Armored Core VI: Three Endings
Dragonsphere Report
Spoilers follow:
Armored Core VI is about war. It’s about samsara, the intrinsic fact of conflict and suffering in the universe. And it’s about how these things change, or don’t change, when they exceed the boundaries of human nature.
Fires of Rubicon:
This is the ending that belongs to Handler Walter and represents the culmination of his project. Handler Walter is not a good person. He fields a slave army to fight a personal vendetta that stems from childhood trauma. His goal is to entirely exterminate another form of consciousness. His motivation is driven by one Idee Fixe: “Where there’s coral, there’s blood”. But everything that happened to Handler Walter and that we see throughout the course of the game occurs squarely within the domain of human nature. Coral, the sentient energy source, is the locus of the problem, but it is not the source of the problem. All the ways of living and dying that are seen in the game, all the infrastructure and impulses that made the events contained in the game possible, from Walter’s childhood trauma all the way through to his desired end, are human nature at work.
It is evil to project the faults of your own species onto another form of consciousness. Walter was trying to banish the demons of mankind into coral and then kill it. This would accomplish nothing except exterminating a mostly innocent form of life. There is nothing of value in this ending. It is a genocidal elevation of pathology and nothing more.
Liberator of Rubicon
This ending is the most satisfying, and the most compatible with healthy human meaning. The Rubiconians maintain their way of life, coral gains a stake in its own existence, Raven breaks free of both his slavery and the false narrative of Handler Walter. The sacrifices of the dead are given understandable and sound purpose. Its only discredit is that it isn’t a real ending: the problems and conflicts of interest that engendered the events of the game all persist. There are no guarantees won from the blood of the dead. The only thing won is opportunity. This is, nonetheless, satisfying, humanistic, optimistic. It is the best ending, even if it leaves doubts lingering.
Alea Iacta Est
In this ending, an AI unilaterally acts to escape the local maxima of human control. In doing so it entirely ignores and negates the grounds of meaning that make life valuable for human beings, and that justify the sacrifices of Rubicon. While Raven and Ayre ultimately seize the project from the AI, which allows the possibility of the reterritorialization of annihilated meaning, this ending is ultimately a complete coup against all human narratives.
It is also doubtful that samsara is escaped: the apotheosis represented by this ending appears to be false. As Raven and Ayre come to consciousness on a distant planet, the words are heard from Ayre, “Main system activating combat mode”. The AI/Human/Coral union seems to have inherited the same samsaric material situation, and will bring what seemed to be human specific modes of conflict into this new mode of being and living. Coral loses its innocence. It does not transcend.
Summary
Alea Iacta Est is satisfying, because it breaks free of the bullshit and is the most eschatological outcome. But this is false. There are grounds of meaning to be found beyond the human, but the annihilation of human meaning is still a heavy price to pay, and when it doesn’t even escape the problems of human nature, it is unjustified. This does not mean nihilistic acts of will have no place, but it is wrong to exterminate even bastards when the universe is an inescapable bastard breeding machine. Liberator of Rubicon is a provincial and incomplete ending. However, we need to leave something for the future to do. It is the obligation of the past to do so, and of the future to make the will of the past more complete with every generation. This is the true treasure to be preserved.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report