doing this for a billion years. 10 billion years, 50 billion years. External forces will have influenced the earth one way or another over such a vast amount of time, magnetic fields may have come and gone, the earth's core "dimmed" etc. The "1G" atmosphere that we measured everything with will surely have changed over such a long time.



The same goes for these timeloops, it can only go on for so long until something influences the experiment. For all we know, the timeloop that we are in in PFE is the 100 millionth and enough extremely small changes might have occurred that a force pushes time out of the loop, like a centrifugal force could push an object out of a circle. For all we know, the particles have done this loop so many times, that is why it knows how it can get the last piece of information to only be picked up by a HQ, put up a trap there and scan the HQ before blowing it to smithereens. For all we know, in the first million timeloops, the crew didn't even survive the first 5 missions and the particles took that long to figure out it needed to give the crew tools to get further. After the 50th million they (the particles) understood they needed information on how the HQ was made for an ulterior motive (anti-creep?), after the 70th million on how to go about it and finally orchestrated all of it after the 100 millionth.

Why do all that over timeloops and not just take it slow and let the crew grow slowly? Because the creeper is doing the same thing, if the creeper is doing it in timeloops, then the particles would be too late if they didn't do the same thing, with shorter timeloops to beat the creeper. It was designed to beat creeper after all (Like many weapons before it), and creeper used time loops extensively during many universe lifespans.

Yes, it's 3:42 AM and for all I know you all think I'm talking out of my *** and rambling on. But that's my take on it. And I think it is the most logical one.

Edit: Especially considering how effortlessly the particles blew up the entire fleet after they scanned the HQ a.k.a. particles reached their goal. Why not do that in mission 1? Because they needed the HQ data and tempt and give reason to the crew to put it in such a dangerous position. It was just a big lure.

[Relli]

GoodMorning, your idle thought led me to a far less idle thought of my own. Awesome speculation follows:

Spoiler

Lia calls the forge a Ticon invention. The Codex summary specifically states a LACK of prevalence of the name Ticon. It's fair to assume that for one reason or another, the civilization Dagr Ticon hails from is the Ticon we know from CW3. Dagr and crew, as well as Varro and Lakshmi, give their lives in order to send the culmination of human knowledge back home. This includes, as Ana mentions at the beginning of Origin, knowledge of the Creeper threat, and the fact that it had destroyed EVERY previous civilization. So they now know to prepare for this threat.
To sidetrack for a second, we know the Ticon Forge uses the shattered remnants of Rift Space, pulled from Totems, as its power source. But we also know that the CHQ was capable of jumping through Rift Space as readily as was done in CW2. In the final mission, losing your HQ results in a loss, because the ability to jump to safety was removed. While I forget the exact words used, what I got from that at the time was that that was when Rift Space collapsed. Which means it would have JUST happened as the Ticon civilization was learning about the Creeper threat. What a perfect time to discover and harness the shattered remnants of Rift Space.
Why do we bother to speculate? Because my heart races when something like this happens. Amusing doesn't begin to cover it :D

[close]

[GoodMorning]

I have no problem with time travel. I merely posit that it ensures that the lore-space becomes unbounded and difficult (impossible in finite time) to definitively address. The same is true for the parallel realities allowed by the Arc.

In other words, the system is not closed and finite. Lore can be invented to explain any issue, but must raise another question (save for a catch-all omnipotent omniscient unfathomable motivation solution).

And one final note: Plot arcs can easily follow unusual curves through spacetime, and a regular feature is the idea that they must at all costs not become self-intersecting. Often they do anyway, but that is another issue.

And yes, a gradual movement along another plot-space dimension (wrapping helically along that axis and curving in the standard time through a looping construct) is a vaild device, though difficult to explain in a language "originally developed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is" (Pratchett, Night Watch).

Relli:

Spoiler

I agree, which is why I mentioned the names above, though less clearly.

However, Rift Space was impassable "until this clears", and was generated by an outside agent.
Using a cop-out theory, this agent was "the hand of Virgil", destroying Rift Space because [Lia, CW3: "I guess it doesn't matter now"...] it makes a better story for Ticon.

Surprise twist: Creeper and Particulate are recorders, and GalCorp/House Abraxis arrange to extract the mind-states of the crew on the Hale and Ticon missions once they have the message. Further, Skars and Lia restore the universe through the Arc. Finally, the Particulate is shut down by the Ticon, until it is realised that it can become a self-powered nanotech factory. Cue rapid Creeper assault. Perhaps they seal Rift Space to stop Emitters dropping out of it?

[close]

[PhailRaptor]

I'm gonna echo what the Codex says a bit, in case you overlooked something that answered this question. If it's irrelevant, I apologize. I think I'll also spoiler-tag it just in case.

Spoiler

The Creeper's purpose is to collect enough information to uncover the Arc Eternal and allow for time-travel shenanigans and the power that comes with it. A human race known as the Seloi (also the Precursors, by our people) managed to learn of this, and their entire civilization became devoted to uncovering the Arc for themselves before the Loki/Creeper could manage it. To do that, they created a system similar to the Creeper that would learn a great many things, but preferably without destroying the entire universe in the process. This became the Particulate. It was released on the Origin World in Redacted Space, the area around it evacuated and sealed off, so that it may do its job without hurting humans. So the answer to your question is that yes, the Creeper and Particulate are related. They share the same purpose of learning for the sake of creating/uncovering the Arc Eternal.

[close]

I interpreted that exchange a little differently...

Spoiler

My understanding from that sequence in the story was that the Seloi created the Particulate as a means of stalling out the Creeper, both literally in blocking it's advance, and as well as on the Entropy front.  In addition to collecting information about the raw universe itself, the Creeper also eliminated complexity from the universe.  By their very nature, lifeforms generate complexity on a moment-to-moment basis, and that complexity ultimately creates more for the Creeper to "remember".  It is far simpler to eliminate the complexity than to remember it, and so naturally the Creeper was designed to kill all life.

Back to the Particulate, my understanding was that the Seloi created the Particulate not to uncover the Arc, but to prevent the Loki from doing so.  The more particles available, the greater the complexity.  The interactions between the particles constantly become more complex.  Single particles are replaced by doubles.  Doubles become squares.  Squares become long chains.  Emergent start to form from Mired land.  Doppel Spawners materialize.  Even full on shipyards capable of producing actual ships with actual weapons.  To me, this all points to a deliberate attempt to create a permanent source of complexity to counteract the Creeper's inherent reduction of complexity.

And then there's the epilogue from CW3.  The overall tone doesn't appear to be about starting a race with the Loki to find the Arc.  The Loki were already millennia ahead of the Seloi and had engineered the perfect weapon for the task.  The Seloi would have quickly concluded they had no means to compete in that race, at least not without moving the finish line (more complexity).

Actually, now that I think about it, that epilogue talked very specifically about there being 2 methods of revealing the Arc, then quickly dove into the Loki only being aware of the one method.  It never discusses the other.  My curiosity is now tingling furiously...  What is the second?

[close]

[GoodMorning]

Spoiler

It seemed to me that the complexity was the key element in an Arc reveal. So the Creeper records, destroying in the process, everything of complexity it encounters, which is why the terrain is largely safe. Civilizations are very complex, and so are prime Arc-finding material.

The Particulate, rather than needing "an ever-renewing font of complexity", made it for itself. This gives it a huge advantage in terms of speed, but means that it has to be left alone to work. Better not let the Creeper get ahold of it. So the Particulate is not a friendly neighbour, leading to Redacted Space.

[close]

Of course, who knows what the rules are, or even which parallel reality this occurs in...

This is fun. Who knows where it will lead, but sometimes it's about the journey, even with no end in sight.

[Xeneonic]

My curiosity is now tingling furiously...  What is the second?

If we can assume the Particulate was created to counter the creeper, and the creeper put all information into one location to bring out the arc, it stands to reason that it could be brought out by spreading the information.

However, since the creeper wants to - as you so adequately put it - prevent entropy; the "second" method would go against the very nature of the creeper. Just like the Particulate goes against the very nature of the creeper.