Headscratchers / Primordia (2012)

• Does anyone want to guess what happened to Metropol's human population? MetroMind doesn't answer that question, Horus didn't kill them, and it seems strange that the Urbani Legionbuilt infantry would attack the city if the "kill all humans" mission was already complete. It'd be easy to blame it on MetroMind, or on chemical weapons, but details seem to be pretty sparse.
  • It's mentioned (forget when...think during the conversation with Memento) that Metro gassed the human population.
  • During the final conversation with MetroMind you can ask her what happened to the humans in Metropol. She tells you that they took shelter from the attack in her subway tunnels. That's when she decided to gas them herself. She believed humans had become obsolete, and destroying them was necessary for progress.

• There's a lot of Plot Time involved in this game - humanity doesn't seem to have died off that long ago, but the robots have advanced (or degraded) enough to have nearly forgotten what humanity was actually like, and I'd guess Goliath wasn't buried in a day. What do you suppose the time scale is for entities that measure time in Cycles instead of hours, days, and years?
  • The skeleton is the real confounder, as if it had really been sitting there open to the elements without protection, I doubt it would've lasted a month (given the windy, sandy place it's sat in).
    • Although, taking the side story Fallen into consideration, it could be that the skeleton is newer than the war.
  • The UNNIIC/HORUS too. It's either seriously Ragnarok Proofed or hasn't actually been stranded in the desert that long.
  • There are some references to years. On clicking one of the dead robots in the Dunes, Horatio notes "I picked it clean years ago." This would mean that version 5 alone has been around for multiple years, never mind the lifespan of the previous four. 187th also mentions having waited for years for the chance to pay his fine.

• Does anyone else find it odd that neither Horatio nor any other robot thinks Nullbuilt is an odd name? Null is the term for "no value" in data storage, so Null-built implies that Horatio doesn't know who made him.
  • It just means you're essentially an orphan, by robot standards. Tragic, but not particularly uncommon or strange.
    • One would assume any robot subjected to a complete memory wipe would, on waking up, assume the Nullbuilt surname. It can't be that rare, especially as the rest of the robot populace doesn't even bat an eyelid.
    • If you have Clarity decide the case for Rex she will declare that neither Cornelius or Oswald can claim buildership of him and henceforth he is to be known as Rex Nullbuilt and is a free robot.

• What do robots need beds for?
  • Standby-mode? Throwback to their old human creators?
  • If you stay in that part of the ship long enough without doing anything, Crispin asks about this. Horatio doesn't know, and assumes that the bed was built by one of his previous versions. HORUS's log suggests that the ship was built with a human crew in mind, as HORUS specifically detects the absense of it. Presumably, the bed was meant for humans.
  • Additionally, clicking on the bed early on has Horatio comment that this is "no time for a nap" and clicking on one of the doors in Metropol mentions a dormitory with cots and recharge stations. At least some models of robots in this setting may have a short process akin to sleep, then, and they all seem to know what beds are for (though they aren't required) and will use them if available.

• At the end, following the first confrontation with MetroMind, where did all the robots go? You exit the Tower and the streets are empty, but I don't remember being told where or why they've gone.
  • If you got the Golden Ending, a lot of them show up at the UNNIIC crash site - perhaps they decide to skip town after the Courthouse blew up and Scraper started running around. Beyond that, the only idea I have is that they all went down to the underworks (You may recall not being able to go down there during that part of the game) to retrieve supplies for MetroMind as part of her Assimilation Plot.

• When you get out of the ship for the first time, it's fairly clear that the UNNIIC tag is incomplete. There are marks under the letters, suggesting another name. How can it be that neither Horatio nor Crispin ever thought "hmm, let's have a closer look at this"?
  • The lower half of the letters is scorched, blasted, smudged, and in places completely erased. To someone with no idea that there's anything else to look for, and no particular reason to care when there are more important things to do, that just looks like more random weathering/crash damage.

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