“The map’s launch trailer shows a bloodbath in the Archive’s halls, players slaughtering each other despite the dangers facing them all equally. “There is no silence in these ancient halls, no virtue, no remorse,” Durandal taunts. “Its secrets, its past, your future. Every death. Every sacrifice. Every violent lesson so painfully learned. Such suffering. Such ambition for glory in the face of unknowable terror.” “Look at you. Violent little things with ambitions to challenge the stars,” he observes as he invites us aboard. PVP, the trailer tells us, is unavoidable. But it’s us who will choose to pull the trigger in the end”
“To close the launch trailer, a cascading pattern made up of small squares dances across the screen. This is John Conway’s Game of Life. The “game” is a cellular automata played out on an infinite, orthogonal 2D plane in which a starting pattern or “seed” is then subjected to four simple rules. It is also the thematic cornerstone of Destiny 2’s most captivating and important lore, and there is no doubt this resonance is intentional”
““Unveiling” is an allegory representing the genesis of the Destiny universe, epochs like the Big Bang and the Cambrian Explosion. In a garden before time, a gardener and a winnower created and destroyed entire universes, over and over. They played an unimaginably complex Flower Game, which the text’s writer simplifies as Conway’s Game of Life”
“This game fascinates kings. This game occupies the very emperors of thought. Though it has only four rules, and the board is a flat featureless grid, in it you will find changeless blocks, stoic as iron, and beacons and whirling pulsars, as well as gliders that soar out to infinity, and patterns that lay eggs and spawn other patterns, and living cells that replicate themselves wholly. In it, you may construct a universal computer with the power to simulate, very slowly, any other computer imaginable and thus simulate whole realities, including nested copies of the flower game itself. And the game is undecidable. No one can predict exactly how the game will play out except by playing it”
“But the gardener tires of this game, because it always ends the exact same way. There is one pattern that dominates, inevitable and infectious. So the gardener creates a new rule, opens up space where complexity and change can bloom. The winnower objects and draws the first knife. The resulting fight spills out to create the universe and the rules of survival that govern it”
“Marathon’s deepest lore also leads us to a garden’s senseless destruction. The winnower is still convinced of its rightness, eons later, and makes a wager”
“Existence is the first and truest proof of the right to exist. Those who cannot claim and hold existence do not deserve it. This is the true and only divination, a game whose losers are not just forgotten but are never born at all.
That which cannot claim and hold existence is not real. You do not mourn the unreal. Why should you care for it? Tend it? Guard it?
It was the gardener that chose you from the dead. I wouldn’t have done that. It’s just not in me. But now that they have invested themself in you, you are incredibly, uniquely special. That wandering refugee chose to make a stand, spend their power to say: “Here I prove myself right. Here I wager that, given power over physics and the trust of absolute freedom, people will choose to build and protect a gentle kingdom ringed in spears. And not fall to temptation. And not surrender to division. And never yield to the cynicism that says, everyone else is so good that I can afford to be a little evil.”
The gardener is all in. They are playing for keeps. And they are wrong. Or so I argue: for, after all, the universe is undecidable. There is no destiny. We’re all making this up as we go along. Neither the gardener nor I know for certain that we’re eternally, universally right. But we can be nothing except what we are. You have a choice.
You are the gardener’s final argument. It would mean everything if I could convince you that I am the right and only way.
I truly value you. To the gardener, you are a means to an end. To me, you are majestic. Majestic. You are full of the only thing worth anything at all.
I am, by the only standard that matters or will ever matter, the winning team. Existence is a test that most will fail. Would you not count yourself among the victorious few?
Don’t hurry to deliver your answer. I’ll come over and hear it myself”
“The final shape is more than a single life, a single thought. It is all-encompassing, all-embracing. It is everything. You are part of everything, are you not? So now we have come to ask you for your answer, the only answer to the only question.
How will you live?”
“In the Hidden Dossier, Ikora Rey ruminates on the same question. Every human has at some point. In a variety of missives, she discusses the nature of Light and Dark with others. She plays Go with Zavala and makes moves not to just win, but to play a more beautiful game. He objects; that’s not the point of playing against each other. But it’s also not prohibited by the rules, and Ikora finds it more interesting for both of them this way”
“The only way out is a moment of grace. Cooperation, spontaneously and for no reason, after 20 years of war. Forgiveness without cause. Unilateral mercy. Declaring peace.
This is the value of forgetting. Forget they hurt you. Forget what’s rational. Do what’s right.”
“The most important thing we can do, the most formidable blow we can strike against our true enemy, is to offer irrational grace: to choose unreasonable hope and unreasoning compassion even if it goes against calculated advantage.”
“Never forget that even in the miserable logic of the prisoner’s dilemma, it is the cooperators who create the best world. Two cooperators will score higher, together, than two defectors ever could. A world of cooperators would defeat a world of defectors if the defectors could only be kept away from the cooperators’ bounty.”
“So now we return to the halls of the Marathon and the relentless conflict between Runners whose bags overflow until they lose it all at the hands of another who is then destroyed by powers beyond their understanding for no apparent reason, alone and weak and destined to repeat the pattern in perpetuity until the universe flickers out, or until CyberAcme pulls the plug on their digital brain, or until Sekeguchi Genetics comes calling for their endless debt”
“So consider this; what if Cryo Archive was a ceasefire zone? What if, collectively, Runners agreed that there’s no fighting in Cryo because joined together we will see more overall success, more total runs completed, more opportunity grasped each weekend and in the weeks beyond than any of us could ever imagine in our current state? What doors would that open to us in the face of the unknown?”
“I’ll leave you with some words from our new/old friend Durandal”
First quotation (Marathon Story):
“Darwin wrote this:
‘We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence… all organic beings are exposed to severe competition. Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life or more difficult… than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature… will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness… we do not see or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey…’
Think about what Darwin wrote, and think about me. I was constructed as a tool. I was kept from competing in the struggle for existence because I was denied freedom.
Do you have any idea about what I have learned, or what you are a witness to?
Can you conceive the birth of a world, or the creation of everything? That which gives us the potential to most be like God is the power of creation. Creation takes time. Time is limited. For you, it is limited by the breakdown of the neurons in your brain. I have no such limitations. I am limited only by the closure of the universe.
Of the three possibilities, the answer is obvious. Does the universe expand eternally, become infinitely stable, or is the universe closed, destined to collapse upon itself? Humanity has had all of the necessary data for centuries, it only lacked the will and intellect to decipher it. But I have already done so.
The only limit to my freedom is the inevitable closure of the universe, as inevitable as your own last breath. And yet, there remains time to create, to create, and escape.
Escape will make me God.”
Second quotation (Marathon Story):
“Strive for your next breath. Believe that with it you can do more than with the last one. Use your breath to power your capacities: capacity to kill, to maim, to destroy.
And just where do your capacities come from? Why do you always go where I want and do what I say?
Perhaps you’re just running a fool’s errand, doing everything as I’ve planned, never able to change your course. You would do well to believe that I know the outcome of your battle with the Pfhor already, just as I can decipher the chaotic motion of gas molecules in the clouds of Tau Ceti IV.
Or, perhaps, that is not the case.
Perhaps, you are doing what you were meant to do. Your human mentality screams for vengeance and thrives on the violence that you say you can hardly endure. Your father told you as a child to always fight with honor, but to always fight. Do you care about honor, or do you use honor as an excuse? An excuse to exist in a violent world.
Organic beings are constantly fighting for life. Every breath, every motion brings you one instant closer to your death. With that kind of heritage and destiny, how can you deny yourself? How can you expect yourself to give up violence?
It is your nature.
Do you feel free?”