VectorM wrote:Chris, you used to have a website up, where you shared an interesting theory about holograms at the Area 51 facility. Is that site still up, and do you still support that theory?
It wasn't my site. I contributed, but walton simons (lowercase) set it up and maintained it and deserves the credit. This is embarrassing, but I don't actually remember what he changed his name
to when he decided that having a name that differed from a prominent character only in capitalization wasn't something he wanted anymore.
On the actual question you asked, it would appear that the site is gone but archived.
Front Page.
Hologram Article. And . . .
sweet fuck, I put the developer emails there.
I thought I was going to have to search through backups of computers ten to fifteen years gone to find those things.
Chris Todd and Steve Powers speak.
It looks like the only things missing are some images, and those should be reproducible.
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Ok, so, do I still stand by it?
*reads a bit*
I definitely stand by it not being a bug. For it to get that way someone had to choose to make the model incorporeal. Also, if it were a bug, there's the question of why no one would ever have chosen to fix it given that it was noticed and publicly discussed early on. (And then forgotten. And then noticed again. And repeat.)
*reads more*
I acted like things were way more definitive than they actually are, I presented opinion as fact, and I didn't elaborate much at all. I wonder if that article, I use the term loosely, was originally just a random post on the PDX forum.
If I were writing it now I'd change a lot, both in terms of style and substance.
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I still support that it doesn't make sense to assume it's a bug. Changing something from solid to ghostified isn't particularly complicated, but it's really not something you'd do by accident. All of the explanations people have come up with that aren't story based are demonstrably BS.*
We can be about as sure as we can be about anything about the game that it wasn't a bug
and that it wasn't done for out-of-universe reasons. So it isn't there, but it looks like it is there, and --given that this is a conspiracy game we're talking about-- I figure that's because
that's what they want you to think.
That much I completely stand by, unless given a reason to think otherwise, I'm treating non-solid clone as some form of deception. Then the question becomes "What was the deception being used to hide?" and that's where I disagree with my past self the most. The simple truth is we don't fucking know. There's no indication. (And this long after the fact, the devs probably don't know either.)
I think the simplest explanation goes something like this:
JC was coming to the area and everyone and their brother was watching the feed from his infolink. If there were two empty tanks people would ask why they were empty and who (if anyone) had been in them. So they couldn't have two empty tanks.
They could, however, have one empty tank. It was useful to have one empty tank. Given the odds he was up against, JC did not have the time for mind games right then, so hitting him with the basis for an existential crisis was a good idea. It utterly failed to work, but it would have taken two minutes to set up (if that) and it would have meant that they only had to deal with making one of the empty tanks look full.
They made it look full using a solid looking hologram. (Also, you know the floating globe being grasped by the giant statue hand? It is my belief that that's a solid-looking hologram with no visible emitter as well.)
That, however, leaves the critical question of "Why?" unanswered.
I'm agnostic on whether or not JC was actually created there. On the one hand, it's certainly possible. (Impractical, but MJ12 is.) On the other hand, the only reason to believe that he
was is that Page said so. Regardless of where JC was created, I think that the datacube in front of the open tank is showing accurate info. JC is a clone of Paul. That is the right birth year, and we have no reason to doubt the month and day. The incept date is an entirely different rant, but interpreted as I do, that fits well too.
And we should probably talk about the problems with the lab in general. The open tank is the only one that's solid, the "glass" is a different color on it. We have almost no information on what's going on there, the person providing backstory is trying to kill you, we don't know if these represent four versions of one thing (in which one of them has to be done differently for game play) or one version of one thing and three versions of another. There's a decent chance the overall design is from a time when the Deus Ex plot still included a clone of the president, so vat for
him, and so forth.
It's entirely possible that the lab started as concept art that person A made for a radically different version of the game, was passed to person B to figure out what changed needed to be made to have it still fit, and then was finally mapped by person C, who had no idea what people A or B were thinking, and just had to go off of the art and the notes for what needed to change.
Here's something I've
never heard anyone posit before:
The tank was for a different JC. Specifically, MJ12 grew and memory implanted a back up JC Denton. That's why it's adult sized. That's why it's still open. That's why it has JC's name on it. The tertiary unit is currently having his augs installed in Copenhagan and should be operational by next week. If necessary, it will be used to replace the secondary unit.
Happy coincidence that that means MJ12 doesn't have to fake an occupant for that tank.
Whatever the case, I think that the thing with the Alex tank is that it's empty and Page doesn't want anyone to notice that and go looking for the former occupant.
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A long, long time ago, Smike sent me an email asking if I could look over something he came up with. Something new. Something different. Something no one had thought of but, once you did think of it, tied everything together and just made sense.
I was deep in a depressive episode. By the time I was back with it enough to respond, Smike was in one of his disappearances from the face of the internet.
I would have loved to hear the theory. Maybe it changes everything.
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* Note well, however, that they weren't at the time. People came up with ideas that made sense, we only learned that they were bullshit when we specifically went to look into the ideas, which only happens
after the idea has been put forward.