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Looking through the Brahman - Chapter1
Markuz, February 27, 2014 Translated by: Stefania, Sara, Markuz ATTENTION! The following article presents a highly SPOILERISH content for those who have not yet read the AC: Brahman Comic book. Access The Animus does not take responsibility for burned eyes, screams in despair (for the spoilers) and in happiness (for the content) and for every side effect that this article might cause.  The time has finally come for the Italian hardcore fans to live the moment that some of you, in foreign countries, has already had. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for us to talk about Assassin's Creed: Brahman. The comic book built up a healthy hype in the fans both for the particular setting and for the various teasers released by the writer, Brenden Fletcher. About his work, Fletcher said that the comic book would have established interesting links with the current saga, and especially with the future of the franchise. And so it was, actually, and we can say by judging some of the elements that we’re going to analyze. Let’s start from the beginning, however, and let’s follow the course of the comic book.
Select New Brahman V.R. Experience:
In the upper left, we can see the box of the previous page with the word "Fantasy" highlighted to indicate which mode from the menu has been chosen by the user. It is possible that this choice may affect the rest of the page. At the top, we can see five heads and every one of them seems to stare at the reader. These heads are actually representations of Hindu deities. What led us to understand their nature is the face of an elephant, who necessarily reminded us of Ganesha (or Ganesh), the elephant-headed deity equipped with a single tusk, symbol of good luck, prosperity and fortune. So, starting from this, together with our Hephaestus, we tried to understand the other deities’ identities and we drafted the following hypothesis list.
The head in the center, however, is surely the one who catches the eye the most, both in terms of size and characteristics. In this case, the distinctive element is the nose ring with a chain connected to the ear, typical representations of goddess Durga. Recalling Hephaestus’ words in "The Indian matter", Durga (Sanskrit for "the one that you can hardly approach ", the "unreachable" or the “Invincible") symbolizes the Indian Goddess that represents the victory of good over evil:
The representation of Durga is also of importance both because in the page there is another symbol that represents her, namely the tiger, which the goddess mounts in some representations, and also because it has three symbols of the Assassins on it: two small stylized Assassin insignias are located between the eyes of the goddess and her headdress , while the third is as large as all the headgear and encroaches on the face of the goddess. Why should the goddess therefore wear on herself so many "connections" to the Assassins ? Perhaps also the symbol of the Assassins has a special meaning in the First Civilization era as it happened with the Abstergo logo? Or is the presence of the Assassins insignias some sort of recall towards the nature of the ancestor than that of the member of TWCB, being this page still part of the memories of Soora’s ancestor? Both hypotheses are equal because of the Assassins symbols show up, again in a stylized manner, also on the forehead of the snake that can be seen on the right side of the page, on a golden temple in the upper left in the background (First Civilization building or representation of the Golden Temple?) and also on the purple underlying foliage / peacock feathers. The main attraction of the page, however, can be found in the center of the page. We don’t know yet what it is in terms of plot, but our curiosity will be satisfied in a few pages. It’s a large, bright diamond floating between two hands put in the shape of a bowl to contain what it seems to be water. The hands are located beneath an arch that resembles an Indian temple and, on the top of it, we can see a tower that rests on what appears to be a lotus flower. Keep in mind this page and the diamond because they will prove to be the core of the comic book. In addition, on the page there are two text elements, which obviously had to be difficult to interpret: the first one is written in computer language, while the second one is in Sanskrit (I told you it was the mindfuck page). The one in computer language, overcome by an Abstergo logo, probably represents how Soora’s visor is working. We can read: 
The box containing these command strings lies on the far right of the page, and these commands are so long that the last lines are cut by the edge of the page. Nevertheless, it is possible to deduce several things from the text.
The requested file is called system00.abst.tplr: it doesn’t hold any particular function per se but the abbreviations "abst" and "tplr" that stand for "Abstergo" and probably "Templar", again always following Hephaestus‘ ideas. The text that follows, instead, is written in computer language and, after a brief research, we found out that the command strings belong to the C++ language. The code, in fact, is completed as follows: 
So we are in front of a script that manages the access to many levels of something that refers to a folder named “Brahman” in the Abstergo files. This idea is also confirmed by the fact that below the script in the comic book you can see a black box with a white line as if it were asking for a password. Later we will see how this access has its importance for the events of the comic. The writing at the bottom of the page, instead, as was stated before, is in Sanskrit and is the following, with the first two words in gold:  The phrase, although covered by a hand, turned out to be a saying, which we translated with our powerful tools (Google Translate). The meaning is literally “All that glitters is not gold”. In particular the highlighted part can be translated as “All that glitters”. So, does the message imply that we must watch out for appearances and glittering things? This too will be touched upon by the unwinding of the events in the comic book. At last we can proceed with the comic and in the following pages we come back to our Jot Soora in the present day, a week prior to when we saw him tied to a chair forced to use an Animus-like visor. In this case Jot is dressed up to the nines, in a suit, and he’s sitting at a desk in his business office, busy using the same visor with an Abstergo logo connected to his PC and also to a console, this one too with an Abstergo logo. Jot stretches his hand forward, confirming the virtual reality featured in the visor we saw a while ago in the menu. So thanks to this page we can understand that the hand stretched towards the diamond covering the Sanskrit writing belonged to Jot Soora who was viewing the various images. But while in the virtual reality his hand gets closer to the diamond, Soora sees the picture of a fluorescent tiger with bloodstains all around and, shocked, he turns off the visor. On his computer various writings appear, extremely useful to understand what we have in front of us.
The other two elements, on the other hand, are IP addresses configured for a WAN and a LAN. The first one, Wide Area Network (WAN), is defined by Wikipedia as a computer network spanning regions, countries, or even the world. Instead the second one is a Local Area Network (LAN), a limited and local computer network that usually covers a limited area such as a home or an office building. In particular, the IP address specified for the LAN is used to indicate the computer in use, in other word the localhost. In this case the idea is that the specified addresses show that the Brahman is connected locally to Soora’s PC and from here it is connected with an IP address (pointing to Philippines) to a far larger network, the WAN, that probably, considering the logo on the visor, is the Abstergo Cloud, as pointed out by our Hephaestus. Also, there are other two windows on the computer screen. The first window contains the following text:  QThis command lines show various data. First of all there’s a further reference to the fact that the visor is called Brahman and we also come to know that it’s a product coming from, or anyway is related to, Abstergo Entertainment. Also, in the initial notes, we can see that the Brahman is copyrighted by Absergo and is part of a series of works started in 1985 (the reference is obviously to the Animus Project) and completed - for now - in 2013. The following strings resemble an anonymous access to an FTP server (the file transfer protocol used to transfer files from one host to the other). So in this case the strings indicate an active data exchange (a bit slow, 2,3 KB/s) between Soora’s PC and the Abstergo Cloud through an anonymous access and the support of the server "br-bangalore.com", in line with the fact the Brahman in the present day takes place exactly in Bangalore. This last part is confirmed by an additional writing visible on the screen that surprises Jot:  Jot does not care about the last string though, and not only he disconnects the viewer, but also uploads everything to a USB flash drive that he brings with him.
Monima puts the visor on without turning it on, asking Jot what she should see and he answers she can look at real memories, from the point of view of the people who lived them (this is useful to confirm that the Brahman is based on the Animus technology). Mon doesn’t activate the viewer because the next morning she has to leave early for a photography session (Monima is an actress) and asks Jot to go with her but he says he wants to stay at home; the girl seems to be offended and tells him to stay at home with his toy. And that’s exactly what Jot does that night, until he goes to sleep and some hours later he’s woken up by a call from Ajay Rana, president of MysoreTech, the company where Soora works. Jot ignores the call and not seeing Monima in bed with him, he looks for her in the apartment and finds her on the couch using the Brahman, with a PC next to her with the same screen of data exchange he saw the day before at work. We’re immediately thrown in the past, where we see another full-page illustration, this time not inclined to the mindfuck but to the contextualization. We see some elephants, an Oriental-like architecture, fruits, a girl with a nose-piercing (similar to Durga’s piercing) and aristocratic clothes and jewels speaking with an older man dressed up as well. Further down we can see a close-up of the girl, next to the face of our protagonist of the past, Arbaaz Mir. The scene shows a seducer Mir who catches up with the girl showing he stole a pink oleander for her from her dining room. This suggests that probably it was guarded and this confirms the probable - until now - nobility of the girl. Everything is supported by the fact that Mir introduced himself as an emissary of Kashmir and by the fact that the girl, before “surrendering” to Arbaaz, says her grandfather could have him killed. Jot, in the present day, looks at the monitor of the PC connected to the Brahman, that shows the same graphic he saw when he was using it in his office (so with the same upload of data to the Cloud), but with the appearance of an additional writing, “Bangalore 31”, where the name of the city probably indicates the (first) place in which the data is transferred while the number still doesn’t have an explanation. Our protagonist, hearing Monima sighing, closes the laptop deactivating the Brahman and for this reason Monima wakes up. The girl is annoyed and in a bad mood while she observes her engagement ring and soon after Jot, as a good partner, incessantly asks her what’s wrong, pointing out that he modified the Brahman so that only genetic memories (and so not other users’ memories) could be visualized. Following Jot’s insistence, Monima tells him she lived the memories of a princess of Punjab, the state of India where Amritsar is located, and that this princess was no less than the granddaughter of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. This is the same Maharaja we supposed to be important for the comic in “The Indian Matter" because he could have possessed a Piece of Eden, but there is more.
In the following scene we see Jot at work at MysoreTech in front of the usual computer connected to the Brahman, but this time the writings on the screen are different: Application quit unexpectedly Send report? Yes/No Data stream interrupted. Upload incomplete. Scan incomplete. User identity unknown replay last data strea_ The information shows that the application of the Brahman was quit unexpectedly (due to the “manual” closing of the laptop the night before). For this reason the data stream was interrupted and the system communicates that both the upload and the scan are incomplete. It also says that the identity of the person using the Brahman is still unknown (to the Brahman itself and to the Cloud). The last line is a command that Jot is inserting in this moment, it’s clear from the fact that the first letter is in lowercase, that in place of the last letter there’s still the classic “flashing underscore” and also from the sound effect of the pressing of the keyboard keys. We can deduce that Jot hasn’t overcome yet what happened the night before and he wants to see the same memories of Monima. Jot gives the command to the Brahman but the answer he gets is the following:  So the system tries to access the uploads made through the unit 00 of the Brahman (the one that Jot has), but it reveals that our protagonist doesn’t have access to Abstergo Cloud and so he can’t visualize the memories. Also, this shows the Abstergo security system for the Brahman: everyone can upload memories to the Cloud at any time, but only an authorized person can see or analyze them, and this makes our Jot swear. Immediately after, one of his collegues appears at his office door, offering him some coffee. She walks in and she notices the Brahman. She also seems to be aware of the visor because she expresses her satisfaction for the hardware arrival by saying " Badhiya hai!", which, in desi slang, is a sentence used to praise someone’s work, the same as "good job". The girl asks Jot if she can try it, but he refuses and he sends her out of his office . The girl obeys but, while leaving the room, she reminds him of the forthcoming meeting with Mr. Rana (Do you remember? The man who called him while he was asleep) and the "guys" from Montréal (coming probably from the Abstergo Entertainment facility we knew in AC4). Jot is still distracted and the comic suggests us that he keeps thinking about the line which implies that the last user’s identity (Monima) remains unknown. For this reason, Jot wears again his visor and goes back to the past.
Hamid, who will then reveal to be a high-ranking Assassin and then will also be confirmed by this year's Encyclopedia as Mentor of the Assassins in Amritsar, answers with "Wa alaikum assalam", the traditional answer to Mir's greeting, which means "And with you may peace be". The Encyclopedia also specifies that the two knew each other well before this meeting. When he was young in fact, Mir was involved in a tryst and was rescued from a difficult situation by Hamid. It's exactly because he owed his old friend a favor that Mir in 1839 stole the object that we are going to see. Hamid can't wait to see the object wrapped in the paper, but Mir is doubtful because he does not want it to be seen by prying eyes. Hamid reassures him by saying that there are other people in adjacent rooms but they are sleeping (perhaps forgetting about the boy) and even if they saw the object in the package, they would not believe their eyes. Immediately after Hamid opens the package and inside he finds a scroll that shines with a blue light. THE scroll.
On the right side, instead, two other "gifts" for hardcore fans appear: another drawing of an Apple of Eden, this time the AC2 version, and, unbelievable, the fourth scroll of Romulus depicting Juno's Temple and what at the time was theorized to be a stylized representation of a tree with branches and roots.
The last two elements of the parchment recovered by Mir are special because they are made up of drawings and lines that never appeared in AC. The first features a series of concentric circles with a series of figures (men or gods?) placed long these circles, each separated from the others by a star. The second one, instead, shows some kind of river in which other women are perhaps taking a bath, alongside a symbol and again, some rays that likely indicate the sun. The two drawings remained a mystery to me for a long period of time until Hephaestus had an epiphany: they are two illustrations belonging to the Voynich Manuscript, one of the most important cases in the history of cryptography in which the document has never been deciphered (if not during these days). This document is a codex dating back to the fifteenth century, which may have been written in Northern Italy, on vellum pages (info coming from Wikipedia), which takes its name from Wilfrid Voinich, a book merchant that bought it in 1912 in Villa Mondragone, near Rome. The manuscript, though it has never been deciphered by all its owners (and the same goes for its copies), features illustrations, as stated earlier, that make it possible to grasp its multiple content / sections:
What does this mean in AC, then? The Voynich Manuscript in my and Hephaestus' theory is most likely a copy of a document of the First Civilization, a Book with similar abilities to the ones featured in Project Legacy, like creating pictures and especially formulas in the mind of the user and containing who knows what other information.
The last element of the page that we have to analyze is paradoxically the most important one and it is located in the very center of the scroll. It is a diamond, extremely similar to the one we saw in the mindfuck page, where we saw the faces of the Indian gods and the Assassins insignias. Its presence on the parchment hints that the diamond has something to do with TWCB and the Pieces of Eden. Its central location within the scroll also gives the sense of its importance. The comic's focus shifts on the eyes of Hamid's slave boy while he is peeking into the scroll and listening to the discussion that his master is having with Arbaaz. Hamid claims to be able to understand very little of what is written on the parchment, and that no one has ever been able to fully understand the text (an assonance with the inability to read the Voynich Manuscript). The Mentor also adds that the text on the parchment is written in the language of the Gods. This is very interesting because it is probably the first time we see the calligraphy of TWCB, and, again, it is also a small reference to Edward Kelley, who "spoke with the angels" (again, in Project Legacy), and to William’s words in AC3 about the difficult comprehensibility of the messages of TWCB.
Hamid has not finished yet playing his trump cards and, in fact, he states that the Brotherhood higher-ups consider the the Koh-i -Noor as an immense source of energy with the power to bind the fate of all Pieces of Eden together as one. Mir asks if the scroll indicates the diamond location but Hamid says they already know where it is: Maharaja Ranjit Singh owns it. The mentor asserts that all the attempts to steal it ended with the death of the thieves after a short time, and this generated a curse: the diamond would have given great wealth to the owner (according to Indian mythology), but the owner would have suffered a bad end. Mir claims that Singh actually is expanding a bit too much, saying that he is a "murderous cur". Hearing Mir's words, Hamid says that his people in Kashmir had suffered a great tragedy (due to Singh) but those days have long passed and now Singh is the only line of defense from the British conquerors. This last Hamid reference, luckily or not, is explained in this year's Encyclopedia, in which we can read Mir’s family story according to which they were killed during the Kashmir annexation by Singh in 1819.
Immediately after, we get back to the present day with Jot: he is getting ready for the meeting with his boss and the "guys from Montreal". He is still upset about the bad situation that has arisen with Monima and, while looking at the mirror, he sees nothing else but Hamid’s slave boy. In this very moment we have the certainty that Jot Soora’s ancestor is the slave boy and not Arbaaz Mir as we were driven to believe before the comic's release. We could actually guess it before: the introductive page on the boy and the focus on his eyes were suggestive elements. The Encyclopedia also expands what we have seen so far and gives the boy a name: he is Raza Soora. Jot recovers from Raza's vision (a vision that left him shocked and upset) and goes to the meeting room where on a big screen we see the lines " Brahman Project - MysoreTech - Abstergo Ent.". His boss, Ajay Rana, introduces our protagonist as the company genius but, unfortunately, he behaves hesitantly in front of the Abstergo leaders, probably because he’s still upset about Monima. Not only he hesitates while talking to them but he also gets to say that the Brahman adapts itself to the genetic memories. He then corrects his words immediately by saying that it adapts to the user. Rana seems surprised and he probably is because he understands that Jot somehow grasped the way in which the Brahman uses the genetic memories. For this very doubt, later he invites him to a squash game. Rana asks him if he has problems at home and says that he was contacted by Abstergo because they needed to requisition his laptop (of course to better analyze the data and their sources, and to be sure that no one else can see them). Rana answers to Jot 's doubts about the Brahman and about the intents of Abstergo with the visor by saying that MysoreTech was hired to launch a console on the mass Indian market and that's what they are doing.
Going back to the comic book, Rana also claims to have spoken with Monima and advises Jot to spend more time with her instead of digging into matters that don't concern him. Jot in a way follows Rana's advice, as in the next scene we see him engaged in a sexual intercourse with his girlfriend, unfortunately unsatisfactory for both, because their thoughts are probably dedicated respectively to insecurity and to Arbaaz Mir. Returning to the past, we find Mir intent in explaining Raza their mission, stating that he never had a servant but to pretend being a dignitary
Later Mir shows us and Raza he has various information about the diamond, the objective of his mission. “Koh-i-Noor” is a Persian name and, referring to that, he cites an episode of the long history of the diamond, in other words the theft by the “fiend” Nader Shah. Arbaaz refers to the invasion of India by Nader Shah, the shah of Iran, in 1739 and to the sack of Agra and Delhi thanks to which he stole not only the Koh-i-Noor and the Darya-ye Noor (the “mountain of light" and “sea of light" diamonds) but also the Peacock Throne. The latter was a jewelled throne that was the seat of the Mughal emperors and on which the Koh-i-Noor itself was placed for a period (hence the presence of the peacocks in the mindfuck page featuring the faces of the gods?). Eight years after the theft of the diamond, Nader was assassinated, joining the other victims of the diamond's curse, as any other man who was obsessed by it. But Arbaaz is still skeptic, the diamond was simply stolen several times and this is also the intent of our Assassin of the past.
Arbaaz explains that, from the information he has, the diamond that Maharaja Ranjit Singh shows to the public is a fake and the real one is inside a Tosha Khana (the room dedicated to treasures, gifts and emblems of honor) placed below the Summer Palace which is accessible only by Singh and his treasurer Bustee Ram. Mir, then, is planning to enter with Raza as a dignitary of Kashmir with his servant, in order to tail the Maharaja’s treasurer and obtain access to the Tosha Khana to steal the diamond.
While Cotton and Arbaaz continue their psychological clash, Raza turns around and soon after Mir does the same, because the princess we saw in the first pages, Monima's ancestor, makes an entrance and catches up with the Maharaja, her grandfather, while he gives the fake Koh-i-Noor to Bustee Ram. So Mir asks Raza to follow him, while he steals a pink oleander with a smirk that, after having seen the princess, reveals the intents of the Assassin. In particular the pink oleander in the hands of Arbaaz makes us understand that all the events until now happened before the facts described when Monima put on the Brahman in Jot’s apartment, specifically the seduction of the princess by Mir and their moment of passion.
The following morning (and that could say it all) Jot arrives at the hotel where he should have stayed with Monima. He is so late that the girl is going out because she must take a taxi to the airport to fly to Mumbai for work. Mon is obviously annoyed and the two talk lazily, but an important detail emerges: Ajay Rana called Monima to ask her to be the testimonial of the advertising campaign for the Brahman. This suggests that maybe Rana or Abstergo identified Monima too, or they want to test her past too in addition to Jot’s one to see who generated the memories dedicated to the Koh-i-Noor and its scroll. Before leaving, Monima gives Jot her engagement ring because the advertising campaign wants her to be single, asking him to keep it until her return. The Italian version of the comic book ends here, as though it was “cut”, without cliffhangers, even if surely everything is still open and the questions are many. Was Raza Soora able to tail Bustee Ram to find the real Koh-i-Noor? What kind of relationship do Mir and the princess have? Will Jot and Monima be able to settle down their differences? We already have the answers here in ATA, but out of respect for Italian readers we are not going to reveal them. Just to create some hype for you while waiting we can say that we will discover some interesting details about Ajay Rana, about the Koh-i-Noor abilities and about how the Assassins and Templars fight in the modern day and ... and we will have an extraordinary guest star. The second part of this article, therefore, will be published only during the release of the second part of the comic book in Italy. Stay with us. Keep reading "Looking through the Brahman - part 2".
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