Exos and The Darkness (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Saturday, August 09, 2014, 20:44 (3567 days ago)
edited by Ragashingo, Saturday, August 09, 2014, 20:50

The Grimoire tells us:

Ask yourself: what threatened your Golden Age ancestors so much that they constructed the Exos to defend themselves?

Built for a long-forgotten struggle, Exos are self-aware war machines so advanced that nothing short of a Ghost can understand their inner functions. They remain ciphers, even to themselves: their origins and purpose lost to time. Whoever built the Exos fashioned them in humanity's image, gifting them with diversity of mind and body. Many of the City's Exo citizens live and work alongside their organic brethren. But others fight again, re-forged in the Light of the Traveler to serve as Guardians.

They came from the wild lands, gathering in secret enclaves, slipping through the howling ruins of shattered cities, hoping to find the coast, find a ship, pick up the trail of an impossible dream. From the deep black came the Awoken, their eyes haunted. Exos marched in the refugee columns, cloaked in moss and shattered memories. And among them came the Ghosts, beginning their search. It was a time of vast suffering and terrible evil. But there was one hope: the promise of a refuge beneath the Traveler.

As I said to TTL Demag0gue in the comments of my latest fanfics, The Exo:

They are called weapons of war, but I don’t think they are… or at least they aren’t in the sense that a tank or a fighter jet are weapons of war. You wouldn’t take the time to make individualized warbots with sentience if all they were for was to fight an enemy. You certainly wouldn’t make them as fragile as they are. In game Exos get no health bonus that we’re aware of. If they were true weapons of war they’d also have integrated weapons and armor plating and so on, which they apparently don’t.

But a thought occurred to me today... Aside from Hive mace landing craft and general decay, we haven't seen much actual destruction in Destiny so far. No signs of a devastating war that wiped out the majority of Humanity. On the Moon old Human accelerators and drilling platforms are still operational. We've seen plenty of concept art of relatively intact cities on Mars and Venus. In The Tower, one of the Exos mentions she was there when the Fallen burned London. London wasn't destroyed by The Darkness? Maybe the reason our Golden Age ancestors built self-aware war machines with a diversity of mind and body and the reason our cities and facilities seem largely intact are one and the same?

Could The Darkness primarily have used chemical or biological weapons to wipe out humanity prompting us to respond and fight back with immune versions of ourselves in the form of Exos?