Shadow of Chernobyl's story as I understand it

[Kaneki <3 Cheryl]

The Monolith is actually under control by an entity called the C-Consciousness. Not the Wish Granter. The Wish Granter is a coverup. It's supposed to lead Stalkers away from the truth.

The C-Consciousness is a group of scientists who uploaded their collective consciousness into a machine to test a theory. That theory was that if multiple minds merged into one, it would be better able to affect something called the Noosphere. The Noosphere is defined as "the sphere of human thought." They wanted to influence it, and remove crime and negative feelings.

Somewhere during this process, something went wrong and the Zone was created. It seems that merging multiple minds into one does not actually increase one's influence on the Noosphere; instead, it corrupts the Noosphere. It puts it out of balance. So the Zone was created as a result of this unintended corruption.

C-Consciousness was in development for many years. In Labs X-18 and X-16 you can see some of their experiments. In the Fire Poltergeist room, you can see tubes of babies. These were test subjects for the C-Consciousness. The people in C-Consciousness are asleep in tubes, with only their nebulous minds awake. The babies, however, are dead.

Emissions are like the Zone's fevers. The Zone is a living entity; not merely an area. The point of fevers is to help kill intruders in the body; this is exactly what the Zone is trying to do against Stalkers. The reason why emissions became more frequent and more powerful as Strelok sneaked past the Brain Scorcher is because the Zone knew he was getting close to the truth: C-Consciousness. It was trying to stop him and his group. It was unsuccessful. Due to its failure, C-Consciousness had to improvise. Strelok was close, but they did not know how close he truly was. They took the nearest Stalker and brainwashed him into the Monolith and gave him the very important task of killing Strelok before he can find C-Consciousness. However, they made one mistake. The Stalker they took was Strelok. Because his objective was to kill himself, the brainwash ended the moment he woke up from his catatonic state after the brainwashing, because you cannot persuade someone to kill themselves, however it did cause him to lose his memory.

In the good ending, Strelok destroys C-Consciousness, killing all of the men and making the Zone a little bit greener and more peaceful, but not entirely gone, as it is a permanent scar on the Earth, inflicted upon it by those whose aspirations traveled beyond the universe's limits. This is exactly the reason why the Zone expands every time a wish is made at the Wish Granter; because it feeds off of humanity's aspirations, just like humanity's aspirations are the CAUSE of the Zone.

[terryt3535]

If the C-Consciousness is dead, why does the making a wish at the Wish Granter still work? :)

[Kaneki <3 Cheryl]

Originally posted by terryt3535:

If the C-Consciousness is dead, why does the making a wish at the Wish Granter still work? :)

Because the Wish Granter is not related in any way to C-Consciousness. It is an entity of the Zone just like radiation, just like bloodsuckers, tushkanos, anomalies, etc. It is an entity of the Zone and not under direct control by C-Consciousness. They do not control it. They created it.

I'm not even sure if using the Wish Granter is even possible after the events of Shadow of Chernobyl. Remember in Call of Pripyat how broken the Monolith is? "Oh Monolith, why have you left us..." Obviously, C-Consciousness's destruction had affected the Wish Granter in some way. Monolith are still under control by it, but it is no longer able to communicate to Monolith.

[Zorgl]

Well written.
If i remember well, Strelok says in COP that the wishgranter has never existed.

[Fostin4]

Just beat the game for the true ending and I'm wondering how do you explain all those people in the zone espically the Barkeep and the trader to NOT recognize a high ranking and skilled stalker like Strelok who has been in the zone like forever?? This is like a huge loophole in the story and would probably cutdown the gameplay to less than half .

[terryt3535]

Originally posted by Fostin4:

Just beat the game for the true ending and I'm wondering how do you explain all those people in the zone espically the Barkeep and the trader to NOT recognize a high ranking and skilled stalker like Strelok who has been in the zone like forever?? This is like a huge loophole in the story and would probably cutdown the gameplay to less than half .

I have wondered similar to that. The only thing I can think of is that he purposely avoided meeting Sidorovich, Barkeep, or Sakharov, and used Ghost and Fang as intermediaries to deal with them.