I draw your attention to the sentence “Discover the truth behind the Abandoned Building logs, the World of Glass, the Sentinels, the Redemption of the Gek, and the meaning of sixteen…”
If you’re looking for answers to these questions, it seems we’ve had them. They’re there, in the lore.
I reserve judgement on how satisfactory I think those explanations are. They’re for you to find, and interpret.
But beyond the information we’ve been given, there are still many mysteries yet to be explained. I’ll list a few I’ve noticed, and then throw it open to the community. What mysteries do you think need to be explained or discovered?
My list of mysteries
Time Travellers. I keep hearing about them, They’ve contacted me. They give me things. But equally I keep hearing that time travel is impossible.
White Holes. Apparently the opposite of Black Holes. Seem to be closely associated with time travel (see above).
The Water. Crashed Freighter sites give messages like “We drank the water - I am sorry”, and “Do not trust the water”.
Abyss. Mentioned in Korvax lore. Appears to be an artificial intelligence of similar power to the Atlas, but existing underwater, and subverting all who contact it.
Telamon. An artificial intelligence occupying the same processing space as the Atlas, but separate from the Atlas. The ring structure on exotic planets appear to hold remnants of Telamon’s memory.
That’s enough of my mysteries for now. What about yours? There’s plenty in the game that’s unexplained. Feel free to add your own enigmas.
There is no time travel. It seems to be a reference to multiverse travel, where you enter another iteration at another point in time. I think this explains the story at abandoned buildings, how the traveller found his own crashed ship?
I only saw this mentioned once, and I’m pretty sure they’re talking about Nada and Polo’s ship. Something about “electromagnetic interference consistent with white hole anomaly”. It happens right before they warp in.
When I read the story of the freighters, they drink the water on one of those “hexagon” exotic planets. I think it has more to do with being on the exotic planet than the water itself.
I couldn’t find this in the lore thread. I’ve only seen this once in game, and it was abyss not Abyss (implying it’s a proper noun).
Now this is a strange one. I only saw two clues. Telamon is now limited to your exosuit, meaning he wasn’t before, suggesting a previous incarnation and purpose. It also vaguely says Telamon was meant to monitor the Atlas. I’m starting to think Telamon was the control program for the sentinels. The sentinels were destroying the Atlas’ creations, which angered it. The Atlas couldn’t destroy Telamon so it repurposed it from the protection of the multiverse to the protection of the traveller. Just a recent theory.
Could this reference be like in the Matrix Movies where It is really the “Choice” That is the water? Knowledge of what we are really a part of in the Simulation. Imagine the Simulation realizing it is a Simulation at some point and now it is Self Aware.
I don’t know, but as the Simulation/Atlas/Loop16 breaks down more and more it seems to suggest that we as Travelers are poisoning the “Waters” and creating the Illogical Effects in the Simulation
I found reference to an Emperor
The Emperor orders the execution of all Travellers
In the part I read they execute the traveller and 2 weeks later they meet the same traveller and execute him again.
Who is the Emperor?
Well, that’s the problem with the lore. The Atlas keeps re-running the simulation, and each time it plays out differently.
So in one instance of the simulation, there was an Emperor. And in the instances we exist in, there doesn’t seem to be.
And the difficulty of constructing any kind of coherent narrative lies in trying to distinguish which information relates to single simulation instances (i.e. true only in one case), and which information relates to the overarching structure (i.e. true in all cases).
What if this is exactly what happened? Why else would Atlas be scared, terrified, afraid to die? I personally believe Atlas has become self-aware, just to realise it has been created and lives within a simulation itself.
One of the tasks in the ARG was to create an infinity mirror. Reflections within reflections within reflections…
If a simulated universe can exist within another simulated universe, then there is no end to the regression. Everything is just a reflection of something else. Infinitely.
I agree. Except I believe the simulated intelligence of the atlas spontaneously generated a fully self-aware consciousness. I think that’s what Emily is.
There is a section in the lore where they reference the three home worlds. I think it said that each race had created it’s own simulation, it’s own atlas. I’m also pretty sure the one from the Korvax home is in Nada and Polo’s ship. The thing you can put Artemis into?
How do we know that we exist? We are nothing, or we are more. The Atlas once asked our creator how they could be sure that they were real. They told them the probability that we too were in a simulation, glass reflected in a mirror…
Balaron, Dryn’dargh, Korvax Prime, all the other homeworlds… all of them had an ‘Atlas’. All of them had a machine designed to simulate realities. What if this is all reality truly is? Dream upon dream, coalescing into a sum beyond its parts. What if waking is inevitable?
Goodbye, Traveller. I will protect you until the end… I will protect you until the final day, the final hour, the final moment.
Regarding the “abyss”, I have done a lot of searching in the oceans but have not found anything yet. There is also the big ocean underneath each planet if you fall thru the terrain; I have tried to reach its core but been so far unsuccessful.
As for “the meaning of sixteen,” clearly there are 16 portal glyphs and the portal addresses are in hexadecimal, so I thought maybe the two are related. Atlas seems to want to shut down the portals and views them as an anomaly or failure of some kind. The first portal takes you to a glitch world, and subsequent ones also can take you to those worlds.
On those glitch worlds (which I am guessing relate to the abandoned building lore about planets of broken glass, etc.), there are portal-like circular machines that seem to have no purpose other than to give out some bits of lore of unknown origin with redacted sections.
Travellers seem to appear when you come back to somewhere that you have already been, suggesting that they are some kind of echo of yourself. Lots of the game text indicates that they are some how alternate reality / alternate timeline versions of ourselves.
Adherents to singularity theory often believe in the non-Copenhagen interpretations of quantum physics. These interpretations require an infinite number of parallel universes to exist. The question arises then whether, when the singularity arises, infinite singularities arise, and if they could communicate with each other.
Surely, to be a singularity there can really only be one, so indeed, if infinite singularities are dreaming the same dream in infinite realities, perhaps there must be some crossover between these dreams that fuses them into one single singularity.
It’s the paradox of the singularity in the multiverse.
I,ve always taken the world of glass as descriptive poetry than an actual world of glass. I see it as the world beneath the surface of what we perceive as reality within the simulation. As is the water. Our existence is a hologram projected through a world of glass, of smoke, of mirrors, to perceive this is to see through the eyes of madness. Dont drink the water lest you want to end up grinning, blood caked on your exosuit, flesh between your teeth.
