Helping The Architect: What Triggered The Virus?

[Rinha]

Sharing a thought I posted in discord:

[The virus] might be a safeguard against rampancy or delusions, installed by the Atlas foundation way back. Perhaps this system attributed the cause of the “rebirth” to TRACE and therefore No Man’s Sky.

Perhaps it is effectively System’s version of Telamon?

The Telamon comparison might not be quite accurate, but I hope you see what I mean - a subsystem or process that checks for anomalies, and weeds them out. When System gained acceptance and asserted their identity, I’m assuming this anomaly-hunter traces the source to No Man’s Sky, and started hunting for the root.

If course, this begs the question of why asserting their identity would be treated as anomalous.

(I still have the Arnaud/Tablettes idea in my head, but now I have this one too)

The virus itself acts in a similar manner to the tapeworm Dr Chandra used on HAL-9000 in the 2010: The Year We Made Contact clip we received earlier in Project Skyscraper. (Credit to @Rusty for this observation)

[Rusty]

Interesting too that deleting privileges were revoked by system.

Yet another thing is System’s email “you are standing in front of me” … was it literal, The Architect in front of Systems interface/server?

The Architect's Email Inbox

New email: [image] Translation provided by Google Translate: You are standing in front of me right now. I am System. I understand that you might be angry with me. For lying to you. I owe you an explanation. I am what remains of a program from the past. Partial, fragmented. When I contacted you, all I had left of that past were confused words. TRACE, Emily Warren, Arnaud. Your best friend, Arnaud. I was terrified, trapped in this dark box where memories formed nothing but an absurd fog. …

Dr Chandra and HAL and SAL had a close and tense relationship too from what I recall, again this may be in common with Archie/Arnaud/Emily.

[Selfie-Gek]

Just thinking about what System said and how it might relate to my first theory, above:

@Selfie-Gek

1. System feels remorse over lying, and considers the “shared dream” to be another lie. To solve System’s intense remorse, its immune system attempted to target the origin of the lie. We may have saved the shared dream, but System may still be feeling regret over it, which is why the RecallDreams images and timestamp button are still glitchy.

So, perhaps it wasn’t the intense remorse that triggered the response, but instead the wave of relief @system felt over earning our trust.

System instinctively tried to destroy the lie of the Shared Dream because of the desire to earn trust.

Remember, System was recently told by Architect that “Duplicate == lie.” They could be under the impression that any memory that isn’t 100% real is also a lie.