» Thu Nov 11, 2010 12:43 pm
I like this discussion. Hopefully it figures out what to do with the contradictory aliens.
Two possibilities (both drawing from Legion as well as the games):
1). The aliens involved in the two incidents may not, in fact, be the same species. They could be unrelated, a coalition, or even enemies. There is no inherent reason to say that they are the same species, and in-game characters are working with character-limited knowledge.Gould mentions this possibility in his apartment in the book. In-game characters still don't know their head from their @$$ in the game with regard to the "Ceph." It wouldn't be hard to believe in some convergant cephalopod evolution, after all (it seems a fairly intuitive design, unlike our cobbled together bipedal structure).
2). We may not have even seen the Ceph yet. Here's how I'm taking this. The ship that crashed at Lingshan may have been empty save for automata. The organisms inside it having died long ago. If we assume Hargreave is right about where they evolved (he's one of the few characters in the game that may have grasp of the aliens; I actually think he does), then two hundred below is not a feasible initial environment. *Where* would we find liquid water at that temperature that would reasonably support life? The organisms onboard the ship in C1, therefore, could not have been aquatic and thus not what Hargreave referred to.
Space travel may not be short. It may take centuries or millennia, depending on how the fiction defines it. There is a classic sci-fi book "Rendezvous with Rama" in which a large ship enters our system to slingshot around the sun. On board there are automatons that were tasked with rebuilding everything. Suppose, along a similar line, the blues are actually bioengineered automata spawned when the ship activated and were intended to build the Ceph. They then locate a threat and try to deal with it with limited resources. If they were initially designed to operate in space, it's a lot cheaper to keep it cold, not simulate gravity, and not have organisms in stasis or feed them. Thus, they need antigrav on a planet and have a limited cold weapon to deal with hostiles. Said weapon is also a global level WMD. In the book it states that it significantly speeds up global warming (this is stated matter of factly in the book; global warming went nuts after Lingshan). The melting ice caps raise water levels and increase the environmental edge of an invading species while destabilizing the established civilizations.
Now what caused them to wake up globally: it was *not* Lingshan itself. Hargreave, according to Gould, found something with a radio telescope and contacted it. Details outside of that are nonexistant (I'm only half-way through the book according to my Kindle). Lingshan's activation could have confirmed the "contact" was not an anomaly to the Ceph.
The Ceph in their turn activate a localized cell (one of several noted in the game). Now, if what I've speculated about biological automata is correct (this would explain why blues never talk with one another), then this implies an advanced society stratified into bioengineered caste systems. There may, in fact, be many, specialized Ceph. Whatever was in the cell wouldn't have been very militarized (we wouldn't have even been a credible threat two million years ago), so they unleash the spore via spires. This experiments with a parasite that quickly becomes innert, a sort of fungus that never develops fruiting bodies to reproduce (thus the spore is not contagious). It interferes with primate minds, especially humans and chimps, and draws them toward a centralized location by inducing a pleasurable religious experience. Most of the infected die happy and "enlightened" as a result. This tests our psychology and anatomy from willing volunteers with almost no risk to the Ceph. The bioweapon doesn't impair their reasoning faculties, after all, so they all move willingly toward the most Ceph-infested zones. The ticks then inject an acid, svck out the dissolved matter, and remove it for anolysis.
The elites and hunters we find (excuse me, the Ceph) in game and fight are actually bioengineered soldiers designed to test our own methods of fighting. This is why they have such poor armor, primitive weaponry (roughly on par with ours), and are forced into a humanoid structure. These ad hoc Ceph are designed to get an insider's view of the realities of hominid fighting while developing techniques agianst it. This data will be forwarded to whatever Hargreave contacted, which will forward it to other centers which will conduct similar experiments in other areas (the cells highlighted at the end of the game).
Incidentally, this also explains why we aren't steamrolled (a non sequitur noted as such numerous times in the book). It also exposes humanity to Ceph technology to reverse engineer so that when the Ceph really bring it, we may actually be able to fight back and, as always, be victorious over the more advanced alien invaders (they may regard us as little more than apes and underestimate how well we can do that).
I doubt Crytek is going to do anything like that; it's a little too complicated for their method of story-telling, but I it seems to be hinted at by the game details to me.
