I think Tucker is gonna be ok……
- Tucker lacks the necessary neural interface implants to actually integrate with an AI in the way the Agents of Project Freelancer did. So Epsilon did not “kill himself in Tucker’s brain” as Epsilon did with Agent Washington.
- Epsilon-Church voluntarily deconstructed his memory based personality; not in a desperate and chaotic act of self demolition but in a calculated and organized act of self renewal.
- Epsilon was not stupid or cruel and I don’t believe he would have fragmented if he had run through even one possible scenario in his statistical models where Tucker ended up damaged because of it. He would have found another way.
- Tucker is significantly more resilient than anyone gives him credit for. He will be alright and he will not suffer the same sort of damage that Wash did.
I’m not saying it’ll be easy for him to accept that Church is gone (again) but the emotional fallout will not be a physical result of Epsilon’s fragmentation.
It does make for good angst warring, but yeah, Epsilon’s deconstruction was clearly much more controlled and less aggressive than what he did to Wash.
Point #1 is questionable, though, isn’t it? I mean this is kind of a detour from the topic at hand, but since I’ve been wondering and you brought it up… 😀 Carolina does say somewhere in the Chorus arc that Omega was able to hop bodies between the Reds and Blues by using their implants. Since according to Halo logic, hosting an AI requires the crystalline lattice layer in a MJOLNIR suit, or something like it (I’ve been assuming that Freelancer armor is basically derived from it, with some mods so it can be worn by people who’re less augmented than SPARTANs), I would assume this means that all the Reds and Blues have the advanced implant that allows them to integrate neurally with Freelancer armor. And Tucker does wear Maine’s suit, after all.
Although why you’d go around putting advanced and more or less experimental tech in the heads of a whole slew of people so low on the totem pole and nearly irrelevant that they don’t even know their actual job description is beyond me. But then there’s a lot about Project Freelancer that never made sense.
And of course that’s assuming we’re still on Halo logic. Considering 90% of the characters go around wearing armor that either only 33 people in the entire galaxy are capable of using without it tearing them apart or else can only be sourced from one wildly dysfunctional military project, there’s a lot I guess we’re just not supposed to ask about too hard.
Yeah point 1 it’s a little questionable I will admit, But I want to point out that there is something about the way Wash and Carolina, as actual Freelancer Agents, are very specifically referred to as having neural implants capable of AI integration. and other than that one line you mentioned from Carolina Dr. Grey (which could have been given falsely for any number of reasons.) the Sim Troopers never are.
I mean, that was the original point of the project after all. As Wash said “At the end of the war things didn’t look good for humans and there were dozens of projects all trying to find the magic bullet to win. Project Freelancer was one of them.”
Yes, in the actual Halo canon there are Spartans and AIs but it’s been stated many times that RvB canon =/= Halo canon and even if it did in this case there are already Spartan/AI interactions of that nature, It’s nothing new or different.
What Project Freelancer was doing was trying to create a totally different way for supposedly “normal” humans to integrate with AI and run advanced armor and equipment. (the reason they originally wanted to get more than one AI and eventually ended up using the fragmentation process to split the Alpha before the whole thing went to hell because of the Director’s obsession with his dead wife.) So with that in mind I will posit that Tucker and the rest of the Sim Troopers do not posses the same type of neural implants as Wash and Carolina do if indeed they posses any at all.
This is total speculation on my part! Supported by some in RvB canon evidence; but speculation none the less.
Carolina did say Alpha, Omega, and Epsilon traveled through the neural implants, and that all Freelancer personnel have them. But Sim Troopers are supposed to be the worst of the worst…
I think the Blood Gulch Crew were probably the only Sim troopers who did have Freelancer level implants. After all, they were the outpost(s) where Alpha was being hidden.
People (more observant than me) have noticed a level of skill that doesn’t match up with the theory that the various Sim scenarios were staffed with the dregs of the UNSC. Sarge is a master at surgery and cybernetics; Simmons at programming (or at least hacking high security level systems); Grif can drive damned near anything after a bit behind the controls; Donut can bullseye targets from halfway across the canyon; Tucker is actually a damned good soldier when it comes down to it, despite his best efforts otherwise; Caboose is good at integrating AI in other machines, and was probably a decent mechanic before he turned into an AI battleground. And of course, Captain Flowers was overseeing it all. (And why the hell were there at least 3 robot kits between the bases?)
I’ve become convinced that they received a bit (or a lot) of neural tampering to keep them from actually trying to fight in Blood Gulch, while still being able to pull together in a crunch to protect Church. (Freelancer probably didn’t predict Flowers’ death or Caboose slowly losing his mind as he kept getting possessed.)
This is a good point too but Church was able to possess run-of-the-mill UNSC Guards at other bases, as he did when he and Wash were attempting to infiltrate the pelican crash site and Church went off to try to find Tex… so I don’t know what that does to this theory. I will agree that the Blood Gulch Crew are definitely special among the PFL Sim Troopers but I can’t say in what way, neural tampering notwithstanding… And as AIs go, Alpha was unique, and Epsilon after him and even Omega because he originally inherited the “possession” trait, were special and unprecedented as well.
Wow, formatting on this got messed up. That last one wasn’t me! I’m assuming it was @forfucksakefelix
But oh! oh! I noticed the thing about all the robot kits and I’m betting that they had them on hand as replacements in case Church’s body got messed up.
A thing about soldiering is that it’s a skill set of its own. You can be an amazing mechanic and a sucky soldier, of course. These guys are all sucky soldiers, regardless of what else they’re good at. (Well, Tucker gets better, but he sucks at it until 1: he’s terrorized into real training and 2: he’s cornered into making an effort.) I mean…it turns out that they’re not half-bad warriors, when they come upon a need to kick ass, but the part about belonging to a larger organization and patching into its cause, goals, tactics, best practices, etc–they fail at that like no one has failed before.
But now that I think about it, as it turns out, they don’t NEED to be good soldiers
in the situation they start in, do they? When they were still sim troopers, it wasn’t like they were ever going to be called upon in a real capacity. And, just speculating, but all the Reds and Blues seemed pretty weird-ass. But that could have been part of the advantage, from Freelancer’s perspective. One thing you can say for sure is that going into one of those bases, you were never going to end up in a predictable, by the book training situation.
But then again, it’s all part of the joke too. Although that idea about them all having been mentally tampered with is gloriously dark and fucked up. 😀
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1R0lpX2