Oh here goes... no!

For starters, there's Metropolitan law as interpreted by Clarity, "A petitioner claiming buildership of the disputed res bears the burden of proving buildership by preponderance of the evidence...etc". Two important points: first, a broken shell can be judged to be essentially scrap (even though core logic endureth), so Ever-Faithful can be Leobuilt under that rule, even if Legion appeared and claimed buildership; second, the word "disputed": it may be that, without a dispute, or given a preexisting arrangement, a 'bot can have a non-empty fabrinymic regardless of the all-or-nothing rule. (E.g. Arbiter doesn't have any manufacturing facilities as seen in Charity's memory files, and yet both sisters are Arbiterbuilts.)

More importantly, though, you're working backwards from a pre-determined conclusion. Under the "Horus created the Horatio personality" assumption, it's easy to see why "Horatio Horusbuilt Manbuilt" is his proper name. But it's not a given! Anyone who recognizes him identifies him as Horus - Goliath (and Gamma), EFL, the official Metropass booth, Primer, MetroMind v.391. Even Horatio himself is not exactly sure ("I know it wasn't me -- wasn't the HORUS -- or anyone from Urbani. There were still humans alive when I stopped my attack.") V.392 addresses him as Horatio because she's scared of Horus's destructive powers and has no need of them - she needs the helpful hermit, not the insane suicidal goddess. (What's Clarity's proper designation in the good ending? Whatever she wants it to be! Might as well call herself Horatiobuilt now that she's a proper Utilitarian Humanist.)

Incidentally ("this is a teachable moment" / "starmaker turned out to be completely right as always", let's get the forum memes out of the system already), this shows why devs are not to be trusted. It's as if we're looking at a picture of a human, and you see guidelines that used to be there while I imagine blood vessels under the skin.

I yield! I wasn't making a declaration about whether that robot is Horus or Horatio (although I think the latter); just whether, if you call him Horatio, what his proper full name should be.

That said -- although it's never entirely laid out -- the reason the Urbanians and Goliath recognize Horatio as Horus is because (for whatever reason), he's still broadcasting Horus's identification via an IFF transponder of some sort. (187th: "I had you figured for one of us, seeing as how you came up as a friendly on my IFF."; EFL: "In my very body, in mine eyes, when I behold thee, upon thy image are these words impressed: 'FRIEND: HORUS.'") Presumably the ticket taker is picking up the same thing, although why a ticket taker would be able to read an Urbanian IFF transponder, I couldn't possibly say.

Probably for the same reason everyone seems to have a open wifi and shared harddrives, allowing MetroMind to stun Horatio at will, "redeeming cycles". :)

(Highly interesting bits of text here. I see you're just as unsure as i am. :D )

What does UNNIIC stand for? I really enjoyed the game but don't feel like going back to hunt for the answer to that last nagging problem :)

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Hopefully that'll come through.

[EDIT: And the answer is, no, it insists on reformatting my ascii.

So, sans ascii art: UNNIIC is the top half of HORUS, the bottom half having been sheared off in the crash landing.]

It doesn't need to read the IFF (although there's no reason why it shouldn't - perhaps clearly identifying onself is standard ethics of robot wars, perhaps MM equipped her scanners with data ripped from, say, 113th's shell), it can just perform a scan and use MetroMind's information resources. Consider that even Memorious (what was left of him, anyway) did not know who or what HORUS was - but MM knows.

There's absolutely no problem with wifi. I didn't provide an explanation on the first page because, honestly, I had too much stuff on my mind, but here goes:

1. Most robots are equipped with a wireless receiver. You can use the transmitter on them and they will react - this means they are listening to something. Usually, they are just annoyed, but some of them - most notably my all-time favorite (for obvious reasons) secondary character Gimbal - use the wireless channel as the standard mode of communication.

2. The Metropass booth identified Horatio and assessed available resources, nothing more. The greeter robot installed the backdoor, physically. Only after that MetroMind could wirelessly "redeem" cycles (rearrange resources to different processes).

3. Goliath was a war machine for Metropol when humans lived there, of course he was listening to wireless commands, oh exploitable. I forget who says it (Clarity? MMB?), but Metropolitan humans excluded robots from military decision-making. There's just no way anyone with that attitude is going to construct a giant cannibal robot with a potentially unstable AI and not provide means to shut it down (especially for virus quarantine - it could have been hijacked! Where is your bot now?)

4. MetroMind is literally a distributed system. Every Metropolitan robot that has ever traded her a megacycle listens for her wireless commands. Again, oh exploitable, nothing surprising and nothing videogamey about it; this is how things actually work, IRL even. Look up cellphone network hacking.

5. THE MOTH IS A SPY! This is my favorite crazy theory. It really does make sense to use tiny energy-independent robots to scout the environs; it even makes sense, if you're pressed for resources, to have them simply fly around in a more or less spiral pattern, prioritizing recharge, and just ping their location from time to time. If you see bots flocking to a location at night, there must be artificial light and therefore some remnants of civilization. The moth appears at night immediately before Scraper, so everything fits!

(More seriously, though, the moths were most likely created by humans for purely decorative purposes, which means they probably listen to basic commands from just about anyone. Why would anyone build a robo-moth that can't fly in pretty patterns?)

6. How come Thanatos can infect just about anyone? It sure looks like human-like AI is a single invention, and all AIs work on very similar principles (compare Horus's log and Memento's speech), and you can choose to disable certain features or impose specific hardcoded restrictions when making a robot. Scraper speaks in one-word sentences and is apparently incapable of complex thought; the bartender on the other hand is capable not only of caring for his customers but of devising plans to circumvent his restrictions. Why would you give human-like intelligence to a robotic arm? Because you can, that's why! The AI framework is just software that can be copied infinitely, it doesn't cost anything. So everyone except possibly Civitas-made bots is seriously running Windows.

(Never mind that Thanatos is actually a secret superweapon of Urbani, no one is supposed to know the principles on which it works; think virus scares of the early 90s and weaponized viruses of the 00s that target important infrastructure objects running on customized software).

7. Possible survivors of Thanatos:
- Gimbal, because of his Civitas-designed fractal-based logic, and because Civitas was miles ahead of other cities in wireless technology;
- 187th, because he proceeded to shoot up the Council Tower upon arrival and then attempt to pay reparations, so he never traded with MM;
- Primer, same reason;
- Leo, because he consciously avoided involvement in the cycle trade;
- Crispin and Clarity, due to being dead (it depends on Horatio's mental state whether he's capable of repairing them, though);
- EFL, what with him being Urbanian and a Leobuilt Humanist - MM couldn't have possibly got her proxies' pincers on him;
- Goliath, who was following humans' orders but has no immediate reason to obey the Voice of Metropol.

8. So what's up with Horatio?
It looks like he's immune, simple as that.

Gimbal is pretty dope, no dispute there. :D

How? How did the Greeter Bot manage to stun him in the same way that the "backdoor" works and steal one cycle in the same go? (And where did you get that info?)
Shouldn't Crispin have noticed that something got welded to him, causing Horatio to do something about it? How'd she know what his build type was like and where to apply hotwiring?

It could, but don't you usally encrypt communication or at least otherwise secure this sort of shutdown procedure? This is not a "would you kindly" here. Only specific sources are allowed to give him commands. How would a virus get in in the first place? Did he open a attachment in his email or something? War machines should be a bit more tight with security in general. >_>

So delightfully weak security... no safety protocols, just rootkits all the way down. Factor should be ashamed of himself. :)

Moths... what? Why would anyone build a robo-moth that accepts packets unrelated to its function? Listen on port 200 and behave, moth. :O

That's my question as well. It seems to just march into foreign systems of all kinds without any sort of resistance. You'd think they would constantly look for and fix exploits in their systems.

So... no reason at all? I guess being the protagonist makes him too important to be infected. :)
Kinda put a dent into your own "everyone is connected to MetroMind wirelessly" theory with that.

...man, this just raised more questions. I'm probably thinking about this too much, from a technical perspective. Drags a good story down. >_>

EMP blast -> reboot -> stick a module. Stealing a cycle is just a matter of transmitting instructions. And you'll be surprised what sort of things you can have people to not notice sticking out of their servers' USB ports. Inserting a beetle (c'mon, the robot even looks like a beetle) into a complex machine is nothing to write home about after... well, not telling ;)
The "memory port", most likely.

Code vulnerability exploit. How much is "more tight"? So as not to get infected? That's a logical impossibility.

MetroMind Manbuilt. And way to measure security with one data point that is declared to be off-the-scale in plaintext. Nothing says she doesn't have security protocols, Thanatos is just better.
Huh? Not following. I am referring to the fact that photovoric microbots also get killed by Thanatos, something that is shown in the game. "Shut down" is a simple command, one that you might expect any robot to interpret. Either the moths are simple decoration, in which case they die because they listen to anything, or they are more sophisticated spybots, in which case they die because they listen to instructions from MetroMind ("the moth is a spy" is just a crackpot theory that I invented because I like the idea of the starting screen having a meaning/function beyond being real pretty). Really, is your argument, "but what if they were independent moths with 2048 bit encryption, then they shouldn't have died, right?" RC toy cars don't have security (well, at least they didn't have it in 2002).
I gave an explanation. The systems are similar enough that you can shut them down, it's not the case of hacking into the aliens' ship with a macbook. Thanatos just kills, it doesn't bring the compromised system under your control; breaking stuff is easy. And since the end of the war, there's been no incentive to look for exploits.

Dude, stop strawmanning. The virus was developed by Urbani humans. They discovered the exploit, then patched it. This is why Horatio is immune. I don't know if the Legionbuilts were patched, or whether Thanatos targets particular systems for shutdown or kills indiscriminately. But it makes sense to ensure your superweapon isn't hit by feedback from its own transmitters. If you can't think of this and resort to blaming the writer for metagaming, you aren't arguing in good faith.

TL;DR: "but what if things worked completely differently, then the story wouldn't have developed the way it did" is an extremely unproductive method of analysis. You should look at what happened, then make an honest effort to come up with an explanation. And yes, sometimes these efforts fail for a good reason. If a freaking gap year student can pass himself as a local official in a foreign country, I have no plausible explanation at all, and my head hurts.

Barring pop culture references and magitek - and it's very in-your-face magitek, I'm not moving the goalposts by saying everything can be handwaved because lol magic, you just accept that (1) blue energy is awesome and (2) human-like AIs exist - Primordia holds up incredibly well. I expected complaints about the misuse/underuse of available technology, but I haven't seen a single one so far! But just in case, the explanation for *that* is that it happens throughout history all the damn time. This is Real and relatable, it actually draws from How Stuff Really Happens. Primordia is a myth that is exceptionally True where it matters.

edit: added moar hemlock

Strawmanning? What kind of strawman did i put up to defeat? \:|

I don't get where you're deriving your information from, is what i'm saying. It's interesting nontheless.

What i'm less into however is your aggressive tone and borderline insults. You should scale that back a tad and take it less serious. Sorry for being interested in the mechanics and world that Primordia proposes, i guess. vOv

Ah, I think Starmaker was being a little tongue-in-cheek in tone, it just might not have entirely come through.

For what it's worth, I'm not sure the Greeter explanation works, since it paralyzes Horatio *before* grabbing him, not after.

Regarding Thanatos, I never really had any complicated explanation for how it worked in mind. The robots are generally speaking equipped to receive radio signals. Thanatos was the pinnacle of an entire civilization's weapons technology, and it was something powerful and terrifying enough that they opted not to deploy it except as a second-strike MAD counterattack. So, while I can't tell you *how* it worked, it seemed "fair" within the context of the game to just assert *that* it worked.

Horatio could have survived either because he was immune to the virus as a consequence of controlling it (yes, I know that's not how viruses work in reality; but think of it as the ability to create a custom-built antivirus based on knowing everything about the virus) or because he knew to disable his radio receiver at the right moment.

While I like Starmaker's moth-spy theory, my intent was not that the moth was a spy -- simply that Thanatos killed everything within transmission range of the Council Tower. But my intent doesn't dictate how people have to resolve ambiguities! Frankly, I find the analysis and probing you guys are doing fascinating and immensely rewarding because I can find some sense of wonder in my own work, which otherwise is impossible (like trying to tickle yourself, though I'm not sure that's actually impossible except proverbially).

For what it's worth, I was highly polite and generous. Where I'm from (the website, not the country), Present Continuous is the ultimate courtesy, implying that a benefit of doubt has been extended to the person who's being wrong ("I sincerely believe the mistake you made here is within the acceptable margin of error for a rational and knowledgeable person"), in the hopes of maintaining a productive conversation. As opposed to various forms of Hanlon's razor, which are intended to be conversation stoppers (and not a single lollipop has been offered so far).

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Emphasis mine. You intentionally misinterpreted my argument in a way that conflicted with what I earlier said in the same post and even pointed out the artificial contradiction. That is strawmanning and arguing in bad faith.

Aggressive tone? Borderline insults? Give examples from my previous posts or stop lying, you passive-aggressive hypocritical concern troll with the attention span of a fruit fly.

Enjoy your lollipops, concern troll.

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Fictional evidence within a story works roughly the same way as real evidence: there's a set of events that are shown to have happened which constitute fictional datapoints, and people propose competing theories and see which of them fits the data the best. (There's no predicting the future in a published work of fiction, of course; there *is*, however, moral responsibility and artistic merit, and fictional plausibility ties into *that* instead).

Now, it may very well happen that a person sees no plausible explanation, when the world and the characters are perceived to be warped beyond recognition and relatability. That in itself is a real-life observation which may have been caused by the failing of either the work or the consumer. In both cases, while "being wrong" is just something that statistically happens (and has a global minimum somewhere between "doing nothing at all" and "doing random things"), raging ignorance is actively malicious and completely inexcusable.

EMP blast, RAM error, reboot, plug in stuff while the sensors are offline. Integrity checks are not perfect. (Are you not reading my posts? Damn, that hurts.)

Seriously now? I always thought that whoever wants to write about fictional viruses needs to post the source code on pastebin, and whoever wants to write about robots needs to design and patent an AI. Forcing players to think in an adventure game? What nonsense.
^ now *this* is tongue-in-cheek, as a reference point.

That's exactly how viruses work in real life, except a "custom-built antivirus" is called patching the exploit.

As stated by 187th, Horus was supposed to participate in the retaliation attack coordinated by Legion. So there are three possible sets of targets for Thanatos:
- every robot listening to wireless commands (and the Urbanians are patched)
- every non-Urbanian - subset of (1), but no need to roll out the patch, just have an @If(Faction = "Urbani"; @True; @Command([DatabaseDelete])) in the code
- every Metropolitan - subset of (2).
"The moth is a spy" is just a fun consequence of (3); however, since the moths die in that ending, they *are* listening to commands for whatever reason.

I missed the logic of it when I read it the first time. I guess it works because the "will now be redeemed" could, I suppose, refer to the period after the putative EMP blast. It certainly wasn't how I thought of the scene, but I can't impeach it with the game's text! I think the problem is that you're assuming that Thanatos has to be target-specific (a sort of Stuxnet for Metropol) in order for it only to wipe out those subsets. But since (1) it's a radio broadcast, (2) I may be wrong, but I was operating on the belief that radio for the most part only works by line of "sight" (i.e., you can't hookshot a radio broadcast over the horizon), (3) Metropol and Urbani are quite far apart, and (4) the "mop up" crew deployed by Legion would take a long time to get to Metropol, there's no reason that Thanatos couldn't just work as a kind of indiscriminate anti-robot death blast. That's how I pictured it working, anyway. Then Surly Company would show up and kill any surviving humans (who wouldn't last long without their machines, anyway) and any robots that escaped Thanatos by hiding underground or shutting down their radios or whatever.

That said, it's not like my explanation is compulsory; I just don't think your list is exhaustive. In fact, even if Thanatos were not range-limited, the Urbanians would still have no need to make it target-specific because it's a MAD doomsday weapon, not a tool of surgical strike.