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Topic: Why did the Precursors build the Mycon? (Read 8928 times)
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Deus Siddis
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What is the purpose of the Mycon? Do their exploded worlds turn into rainbow worlds after a while or something?
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Fossaman
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Deep fried Lemur, anyone?
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I believe that the Mycon were supposed to be organic robots that terraformed planets to make them habitable, but they went out of control after the precursors left and started doing just the opposite.
Although, the MYCON can live on the shattered worlds, probably.
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Deus Siddis
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"But I also fail to subscribe to the notion that the Precursors built them at all. I like to think that they, like the Mmrnmhrm, were built much more recently, by forces as-yet-unknown"
Alrighty, whatever works for you, though the mycon said they're 100,000 years old. That does not sound so recent to me, especially considering that the precursors only disapeared like 20,000 years ago?
The big questions are, where did the precursors go, why did they leave rainbow worlds and mycon behind and why are the melnorme gathering data on both rainbow worlds and all life in the known universe? Has all life been modified by the precursors for some reason?
I'm surprised that it leaves all these mysteries behind with no way to solve them. In starflight you at least got to uncover the truth about the ancients, even if the numlox and phlegmak stayed cryptic.
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Ivan Ivanov
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Internet Piracy
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"But I also fail to subscribe to the notion that the Precursors built them at all. I like to think that they, like the Mmrnmhrm, were built much more recently, by forces as-yet-unknown"
Alrighty, whatever works for you, though the mycon said they're 100,000 years old. That does not sound so recent to me, especially considering that the precursors only disapeared like 20,000 years ago?
The big questions are, where did the precursors go, why did they leave rainbow worlds and mycon behind and why are the melnorme gathering data on both rainbow worlds and all life in the known universe? Has all life been modified by the precursors for some reason?
I'm surprised that it leaves all these mysteries behind with no way to solve them. In starflight you at least got to uncover the truth about the ancients, even if the numlox and phlegmak stayed cryptic.
1) The unkown is much more interesting then the known
2) I belive they said on many occasions that they didn't have time to properly finish the game.
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Your bruises are reminders of naivete and trust
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Deus Siddis
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"I belive they said on many occasions that they didn't have time to properly finish the game."
Oh, I didn't know that. It's kinda like Myst then; lots of unsolvable mysteries which you never get to explore because the devs ran out of money/time.
Sadly, Myst had Riven to tie up loose ends, while Starcontrol 2 has nothing. (yep, SC3 is Nothing)
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0xDEC0DE
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Alrighty, whatever works for you, though the mycon said they're 100,000 years old. That does not sound so recent to me, especially considering that the precursors only disapeared like 20,000 years ago?
Timeline correction for you: The First Ur-Quan Doctrinal War was 20,000 years ago, immediately after the Dnyarri War. The Precursors disappeared much further in the past; around 200,000 years ago. If the Mycon were first created 100,000 years ago, then the Precursors were long gone by then. Which is mostly why I subscribe to my Precursor-less theory. Although a lot can happen to a mushroom in 100,000 years...
The big questions are, where did the precursors go, why did they leave rainbow worlds and mycon behind and why are the melnorme gathering data on both rainbow worlds and all life in the known universe? Has all life been modified by the precursors for some reason?
The Rainbow Worlds are arranged in a pattern that offers clues as to the Precursors' eventual fate. If you chart their locations on a starmap, it's fairly easy to recognise, and once you know the pattern, you can easily find them all, which fetches a pretty penny with the Melnorme.
As for the rest, those are all very good questions.  But what leads you to believe that, in the story, the Precursors did anything to purposefully influence those that came after them at all? It's much simpler to think of them as giant intergalactic litterbugs than anything else.
I'm surprised that it leaves all these mysteries behind with no way to solve them. In starflight you at least got to uncover the truth about the ancients, even if the numlox and phlegmak stayed cryptic.
"To define is to kill; to suggest is to create." - Mallarme
For a practical example of this, see Star Control 3, by Legend Entertainment. Hell, it's been 12 years, and people are STILL talking about this game. What are the odds of that happening if they'd wrapped every plot point up neatly by the end?
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"I’m not a robot like you. I don’t like having disks crammed into me… unless they’re Oreos, and then only in the mouth." --Fry
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Art
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I've never been a fan of the "good-natured service bots that got confused and caused mayhem" theory, because: - That role in the story is already filled by Melnorme catalog item 2418... Remote Self-Replicating Robot Explorer Probe.
Just because there's one example of something in the game doesn't mean it has to be the only example. I always thought the Probes were actually meant to be a nudge toward the real nature of the Mycon, just like the Spathi's saying "Hunams" was a hint to the Mael-Num/Melnorme name discrepancy.
And in both cases they're not "good-natured"; they're *machines*, and machines only do what they're told to do. The Mycon are much smarter machines than the Probes, but in neither case are we meant to in any way feel sorry for them or believe they have good "intentions"; they were intended for a good purpose and their own nature as machines sabotaged it.
- The Mycon are EVIL, through and through; unless someone would like to offer the relativist viewpoint that destroying planets and striving to wipe out all non-Mycon life for no discernable purpose has an upside.
 They are the best kind of evil, though, in that they have no power to realize their ambitions, but given how motivated they seem to be, and their stated willingness to stab ANYONE in the back once once they see the advantage, it could be only a matter of time.
See, SC3 explained this in detail, but you don't have to take it as canon to see its explanation as the obvious answer; I'm pretty sure that it's pretty obvious what SC2 was trying to say about the Mycon.
Just look at the quotes from the Mycon-builders that the Mycon drop for you: `...entry of noise into the signal is unavoidable. We must include a filtering mechanism...' `...the system requires more energy. A convenient source lies beneath the crust...' `...Survival is a priority. Expansion is a priority. Processing is a priority...'
The signal/noise quote is a strong hint that the Mycon -- who have been around for thousands and thousands (I don't believe they actually say 100,000) of years, after all -- have deviated from their original function. It's in a way more tragic and, well, more believable that what they are is a malfunction, compared to arguing that they're somehow still perfectly fulfilling the original plan they were created for.
Look at the last two quotes, particularly the final one. The Mycon-builders knew that their terraformers had to *survive* and *expand* as well as simply be successful terraformers, so they're given a means of feeding and reproduction that allows them to spread while terraforming.
I think it's fairly unlikely that the Mycon-builders actually wanted to live on or create Shattered Worlds, since we're told multiple times that only the Mycon can live in such environments, and then only because they were so carefully engineered to. (The fact that they can survive in such a hostile environment is part of the evidence that they're artificial.) What seems the most likely explanation is that they were meant to seek out worlds likely to become lifeworlds and process their surfaces, heat them up, send gases into the atmosphere, and so on so life could grow. (Keep in mind that, in real life, there was a substantial following for the theory that Earth got a lot of the gases necessary to life in its atmosphere because of meteorite collisions in its early years.)
But over time "noise" introduces into the signal -- as with any self-replicating life form, the life forms that survive longer reproduce more, whether or not they're fulfilling any original function they might have, and defective Mycon that seek to reproduce *first* and terraform correctly *second* begin to take over and break through whatever "filtering mechanisms" the Mycon-builders introduced. They end up going to lifeworlds that already are lifeworlds and completely exploiting the whole world to make as many Mycon as possible -- almost certainly not what they were intended for -- and created the Shattered Worlds.
It parallels the Probes very well -- the Probes in general are a good explanation of how a system can end up doing the exact opposite of its original purpose if the system's own survival begins to become the first priority, since many systems' stated purpose are detrimental to the system's survival itself. (And this gets very Foucauldian and such. Stuff about how good governments turn bad because bad governments can exploit more power than good ones, and so on.)
- Amongst their many ramblings, they say something that is very telling:
I personally love what that little bit of flavour does to their story. It is vague enough to impart a variety of meanings; "the system" could refer to anything from the Mycon's greater mission (which would hint at it being what, some manner of insterstellar dynamo?), to the Mycon themselves (a fancy way of saying "we need more Mycons. Go grow some over there.") but I think one aspect is unambiguous: They are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. We just don't know what "the big picture" is. But it strains credulity to think that they are the result of "an honest mistake". There's just too much evidence to the contrary.
Whoa. You seem to have read that entirely backwards. *I* took that to mean that the *reason* for the whole burrowing-under-the-crust thing was a matter of convenience -- the Mycon's original purpose, the purpose of the "system", has *nothing to do* with drilling into planets and uncovering magma. Drilling under planets into the magma was an *engineering* decision, because whatever the Mycon were intended to do they needed to draw a whole lot of energy to do it -- in this case we can pretty clearly see that what they need to do is make a lot more Mycon and to expand, but it's not clear that the side effects -- the shattered, ruined worlds -- are the point of the whole business, since as you point out it's hard to see why anyone would want to do such a thing and it's very easy to imagine how it might be a different project gone wrong. (Note that I didn't say a "noble" project gone wrong; seeding lots and lots of lifeworlds is likely to be an effort to create an expansive, comfortable empire for a coming wave of colonists as anything else.)
If the Mycon's purpose was to make shattered worlds it wouldn't be that the system requires energy from below the surface, it'd be that the system is well-engineered to go below the surface and break things up.
Anyway, did you miss the fact that the quotes in quotation marks are spoken in a very different tone from the Mycon's own dialogue? These are recorded comments made by the Mycon-builders from eons ago; they're comments by the builders themselves, not the Mycon, and they seem a lot more coherent and a lot more sensible than the Mycon's ramblings. The contrast seems to me to be a very strong artistic sign that the Mycon are in a state of advanced mental decay. I'm pretty sure the "Juffo-Wup" the Mycon ramble vaguely about -- the genetic imperative to create more Mycon, and more Mycon, and more Mycon, forever -- is a corruption of the original "system" the "planetary transformation biots" were made for.
But I also fail to subscribe to the notion that the Precursors built them at all. I like to think that they, like the Mmrnmhrm, were built much more recently, by forces as-yet-unknown, and possibly in conflict/competition with one another. They could each have been sent to "our quadrant" from parts unknown as an "advance guard" in an interstellar war that makes the whole of the Ur-Quan Conflict look like a minor skirmish by comparison.
Sure. The whole Mmrnmhrm plot reeked of foreshadowing for a sequel, and there's the interesting question of how the Mmrnmhrm's makers would react to the Chmmr.
Frankly I'd like the idea that the Precursors, or something connected to the Precursors, were the source of the Mmrnmhrm and the Mycon because, after all, there's only room for so many Ancient Species of Terrible and Amazing Power in one universe before things start to get silly. But sure, there's a lot of room for leeway in the story between them. I always leaned toward the idea that it made a lot of sense for the Mmrnmhrm to be a second wave to prepare the planets the Mycon had seeded for life -- but in both cases something went drastically wrong (the Mycon going crazy and expanding out of control, the Mmrnmhrm losing their memories and not being able to determine their mission before the Mother-Ark's shutdown).
But that, I'm quite sure, is just me. Especially since Toys For Bob is on the record as saying that the Precursors built the Mycon. But there's still time to change their minds before they revisit the franchise...
Well, they're probably not gonna revisit the franchise anytime soon if ever, so we're free to speculate all we want. I see that as a mixed blessing, but hey.
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Deus Siddis
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Yea, that hunam/maelnorme thing is a little nuts, but the other theories sound pretty accurate.
"the fact that the quotes in quotation marks are spoken in a very different tone from the Mycon's own dialogue?"
I liked that, it was creepy and yet showed that the mycon really were falling apart into the twisted creations of a now gone species.
"Frankly I'd like the idea that the Precursors, or something connected to the Precursors, were the source of the Mmrnmhrm and the Mycon because, after all, there's only room for so many Ancient Species of Terrible and Amazing Power in one universe before things start to get silly."
Yea, no more extras, and if not the precursors, at least a milleu race.
"Mmrnmhrm losing their memories and not being able to determine their mission before the Mother-Ark's shutdown"
They were supposed to terraform "heaven" and wait for "group 9". 
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Art
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I've read a lot of your wild theories (presented as fact) in the past, but please tell me you're joking.
Really? The fact that one species consistently uses the wrong name for another species tells us that this isn't a fictional universe where everyone has access to a common database of information, but where individual species have various cultural quirks in the way they name and refer to things.
If in such a short time "Hunam" can evolve into a common "misnomer" in the Spathi language for Humans (i.e. becomes the Spathi word for "Humans"), then it gives us a hint as to how a name like "Mael-Num" could become "Melnorme".
This is *fiction*, and not uber-simulationistic fiction but silly, self-referential fiction. So, sure, this isn't enough fact as a basis for a real theory about the Way the World Works in real life, but it's enough evidence as basis for a theory about the way TFB's minds worked when making the game.
BTW, can we please get off this horse about "theory presented as fact"? This is *a game*. There aren't "facts". There are *story elements*, and those work differently. (A single story element is sufficient foreshadowing or hinting for another story element in a way one fact cannot justify a theory, because *in fiction* all data are presented intentionally and consciously by an author.)
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meep-eep
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Really? The fact that one species consistently uses the wrong name for another species tells us that this isn't a fictional universe where everyone has access to a common database of information, but where individual species have various cultural quirks in the way they name and refer to things.
Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe... Sometimes a running gag is just a running gag. I'm not saying TFB definitely intended it this way (I would be doing the same thing as you if I did), I'm just saying I would be really really surprised if whoever at TFB wrote this dialog had in mind that this would give a hint towards the "Mael-Num" to "Melnorme" evolution.
And in case you didn't notice, sometimes the dialogs really treat all aliens of a species as one individual. I suspect that is because TFB were placing gameplay and fun above accuracy and consistency.
If in such a short time "Hunam" can evolve into a common "misnomer" in the Spathi language for Humans (i.e. becomes the Spathi word for "Humans"), then it gives us a hint as to how a name like "Mael-Num" could become "Melnorme".
It could. That doesn't mean TFB intended it as such a hint. I personally find this ridiculously unlikely, though, granted, not impossible.
BTW, can we please get off this horse about "theory presented as fact"?
No, I won't "get of this horse". As long you're constantly presenting theories as fact, someone should point out to those reading this that even though you keep using words like "is" when describing your theories, there is no general acceptance of it being true. In the Ultronomicon this is even more important as people *expect* some degree of accuracy.
This is *a game*. There aren't "facts". There are *story elements*, and those work differently.
Even within a fictional world there are facts. Something is either true in the fictional world, or it isn't, though which one it is may not be known to the reader. The writer may not have even decided on which it is, but in a consistent world, it won't be both true and not true.
Also, a fact in the story of SC2 corresponds to a fact "TFB intended this to be" in the "real world", and a theory about a story element is a theory about this intent.
(A single story element is sufficient foreshadowing or hinting for another story element in a way one fact cannot justify a theory, because *in fiction* all data are presented intentionally and consciously by an author.)
Strange that while in non-fictional text, like discussions like this, words are continuously being misinterpreted, while in fiction, you insist that everything which can be read into a story was actually intentionally and conciously put in there. Are fictional writers more aware of every possible combination of elements in their writing than writers of non-fiction?
The writer of a story can decide to move his universe as he wants. If it is to be consistent, then everything that he or she said before can be considered a "fact". For everything else there are words like "maybe", "perhaps", "possibly", or in the extreme case where one theory fits so much better with the story than the rest, there's "probably", and "likely". "is" is for facts.
Presenting theories as facts does work to convince people when they are not critically examining every line. Just look at election rhetorics. And that's exactly why I oppose to "is" being used for theories: because people may accept it for as it is presented, as a fact.
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“When Juffo-Wup is complete
when at last there is no Void, no Non
when the Creators return
then we can finally rest.”
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0xDEC0DE
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BTW, can we please get off this horse about "theory presented as fact"? This is *a game*. There aren't "facts". There are *story elements*, and those work differently.
Splitting that hair mighty thin, don't you think? If you replace "theory" with "fan fiction", and "fact" with "canon", I think you come closer to his intended meaning. There's plenty of plot for the game that is written down, and embellishment/speculation, while occasionally fun, will never be anything other than "fanfic", and should be positioned as such. That is not an unreasonable position to take, and there are no "high horses" required in order to take it.
As for the rest of your points, they are all well-put, although if I were a lesser man, I would take offense at your implication that I didn't notice that the Mycon speak with two distinct voices. And your explanation of their circumstance is one of the more lucid treatments I have seen on the subject, but you misinterpret my intentions: I fully recognize that in the story, the Mycon are "broken", they have forgotton their original purpose, and now act in a manner completely contrary to it. That's quite obvious, and although the game fiction is (comparatively) richly layered, it is not what I would call "subtle". After all, it's the plot for a video game; hearing the story unfold is supposed to compel you to travel to point A and use Device B to advance Plot Point C, which then allows you to solve puzzle D, etc. I'm not really the type to search for hidden subtext in the game's plot, because for the most part, I don't think there is any.
The point of view I advanced was admittedly little more than a "what if?" scenario, (namely "what if the Mycon weren't broken, but were instead acting completely as-designed?") but I'm of the opinion that zero changes to the plot as told in the game are required in order to get there from here, as it were. The clues in the game just need to be viewed a little differently from what the "obvious" interpretation would be.
For an example of this kind of storytelling, I'll point to a pivotal scene from a really good tee-vee show from a few years back:
KOSH: I will do as you ask. But there is price to pay. I will not be there to help you when you go to Z'ha'dum.
SHERIDAN: Well, you already said if I go to Z'ha'dum, I'll die.
KOSH: Yes. Now.
SHERIDAN: Well, if that's the trade-off, if you want to withhold your help when the time comes, that's fine. I'll go it alone.
KOSH: You do not understand. But you will.
Taking Kosh's statements at face value led viewers to believe that Kosh was being petty and vindictive, which really ratcheted up the impact when his "true meaning" was made clear.
The fact that the Vorlons and the Mycons are both hopelessly cryptic would hopefully be of assistance to me in making my point, but who knows if I've even got a point to make anymore?
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"I’m not a robot like you. I don’t like having disks crammed into me… unless they’re Oreos, and then only in the mouth." --Fry
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Arne
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Maybe a precursor were just like "Hey I built this mushroom thing, it can traavel between plaaanets!" and the others were like "Yay!" and then they all deliriously clapped their hands and giggled like schoolgirls.
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