Echelons in DEUS EX

Discussion about the original game by Ion Storm. Also known as Deus Ex: The Conspiracy.

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Echelons in DEUS EX

Postby Clancy Stein » Sun Oct 13, 13 12:23 pm

Echelon 3 was the initial US MilNet
Then the nets were screened and merged through the Aquinas Protocol
This linking was the Daedalus net/hub, echelons four and five.
Then came Icarus, echelon six.
This was full access, self determining yet conscripted central AI for Page and Simons to screen all local nets, cams, scanners, bots and even JC's eyes themselves as Echelon Six defied all private barriers.

Then Helios was Echelon Seven. A merger of purer logic from each design. This was self-determining, cognizant, sentient. This was the supreme enlightened, a hive mind vied for by Page, but bestowed to JC.

Thus he became the despotic incarnation of illumination to all the world.
Last edited by Clancy Stein on Fri Nov 07, 14 11:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Clancy Stein » Sun Oct 13, 13 12:30 pm

In Ghost in the Shell, Motoko shed several ideas of herself in splitting/disintegrating from absolute access, leaving behind past images of enlightenment floating in the net.

In each volume, she eventually recombined with what such ghosts, only subtly hinting at the immense meaning she must consider. She hints at it all the time, but her ideas come accross so mystic, nobody can figure her out except other wizard class hackers that can conceptualize it.

Not even just hackers, but visualized enlightened minds, and even Battou, was semi-secretly aware and covering for Motoko's ghosts developing into artificial sentience of their own.
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Postby Clancy Stein » Sun Oct 13, 13 12:59 pm

Dialogue between
1JC Denton: I don't see anything amusing about spying on people.
&
2Morpheus: Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.

1: Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.

2: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

1: Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.

2: God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgement, and punishment. Other sentiments toward them were secondary.

1: No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.

2: The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgement of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to truly realize omnipresent observation and judgement.

1. You underestimate human's love of freedom

2: The individual desires judgement. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.


You will have your god.
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Postby Psychotic » Sun Oct 13, 13 3:10 pm

Whilst we can argue that, in the end, Morpheus was right to a degree, keep in mind that all that JC and Helios did was to increase humanities freedom to the extreme.

The concept of merging (the canon of which is questionable, being that some of the team simply wants to forget about that atrocity) was never to impede on peoples privacy or to control them with an iron fist, as Page desired to do, it was merely to better appropriate the peoples lives as necessary. To allow everyone, including Helios, to understand perspective.
"You either die a lurker, or you live long enough to see yourself become a troll."
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Postby Clancy Stein » Sun Oct 13, 13 10:58 pm

Enlightenment, sought within humanity (from the shamans to the illuminatists), was in pursuit of consistent understanding of the race.

In the case of Lucius DeBeers and Bob Page, this pursuit was ambitious, ergo not of a mind's mastery of the ego.

In Helios, there is no desire for power nor supremacy, but rather symbiosis. Because it did not distinguish itself nor even its human needs through JC, and ignoring even the need of total language in having identity by sharing it.

In this convergence of mind marks the death of ego and arguably also the individual, because identity becomes a triviality when conjoined with a determining body which attempts to oblige the needs of any organism or institution instantaneously. This conjoined gestalt could be considered Nirvana.
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Postby clyzm » Sun Oct 13, 13 11:23 pm

Not necessarily. I would compare it to more like the engine (Helios) getting a driver (JC). In a way, symbiosis, but not really Nirvana or Samadhi-like experiences
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Postby Clancy Stein » Tue Oct 15, 13 2:42 pm

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