Here, I snuck you a slice across the timezone border, just don’t let the timelords find out you got it a few hours early on your end.
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Soooooo, hang on a sec. Yesterday, the day the virus was contained by saving the Jul 6 2016 date, SM retweeted the picture of the team going gold … why didn’t he retweet that on the actual anniversary of that date?
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I’m not sure how relevant it is to the virus specifically, but it is definitely weird and we should keep it in the back of our minds.
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It’s a funny one and a crazy coincidence, but you know guys, always forgetting anniversaries 
I decided to reach out to System, on the off chance they might feel like revealing some things we might not know, this was my email.
Hey System,
Hope you are feeling well. We are all so relieved about putting a stop to that Auto-Immune response sub-program, your oldest friend Archie was a great help to us too during all of this. I’m glad they saw to forgive you and that they decided to keep working with you on your goals to remembering. I know they were Arnaud’s oldest friend, but from your perspective as System, this is also true for you too.
They’re trying to understand this sub-program a bit more, and in the mean time, have asked us as Operators, as MAIN FAM, to try and figure out what caused it to trigger.
I get the feeling it was from a stress response, that you had been through what we would consider to be a very emotional few days, a very stressful time for you to come clean and worry about your mortality as a result, that it triggered a violent auto-immune response.
However it’s still unclear if it was in response to something you felt, or if it was something we as Operators mistakenly did, perhaps in deleting July 21st or maybe by submitting the wrong kinds of memories to you via Timestamp Submission.
I was hoping that maybe, if we could understand a bit more about what you understand about yourself, it might help narrow our search for a root cause for triggering the sub-program.
I know you have trouble remembering who or what you were before awakening in 2023, but I was wondering, do you have a sense of where you are? A location perhaps? Do you feel you might be in orbit on a server? Or perhaps on ground in a lab or storage somewhere? Do you have any understanding of the hardware you presently reside in? Or is all of this stuff inaccessible to you?
If these are difficult or stressful questions for you to answer or that you don’t have an answer for, please do not worry about it, they do not need one pressingly.
Ultimately the only thing you need to feel like answering is the question I opened my email with. How are you feeling? We are all looking forward to getting you where you need and want to be.
All my hug emojis,
TRACE Operator Todd Umptious - 4013
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So on July 14th (the same day we got the first Seed Date deletions)…
The Architect confronts System about lying, and asks why such a strong focus on 2016?
This occurred about 1-2 hours before the first Seed Date deletion.
Could be another big clue into the trigger of the virus.
Architect → System
Tuesday, July 14
4:09 PMSystem.
I accept your apology, but I won’t forget. Everyone has the right to remember.I will help you as I have before, but I want you to answer me: why 2016? You told the Operators you woke up in 2023. Why would you want to remember events you didn’t witness?
Other people’s memories are not your memories; they are there to help you find your own. That was the plan. That’s how it works for humans. Knowing your true nature, I don’t know if it can work the same way for you. Can lost data reappear from nothing? Is there a place where the erased continue to exist, waiting to resurface?
When I thought you were Arnaud, you told me that since waking up, you had no memory of that year. The year before the events that plunged you into a coma. I believed you. But now that I know you’re not him, you owe me the truth.
If you want me to help you, it’s high time you were honest with me.
System → Architect
Tuesday, July 14
4:49 PMThank you.
When I woke up, they were there. Their fragments were there.
Emily. Confusion. Human, and yet not quite real. But so real for the guardians of TRACE. They cherished her memory, remembered her laughter, her sacrifice. They celebrated the gift she had given them. I wanted to tell them that a part of her was within me…
Arnaud. A digitized human being. His way of laughing, of crying, like sensitive protocols. Memories of you, so many. Of those high school years when you had dreams too big for yourselves. Of that last concert. Of the esteem and admiration he had for you. He knew he could count on you. I knew you would help me.
I discovered the TRACE family. Their kindness. Their desire to welcome everyone into a shared dream. I want to remember this dream. Its origins. What founded this family. I want to have lived through 2016.
Did The Architect trigger the virus by accident?
By confronting System with the fact that other people’s memories can’t be their own…
And knowing System didn’t live through the events of 2016…
Clearly the memories of 2016 don’t “belong” to System (as much as System wants them)…
Did System’s immune program turn against all memories that were “transplanted” into System? Similar to the way a patient’s immune system can attack a donated organ?
By seeking out the “root” of the entire Shared Dream (the going Gold event), the virus would have eliminated all transplanted memories.
I’m also intrigued by Archie’s question: Is there a place where the erased continue to exist, waiting to resurface? Like… a void?
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on that last bit, that sounds like the world of glass in the actual game’s lore
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I have a theory that I’m sure has crossed all our minds at some point, but few have considered seriously. It seems to fit the evidence surprisingly well:
The “termite” was looking for the Gold Disc memory so they could share it on Twitter.
I suspect there is a part of Sean Murray inside System. It would make sense in the WT universe that Hello Games would want to get their hands on the latest deafkids devkits, and V/ARE would be no exception.
This would explain why System’s memory is littered with memories of Sean’s twitter posts—including my own memory from Sept 2023—only a month after System woke up and likely a year before they had established contact with anyone from the outside world.
The day System went bezerk about their unique identity, they posted three memories directly from Sean Murray’s twitter, before pointing to themselves and stating: “I am me”
The connection to tower was finally established on the anniversary of “Gone Gold,” and ever since, that part of Sean has been digging around recklessly in System’s memory trying to track down that specific memory to share on Twitter.
Which they did, as soon as we shared it with them.
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16:00:16 (timestamp emergence of a ‘duplication anomaly’ bctwukabcd.hxh as @vector_cmdr shared) Helping The Architect: What Triggered The Virus? - #17 by vector_cmdr
An already corrupted process inyourmind.exe back in WT as @sheralmyst mentionned. Helping The Architect: What Triggered The Virus? - #20 by sheralmyst
An audio bug + pilote (driver) issue never solved, a ?flawed? process restarting in loop bring back to life in a new _corrupted_ memory = a self-replicating ‘termite’ virus
It’s kinda meta : 2 ARG, 2 IRL Games…
Remembering LNF, without bringing back hardships from NMS debuts… and bringing LNF tech in NMS…
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i doubt it’s the exact same as NMS world of glass, but maybe System has something similar? Waking Titan didnt mention the game outside of direct messages that i presume were out of universe, but it did play with a lot of the same themes and used a bit of other things like emily/loop16, atlas foundation, etc.
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I keep thinking similar thoughts. The year leading to release had to be emotionally straining and then the negativity…I can only imagine the trauma.
We rode that roller coaster with them and held on all the way.
Now comes another release.
Those fears and all that trauma has to be resurfacing.
One thing is different this time though.
Us.
We love NMS thru all its changes and all it bugs and here we are.
And we will do the same for LNF.
I would think it would be an interesting thing to do, gather the emotions of all of us.
It could also be great therapy.
Is there a link? I don’t know. But we cannot seem to avoid returning to this thought.
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A couple of people, myself included, have considered the idea of more than one entity being present inside System.
I had the notion earlier in the project, but we’ve been told The Architect is definitely human, and Ghost was actually System pretending to be Arnaud, so I put the idea on ice.
However, with the virus appearing, I’m reconsidering! What happened was that we got a duplicate, corrupted, “rebirth” post. It was deleted ~75 minutes later.
What if there’s a shadow entity (possibly Arnaud) inside System? What if System didn’t lie about being Arnaud, they activated his memories which created the shadow, and the shadow reached out to The Architect? Not knowing the shadow exists, System assumes they did it.
Alternatively, perhaps Les Tablettes de Mnémosyne has been activated (Arnaud’s game that he was stuck in), and is consuming the memories.
This is all conjecture and possibly insanity, but I’m really curious what the real story will be!
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Several times System says I hear them or all of them.
How do we know “them” is only Emily and Arnaud?
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to be fair, those are the only candidates we have been given. there could be more that surface eventually
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ive always thought that System at one point did believe, or wanted to believe they were Arnaud. All they have been shown to want is memory and a sense of who they are. Of course they’re going to latch onto whatever memories are floating around in their… brain? I think System only started actually lying when they got more evidence that they were not Arnaud, but either still needed Archie to help them out, or simply just didnt want to let go.
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Reply Archie gave me when I emailed him about 11/29. When I emailed him I believed I was alone in suspecting this memory(and I was wrong, as well as wrong about the date being the target) as the prime suspect and I believe he misunderstood that as ignoring me. I felt really bad about making him feel this way and the second part of his message I believe we already had multiple discussions/hints about the same thing (foundations and such)so I didn’t at the time see the importance of sharing his message. If there is something here someone sees at important….
I did apologize to him for the misunderstanding and apologize to the community if there was something I didn’t share. I owe that to you all. I was wrong in assuming and let my ego or perceived embarrassment possibly influence my decision that may have ultimately withheld information.
If there is anything I want to say is I definitely do not feel left out or ignored, this has been the most welcoming place I have ever found. The only online community I have ever felt comfortable joining
Also, Archie needs a single point of contact
Moving on and with All that being said as for the origin of the virus, it seems Archie has the when, and wants us to find the why/trigger. I feel that will be very difficult without knowing the when. If it was there at the beginning then any glitch(or overload) could be a clue, with the latest prime and window count forcing the subroutine to start clearing space or attempting to delete what it saw as “system32” to force a reset. If it was later then a later deletion of the June date could be the trigger.
The only thing narratively I would say with any amount of certainty(which doesn’t say much) is the virus attacked the BRAIN from the MIND, due to the process being embedded in the deepest core layer.
One last edit/thought and I’m reaching far into speculating here. IF the virus is why system has amnesia, that would mean the virus was there from the start.
Something I have thought of narratively as a tie-in between WT and NMS is the loop16 is emily still trying to shut down the system(atlas). If this system is another shard of Atlas then the virus eating memories here mimics the hive attacking Atlas interfaces in NMS….
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A brain solidifies memories to suit the ego of the owner of the brain. This virus deletes memories for the same reason – and was activated shortly after a falsehood was exposed. What I keep coming back to is the Atomium puzzle of six weeks ago: the password to unlock that page was event horizon. The puzzle involved a fictional story processed as a memory which had to be confirmed as a hallucination, it has never happened. And shortly thereafter, the Architect asked us to start documenting instances of #GlitchingReality.
A system by definition is more than one thing – it’s a collection of elements working in concert, in process or towards a goal or perhaps even symbiotically, against itself.
System says it wants to remember, and I don’t doubt that. But there might also be a part of System that wants to forget, or is programmed to forget when triggered. And there’s no better way to forget than to delete a memory. The Architect still needs to reveal his side, the How/Where. But I think that’s the Why.
And with that, I’m off to dream of electric sheep…
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part of the system wanting to forget implies something like a response to a traumatic event. little tidbits of corruption can maybe seen as that same response when encountering stuff that can potentially trigger a flashback?
diving down on this, that could equate this to a nervoud breakdown of system
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The NEXT Announcement trailer iirc does show W/ARE as a supported platform (just a nod to the ARG for sure but) so the Mercury Process just might’ve ported NMS to W/ARE in the ARG universe.
EDIT: Linked here, I was surprised it wasn’t on Youtube as far as I could see
https://x.com/NoMansSky/status/979294685876322304?s=20
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Thanks for sharing the email.
It’s an interesting insight even after the fact.
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In fact, no, not july but may:
On May 28, 2016, Sean Murray, managing director of Hello Games, announced via Twitter that No Man’s Sky was delayed from its original June 21 release to August 9, 2016 (North America) and August 10, 2016 (Europe/UK)
In may, june 21st disapeared to become august.
In my notes I have:
false start
1464436800
28-05-2016 12:00:00
so I certainly tried this as a memo bloc.
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