(SPOILERS!) Discussion about the story and ending

[Psyringe]

Now that I've completed the game, I'm curious what others make of the story and its ending, so here's a thread to discuss it. :) Obviously this thread will be a massive spoiler, and trying to use the spoiler tag for each bit of information would become quite messy, so I put that tag in the title. I won't use it in my posts here, so if you do not want to be spoiled, this is your last chance - close this tab and go back to the game. :)

Personally I'd suggest to complete the story and find all the crew logs and messages first. No need to worry about the corrupted logs - while they provide some additional lore, they don't include any revelations that you aren't already getting from elsewhere. Many corrupted logs are just references to other games, TV shows, or similar.

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1. The big question: What is real?

This seems to have been left open, and I can see two main interpretations:

a) Only the ending (the walk from the house to the beach) is real, everything else was a simulation. This is supported by:
- the visual glitches when you leave the Alabaster (they can be seen as a disintegrating hologram, though they might also just indicate that the cameras on the Alabaster are starting to fail as the ship self-destructs)
- the fact that after leaving the Alabaster, you immediately appear in the house on the beach, not in your spaceship (and there's no scene showing you flying to a planet)
With this interpretation, all we know is that there are 6 people (yourself included) with amputated limbs on a beach, and the tombstone indicates that there may have been a seventh at some point. Everything else, all the messages and logs, were part of the simulation. And while the simulation may reflect things that are/were "real" for the people on the beach (e.g. perhaps events from their past), this would be pure speculation on our part.

The main problem with this interpretation is that it offers no explanation for the amputations, and (as any "it was all just a dream" ending) is not very satisfying. Hence I'd prefer the following interpretation:

b) The events on the Alabaster were real. At some point, Pistachio shed her augmented hands and vanished (but did not die, she's present on the beach). The crew mutinied, installed "anchors" on the ship to stop their remote captain (Swan) from taking control, and planned to leave with an escape pod. Canary, Marmalade and Aubergine shed their augmentations on the bridge (they are still lying around).

Vermillion dies, probably as a result from Swan's actions (see Juniper's message to Swan), and is put in the Alabaster's cryo chamber (there is a figure in the red pod, a "miss you" note on the pod, and decorations in front of it).

The crew flees to Vermillion's estate on Earth (the house and lighthouse in the ending sequence are the same as in Vermillion's photo album). They remain a remote connection to the Alabaster (or install an AI that acts as Juniper), and when the player character enters the ship, Juniper acts as if she were trapped in the cockpit. When the ruse is revealed, she self-destructs the Alabaster. The player escapes, finds the others on Earth, sheds his augmented hands, and joins the group.

While many observations on the ship (noted in parantheses above) support this interpretation, it has several problems as well:
- There is no explanation what happened to Pistachio between her disappearance and the scene on the beach. Did she really vanish from the Alabaster? If so, how? Did she just decide to desert, drop her augments, and hide? She _was_ yearning for life on Earth, but how would she have survived, and stayed hidden, on a small ship with lots of security cameras?
- How did the crew leave the Alabaster? The escape pod is still its bay. Perhaps there was another escape pod, but is there enough room in the bay? Or did Arnold (with its mysterious technology) teleport the crew directly to Earth? That may be the best-fitting explanation, but is a bit of a stretch with no solid hint in the game that Arnold could do that.
- If the crew has the ability to self-destruct the Alabaster, then why didn't they do so after leaving? It would have been a good cover-up for their escape. We can speculate that they perhaps didn't want to add the destruction of expensive Filament Corp. property to their criminal record, but would that really matter at that point?

As deus-ex-machina as it is, I think the most convincing explanation is indeed that Arnold is a powerful, alien-tech teleporter. It builds up immense power (as indicated by the radiation), "senses" where people around it want to be, and teleports them there (but only their bodies, no clothes or augmentations). That _would_ explain Pistachio's disappearance without a trace, also the crew's disappearance without an escape pod missing, and the player's sudden transition from the self-destructing Alabaster to the house on the beach.

Still, I'm not completely satisfied with that explanation either. Have I overlooked anything? What do others think?

[Psyringe]

Also (and I apologize for the walls of text, it's just that there _are_ many details to this story which are worth considering), here are some more topics that I'm thinking about:

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2. What is Juniper's agenda?

First off, it's important to note that Juniper is an unreliable narrator. At the start of the game, she claims to be trapped in the Alabaster's cockpit. Yet, your ship's systems can't detect any life signs, she's not in the cockpit when you enter it, and Juniper's "email" account received a message about dangerous radiation levels on SA75. So it seems likely that Juniper already left the Alabaster when the player arrives, which would mean that either she is communicating remotely from Earth (large-distance communication is possible in this universe, as evidenced by the conversations between Swan and Canary/Juniper), or that Aubergine installed an AI on the Alabaster that just acts like Juniper (Aubergine is very capable, though there's no indication that sophisticated AIs even exist in this universe).

Juniper also praises Swan in her voice-overs ("she's a good one, she approved the resources for Marmalade's cake"), while in her "email" blaming Swan for Vermillion's death and calling her a monster. This makes sense if Juniper's goal is to protect herself and the other crew members. Juniper clearly sees the player as a Filament representative when he arrives - and perhaps the plan of the mutineers is to make Filament believe that all crew members died, so that Filament won't look for them. With that perspective, it might make sense to frame Swan in a positive light, so that Swan has less incentive to push for further investigations.

Juniper also says in a voice-over that she doesn't like cats very much (if I remember correctly), while her emails suggest an active interest in seeing the kittens. That might be just an oversight from the devs though, or I might misremember. In any case, it's not an important detail I guess.

The problem that I see with all this, is - why would Juniper encourage the player to solve the anchors, when she knows that this would ultimately lead to the revelation of things she wants to hide?

I also struggle to make sense of Juniper's dialog in the cockpit ("They were always watching me"). Who are "they"? The other crew members? Filament? The latter seems unlikely as Juniper is in hiding at that point, but if she means the other crew members, then what does she mean by telling us this? Is she apologizing to the player, and trying to make a point that the other crew members would not have approved if she acted differently?

I realize that part of Juniper's dialogue is justified simply from a game design perspective, but I still wonder if there's a better explanation than what I can come up with.

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3. What happened to Vermillion?

This really feels like a loose end. It's fairly obvious that Vermillion has died or at least been severely hurt: The red cryo chamber is occupied, Vermillion is not present on the beach (but there's a tombstone in the larger area), Canary accuses Swan of having taken a dear friend from them, and Juniper calls Swan a "monster" for killing "him" (she doesn't say who "he" was, everyone else is still alive at the beach). Swan even defends herself with "I didn't want to hurt him", which shows that she did something that, in some way, led to his death.

But what is that? I haven't found any clues about that. I can pinpoint the time - Vermillion's last message is from SA62 (the day of the planned escape), Juniper's message to Swan is from the same day, and one day later Canary suggests that Swan may have access to all written communication, as that would explain "her uncanny timing". So Swan did _something_ that apparently killed Vermillion and caused the escape plan to fail - but that is all I can find about it.

[Tenebrais]

So, here's what I pieced together.

Arnold is, obviously, not a planet. The Alabaster crew were not there to analyse it for colonisation. It was some sort of construction by Filament, and the crew were there to be its guinea pigs. I'm not certain what exactly it's doing - maybe some of the corrupted logs I haven't unlocked would shed light on it, I don't know - but it appears to be either teleporting people, or digitising them into some sort of virtual space.

In weeks nine and ten of the mission, the experiment began in earnest. Perhaps they intended it to take longer and Marmalade figuring out the hologram convinced them to move up the schedule? Either way, it got Pistachio first, vaporising her biological parts and leaving her prosthetic hands and her clothes. (I would guess it was supposed to get them all at once, but the ship had an unexpected extra set of cats around that don't seem to be there any more...)
This, of course, triggered the mutiny - the crew planned to abandon ship. But Swan had remote control of the Alabaster, so they needed to lock her out - this was the entire purpose of the anchors, to prevent the systems being used remotely. Unlike what your companion in the game says, this wasn't a side effect, it was their direct purpose.

With the anchors in place, the time came to take the escape pods. But they hadn't wired up the pods, and Swan could still control them. When she got wind of their plan, either through the surveillance system or by reading their emails, she fired them prematurely, exhausting their fuel before they were released from the bay.
Unfortunately - and, from what I can gather, unintentionally - Vermillion was standing behind one, packing supplies. You can see his charred silhoutte in the pod bay, and a trail of ash where he crawled a little way before he died. The crew interred his body in the cryo-cells, and turned against Swan forever.
With the escape pods spent, they had to change plans, to pilot the Alabaster itself to safety. To do this they'd have to wire the whole bridge and cockpit up with anchors, which they did.

But it took a little too long, and all four of them were uploaded too. Looking at his log in week 10, I assume Aubergine was the last one to be taken.

You know what that means, right? You never spoke to Juniper. She was never trapped in the cockpit. You were speaking to the woman who had been locked out of the ship.

You were speaking to Swan.

She isn't a monster, she feels guilty about what she did to the crew. But she is being watched all the time, in the Filament installation she captained the ship from. The mission must take precedence over the lives of the crew. However much she wanted to save them... she had orders to follow, and she was afraid of whatever consequences she might face if she rebelled. And there is still a loose end to tidy up - the Alabaster is still derelict, wired up by its mutinous crew, out of the reach of Filament. So when some curious scavenger docks to check out the wreck, she knows she has to take advantage of this situation and use him to unlock the ship. She pretends to be the ship's pilot, locked in the cockpit, desperate for a hero to save her as the anchors have locked her in. These are her orders. Once this is done, there is a new loose end to tidy up - the nosy scavenger - so Arnold is activated once again, and just before you make your escape, you too are whisked away to the same place as Alabaster's crew, leaving your clothes and prosthetic arms behind.

Swan didn't want to do this, so she tried to give you enough breadcrumbs to figure out the scam. She authorised the release of the crew's email logs, so you could read them and figure out what actually happened to them and why the anchors are there. She let her story of how things ended differ from the real events. She even heaped praise on herself, hoping you would see the difference between what the real Juniper thought of her and what she was telling you. And, at the end, on the Bridge, she even tried to convince you that it wasn't worth going through with it and to leave and live a long, happy life.

Obviously, she failed. And you too are taken.

I do think a lot of the emotions Swan displays are genuine. She genuinely mourns what happened to the crew. She really doesn't feel like she can talk about what happened to Pistachio, and it causes her real grief to see that the plant she loved was in bloom just a couple of weeks after she was taken out of reality. She really does regret taking the Filament job, not because it was dangerous but because it would push her to cause such terrible things. It's why she gave you a chance to see through her and leave. But she was still ultimately a coward, afraid to stick her neck out for her crew or for you, and her guilt is very much deserved.

[♥♥♥♥ Goblin]

Interesting theories.

What do you guys think the point of the players character was then? Why were they part of the story?

I assumed the end was telling us that the player's character had a wild imagination and was dreaming/imagining what life would be like if he and his companions were on a space odyssey. And how he has two broken arms but no mother to help him relieve his stress...

[Casual Bird]

I disagree with 1. I believe you were not in a simulation. What I believe happened is that the planet whisking away the rest of the crew also picked you up at the very end, before you could escape its influence. I think this also being at the time of the self-destruct of the Alabaster was a coincidence.

[SDSkinner2011]

Filament didn't know in advance. If they did, they wouldn't have sent a biologist, had the crew work on surveying or do the experiment with a pregnant cat. They would have sent a ship with convicts in cryosleep or a bunch of animals and leave them in a capsule while the crew stand off and observe.

They are however aware something is happening- they lied about the cause of the ships orbit being off.

The most likely explanation is this has occured before. They found a ship orbiting a planet with no crew and when they tried to check its records they found radiation made them unusable. They realized something was wrong with the planet and moved outside its range until they realized it was a hologram. So there is more then one holographic planet and they are trying to figure out what is going on.

[Casual Bird]

Oh also for 3 @psyringe, just so you know in the escape pod room you can see exactly how Swan killed Vermilion. It seems Swan caused the escape pods to all fire their engines while still docked, as evident by the big scorch marks in the room and the crew remarking she must have had control over the pods. You can see a human shaped clear spot on the wall in the middle of one of these scorch marks, as well as streaks along the floor from that spot, showing they tried dragging him away. I'd say you were just unlucky in not spotting it, perhaps pay the escape pod room another visit. It does not seem to be a loose end.

[Bidji29]

Tenebrais I think you're right. Everything you said make sense.

Just one thing : I don't think Arnold is a filament's project, but more an alien entity/technology.
The reason it teleport Pistachio is becasue she didn"t want to be on the Alabaster anymore, she wanted to be on earth. You can clearly see it on her last logs.

So Arnold detected it and sent her there.

Then Arnold sent all other crew member one by one (maybe the ability have a cooldown).
And finally, yourself, when Swan activated the self-destruct of the Alabaster, to prevent you from dying.

[Tenebrais]

Originally posted by Bidji29:

Tenebrais I think you're right. Everything you said make sense.

Just one thing : I don't think Arnold is a filament's project, but more an alien entity/technology.
The reason it teleport Pistachio is becasue she didn"t want to be on the Alabaster anymore, she wanted to be on earth. You can clearly see it on her last logs.

So Arnold detected it and sent her there.

Then Arnold sent all other crew member one by one (maybe the ability have a cooldown).
And finally, yourself, when Swan activated the self-destruct of the Alabaster, to prevent you from dying.

That's a pretty decent point, that everyone got zapped away once they wanted to leave the ship. Although it took a couple of weeks for the rest of the crew to get taken while it's under a minute for Pluto...

I do still feel like it's a Filament project, though. Marmalade discovered the planet was a hologram when he noticed it display the same artifacting behaviour as his fireplace hologram, and the fireplace was built from the Alabaster's hologram projectors. In other words, it's all the same technology. It's possible that precursor aliens that build Arnold happened to build holograms in the same way humanity eventually did, I suppose? Seems unlikely though.

There also doesn't seem to be any indication that alien life has ever been discovered in the setting.
Of course, both of these could mean that some rival faction to Filament built it, and Filament stumbled upon their experiment thinking it was a legitimate planet.

Swan's line at the end of "what were you thinking, boarding a Filament vessel", though, is telling to me. It carries a strong implication that you really should have expected nothing good to come of messing with their stuff. Have you ever wondered why all of the crew are given code names, and even coerced to use them in private? As close as you start to feel to all these characters, you never get so much as a hint to what their actual names are. The only reason I can think to do this, both in the setting and for the game's scenario writer, is so that Filament dehumanises their crews. It's a lot easier to send Systems Analyst Aubergine to his doom when you never knew who he really was. And Filament is absolutely prepared to do that - one of the corrupted logs shows what a new captain (for a different ship) is told upon taking their position, and notably that includes prioritising the completion of the mission over the safety of the crew.

Putting this together, I'd say Filament is absolutely the kind of company that would assemble a crew under false pretenses and send them to some black site to be unwitting participants in a potentially lethal experiment. But yes, I can't prove one way or another if they actually knew what they were experimenting with.

[♥♥♥♥ Goblin]

What about the light house in the end? I find the Filament logo looks a lot like a light house light bulb.

Perhaps Arnold was a light house warning ships to avoid the planet / area?

[kanarienvogel]

Lighthouse was near Vermillion's home, you can see it in the album in Pistachio's room.

I absolutely do not buy that Arnold is a Filament project. As was rightly noted in the crew logs, something this big, with a huge hologram, and capable of changing gravity at orbital scale would require tremendous amounts of energy and material. It would be an undertaking compared to which the Firmament is a toy house. And making something like that just for a weird psychological experiment on a crew of six? They could've performed it literally a trillion times cheaper. That's even before talking about interstellar teleportation itself, which seems to be way ahead of humanity's tech in the setting.

[Virtia]

Originally posted by kanarienvogel:

I absolutely do not buy that Arnold is a Filament project.

Agreed on this. Arnold very much feels like an actual alien site of some description, and I'm pretty convinced that Filament specifically did not know that when they sent the crew out.

If Filament had known ahead of time what Arnold was capable of, then letting the crew get through any meaningful anchor construction without just blowing the ship immediately when the crew starts acting on Pistachio's disappearance makes no sense to me. With as much forethought as they gave the crew names, remote captainship, pet stuff, etc., I have trouble believing that Filament wouldn't have had a playbook for "what to do if the crew figures it out" if they knew ahead of time what was going on with Arnold.


Think through the timelines:
Arnold "acted" on its own. Its motivations are largely unknown here, but it seems to have first digitized/granted-the-wish-of Pistachio. Its process of uploading people vaporizes and replicates only their biological parts (thus the augmentation pieces and jumpsuits laying around where people were when they got taken), which left behind her (augmented) hands.

The crew moves to leave, at which point Swan intervenes, locking the crew out. The crew begin constructing anchors to wrest back control, and Vermillion is killed by Swan overriding the escape pod engines. The crew finish locking her out. The fact that this 1) works and 2) was allowed to happen makes little sense if Filament has any forewarning of how south things will go with Arnold.

At some point immediately following, Arnold acts on the remaining crew's desire to leave, digitizing them all as well. The same happens to you -- once you release the final anchor, Swan has all the control she needs to trip a self-destruct of the now-recovered once-derelict ship. You, on your way out, also wish to bail hard enough that Arnold acts on it, digitizing you.

Re: Filament not knowing, the fact you're here at all is probably the biggest glaring truth for me. If Filament knew about Arnold, then the ship ending up crew-less was always a real possibility. The way to avoid people finding out what happened would be for Swan to remotely recall the ship once the crew was expended. If that was always the plan though, then why allow anything to go forward after the first Anchor is constructed?

[Eureka!]

If swan was talking to pluto, and juniper really wasn't in the cockpit, then how did juniper email pistachio on day 70 (week 10)? and why/how did juniper get an email from TFC in week 11?

[SDSkinner2011]

The email week 11 was an automated system.

[Eureka!]

But no one else got that automated email? and how did juniper send an email on day 70 if aubergine already said on (i believe it was) day 65 that everyone is gone and there is nothing he can do about it?

[Tenebrais]

Originally posted by Virtia:

Re: Filament not knowing, the fact you're here at all is probably the biggest glaring truth for me. If Filament knew about Arnold, then the ship ending up crew-less was always a real possibility. The way to avoid people finding out what happened would be for Swan to remotely recall the ship once the crew was expended. If that was always the plan though, then why allow anything to go forward after the first Anchor is constructed?

I've been thinking further on what we know, and I'm confident Filament knew Arnold wasn't what it appeared to be. The reason is the stationkeeping.
Within days of arriving and setting their orbit, Juniper found the Alabaster was drifting. The crew contacted Swan, and with some back and forth with Filament they were told it was a built-in defect and actively told to not look into it further. But this is a transparent lie; Marmalade and Aubergine didn't buy it even at the time, especially when told they can't try to find and fix it themselves. In hindsight, the reason the ship was drifting is obvious - Arnold isn't the planet it's appearing to be, so its real mass is different from what is calculated, so the orbital velocity they are setting isn't correct to keep the ship in the orbit they want.

If this came as a surprise to Filament, why would they shut down investigation into the matter? If they were really hoping to find a habitable planet, they'd want to know everything they could about it, and solving that sort of mystery is ostensibly what the crew is there to do. The only reason to lie to them about it is if they expected it and were hoping to hide it.

The cats also make sense if Filament at least had an inkling of what was going to happen to the crew. The unexpected kittens being an unlisted experiment is similar nonsense to cover the fact that they didn't bother to give the crew pet a proper medical exam before sending her off with them. Why would the bother? An observational team expecting to spend months, maybe even years, observing a planet would need a pet that will stay healthy all that time (especially since the medbay isn't really equipped for animals) but if the crew is only going to be there a few weeks before being zapped away who cares? Might as well grab a random cat from the pound and send it off, it's not going to last any longer than the crew anyway.

In regards the anchors, think about the layout of how you find them. The very last one you unlock will be the very first one they placed. And that's the anchor wiring down the cockpit. As soon as they proved their bizarre physical-encryption device actually works, Swan is no longer able to pilot the ship. What else is she going to do, turn the lights off? Maybe she tried. Lock the doors? Marmalade and Aubergine can easily handle that. Disable life support? That might stop them, but that goes against her prime directive of seeing the mission through - a dead crew is useless to Filament, even if Swan had been willing to do that, which I doubt. Even as a threat to get them to unlock the anchors, why would they? They're already doing this because they think letting Filament take control will get them killed.