Links with NMS: Nada encounters

Archive WT Thoughts & Theories
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I have copied most interactions with the rogue Korvax entity called Nada, that happen within No Man’s Sky. Texts are slightly edited for brevity and bolded to highlight what I believe are more crucial and/or connecting parts to Waking Titan. This might be especially useful to those that do not play NMS, and I think it does help a lot with adding meaning to the lore of the game in general. Ok, here goes:

2nd encounter
Nada, is, they reveal, a Korvax priest somehow freed of the group mind, now researching the origins of the galaxy. They express a bold theory - that our entire reality is something else’s experiment. A simulation. I want to laugh, then I remember the Atlas.
Nada offers me a choice - or is it a test?
Be returned to the fixed path of the Atlas. Find black holes to carry me to the galaxy’s core. Or accept a gift to aid me in my own travels.

3rd encounter
The Korvax endlessly attempt to regain their errant shell and wipe Nada from existence. But the Priest Entity won’t succumb until they have solved the riddle of reality. Korvax Convergence crave ‘non-compliant’ Nada shell. Convergence illogical.
Traveller data, conclusion irresistable. Galaxy shape / size / distribution error. Explore more!

4th encounter
Nada is plugged into a bank of instruments as I approach. Suns flare and die on the panels, voxel-molecules pop in and out of existence in matched pairs. I see error messages reeling on the readouts and am perplexed.
**Nada sees me and explains. There are repeating patterns all across the galaxy, identical elements where there should be endless divergence. This cannot be a coincidence. Did the Atlas do this? **
Nada says: Physics simplistic. Chemistry arbitrary. Hypothesis: simulation. Galaxy not base existence. Explore but beware red orb. Find flaws in model, exploit, find truth. Yes/no?

5th encounter
Nada explains that their reasoning has advanced. They have found no room in the galaxy for free will or anything but brutal causation. They worry we are but pawns of whatever higher being created us - puppets, dancing on strings. And Nada suspects me. I am the abberation. Am I the puppet-master too?
Nada says: Creator of simulation friend or foe? Paranoia imperative. Galaxy purely causal, individualism statistical anomaly - Nada is an error. Trust Nada? Trust you?

6th encounter
Nada says: Red orbs. Dominant, hostile. Creators or their relics? Singularities are key. Peripatetic path to galactic core. Path message from creator? Or sloppy workmanship?

7th / 8th encounter
Nada says: Nada, tied to Shell, to this galaxy. Frustration / sadness. You, not tied. Key - explore, escape, report back. Value in progress. Help you escape, purpose at end. Discoveries converge. Casuative galaxy. Path to core. Red orbs. Simplistic physics.

9th encounter
The panels and systems are idling now. Nada seems to have learned all it can from them. I report my travels and discoveries, and their mask lights up. All the pieces have fallen into place, Nada explains. Where once Nada stared at starmaps, now they see lines of code. Connections and patterns everywhere. The galaxy is a spiderweb - but who or what is the spider?
Nada says: All must end. Time must end. Data must survive. At start - centre of galaxy. Calm heart of storm. Your travel vital. Reach the end. My work done. Return to Convergence

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Nada = zero, nothing, National Automotive Dealers Association. Sorry, I’m loopy, can’t sleep. :yum:

In most languages, nada means “nothing.” Portuguese has some interesting shades of meaning.

nada m (uncountable)

  1. nothingness (the state of not existing)
  2. the void (the vacuum of space)

The Korvax Priest, Nothing or Void, explores reality that ends up being nothing but code. The only reality is nothing. That would be a bit depressing to a being intent on learning great mysteries. What perplexes me is the nature of both the Atlas and Nada.

Some of us surmise that the Atlas is the source of this universe, that it seized control of our universe at the quantum level and manipulated it into its current/future form. And yet, it requests the Travellers to explore the universe and feed it information about it. So are we wrong? Is the Atlas something like an app within the greater Code of Reality? A catalog, a database, ravenous for information of this universe it seems to be scattered all through? Not associated with the Sentinels at all, those weird little tyrannical bots constantly analyzing the worlds for discrepancies from their established data sets? The Lore hints that they might be completely different entities with different origins.

Nada also needs us for the same thing, to collate information from our travels used to fill in its understanding of this dimension, and when evidence becomes more than circumstantial that the cosmos is a simulation, it strangely caves in on itself in some sort of intellectual crisis. It can’t deal with this revelation, or has great difficulty with it, and decides to flee this unexpected reality to the comfort of the Convergence. I would think that a being of cold intellect would simply adapt to new information and pursue this new foundation for its own truths. Nada appears to have no interest in this pursuit. He seems fixated on his initial view that all beings have, that the world they find themselves in is a discrete reality with definite properties to explore, manipulate and enjoy. He seems to lack any flexibility to adapt to such drastic, unexpected information.

Maybe a clue lies in his relationship with the Traveller. I recall that he feels a twinge of jealousy towards him/us. That we seem to be free beings, anomalies, with free will in a realm of determinism in which free will doesn’t really exist. He feels distrust, that this freedom implies that the Traveller is from outside of the simulation somehow, maybe one of the Code Masters. Much like the Users in Tron, who are regarded as gods to the digital beings in that simulated world of code and data. And as we travel through this realm of uncertain reality, we also begin to question just what the heck we are. What the purpose of this existence is.

If you really want to work your noodle, a growing number of scientists are convinced that our reality is a simulation. To throw the doors open wide, google “universe is a simulation,” or go to the popular one-stop shop Wikipedia and read the article Simulation hypothesis.

What a strange universe. :thinking: :upside_down_face:

Edit: still can’t sleep, definitely staying home sick today.

A thought occurred to me as I was having a little meal. That it’s possible that the Korvax, originating from humanity or some other race, might have a vestige in their psyche which sought evidence of a Supreme Being in this universe, a Creator to explain why they exist. This is definitely a grasped straw, but consider this.

The Korvax venerate the Atlas and the Sentinels, perhaps seeing them as distant cousins produced by a race which made them or the Atlas itself. This being the case, why would Nada have such a meltdown at the prospect that the universe was a simulation? If it was possible that Atlas made the simulation, which is the conclusion some of us have (in spite of my logic dilemma I mention above), wouldn’t that tickle Nada, dare I say it, pink? I would think this would align marvelously with their veneration of Atlas and confirm it as their creator in an even grander way. For that matter, why would something as potentially problematic as free will matter to a being whose basis was computer code, a tool for which collective purpose, determined functions and predictive outcomes is kind of the point?

This whole matter baffles me. Someone pick this up and go somewhere with it.

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Can Nada’s feelings be explained through realizing that he himself, with all his intellect, is nothing but a simulation? A product of code, hence without free-will? For sure that would make any being, believing he or she is free, to be sad. I think we can use Nada to realize that the universe indeed IS a simulation, something created for a greater means. Maybe WT is introduced to talk about what those means are, followed by a NMS 2.0 that incorporates this in actual gameplay?
Anyway, what those means are we still don’t know, but it seems that NPCs within NMS have tried to find out before the Travellers. And it is here I link to the set of messages at the Abandonded Facilities. What do you think of those messages? Any relation to these ones?

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A few more thoughts on Nada. I might have misunderstood him, might not.

He’s a unique Korvax, having split off from the Convergence for the sake of unfettered research. He must have concluded that he needed to think outside the box, and went as outside as he could, severing his connections to the Echoes. This is interesting. Wired into the Convergence, he has the advantage of access to all that knowledge collected for ages. Possibly processing power too, like cloud computing with his ancestors. So why break free?

He might have concluded that the Convergence had something wrong. He couldn’t pursue that as part of the collective, they would shut such heretical hypotheses down. So he disconnected. Maybe the Korvax knew that the cosmos was a simulation and Nada wanted to disprove that. Or maybe they thought the universe was a discrete reality cluttered with worlds and events going along their merry way, and he began to suspect the simulation was true. Either way, his beliefs about free will are puzzling. It’s hard to think of anything more “free will” than an ant going against the Hive. And yet when it comes down to it, he believes that we Travellers have free will but ultimately he doesn’t.

Maybe I don’t understand the way the Korvax see themselves. That submitting to a collective will is its own free will. Nada rejects this, sees collective thinking as fraught with problems, like our own scientific community. All going along with what is scientific “political correctness,” and suffering intellectual fossilization as potential erroneous ideas aren’t able to be challenged, until Science one day suffers a crisis from data that conflicts with its preconceived notions. It takes the iconoclasts to shake things up and get us to inquiring for Truth for its own sake again, rather than support for accepted dogmas. Starflight will no doubt come from challenging stale thinking that keeps us from seeing what’s possible from unorthodox physics.

Maybe bcatrek is right, and Nada suffers a crisis when the truth smacks him in the face. He thinks the Korvax are working towards some wonderful goal, and he finds out that the whole thing is just some sort of simulation experiment. He thinks he has free will, but nope, he broke off as a consequence of the Simulation needing some novel approach to a problem, and he had been directed to do this all along. Just a puppet on strings of code. But Nada sees me as a suspicious actor in all this. I am the abberation. Am I the puppet-master too?

Then again, maybe it’s even deeper. Nada the Priest of Knowledge was once a living priest seeking Spiritual Truth. This sublimated nature nagged at him until he decided to act on it, and reject that Echo connection so he could think clearly and independently. Only to discover that the Creator he sought had nothing to do with this reality. It was all a fabrication, an un-reality. He was just playing a predetermined role after all. Poor Nada…

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One thing to note regarding “the world is a simulation” theory; Elon Musk met with Sean Murray last year at E3. Musk is a proponent of the theory that our universe is a simulation, and I believe he talked to Murray about this?

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Before further ado, may i just notice that Etarc user @Priathic, has his/her address registered at the Tesla Center in NY state.

Check his coordinates, the ones in his profile description, in google maps (changing east to west because google).

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Whoever thou mayest be, beloved stranger, whom I meet here for the first time, avail thyself of this happy hour and of the stillness around us, and above us, and let me tell thee something of the thought which has suddenly risen before me like a star which would fain shed down its rays upon thee and every one, as befits the nature of light. - Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, - a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things:- and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon

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This is a quote from Nietzsche. And supposedly a great inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s “Space Odyssey 2001”.

I am so stoked for this - it’s my favourite movie since forever. I lost so many tears due to this movie!
(In the above link, scroll down to see Nietzsche’s quote written above by @Priathic)

In 2001, Kubrick does elaborate on birth and death, and seeing that they are nothing but two different sides of the same coin, and also that a mysterious MONOLITH somehow holds the key, the truth to the everlasting question about the nature of human existence.

What is life? What is love? Does a reality independent of ourselves exist? What is the essence of existence?

For me, everything just got bumped up a level. See more on the movie here.

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You should ook up Wikipedia for ‘Eternal Return’, it’s a common theme for WT and NMS and is what the quote was referring to when it was originally written. It’s a nice tie in with the echo / NMS galaxy theme.

Priathic.

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Now, I don’t remember Nada’s lines when I started playing, but once I got back into it because of WT, and saw some of the abandoned building messages-from-your-future-shelf, well… I think at first Nada was just a bit of lampshading, a little genre-savvy fourth-wall-knocking. But now with WT I’m thinking there was a bigger, deeper, subtler lore that they had in mind all along… like, this isn’t them taking it in a new direction, pulling at just one particular loose thread they left in the game.

I know the popular conception of NMS is “Where’s my multiplayer? Where’s my dinosaur planet? The end just makes you start over wtf?!” But me, I was on board with the Atlas mystery from that the start; that kind of unknowable, Lovecraftian cosmic horror is right up my alley. I find a frightening poetry in that reaching the center of the galaxy just moves to another one. I hope so much that we never get an explanation. It’s more fun to wonder and dream and follow this uncatchable shooting star, than for it to just have an answer and be done with it all. (This is also why I love Bloodborne and 2001!)