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The Camerata were a pact of four influencial citizens of Cloudbank who wanted to preserve Cloudbank in a state they found appealing rather than watch it constantly change on the whim of the people.
The process are the Camerata's pet project for seizing control of the city. They went beserk seemingly because the Camerata didn't do a good job of programming them with an effective failsafe.
The slot at Fairview is where the transistor originated from. Returning it there let it re-log into the city network as far as I can tell.
The transistor battle was taking place inside the transistor. There's two transistors because both people want to get out and there can only be one transistor in the real world for undefined reasons.
Anyone who successfully evacuated Cloudbank is completely fine. Anyone in Cloudbank is dead.
Why did the Camerata need to start "absorbing" people (like Red) into the Transistor? And why did the sword teleport those around it when used on Red?
As for the teleportation, I have no idea. I don't have an idea why Sybil remained, or what really made the Process berserk. The story is much more vague and surreal than Bastion's was. I enjoyed it since I could understand the antagonists' and Red's motivations.
But I have to say this story is very esoteric to me. I usually don't have a hard time following the most convoluted plots but Transistor has a few concepts that are just too strange for me.
Overall the esoteric "ness" of the story doesn't really help it lend itself to me.
Camerata wanted to make it so nothing changed I think, ie the flux the world existed in would stop. To do that they needed to control the city. Ergo the process.
The process is like a rewiting of a file. It over writes things, bodies, people living beings. etc.
The process didn't go beserk, it was just programmed badly.
Here is a question what the fk are the creature animals that could effect the transistor in some way??? Cuthulu coming to roost?
Part of the Process. It seems to be a collective, with these beasts being present at where the Process is strongest or needs the most muscle.
It seems to me that they did go berserk. Because they immediately began to assault the city after Red picked up the Transistor. I guess they were unleashed to find Red, but then again the story implies that they're always around, in the background like the circuitry in our monitors, creating landscapes at the command of the user. If they were just badly programmed (though that is a perfectly logical conclusion) Cloudbank would've been deleted long before the events of Transistor. After all 82% of it was gone before the end of a single night.
-The Camertra believed that if everything changes nothing changes. In other words the maleable nature of the city and the fact it constantly changes became monotomous in itself so they wished to restrict how much it changed. Why they hunted people down I never figured out but those people were the ones causing the most change.
-The process are robotic creatures that are normally unseen and enact any changes that occur in the city.
-When Red was attacked something caused a loss of control over the transistor. I think it was essentually reset to factory defaults and so the town was converted to a basic version of itself.
-They regained control over the transistor and therefore the process.
-They both died and were absorbed by the transistor. For some reason only one could escape and so they fought for that right.
- Some people probably fled the city like the new rucks suggested at the begging of the game.
Speaking of this. Are people processed or are they killed then processed. It's implied that their soul is just data linked to flesh. In which case what does that mean when they're processed? Do all of these thinking minds condesense into one consciousness (We all Become One)? Wouldn't restoring the jumbled mess at the end reverse this process and free these souls from one collective so that they could go to the Country. It's shown you can restore a body, abeit one whose function is held in the transistor, which is said to be a permanent residence once you get in.
Does that mean at the end we left an entire city and populace to linger on as gumbled data where individuality is gone and the one means to restore it permanently inert?
Speaking of that, Royce mentions that the Process can't stop, only be compelled to go away. Where do they go away to? Back to being unseen creators of the world. Or are they now like a roaming band of rampant AI deleting everything besides Cloudbank?
Like a big file, being rendered, it becomes more clear the deeper you do.
The Camerata, the Process, etc.. Much of that is explained from the dialogue and the function profiles.
As for the Transistor battle, it serves two purposes.
1. From everything else in the game, what is the most powerful entity? Answer: You. So naturally, the final boss with against another Transistor user.
2. Once the Transistor was placed back into the cradle, the world went into a sort of "reset" state. Both Red and Royce were pulled into the Transistor's virtual world, and being the last two and closest two, they must fight for control.
- At this point, we see a land with bigger transistors in the background, this nurtures the speculation of repeated recursions taking place. Transistors within transistors, in an infinite cycle of repeated history.
The functions hold the bulk of the story. I believe knowing stuff about computers helps know more about the story, but it's not exactly all about computers. Red's still a singer in this and all.
I really like this idea that Red's lover is somehow "outside the system", an anomaly, and that's what causes the Transistor and/or Process to malfunction.
As for what's going on in the game, I currently have two ideas, but I'm not entirely convinced of either of them yet. So far I get the impression that Cloudbank is either a city in the real world in the far future (I think some of Royce's diary entries give the year as XX66), or that Cloudbank and its citizens are actually computer programs living in a virtual world.
If Cloudbank is a real world city, then I guess that in the future, they have technology that's so advanced that people can just vote to change parts of the city, and the changes happen near instantaneously, like magic. As Arthur C. Clarke stated, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
However, people don't actually understand the underlying laws of reality that make these changes happen, like how we don't entirely understand the laws of physics of the real world. People don't understand that the forces that change the city are actually the Process, working in the background, unseen.
Then one day, in a fit of slight madness, Royce finds the Transistor...or the Transistor finds him, as he speculates in the game. Through the Transistor, Royce discovers that it's the Process that changes the city according to people's whims. With this knowledge, the Camerata decide to take control of the Process using the Transistor, for their own agenda.
When the Camerata lose control of the Transistor, they lose control of the Process, which then just goes rampant in our reality, in Cloudbank. The Process reverts to doing what it always does, just in a larger-scale, uncontrolled manner: it starts to tear down the city, creating a "blank canvas" from which something new can be created.
It's like a hard drive running out of storage space. You can't add new items until you've deleted some of the old ones. The Process are like computer programs maintaining a system, helping to cleanup and keep things running smoothly, except this time they went a little haywire and overboard. The Process isn't evil, it's just a machine doing its job.
When Red returns the Transistor to its cradle, it sends the Process back to their own background-reality (or as Royce puts it, it compels the Process to "just go away"), back to working as they did before.
This is mentioned by Royce in the Limiter files for the Young Lady and the Man processes. Royce finds the fact that Men processes start showing up to be disturbing, but we don't really get more information into why it's so troubling. Royce is also disturbed by the sudden appearance of the dog "Guardian" processes.
The dog and Men process files suggest that there's something perhaps a little more sinister going on with the Process. Or perhaps there's nothing sinister going on at all, Royce is just disturbed by what he doesn't fully understand, and the strange nature of the Process.
I don't really have a conclusion about why the Process starts attempting to take on human form, it's just a little thread that I picked up on from the Process description files.
This is the other idea that I've been getting an impression of after having played through the standard game and the recursive mode. I keep getting the impression that everyone in Cloudbank is just a computer program, living in a virtual city. The game is chock full of references to computer hardware and software.
For example, when Red defeats Royce and returns to "reality" (whatever that actually is), she gains "read-write" access to the city, and uses it to rewrite/restore the bridge from Fairview back to Cloudbank. Also, as pointed out by Yohtaoken (emphasis mine)
In the real-world, processes are ordinary programs that normal users almost never interact with or see. They're usually always running "in the background", invisible, performing basic maintenance and administrative tasks. So in the game, that's what the Process does too, except when the Camerata loses control of the Transistor, the accidentally unleash an uncontrolled Process onto the city. It's like accidentally typing a command to reformat your hard drive, and watching helplessly as the reformat process erases all of your data.
So if everyone is a computer program, what does it mean when they become trapped inside of the Transistor? I'm going to be honest, I have no idea, but maybe they just go to some special region of computer memory...but that's a really dull and boring way to interpret it.
Being trapped inside the Transistor is supposed to represent and symbolize some kind of eternal after-life, whether you accept the idea that everything that happens in the game occurs in the real world, or that it's all just a computer simulation.
This doesn't really answer any questions, it's just another idea that I thought about while finishing the game. When Red defeats Royce, Royce is trapped inside the Transistor, just like everyone else. When you begin the Recursion mode of the game, instead of hearing Red's lover inside the Transistor at the beginning of the game, you hear Royce's voice.
The implication is that at the beginning of Recursive mode, Royce is already trapped inside of the Transistor, from the time when Red defeated him in the previous standard mode! So while Royce is all holed-up in his hideout in Fairview in Recursive mode, another version of him is already trapped inside of the Transistor!
Woah.
It's really the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I had a longer post written, but cut part of it out: in the bio for Breach(), it states that either the data from integrating the subject was corrupted, or the subject being integrated had no Selections, which is apparently impossible because according to the Transistor 0% of Cloudbank citizens willingly choose nonselection. So for the Transistor given the available census data, this person can't not have selected any disciplines. It just does not compute.
But the thing is, he really had no Selections. He even says so himself. When you pass by the Selections Office, he says something along the lines of "Well I guess I can put off Selection for another year". This guy really is outside of the system. And when the Transistor integrates him, his name may as well be Robert'); DROP TABLES Users; --[xkcd.com].
So because he's made no Selections, his trace doesn't match any census records, and the Transistor suffers a momentary BSOD. It explains the random teleport, and also explains why Grant inexplicably lost User control over the only thing keeping the Process in check. According to the same bio, the Timestamp for the trace for Breach() occurred matched the timestamp for Grant relinquishing User access. Grant never wanted to give up User control, but Mr. Nobody becoming integrated reset something in the Transistor, and also teleported them to the edge of town seemingly at random; all because the Transistor didn't properly santize it's inputs.
The Transistor is the master control system for the Process. The Process is a series of machines that do all the background work in Cloudbank, constructing whatever is voted for by the people.
The Process goes berserk because the Transistor loses its connection to the Cradle (note how the Cradle says "Connection lost" when you approach it) as a result of it becoming corrupted by the narrator's trace (which most likely happened because he was the Cloudbank equivalent of a man living "off the grid"). Reestablishing the connection by putting the two back together would bring the Process back under control.
One of the side effects of having Cloudbank be run by direct democracy is that things are determined by the whims of the people at the moment. In practice, things tend to go in cycles. As a result, over the long run nothing of significance ever actually changes. The Camerata (originally just Grant and Royce) decided this made the whole thing pointless, and that some stability needed to be enforced on Cloudbank. To do this, they needed a way to go around the democratic process and control the Process directly (hence the Transistor).
When Royce and Red were drawn into the Transistor, there was a virtual world inside of it (in fact, during your turns you can see the trace of some of the people inside it in the trace banks). As it turns out, there are virtual Transistors inside the real one that you can use to do battle.
At the end, everyone in Cloudbank is dead except for Red. So, she attempts to resurrect the narrator, only to discover that resurrection is beyond the Transistor's power. If there are people in the world outside of Cloudbank, Red has probably saved them, but she doesn't care about them. All she wants is to be with the man she loves. So if she can't get him out, she has to go in. She does, and the two of them get to live happily ever after.
You know, someone should really just make a steam guide for the game's plot.
...
Ok, fine, I'll do it.
Done.