<\/div>He also expresses disdain for the TranStar board of directors and calls them “Leeches”. Alex – whatever his many faults might be – is not doing this for personal glory or financial gain. He believes that what he’s been doing up here is right. Or at least, it’s worth the short-term moral compromises the two of you have been making.<\/p>\n
Like most people, I emphatically disagree with this point of view. Even if you really do have a miracle to share with mankind and even if it all works out in the end, I don’t think you can solve this with arithmetic. “Oh sure, I murdered a few hundred people, but in the end I made a new technology that saved millions so it all cancels out.” But while I disagree with him on a philosophical level, I love his character and I find his viewpoint understandable. I can also see how maybe this whole thing started with sacrificing a small handful of bad people for “the greater good”, and how the sunk cost fallacy<\/a> dragged him into making bigger and bigger sacrifices, and he’s so sure it’s all going to pay off any minute now<\/i>, he just needs to talk you out of blowing the place up.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, I feel strongly that this ought to be the cue, but it doesn’t happen quite yet. Maybe this moment is too on-the-nose.<\/p>\n Alex then hands over a fabrication plan for the nullwave device that will french-fry the coral. It’s not totally<\/b> clear what the device will do or what the aftermath will be, but Alex is pretty confident that it will allow us to tame the Typhon.<\/p>\n Alex then brings up the arming key he’s been promising us for the last six hours, but he doesn’t finish because THIS is the cue the Typhon have been waiting for…<\/p>\n We’re in the domed Arboretum, surrounded by the vastness of space. Suddenly, a shadow appears across the stars. Some sort of opening has appeared in the sky. And through the opening we see…<\/p>\n Earlier in this series I said the game isn’t really aiming for a Cthulhu-style story, but screw it. Purists can haggle over the works of H.P. Lovecraft and what counts and what doesn’t, and which works are too problematic and which ones are okay. I don’t care. This moment is exactly the kind of thing I think of when I hear the phrase “cosmic horror”.\u00a0<\/p>\n This writhing mass of tentacles slips out of the hole in space and envelops the entire station. The game calls this thing “The Apex”, but that name doesn’t work for me. When I hear “Apex Predator” I think lions and sharks. I think comparing this thing to conventional animals actually makes it seem more pedestrian. If I had to give this thing a name, it would be something more abstract, like “The Horror” or whatever.<\/p>\n This business of calling it the “Apex” is, I think, an attempt at making the “Prey” name fit a little better. I appreciate the effort, but I’d rather they called this game “NeuroShock” or “PsychoShock” and left this predator \/ prey stuff out. Calling this thing an Apex predator is like saying a nuclear bomb is “a kind of heater”. Ok, I suppose that’s technically correct, but you’re really selling it short, you know?<\/p>\n Also, calling it “apex” implies that we know this thing is on top of the cosmic food chain. Frankly, we’re nowhere near<\/b> being able to make those sorts of claims. In fact, who’s to say this thing isn’t just the next step up from us, and there are even greater monsters out there that eat critters like this thing as a snack?\u00a0<\/p>\n The universe is really big!<\/p>\n I find it interesting that this thing is about the same size as Talos-1. Maybe that’s just a coincidence. Maybe that’s just what was convenient for the game designers. Or maybe – and this is the possibility I find interesting – these creatures operate on many different scales. Maybe if Talos-1 was an enormous Death Star sized station, then the Typhon here would have sent a slightly different signal that would have attracted a larger horror.<\/p>\n Allow me to speculate on how this thing works…<\/p>\n And maybe a few of these creatures find some. Somewhere out there, various sapient species busy themselves building rockets, space elevators, shuttles, super-jetpacks, or what-have-you. Mimics land on their vehicles and platforms, devouring the inhabitants. Once the Typhon get enough biomass together, they start scaling up, forming Weavers and other creatures designed specifically to ambush these particular sapients and exploit their technology. Maybe for humans they make Telepaths and Technopaths, but for another species they’d make a creature that released pheromones, or certain sounds, or chemicals, or confounding radio signals, or whatever would work on the locals.\u00a0<\/p>\n Once the Typhon feel like they control their environment, they start building coral. The bigger the ship \/ station, the bigger the resulting coral structure. Then the coral reaches out to that Ur creature – that mother, or queen, or whatever we want to call that huge mass that kicked all this off. It responds by sending something of the appropriate size to seize the structure. If we absolutely must, I suppose we can call this thing the “apex”. Eyeroll. Heavy sigh.<\/i><\/p>\n Here is the tricky part for the Typhon: Despite all the crazy stuff they can do, they still can’t survive atmospheric entry un-aided. So the “Apex” shows up to do two different things:<\/p>\n Plan B wouldn’t work for Talos-1, since the station is orbiting out beyond the moon. But it would probably work for things like (say) the International Space Station<\/a>, or Skylab<\/a>.<\/p>\n If your species has made it far enough to begin building crap in space, then it’s a good guess that you’ve spread out over the face of your homeworld. There are no doubt a lot of you, and you’re probably packed into cities. Once a couple of Typhon reach these population centers, it’s game over.<\/p>\n So then the Typhon eat the whole planet. They devour the entire food chain, from the plankton to the sapients, and in the end the planet is just a big rock covered in Typhon cells. Then it flings a few mimic-sized seeds into the void and the process begins again.<\/p>\n *BURP*<\/p>\nThe Galactic Dinner Bell<\/h3>\n
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\nAlex also talks about the data you gathered just before we were ganked by Walther Dahl. It turns out that past-Morgan was right. The coral is some sort of (and I’m paraphrasing here) neurological whatzit that does thinky stuff. It seems to be sending out a signal. What has Alex curious is: What is that signal saying, and who is listening to it?<\/i><\/p>\nFrom The Darkness<\/h3>\n
<\/div>The Apex?<\/h3>\n
The Actual Literal Eater of Worlds<\/h3>\n
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\nSomewhere out there is some horrendous ball of tentacled flesh that’s grown to something approaching planetary mass. Or perhaps it’s just so big that it’s enveloped an actual<\/i> planetary mass. It flings out these tiny little mimic-shaped creatures that drift through the universe like spores. We don’t know the exact mechanics of how they get around, but somehow they tend to end up in orbit around planets with a reasonable chance of harboring life.<\/p>\n\n
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