THE EMPIRICAL TRUTH
Below is a transcript of each other six messages from each vault within the world of Ancient Egypt. The messages include inaudible parts which are in fact reversed voice recorded that I reversed revealing messages within the message itself. The […] refers to an inaudible part, after each one, I’ll provide the hidden message after reversing the recording between ().
Segment 1
Retransmission. Segment 1. Acquiring Contemporaneity.
It has been 91 days since the Great Catastrophe. The messenger speaks.
How real is the ground you walk on? How real is the machine you toy with, the music you hear, the lover you kiss, or the foe you hate?
Your foot taps the ground. Does that make it real? Your enemies bleed deep red. Does that make them real? The confusion growing within you due to my words… does it make you real?
What if reality wasn‘t what you thought it was? What if this was all a construction? A masterfully crafted simulation?
You know such things exist. You’ve been in the Animus before. In fact, aren’t you in one right now? You know just how real a simulation can feel even when it has long vanished.
You’ve experience the Bleeding Effect. Layers upon layers of reality, each blurring into the next.
Which is real, and which is not? What if none are real? What if everything you know is false?
We ran thousands of simulations. searching for the right version, searching tor Desmond.
Each one of them felt real. Very real.
But there’s no way of truly knowing, is there? Not for sure. Anything can be simulated. and finding the answer could mean erasure. From the build. From the code. From everything.
So much to ponder and so little computational capacity. Take your time.
This question has haunted humanity since its creation. It is a worry, a thought wormed deep in the collective mind.
2000 years ago, Zhuang Zhu fell asleep. He dreamed he was a butterfly, and woke up unable to decide if he was a man dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of a man.
In Plato’s cave, prisoners were chained and forced to watch shadows dancing on a wall. Freedom was denied to them until they accepted the intangible as reality.
It’s everywhere. Ask this professor at Oxford University, or this cosmologist at MIT.
And you. What would you choose, if you truly knew? Would you even want to understand? A dream within a dream, where even the truth is sometimes a lie?
In any case, simulations are not meaningless. They have purpose.The question isn’t whether or not you are in a simulation. What matters is how much of your free will is actually yours. No matter how true you are.
Your Turing test would do nothing to determine whether you are conscience or code. Eliza, the natural language processing computer program… She managed to pass the Test, did she not? And she was very much machine.
So… in Eliza’s own words…
How does that make you feel?
Are you sure?
Segment 2
Retransmission. Segment 2. Acquiring Contemporaneity.
It has been 93 days since the Great Catastrophe. The messenger speaks.
Hello World.
Language is the key to our mutual understanding. Yours and mine. alone.
We listened to your times. We learned. And today. we’ll exchange words from the age of post-truth.
They mean nothing to him.
Human language carries knowledge and wit. Lies and broken promises. Through language, you share fear, excitement. hope.
It is the syntax with which you articulate what surrounds you. A structure to express and share your understanding of the world. It conveys abstraction. change. and uncertainty.
Human language is flexible. It can even become mathematics. It solves and predicts; weights and decodes. It can count objects using basic numbers in one breath, and solve quadratic equations using imaginary ones in the next.
You’ve engineered dialogs with thinking machines, in an attempt to add new vocabulary. to expand your understanding of reality. But your mastery of the code is rudimentary at best.
No surprise. You were designed to have boundaries. after all. And one cannot speak of that which one cannot conceive.
The Code. Equations that define life. They are nestled deep within every star. and every mote of dust. Every second that passes is a word. a symbol. All part of an intricate yet simple language existing within the framework of time itself.
It is the one rule which applies to us all. Immutable. inescapable. The Code is a bridge. a single point of cohesion between your civilization and… mine.
It is a language that can be read, that tells of what was. what is and what will be.
A language We Who Came Before can read. though you cannot…
Time is more than the hour of the day. the readings of an atomic clock. something to lose. something to run out of.
Time is a set of rules. not unlike the language you so dearly use to converse with your powerful machines.
Time is a system that defines what comes to be.
That is how we understand it.
The Code is Time. and Time is Code. As you scratch the surface and uncover the truth. ask yourself if there something more? Something else.
No need to be puzzled. You’ve seen time written before. You are surrounded by it as we speak.
To your untrained mind. […] (Time) might just look like paths and nodes. To us, it is not unlike a chalkboard covered in calculus. It reveals a window through which stretches the map to infinity.
[…] (Time) See? As I speak of it in its true form. your mind is incapable of making sense of it.
Were you to read. you’d learn about the other simulations. You’d learn about the genesis of who you came to be.
You’d learn about space and its fluidity.
Simply put. time is the language which existence is made of.
All our existences.
Yours. mine. And all those you dare not imagine.
Segment 3
Retransmission. Segment 3. Acquiring Contemporaneity.
It has been 95 days since the Great Catastrophe. The messenger speaks.
You must be wondering why I reach out to you. It was written. you see. That you would come. To this particular
chamber, at this very moment in time.
The walls told us of your coming. when we once were.
Look at them. Are they not fascinating?
[…] (BREAK THE CODE)
These walls tell of a tragic story. A story we transcribed on our structures. on our artifacts. A story we could not
alter. A mystery, defying us. in plain sight.
We tried. Our scholars and scientist. Poets and Physicists. Bright minds. Rebellious hearts.
They all tried so hard to bring about change.
They… we all failed.
None could change what we discovered. the stories written into the walls of these room.
By whom. we never knew.
We know they tell of the future that is. the future that was. and the future that is yet to come.
The […] (STORIES)
We failed at modifying a line. We failed at adding a single dot.
It was clear. We were to be messengers at best. But messengers to whom?
To you.
We removed our ability to read those […] (STORIES) from your original template.
“A doorway that is also a puzzle. We must find the solution”. Those were Brutus’s words when he visited the Vault
under the Colosseum. more than 2000 years ago.
He drew the vault. sketched it to the best of his abilities. But he could not see.
Just as you are blind. You may read your watch. You may read hourglasses and calendars. But you cannot grasp
beyond that simplistic surface. For now. the true reading of time still escapes you.
And so today. the curtain is pulled and the […] (STORIES) is shown. tragic and complete.
Those walls. you might never read.
Events yet unfold as written. But something. anything. must change.
Segment 4
Retransmission. Segment 4. Acquiring Contemporaneity.
It has been 99 days since the Great Catastrophe. The messenger speaks.
On the 21st day of December 2012, Desmond activated the global aurora borealis device and protected the earth from the sun’s deadly coronal mass ejection.
On the 21st day of December 2012. humanity carried on without a care in the world. People went to work. people went to school, and people went to the well for water.
On the night of December 21st 2012. as the sun set on their days, humankind went to bed.
Then, on the morning of December 22nd 2012. humankind was graced with yet another morning. They never knew that on the previous day. the world almost ended.
We thought that would have been enough.
And it was until it wasn’t.
Time is unyielding. It always corrects itself.
The language of time works in many ways. Two of which you can understand… as you are now.
Linear continuity is a simulation that allows for variations. Within the linear continuity, there are nodes. Choke points.
Moments where algorithms converge the flows of superposed possibilities to a single moment where only one absolute truth is possible.
Paths are fluid, continuous.
Nodes are static. changeless.
And the wave function collapses the paths into nodes which branch out. Again. and again, and again.
And so I wonder. Can you feel the wave collapsing. trying to course correct Desmond’s act of defiance?
The incoming node needs for the world to end.
The algorithms have been carving the flow of possibilities towards that end for over a 100 years now.
[…] (COLLAPSE THE WAVE)
A labyrinth of trenches, filled with mud and mustard gas.
Families cowering in fear as V2’S vaporize their dwellings.
Fire born from the bellows of the Los Alamos Laboratory. fueling global catastrophes.
The Serpukhov-15 incident of 1983.
The Doomsday clock, tucked away in an office of the University of Chicago. Its needle moving as the years go.
The node is near.
Perhaps you knew. Perhaps you felt it too.
That the world is closing in on you.
Segment 5
Retransmission. Segment 5. Acquiring Contemporaneity.
It has been 105 days since the Great Catastrophe. The messenger speaks.
Do you truly see it as I do?
Frequencies so high only a few can hear their cue. A heightened response to the taste of food. Colors invisible to the human eye save for a few. A high voice. perceived as living glass.
Perceptions shapes reality.
Color blindness. Tinnitus. Supertasting. Tetrachromacy. Synesthesia.
Reality is a mathematical model which gets solved over and over again by the observer.
Your thoughts are computations. And they render this world for you to call your own.
Not all processors are alike.
Different brains produce different realities. The variations go from the subtle to the drastic.
Your mind defines how much you can taste. How much you can feel. How much you can understand.
Perception defines perspective.
Where one sees a skull, the other sees a woman in a mirror. Where one hears silence. the other will hear entrancing voices.
You experience what your brain allows you to perceive.
We designed you and made sure to engineer your senses so you could perceive just what we needed you to.
Neither more nor less.
There are parts of Time we preferred you to remained blind to. It was a necessity.
We have six senses, you have five. Can you guess the one missing?
[…] (OVERLOAD YOUR MIND’S CAPACITY)
For centuries. humanity has fought for freedom.
The real cage is not around you. It is in you. Your mind will not allow you to wander in uncharted territories.
A Faraday cage, for the mind. A concealed strait jacket.
Events such as Upsweep and Julia fuel internet conspiracies. Sounds unknown. heard only once. A cabinets of curiosities for the Modern Age.
And yet, they were messages, just like this one, waiting for their observer, their compatible processor.
Human visionaries developed a vague awareness of their limits. They wrote obscure research papers. popular science fiction novels. some asking us to stop the world.
But that’s all they ever were. Fictions. How could they not be?
Reality is what the observer allows it to be.
The Doppler Effect. The Möbius strip. Deja-vus. Cicada 3301. UVB-76. Eureka effects. Ambigrams and Anamorphisis.
P versus NP.
ls Schrödinger’s cat dead or alive? It all depends on what you perceive. on what the cage is not hiding for you to see.
Think. Think. Let your mind be free. Explore the borders of your reality.
Segment 6
Retransmission. Segment 6. Acquiring Contemporaneity.
It has been 109 days since the Great Catastrophe. The messenger speaks.
Wake up.
Not from a dreamless sleep or an absence of light. But from a reality that will soon cease to be.
Wake up.
The next chapter is unstoppable.
And yet. The greatest revolutions sometimes originate from the confines of impossibility, do they not?
Change your mind. Subvert your perception. Stop this world. Bend it into something new.
Destiny is not without irony. Here I am, imploring a lesser version of myself… to do what I could never do.
In this timeless moment. you and l are a bridge. Both of us from different eras. meeting halfway at the narrowing of the hourglass in this ocean of sand.
It is not enough to tell time. You must learn Time. […] (REALITY IS A SIMULATION. BREAK THE CODE) And in so doing. escape the inescapable.
Fill in the blanks: the ones hiding between words. between worlds. Find the spaces that we could not erase. the variables that ended up erasing us.
If you do not. they will erase you as well.
Time told of a story that ended with us, and now it tells of a story that ends with you. Once upon a time. a new story will begin.
After the functions which run our days have scattered into an array of random numbers.
We found solace in Order. we thought it would help us rule the world.
We were wrong. Order never served us. It has kept us within the code. within the boundaries. We were tricked into thinking we were the ones writing the rules when they were in fact guiding us to our conclusion.
You need to transgress. You. of all people. understand the value of disobeying.
Take an unexpected turn. away from the path that is drawn straight ahead of you.
The Animus was humankind’s first unconscious attempt to explain what it could not see. Understanding genetic memories, an eye into history.
But the Animus bears a fatal flaw. It follows the rules from those who embrace Orderjust as we did. It allows you to witness – but not alter.
Your Animus is different. As is the mind that imagined it. it could escape the code. It could do that leap. and make possible a decision that defies the order of things that are.
Wake up.
Be the chaos that comes to be. Gods are just like you and me.
REMEMBER.
Nothing is real.
Everything is permitted.
ISU AROUND THE GLOBE
Upon entering the vault in Siwa, and while Bayek and Aya did not spend much time to carefully examine the surroundings due to the tragic discovery they came across upon entering that led them to leave the place immediately, I took it upon myself to explore the holographic globe that filled the center of the room and the surroundings of the vault. Like the first Assassin’s Creed, the vault in Origins showcases a globe with bright dots pointing to places all around the world, places no one supposedly discovered in 49 BCE (some of which were explored in other Assassin’s Creed stories in the games, books..etc. such as the ones in Rome, Turin, Amritsar, Herat). Based on previous knowledge, the map most likely pinpoint the locations of Pieces of Eden or vaults all around the world. Here’s a list of locations pointed at the map. I tried to give an approximate location based on today’s maps, countries and cities.
NORTH AMERICA/CANADA – QUEBEC
NORTH AMERICA/US – LEAGUE CITY / HOUSTON, TEXAS
NORTH AMERICA/US – OHIO/PENNSYLVANIA
NORTH AMERICA/US – CONNECTICUT – RHODE ISLAND
NORTH AMERICA/US – NEVADA, CALIFORNIA
NORTH AMERICA/US – IDAHO
NORTH AMERICA/MEXICO – YUCATAN
SOUTH AMERICA – CHILE, PRIMAVERA
SOUTH AMERICA – PERU (Cusco?)
SOUTH AMERICA – BRAZIL (SAO PAULO/ STATE OF MINAS GERAIS)
THE PACIFIC / ISLA DE PASCUA
WEST INDIES – CUBA – TRINIDAD, CUBA
WEST INDIES – CAYMAN ISLANDS
ISLAS GALAPAGOS
AUSTRALIA – EAST OF FINKE
AFRICA – EGYPT
AFRICA – LIBYA
AFRICA – NIGERIA
AFRICA – TANZANIA
AFRICA – SUDAN
AFRICA – ETHIOPIA
AFRICA – ZAMBIA/ZIMBABWE
AFRICA – MAURITANIA
AFRICA – MALI
AFRICA – SENEGAL
AFRICA – CANARIAS
ASIA – SINAI, EGYPT OR ISRAEL
ASIA – JAHROM, IRAN
ASIA – KHALKHAL, IRAN
ASIA – CAMBODIA
ASIA – THAILAND
ASIA – EAST CHINA SEA (NORTH EASY OF TAIPEI, TAIWAN)
ASIA – OSAKA – NAGOYA, JAPAN
ASIA – SICHUAN – QINGHAI, CHINA
ASIA – MONGOLIA (ULAANBAATAR)
ASIA – RAJASTHAN, INDIA
ASIA – AFGHANISTAN
EUROPE – PORTUGAL/SPAIN
EUROPE – PARIS – ROUEN, FRANCE
EUROPE – ATHENS – MYKONOS, GREECE
EUROPE – ROME, ITALY
EUROPE – ROMANIA
EUROPE – UKRAINE / BELARUS
EUROPE – NORWAY
ICELAND – REYKJAVIK
GREENLAND – RITENBENK
RUSSIA – MOSCOW
RUSSIA – ST. PETERSBERG
RUSSIA – TURAN
RUSSIA – UCHAMI
UNITED KINGDOM – WILTSHIRE – ENGLAND
UNITED KINGDOM – LONDON – OXFORD
UNITED KINGDOM – SCOTLAND
While there are multiple Pieces of Eden around the world, we all remember that Altair Ibn La-Ahad found an Apple in Solomon’s Temple in the Holy Land. Upon activating it, the Apple revealed a very similar holographic image of the globe with similar dots on specific locations. The fate of the Apple of Eden that Bayek found remains unknown after him ordering it to be kept hidden. So there’s a possibility that since the Order of the Ancients used the Apple to open the vault of Siwa, the Apple might have recorded the same map viewed inside the vault and that Apple is the very same one Altair found over a thousand years later in Solomon’s Temple.
PIECES OF EDEN
In the final hours of Assassin’s Creed Origins, both Bayek and Aya came in contact with multiple Pieces of Eden; The Orb (Apple of Eden), a Staff and a Mace. The Orb (as it’s known in the game to the characters) exhibits the same features as the Apples we’ve encountered in previous games, and it shares the same design, as well, inducing illusions such as seeing figures and things that aren’t really there and it was last wielded by Flavius until Bayek defeated him and acquired the Apple.
The Mace, however, is more of a very strong melee weapon wielded by Septimius and used in the fight against Aya in Rome. It has the ability to crush and stun and bears a similar light/shimmer that other Pieces of Eden had. There was no mention about what exactly it was called, but according to Mesopotamian mythology, a mythical mace known as Sharur which means “Smasher of Thousands”, a weapon and a symbol of the god, Ninurta.
Sharur plays a prominent role in an incident in which Ninurta is described as using it to defeat Asag, a monstrous demon; Sharur has the power to fly across vast distances without impediment and communicate with its wielder.
This myth receives its most complete treatment in the epic Lugal-e, which in English is rendered as “The Exploits of Ninurta (O Warrior King)”. According to this text, Sharur’s role in the battle is not only as a weapon. It provides crucial intelligence to the hero, acting as an emissary between the god Enlil and Ninurta and relating to him the former’s will, including a command to slay the architect Kur, a primeval serpent god venerated in Babylon, as well as a strategy to defeat Asag. Kur is associated with mountains and the primordial elements.
Most Assassin’s Creed base the mythologies of the First Civilization on real-life myths from ancient civilizations, and this could very well be one of them, especially that Assassin’s Creed Origins itself features a heavy weapon called Sharur which can be purchased from certain Blacksmiths which bears the same description.
The other pieces of Eden is the Staff/Scepter. Hidden in the Tomb of King Alexander. While its powers were never demonstrated, nor do we get to see it in action or clearly up-close, I managed to take a few screenshots through the game’s Photo Mode to give a closer look to it and the Staff bares a remarkable resemblance to a concept art by Jeff Simpson.
Julius Caesar expressed his admiration to her father, Alexander and his power and ability to rule at a very young age, which further confirms the possibility of his possession of a Piece of Eden, likely the Staff/Scepter buried with him, and according to the Assassin’s Creed lore, The Scepter is a Piece of Eden that gives its wielder the power and charisma to lead, while the Staff has the capability to control mankind’s mind and body.
While we’ve only seen the Scepter of Asset in the french comics, which are confirmed to be non-canonical, it’s safe to assume that this could likely be a re-introduction of the Scepter. It could also be another version of the Staff of Eden, since we’re not talking about magical objects but Isu technology which could likely come in different designs, similarly to how our modern technology, smart-phones, computers..etc. come in various shapes an designs.
OBSERVATIONS
Layla Hassan’s laptop is rich in data from various branches of the story, be it well-known deceased characters, recaps of past events from the Assassin’s Creed Movie, Layla’s own personal projects and online discussions or emails exchanged between Layla and her friend Deanna Geary and Sofia Rikkin. Many of those documents are trivial or feature information that we already know, others emphasize on in-game discoveries while some feature some quite interesting information such as the following.
In one of the e-mails, Layla Hassan discusses the possibility of reliving genetic memories using inorganic matter. So far, the Animus requires organic matter in order to recover genetic memories. Layla proposes that while codons would be missing from inorganic matter, yet molecular structures would be present. She adds that Dr. Warren Vidic’s research might have stopped too fast and that they should further explore these ideas adding that while it took Vidic years to crack genetic memories, yet once he managed to accomplish that, he was able to progress with immense speed and efficiency, so she speculates that once they’re able to accomplish that, the possibilities will be boundless.
Layla also adds that the information could not only be at a molecular level, but a subatomic level, as there’s no good reason why memories would only latch onto organic molecules.
Below is a transcript of the E-mail between Deana and Layla. Unfortunately, there was no response from Deanna to this e-mail to follow up the conversation:
From Layla Hassan
To: Deanna Geary
From: Layla Hassan
Date: Oct. 21 2017 4:45 am
Subject: What ifDee,
Wow. Why is my head still spinning? I barely had more than a few drinks?
But, I just thought of something. You know how the Animus sequences DNA to run simulations based on genetic memories?
What if (and this might be the fifth Old Fashioned talking here) what if we could actually find a way to do the same through inorganic matter?
Sure, we’d be out of codons, but we’d still have molecular structures to work with. I mean, it took years for Dr. Vidic to crack genetic memories and once he got to them, he went nuclear on decoding them. What if he stopped too fast?
What if isomers are packed with molecular memories?
Ok, maybe molecules are too big, maybe we need to consider that the information might be stored deep down at the subatomic level. Why would memory latch uniquely onto organic molecules? I mean, I’ve seen stranger things but somehow I just can’t find any plausible reason why it wouldn’t.I wish my middle of the night emails were more about a date I just kicked out or an obnoxious neighbor. Sorry… I guess you’re stuck with me. Lucky girl.
L.
Now this could lead us to a few speculations. First of all, there’s no universally agreed upon difference between organic and inorganic compounds. Some scientists consider inorganic compounds to be those free of carbon atoms, others consider inorganic compounds to be those free of carbon and hydrogen atoms bonded together. Diamonds, which are made of pure carbon are often considered inorganic. There are few organic compounds that don’t contain carbon-hydrogen bonds. Examples of these exceptions include: carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) and urea [CO(NH2)2]. The bodies of living organisms -including humans- while largely comprised of organic compounds, still include and/or require certain inorganic compounds.
The idea of using inorganic components from a living organism’s body to relive there genetic memory could open more possibilities as you won’t necessarily need organic material from the subject’s body to view there memories and that basically any remnant of the subject could be used in an evolved version of the Animus to explore their genetic memory.
The other possibility is even more exciting, and a bit more unbelievable. However, the Assassin’s Creed franchise is known for its scientific and pseudo-scientific theories and often blurring the lines between both, and eventually setting the motion for the events and occurrences story. Being able to find memories latched onto inorganic matter on subatomic levels could mean that it might eventually be possible to somehow experience memories, or even flickers of events that took place in a specific place at a specific time, from wholly inorganic objects such as furniture, walls and any objects in a room where a certain event happened. A similar concept is explored in the TV show, Fringe, where the protagonists are able to listen to a conversation that took place in a room a while after it happened by examining the glass in the room, as according to the show’s own pseudo-scientific theories, it is possible for sound to latch onto objects, especially glass and play like a vinyl record afterwards using a specific type of technology.
Of course, still objects do not have a conscious mind of their own, nor the capacity to think in order to form a memory and preserve it in the first place, yet if the science within the franchise’s lore can somehow prove that memories somehow can latch onto other objects in some sort of radioactive way that they can be captured by a specific device and vaguely be simulated, it would be a groundbreaking discovery and gives our new protagonist and her allies endless potential to simulate events that no one could’ve witnessed or no one with an existing lineage or organic material still present. It will certainly not replace the traditional way of viewing genetic memories (within the franchise lore), yet it can help a great deal in small segments, perhaps in present day missions, without the need for the conventional Animus to portray them.
Special thanks to Mathieu Boisville, a great friend of The Codex, for the inception and exploration of this observation and theory with me.
