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BUT if we don't ever see Escher again after his contributions to that narrative... It'll really feel like a dropped ball in a story that would have otherwise exceeded my expectations in its themes. :(
Guess I'll be hunting for him in the postgame along with the other collectible characters. 😭
Right! I normally hate it when a robot or magical construct or other created being was secretly a human all along. I guess I was able to suspend my disbelief because it almost seemed like the story was trying to suggest they shared a soul, or that the body has its own memories—Tryce even cites something like muscle memory as why Red can pick things up so quickly—OR that this was exactly what it looked like, a placeholder head given life only to be discarded when the real head was recovered... But since characters like Escher asked these questions in the first place, it kind of gave me faith that the narrative would actually... address it?
WOULD Red kill himself if he got his head back? Is he comfortable being discarded? Was he only going after All City because he was a robot accustomed to complying with outside directives, and this goal was tacitly imposed upon him by Tryce and Bel telling him that's what they wanted? What's more, Escher is able to hack into Red's brain to find their location, isn't he? He can briefly commune with Eightball after his assassination? So I don't think Felix is 100% human either... But the extent to just how cyber he is remains up for debate, I suppose.
As fun as it is that the head/body switcheroos all worked out in the end (and I love Solace so I was swayed by the endgame completely lol), I would have liked to revisit some of these themes in the finale... At least Escher saying something like, "So, you weren't a cyberhead after all..."
SOMETHING...
I do want to point out the game heavily foreshadows this, so I think you might have misunderstood what to take from escher's comment. Other than the opening "cyberOS" screen directly saying "MISSING AI COMPONENT" Think for a second who put "red" on Faux's body. The Flesh Prince, a guy who of all his work, we've only seen him put human body parts together. The fact that a robot head came from this guy should have been red flag number one. Red flag number 2, one the franks comments on his roots and how red doesn't know anything about his. Considering Flesh Prince is surrounded by franks, and very likely knew he had Felix's head. This in retrospect is a total freudian slip.
Red flag number 3, the reason why escher is completely confused why the hell red wants to know his roots, and basically off himself. Is to highlight a massive difference in how red acts compared to a proper cyberhead. all the forshadowing is to point out why red being a cyberhead doesn't make sense. He shouldn't have "roots" nor a need to find them, its meant to make you realise something isnt right.
Why escher knew where red was, was most likely because he was jacked into project algo/faux and could see/control everything the police could. So he just needed to connect to faux and show him where they were. Why Eightball could talk to him before his death is unclear but red kinda just drops in that interaction that he can't do what eight can do, and that he is still "too human" to do that. (which personally i found a bit too heavy handed for all the subtle forshadowing) Im also unsure if this is whats going on, or if its just felix piecing together eightball from dormant memories and what he just heard prior to that.
Apologies for the long response, but I'd like to address each of the points you made, because I do think they're interesting moments that hit different when you know how the game ends—but when they arrive in their own time in the story's natural course, I don't think they necessarily indicate on their own that Red is definitely a human and not a robot.
- "Error: can not find AI:main Component" is a fun foreshadowing moment, but could theoretically support a number of interpretations. Is the component truly absent, or is there an internal connection issue? In games like Mass Effect, distinctions are drawn between Virtual Intelligence (programs which emulate human behavior but which are not sentient, built for personability and compliance) and Artificial Intelligence (true sentient machine intelligences with their own will). AI is thus often treated as an equivalent of a robot "soul". So is Red without sentience? This could explain his quick compliance with Tryce and Bel's agenda. Or is the AI unreachable/disabled/circumnavigated because he somehow shares a metaphysical soul and some muscle memories with Faux? This could provide an explanation for his immediate affinity with Faux and his interest in retrieving his old head, despite the questions this would ordinarily raise for any other newly sentient being finding himself temporarily attached to a loan body.
- The fact that an OS boot screen appears at all is a pretty strong indicator that Felix is no longer entirely human. Whether that OS is housed in the casing of the cyberhead, inside his skull, or somewhere in between cannot be deduced with any certainty, so it creates plenty of wiggle room for interpretation. Maybe he was already augmented with cybernetics before his accident. Maybe DJ Cyber had to augment his severed head to keep him alive. Maybe the OS screen is just a dummy HUD that doesn't do anything, in sole service of DJ Cyber convincing Felix he's a robot to conceal his identity.
- Flesh Prince's introduction makes it clear his medium is "meat and metal", and he states outright that people go to him "when they lose an arm, or in rare cases, their mind." Neither he nor the Franks are unaugmented, and he's got a scrap pile of parts (including cyberheads) in the back of the basketball court. Tryce deliberately went to FP for a cyberhead—presumably to preserve Faux's body and keep it active while they try to get the original back. This doesn't make sense for Tryce to do if that's not a service FP provides. Ergo, FP is a back-alley sawbone who performs augumentation surgery, up to and including affixing cyberheads to viable bodies. Bel even says this is "not uncommon" in New Amsterdam—though according to an Oldhead in Brink Terminal, this usually involves uploading one's memories into a new head in a process they compare to "having a child" (since not everything is preserved in the transfer, so some fundamental organic part of you does die in the process).
- The Franks are proud of their roots (and seem like something of a metaphor for people with mixed heritage), so Freudian slip or no, it doesn't seem out of character for them to choose this angle to talk smack. And while it creates intrigue, smack talk doesn't necessarily contain factually true information. For all we know, since FP made the Franks AND sourced Red's head, they're talking about Red not "knowing" the Flesh Prince personally. Though again, this is vague enough to offer multiple avenues of interpretation. I certainly don't think them mocking Red is conclusive.
- Eightball's encounter is pretty interesting. It doesn't seem like that interaction is something Felix could have constructed totally on his own. But this happened once before, too—in DJ Cyber's Ghost in the Shell Tachikoma-looking roller tank brain scanner. DJ Cyber isn't even a cyberhead, but with this device he can still simulate Red's "machine mind" and interact with it through some kind of remote interface. That setpiece reinforces the expectation that Red is a robot, albeit one who may have memories of his own prior to his recent activation ("You can only dream of what you've already seen.") Looking at this exchange in light of the revelation that the cyberhead houses Felix's head (and the Eightball exchange) implies Felix (and DJ Cyber by extension) is at least somewhat augmented for this direct communication to be possible.
- Fair play to you that Escher is probably tapping into Algo rather than linking up with Red directly; however, this scene is clearly a misdirection meant, again, to make you think Red is a robot before the full details of Project Algo are revealed. Even if it's just because he interfaced with DJ Cyber's Tachikoma-looking brain scanner and is plagued by sudden flashbacks every time he comes closer to All City, the fact that Red passes out at that moment is a remarkably timed coincidence. Frankly, given we've seen him mentally interface with two other characters, we have no reason to doubt the misdirection at this point.
Anyway, thematically speaking, it doesn't really matter that Red ends up not being a robot. Escher is still addressing a pertinent question when he asks Red if he's willing to kill himself when he gets his head back, because it calls into question the way he's treated as theoretically disposable by his new crew. They never promise to find him a new body when he's reunited with his old head. Maybe it's a foregone conclusion, or they'll cross that bridge when they get there. Red is kind of hilarious for not caring at all, but the narrative isn't raising these questions for no reason. It wants to engage with them. And just because it all turned out okay in the end doesn't mean these aren't questions worth asking in a setting like this.
My usual gripe with stories that set up the protagonist to be a machine with burgeoning sentience or self-worth, only to reveal they were secretly human all along, or had a soul, or whatever, is that it changes the story's theme and discards its fundamental question. Is a robot's life worth the same as a human's? Or are they seen as expendable? Can a robot love crime and do violence? Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Really, I'm mostly content with how the story ends. It was a fun and wild ride. But the questions raised at the beginning of a story like this don't go away after the twist reveal. And what a playable Escher would give us is an acknowledgment of the investment we had in those questions of robot personhood at the beginning of the story.
It's kind of fun to see the different cyberhead designs that the NPCs can have, though. Makes it even more of a shame that the Red/Escher design and the Dot Exe design are the only two with full models imo
I spent a lot of time talking around the idea, but you've hit the nail on the head. The writing spends SO much time on these fascinating concepts—robots that dream, transferring memories onto them, attendant advancements in cybernetics—only for cyberheads themselves to be revealed to be ultimately peripheral to the main story. ): I miss them.
Would love to play as the cyber-Oldhead too, good shout!!
Found Escher's concept artist RTing from the devs' Twitter by the way. Will probably be very normal about this! (Here's the link, if it works.)
https://twitter.com/snafaman/status/1693612619725218262
Just checked some footage, and it looks like the Dot Exe crew has 2 (blue), 4 (purple), and 5 (orange) -- is 5-orange the one you mean? Assuming consistency with real billiard ball coloration, a red Dot Exe crew member would have a 7 or perhaps a 3 on his face. Though I couldn't find footage immediately at hand for all their challenges throughout the mall before the crew battle... So maybe they're not all represented in this video?
At the beginning of that same video we do see Cue and 8, and yeah, I agree -- 8's light blue and Cue's black tracksuits are both pretty tasteful, whereas their compatriots are wearing colors a little too garish for my tastes, LMAOOO.