Big Picture (Destiny)

by Robot Chickens, Tuesday, October 24, 2017, 15:04 (2591 days ago) @ Korny

Haha. Yeah... I'm gonna have to look into that. Might be our first serious story retcon.

Certainly there were subminds like Malahayati, and Colony Ship AI's like Failsafe and the AI of the Exodus Red that we've heard from before. But I think some new things were said about "the" Warmind that I want to really dig in a verify.

I'm pretty sure 'Warmind' is a term that doesn't simply mean 'AI'.

I always felt that a Warmind was a planetary system of "neurally-linked" AIs, and Rasputin was the AI of the Russian branch. What one AI learned, they all learned, and could use their own individual knowledge and systems to instantly come up with separate assessments. It's why the Vex couldn't simulate them:

• SUNDARESH: If we're sims, we exist in the pocket of the universe that the Vex specimen is able to simulate with its onboard brainpower. If we're real, we need to get outside that bubble.
  
  ESI: ...we call for help.
  
  SUNDARESH: That's right. We bring in someone smarter than the specimen. Someone too big to simulate and predict. A warmind.
  
  SHIM: In the real world, the warmind will be able to behave in ways the Vex can't simulate. It's too smart. The warmind may be able to get into the Vex and rescue - us.

Until, like Cody says, Ikora seems to retcon it to be "only one Warmind", despite the fact that Rasputin is referred to as "The Last Warmind". Then again, Saladin has stated that the Vanguard have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to Rasputin, so it stands to reason that they've simply made assumptions about Golden Age tech that they don't understand.

"The legendary Warminds stood watch over our Golden Age colonies: vigilant intelligences stretched across thousands of warsats and hardened installations. When the Collapse struck, the great Warminds fought and died."

So yeah, Io may very well have a surviving Warmind AI, with Rasputin simply being a "mutated" patchwork of the different (dead?) AIs rather a conglomerate of them, existing separately from it, but probably still linked to its network...

So Ikora wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but she wouldn't be right, either...

I like this approach. I was also under the impression that Rasputin was connected (reconnected?) with the other warminds (or at least their architecture) when we fired up the array in D1. Could it be that Rasputin is the only remaining warmind and he has been spreading through the lifeless systems of dead warminds? This would also make Ikora correct without retcon.