The HORUS-as-female idea came from Starmaker, a great supporter, critic, and analyst of Primordia. She made the savvy point that ships are typically (though by no means exclusively) considered female so, to the extent HORUS had a gender, it would be female. But that is really fairly, I dunno, extra-textual.* Generally in Primordia gender is identified by voice** (hence Factotum's being female, which was, as much as anything, a quirk of voice acting). Since we never hear HORUS speak (he/she/it never communicates at all; what we see is a sort of code-dump of internal reasoning), there's no way to assign a gender within the confines of what the game actually says.

(* I've always felt that Starmaker found a much better story in Primordia than I put into it, and given her attentiveness to details she often knew the story better than I did. So her word is probably as good as mine.)

(** There are exceptions such as the lamp robot, who never speaks but whom Crispin identifies as female, and a couple other robots whose gender is more indeterminate.)

Incidentally, I should say that gender in Primordia doesn't really mean so much -- notwithstanding Crispin's shenanigans. After all, Oswald and Cornelius make a "child" together (and have a custody dispute!) even though both are identified as male, while other reproduction is asexual.

In terms of my intention, I didn't really have a strong view either way as to HORUS's gender. I view HORUS more as a primordial (haw haw) force of destruction/death/vengeance, one that doesn't have "personality" let alone gender until the fatal and fateful decision at the end of the datadump/flashback. Through a false etymology, I sort of think of Horatio as HORUS's reasoning/understanding, i.e., HO-ratio. So I don't know that it makes sense to assign ANY gender to HORUS, except insofar as Primordia assigns gender to other seemingly impersonal machines (like Factor).

One thing re: HORUS to bear in mind is that HORUS-AI vs. HORUS-the-warship are arguably distinct things. HORUS-AI is an autopilot that activates upon "Condition:Doomsday=True" or whatever the line of code is. By default, HORUS (unlike Goliath) was meant to be a human-operated battle platform. So I'm not sure whether HORUS-AI would've had robot-to-human communication like speech. HORUS-AI does have a robot-to-robot form of communication via radio, but to hear his/her/its voice is death. :/

-EDIT-

Went back and reviewed my emails. It appears that: (1) Factotum was originally intended to be male, but we decided to play it by ear until we heard voice acting; (2) we cast a female VA but used a filter that would make her sound non-gendered; and (3) it appears the text still calls Factotum male ("Boss, there has to be *something* we can do to make him realize that this matters to Factor."). This ambiguity was not really by design. I assume this is the quote you had in mind, from a Steam post: "WEG's roster of voice actors skewed male, and then a mix of typos and miscommunication meant that three characters who should have been unambiguously identified as female (Factotum, Gimbal, and Memorious) get genderswapped at least some of the time."

What was meant here was that it was not by design that these characters are described as a different gender than their voice would suggest -- in some cases, they are sometimes called "he" and sometimes "she." In hindsight, I think this was a fortunate mistake because it make the gender situation in Primordia more fluid and flexible, which makes sense since there is no reason why the robots would always say female voice = female or whatever.

Alpha (or is it Beta?) refers to their fate as "fragmentation," which is a deliberate use of the term related to memory storage, though the process isn't really the same. For flavor, I tried to employ computer/tech terms where I could (e.g., the world "spins" (like a hard disk) rather than "turns"), even if the term isn't perfect. I think partials might be called "partial backups" somewhere in the game, so I suppose "backing up" or even "uploading" might be the term I'd use.

Very tangentially relatedly, at one point I mulled a comic book sequel to the game in which a prior robot made by Horatio ("First Horusbuilt") sets out to destroy Metropol in order to complete HORUS's mission. MetroMind, bereft of Scraper and faced with an increasingly crumbling city, has to try to stop First. My basic idea was that MetroMind would be the narrator (i.e., non-spoken text boxes would be in MetroMind's voice), and the gist would be MetroMind's desperate care for the city. It would've sort of set up "Fallen" insofar as it would explain how MetroMind/Metropol became "The Tower" and how the Autonomous robots got started. But in the end, I was skeptical that it would really materially add to the setting -- it felt more like milking than building, and also sort of undermining of the moral ambiguity of MetroMind (i.e., Is she ever telling the truth when she describes her motives?).

Anyway, thanks very much for posting! It's been ages since I've been able to answer a non-tech-support question about Primordia. :)

It's always tempting to add more to the setting, but I think the temptation is mostly a bad one. :D

Re: Planescape -- Not sure if you're aware, but I'm actually working as a writer on the new Torment game. I'd be surprised if it turned out to have the same impact as PS:T (the first time with that kind of game is always going to be the most significant), but I do think it has a lot of interesting elements to it and some nice turns of phrase. (My role is fairly limited since I'm a hobbyist game writer and don't have that much free time for it any more.)