Conspiracy theory contest (may contain traces of spoilers)

General
1

Dear Omnipedians :globe_with_meridians: :heart:

With the release of episode 8 in the rearview and two more episodes ahead, I wanted to take a moment and thank you all for the amazing theories, discussions, ideas, and good vibes you’ve contributed to Neurocracy over the past weeks. It’s been a hell of a ride, and I think we’ve made it to a place where we can ensure a mind-bending final act. We have some… interesting surprises in store for you :eyes:

With that in mind, @pyrofoux came up with a lovely idea to celebrate what we’ve accomplished:

Several players (and devs!) expressed how they’ll miss the weekly ritual of logging on, chatting with others and discovering the new release. Because the last episodes will mark not an end, but a transition from a way of playing to another, I’d like to suggest we do something a bit special on the forum before this “departure”

Therefore hence as such, we’d love to invite you all to this thread, where the year isn’t 2049 and we can do as we did on Discord during Neurocracy’s first run: comparing theories, throwing around wild ideas, and discovering things together. Since episode 8 has marked the part of Neurocracy where some answers will start showing up, what better way to start things off than with QUESTIONS?

  1. Who killed Xu Shaoyong?
  2. Who is Adira?

Also, please do post questions of your own about any topic you’re interested in or actively pursuing! From Imran Djebarri to Bohuslav Skinner and whether 6b killed both, anything goes! Who knows what discoveries it might inspire :mag:

You might even get something special for coming up with good questions! Something that isn’t a positive CMD diagnosis heheh heh :eyes:

5 Likes
2

I really love this idea! It has been (and still is) SO MUCH FUN to roleplay as a person living in Neurocracy’s universe, but some none-roleplay theorizing sounds just as good. So yeah, let’s do both! <3

I start from the more simple one… At least a little bit. Who is Adira? I really have hard time believing Adira exists as they are described in Omnipedia. Having a hacker to blame for everything that goes wrong sounds just way too convenient. But Adira IS something - after all Zhupao was proven to be using it as a search term in the data leak. From this point onwards I have no clear ideas, but maybe Adira means (or meant originally) something completely else than anything listed in Omnipedia; maybe it’s, I don’t know, an abbreviation of people asking the wrong questions? So they can be stamped with a CMD diagnosis as soon as possible. :smiling_face_with_tear:

Who killed Xu Shaoyong? Quite honestly I have no earthly idea. Not because there are not suspects, but instead there are so many! It was an interesting tidbit that the drone UI was switched to English before the attack, so it seems like it’s someone who didn’t read Mandarin Chinese. Or it could be a red herring the attacker did purposefully - who knows! But considering how well they’ve evaded getting caught, doing such thing would seem a bit pointless.

Then other question. Hoo boy are there many! I wish I had time to just sit and recall all of them right now, but for now I’ll throw a few that comes to my mind in the air.

What were Muren and Amankwah-Crouse doing in India before Kozlow came into the picture? I think it’s likely Kozlov tried to kill both of them like Amankwah-Crouse said, likely to stop them from doing whatever they were doing. But what WERE they doing or planning to do?

Where are Cariappa and Lian? Please tell me Cariappa is okay, I’m stupidly fond of the fellow. :anguished:

Why did Lassgard kill himself right now? And of course was it actually a suicide or just made to look like one? If it’s the latter, it of course could be that Kozlow started his killing spree from him, as he somehow seems to know where missing people happen to be residing. But if it really was a suicide, why now? He seems like quite an unhinged guy who wasn’t all that bothered by the destruction his actions caused in the CMD pandemic, so starting to feel guilty after all these years isn’t something that first comes to my mind. Was someone threatening him with something worse than death, or did he perhaps hear something that was even worse than killing thousands of people that pushed him off the edge?

And of course most importantly… Will we get to hear Waite’s fifth album on October 10th this time? (Please please please let us hear it.)

4 Likes
3

I feel similarly - the idea of Adira as some kind of rogue super-hacker seems too farfetched and convenient. Maybe it’s a hacktivist collective. Maybe it’s a collective of PACOTTI-powered AI that have unified and are working toward who-could-even-guess-what. Maybe it’s a collaboration between the two?

Who killed Xu Shaoyong?
I think there were probably multiple people/entities/groups involved. Right now my gut tells me Spencer Hagen could’ve been involved, Roshan de Silva is on my suspects list, and I’m suspicious of the CCP. My feeling is that either Xu’susefulness had run its course, or he had become problematic to someone in some way. I’m about 50/50 on whether I think he got brainjacked and reprogrammed at some point.

Who killed Yuri Golitsyn?
It’s possible that he was just collateral damage in Xu’s assassination. Not likely, but possible. Not many people knew where he was - his bodyguard Matvey Kozlov could have known.

My favorite pet theory about the Xu-Golitsyn rendezvous is that Xu had decided he wanted out of whatever scheme he’d either concocted himself or gotten caught up in (maybe he realized he’d been brainjacked at some point along the way) and so arranged to meet Golitsyn to get his help in disentangling himself from the digital web he was at the center of.

What the heck is up with Efrim?
I think Efrim and their bandmates had some kind of shared consciousness experience back in 2019, or that Efrim thinks they did, at least. Or maybe they all had an identical dream. Maybe they talked to the mushroom, or an early AI. Whatever it was clearly set Efrim on A Path in life. That citation about how they made their bandmates record their dreams, their numerous investments in quantum computing, neural technology, bioscaffolding tech and a company that can 3D print with basically any material…I get the vibe that Efrim’s focus into this area was a factor in the issues that prompted the band to take the hiatus in the first place. I think it’s entirely possible Efrim is trying to facilitate/orchestrate a digital-organic, AI-human next step in existence sort of situation. And honestly…I’m not not here for it? It’s fascinating to watch unfold, at the very least.

4 Likes
4

Oh, also, I am very much rooting for Cariappa as the introvirtuous scientist funneling information out of the G6 infrastructure, choosing to stay connected to the project so he can leak information out. He’s one of my favorite characters.

4 Likes
5

I don’t have the first clue of who killed Xu, honestly. I’m certain that it has something to do with why he met with Golitsyn, but I have no idea of what’s up with that, either. It’s probably my number one question - what were they talking about ?

As for Adira… I don’t think they’re anyone. “Mysterious superhacker” was hard to buy into to begin with, and the more time went by the more it looked like a convenient excuse. At this point, the more pertinent question to me is what is Adira. And IDK :person_shrugging:

As for other standing questions… There are a few :

  • The disappearance web : they all feel linked. You can pretty much wiki crawl your way from one of these character’s pages to all the others, or at least in my head you can, but there is no single common point I can spot. And everybody disappearing, resurfacing, or dying-when-we-thought-they-already-did in about a single week is just a lot. What’s going on there ?

  • Lassguard’s first ‘death’. It has to be a cover up - the autopsy and colloid analysis would have identified the body as not his, unless someone took it off him, installed it on another body, managed to hide that and then proceeded to change its dental records, prints and whatever futuretech identity checks they have. I flat out refuse to believe they didn’t check that on such a high profile case.
    So either someone managed all of that, somehow, or the gouvernement covered it up. So which is it, and why ?

  • Efrim Waite. Just… The entirety of them. What in all the hecks.

  • A more minor point, but I’m incredibly curious about omnipedia’s editing situation. At first it was just kinda funny seeing the obviously biased website be obviously biased… and then all this seemingly contradictory info kept popping up left and right… and then we hear about an AI/human split… and then the head of the project disappears for something like 24 hours ? Something has to be up.

I’m honestly pretty loaded on questions, and very short on answers, but those are the big ones.

4 Likes
6

Some wild Specimen 6b thoughts…

“6b” has a very similar shape to “G6.” I don’t think this necessarily amounts to anything, but in a world with such meaningful, multilayered names, it pops out. Maybe signifies some kind of connection.

The notion of a fungal organism as having multiple fruiting bodies that don’t even necessarily look similar but which are all connected by a hidden, underground organism/mycelial network is compelling when looking at a world where humans are being connected in what looks like a very similar, if digital, manner. The clustering behavior of colloids in proximity to each other sounds like mycelial communication.

Do I think Specimen 6b is “behind” any of these goings on? …Probably not, at least not intentionally/consciously. I do think maybe it inspired the G6 network as we’re seeing it. That much biomass with a colloid attached also sounds like it could be a massive source of bio energy, and I can totally see Sanial and others exploiting it for that purpose. Or maybe for storage? Could’ve inspired the architecture for G6 hubs.

I also have some vague, almost unformed thoughts about what could happen if an AI or a conglomeration of AIs came across that biomass by means of connecting to its colloid…I can’t even articulate a theory around it, just that it feels like Things Could Happen.

4 Likes
7

I really like this theory! Maybe Efrim was originally trying to replicate or understand (or both) their “life-changing experience” through technology. And now that we found out in today’s update that they are ill in some way, maybe when that (or the first death of their band mate) happened they started to steer more towards meeting their band members again in a next “digital life” or something like that?

Today’s update offered some very interesting answers, and at least Adira’s mystery seems to be now somewhat solved. I find it almost hilarious how close to the truth my “guess” was:

But Adira IS something - after all Zhupao was proven to be using it as a search term in the data leak. From this point onwards I have no clear ideas, but maybe Adira means (or meant originally) something completely else than anything listed in Omnipedia; maybe it’s, I don’t know, an abbreviation of people asking the wrong questions?

Because yeah, I was here during the first run of the game, so I definitely “knew” the anser to this one. But the thing is that I had absolutely no conscious recollection of it! Clearly it must’ve been stored somewhere in my brain though, hahah. (This happened once before, too, with De Silva. I was the one who first posted about their name mysteriously vanishing from Omnipedia, and only much later I remembered that yeah, this definitely did happen in the original run, too.)

One of the new question today’s update rose was what was Lian doing in the India’s murder site? It seems like evidence suggests that she was there, maybe even had some part in Muren’s death, but was not mentioned by Amankwah-Crouse. To me that sounds like Amankwah-Crouse knows/suspects that whatever happened wasn’t Lian’s fault. Maybe she was blackmailed to do what she did (maybe Kozlov is the one who helped her disappear on the condition that she’d help him do whatever he tells her to) or maybe she was even completely brainjacked to to things against her will.

3 Likes
8

Okay okay okay.

Adira: In the latest update we found out that ADIRA is an acronym for a disease and that Spencer Hagen has been covering it up. Does this mean that he also planted the idea of Adira as a terrorist to further cover and confuse the trail?

Who killed Xu and Yuri?: I honestly spin around on this constantly. I can’t find a reason that someone would want to kill BOTH of them. This leads me to believe that Yuri was collateral damage. (But why were they together? What were they scheming?) Due to his advanced rogue technology he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I also spend a lot of time trying to piece together what kind of man Xu was. It seems that he was no angel but also tried to guide the technology away from extreme misuse. Specer Hagen looks more and more like our bad guy. He gives me the ick and I could believe he wanted to go farther with the tech than Xu was comfortable. We already know he threatened Connie and Cariappa. He has exclusive access to Omnius. Granted, doing this post seems like cheating after episode 9 but Hagen’s got megalomaniac written all over him.

Efrim Waite: I echo what has already been said. Efrim and their bandmates found something and it changed them. It stands to reason that this something is also what is getting them killed but the timing is strange. Why wait so long after the initial incident? Maybe Efrim has been trying to recreate or reach whatever it is they communed with initially?

6b: I love this mushroom and I so hope the colloid isn’t hurting it. It’s clearly more aware of the “outside world” than I previously thought. It has a sense of self. It has empathy. Do you think the mention of the grave in it’s recent post means someone is buried on its lands?

I’m having so much fun, it’s going to be so sad (and satisfying) to reach episode 10!

4 Likes
9

Who killed Xu and Yuri?

I’m leaning pretty heavily towards Spencer Hagen.

The only thing I can see Yuri and Xu wanting to talk about is the negative impacts of colloids. Yuri’s original lawsuit ended up being settled; presumably because Zhupao were covering up ADIRA and didn’t want anyone looking too carefully into that.

My theory is that Xu’s conscience decided that enough was enough and he decided to meet with a specialist in making people disappear to safety, who also knew some details about the problems behind the scenes.

Either Connie or the people working with her clearly had some connections to Pokrov going off all the Pokrov gear found at the safehouse kind of place in Dhawad, so it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to think that Yuri might’ve been in on the whole thing with them, and this whole plan was an attempt to get rid of Spencer Hagen’s influence and try to put the brakes on the colloid disaster the world is racing towards.

Presumably Spencer Hagen found out about this, and tried to intervene by killing or arranging the killing of the people who could stop him. Maybe he paid or convinced Kozlov to betray them, or maybe he was brainjacked (seems unlikely given surely he had administered collocidals before starting to put any plan of Yuri/Xu’s into action).

Efrim

They have many many colloids, mostly custom colloids. What if they’re building some kind of collective consciousness with their former bandmates, merging minds by putting them in colloids inside their head? Maybe the delay is because the first attempt didn’t work?

3 Likes