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Breaking The Code - Part 4
Markuz, April 3rd, 2018
You can find the third part of this series at this link: Breaking the Code – Part 3 Here we are again with our Breaking The Code series of articles which focus on an in-depth analysis dedicated to the Isu messages in Assassin’s Creed Origins! With our last article, dedicated to Segment 4 we learnt about the new catastrophe that Layla has to face and possibly avert, the consequential reduced importance of Desmond’s sacrifice / “act of defiance” and we delved a bit more into one of the ways the humans can use to try and understand how time works (the wave function collapse) – and how that can “apply” to the Assassin’s Creed lore and the Isu concept of time.
We’re almost close to the end, get ready to overload your mind’s capacity… Segment 5 - Qeneb too Kah'Aiye
Location: Seth-Anat Tomb – Desheret Desert Main theme: Reality, perception and perspective; the human perception based on the design by the Isu Dialog by: Seth Anat Narrator (Source: SeoulTeamworkGaming) Click here to read the message once again
5. Qeneb too Kah'Aiye Retransmission. Segment 5. Acquiring Contemporaneity. It has been 105 days since the Great Catastrophe. The messenger speaks. The color blue. We believe everyone sees it as we do. Ocean. Sky. International Klein Blue. What’s to say yours and mine are of the same hue? Do you truly see it as I do? Frequencies so high only a few can hear their cue. A heightened response to the taste of food. Colors invisible to the human eye save for a few. A high voice, perceived as living glass. Perceptions shapes reality. Color blindness. Tinnitus. Supertasting. Tetrachromacy. Synesthesia. Reality is a mathematical model which gets solved over and over again by the observer. Your thoughts are computations. And they render this world for you to call your own. Not all processors are alike. Different brains produce different realities. The variations go from the subtle to the drastic. Your mind defines how much you can taste. How much you can feel. How much you can understand. Perception defines perspective. Where one sees a skull, the other sees a woman in a mirror. Where one hears silence, the other will hear entrancing voices. You experience what your brain allows you to perceive. We designed you and made sure to engineer your senses so you could perceive just what we needed you to. Neither more nor less. There are parts of Time we preferred you to remained blind to. It was a necessity. We have six senses, you have five. Can you guess the one missing? [...] [Overload your mind's capacity] For centuries, humanity has fought for freedom. The real cage is not around you. It is in you. Your mind will not allow you to wander in uncharted territories. A Faraday cage, for the mind. A concealed strait jacket. Events such as Upsweep and Julia fuel internet conspiracies. Sounds unknown, heard only once. A cabinets of curiosities for the Modern Age. And yet, they were messages, just like this one, waiting for their observer, their compatible processor. Human visionaries developed a vague awareness of their limits. They wrote obscure research papers, popular science fiction novels, some asking us to stop the world. But that's all they ever were. Fictions. How could they not be? Reality is what the observer allows it to be. The Doppler Effect. The Möbius strip. Deja-vus. Cicada 3301. UVB-76. Eureka effects. Ambigrams and Anamorphisis. P versus NP. Is Schrödinger's cat dead or alive? It all depends on what you perceive, on what the cage is not hiding for you to see. Think. Think. Let your mind be free. Explore the borders of your reality. Analysis of the message The message, which takes place 105 days after the Toba Catastrophe and is voiced by an Isu called “Seth Anat Narrator” (once again, not super original), is once again about the concept of reality – and this time, about perception as well. One of the first sentences sums it up pretty well: “Do you truly see as I do”?
In fact she mentions how different people can see different tones of the same color but she also references instances of only few people being able to hear sounds with very high frequencies, to have a heightened taste of food or see some specific colors or have a very high voice pitch while the remaining majority of the humans can’t. These are all events / situations that can actually happen and that the narrator describes as “perception [that] shapes reality” as the reality that each individual can observe can differ the others’ based on his / her perception. The narrator gives another series of examples to explain her point: color blindness, tinnitus (the perception of noise or ringing in the ears), supertasting (the aforementioned heightened taste of food), tetrachromacy (the condition of possessing four independent channels for conveying color information) and synesthesia (a condition in which stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to automatic experiences in a second sensory pathway such as watching a city's skyline and tasting blackberries or hearing a violin and feeling a tickle on a knee). All examples that show how humans already have a different perception of reality among themselves even if, in the AC lore, they were all designed with the same amount of senses. In a very interesting manner, the narrator describes reality as a mathematical model which gets solved continuously by the observer using his / her perception. Very much in line with an observer making a measurement / acquiring information through his / her senses and thus collapsing the wave of superposed possibilities to a single “interpretation” as we mentioned in the Segment 4 analysis.
That sentence is not pronounced by chance… of course. In fact, the woman and skull mention is a reference to illustrator Charles Allan Gilbert and his most famous drawing, “All is Vanity”. Using Wikipedia’s words, the drawing uses a double image in which the scene of a woman admiring herself in a mirror, when viewed from a distance, appears to be a human skull. It’s a classic example of different perceptions on the same object / situation, which leads to different reactions to it. The same goes for auditory hallucination, or paracusia, which involves perceiving sounds without actual auditory stimuli and is likely to be what the narrator describes as hearing entrancing voices when there’s actually only silence. So, after giving several examples of similar human beings who possess the same senses and can reach such different perceptions and perspectives, the narrator goes back to… “the matter at hand”. She confirms that the humans were designed by the Isu to have five senses, they were specifically created so that they could only perceive what the Isu wanted them to (that’s a feature you want to include when you plan to enslave an entire race for yourself). She even gets to say that it was a necessity for the Isu to design the humans as missing the sixth sense, as there were parts of time that they wanted the humans to remain “blind” to. Once again the messages in Origins confirm that the sixth sense is the ability to understand time and everything that comes with it. What’s interesting to see, though, is that the Isu didn’t give the sixth sense to the humans to avoid them fully understanding time (that’s a feature you want to exclude when you plan to enslave an entire race for yourself). It’s interesting because this tiny detail adds a bit to the thought process by the First Civilization (or some of them) before, during and after the Human-Isu war. In fact, based on this, we know that originally the humans were created to be slaves and, because of that purpose and to avoid any potential risk, they were built both without the sense that would have allowed them to fully comprehend time and with a neurotransmitter that would have forced them to obey / believe anything coming from the Pieces of Eden. Right before the war between the two races is about to start, though, there already are some Isu like Minerva and Juno’s father Saturn who, impressed by the evolution of the humans, are thinking of giving “them tools to become great” so that “one day they could even sit beside [them] as equals”. The Uprising comic book series, where all of this was shown, goes on to show the start of the so-called Human-Isu war, where a man actually murders Saturn and causes Juno to kill him and all the other humans in the room in retaliation.
One would expect the Isu to be pretty much against the humans during the initial phase of the war, but one of the bottled messages in AC4 actually shows the opposite (you can find it here, it’s called “What the voices saide”). Consistently with the events of Uprising, even during the war Minerva was suggesting to engineer the humans so that they could pass “learnt information” (genetic memories) to their offspring, with Jupiter agreeing with her, once again saying that “By ever ascending Degrees, the Humans shall be as Wyse as we are..”. Of course, afterwards the Toba Catastrophe hit the Earth and after that the Isu shifted their vision even further, to the point where, using Jupiter’s words, they “carried on, together. To rebuild. To renew.”. I guess the humans in the AC universe should be thankful that Jupiter and Minerva were the ones surviving the catastophe rather than Juno or any other Isu that could have sided with her. Then again, we know how that turned out to be anyway, so… Going back to the message, the Seth Anat narrator focuses on the missing sense that doesn’t allow the humans to read the Code and understand time. She says that humans are “caged” as in not free to fully perceive the reality around them, in her words it’s like a “Faraday cage” for their mind. Yet some people have developed a vague awareness of their limitations both intentionally or indirectly. She mentions visionaries that wrote research papers or science fiction novels, but she dismisses them as nothing more than fiction because it was all the product of fantasy rather than actual perception. The same goes for conspirational theories like the ones about unknown sounds that she mentions, Upsweep and Julia. Upsweep is an unidentified sound that was detected on the equatorial hydrophone arrays of the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This sound was recorded for the first time in August, 1991 and consists of series of “narrow-band upsweeping sounds of several seconds in duration each”. The source level is high enough to be recorded throughout the Pacific Ocean. Upsweep at 20x the original speed – Source: Wikipedia Similarly to Upsweep, Julia is another (formerly) unidentified sound recorded in March 1999 again by the U.S. NOAA. NOAA said the source of the sound was most likely a large iceberg that had fallen to the ground in Antarctica and that the sound itself was loud enough to be heard over the entire equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array. The unidentified sound lasted for about 15 seconds. Julia at 16x the original speed – Source: Wikipedia These are just two examples of unexplained sounds that were easily used for some wild theories by humans but were – in the AC lore – actual messages waiting for someone with the compatible processor / brain / sense to actually understand them, as the Isu narrator points out. Thus, the Isu narrator shows how limited the processing capacity of the humans really is, due to the lack of the sixth sense and once again steers her message on the concept of perception, saying that reality is subjective, it’s “what the observer allows it to be”. And while doing that, she gives another series of examples where the human perception can influence the ways in which reality can be experienced and that we’re going to briefly explore.
Even just with this brief description it’s easy to see why the narrator mentioned the Doppler effect as an example of how humans perceive reality.
Déjà vus are a more commonly know event and they are the feeling that the situation currently being experienced has already been experienced in the past. As Wikipedia says, scientific approaches reject the explanation of déjà vu as "precognition" or "prophecy", but rather explain it as an anomaly of memory, which creates a distinct impression that an experience is "being recalled”. But are they right? Guess they don’t know about the Code and the sixth sense… :P Cicada 3301. Ah, this is a good one, sit tight. Cicada 3301 is the name given to a real world organization that on six occasions (from January, 2012 to April, 2017) shared a set of puzzles and alternate reality games focused heavily on data security, cryptography, and steganography to recruit "intelligent individuals" from the public.
It has been called "the most elaborate and mysterious puzzle of the internet age" by Metro.co.uk and is listed as one of the "top 5 eeriest, unsolved mysteries of the internet" by The Washington Post.
According to one of the people that was able to complete the 2012 test, those who solved the puzzles were asked questions about their support of information freedom, online privacy and freedom, and rejection of censorship. If you are interested in his story and his “meeting” with the members of Cicada 3301, like I was, you can check it at this link. UVB-76, also known as "The Buzzer", is a mysterious shortwave radio station that broadcasts a short, monotonous buzz tone, repeating at a rate of approximately 25 tones per minute, 24 hours per day, and sometimes is interrupted by different voice transmissions in Russian such as “Ya UVB-76, Ya UVB-76. 180 08 BROMAL 74 27 99 14. Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 7 4 2 7 9 9 1 4” (broadcast on December 24, 1997) or “UVB-76, UVB-76. 93 882 NAIMINA 74 14 35 74. 9 3 8 8 2 Nikolai, Anna, Ivan, Mikhail, Ivan, Nikolai, Anna. 7 4 1 4 3 5 7 4” (broadcast on August 23, 2010). The purpose of the station has never been confirmed by government or broadcast officials, even though the former Minister of Communications and Informatics of the Republic of Lithuania wrote that the purpose of the voice messages is to confirm that operators at receiving stations are alert. However, there is still a lot of speculation about this station: some say the broadcast is constantly being listened to by military commissariats,
The eureka effect or eureka moment common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept. Otherwise known as the “Aha! Effect” or epiphany, the effect is considered by some scientists as “a memory advantage”, but there is still some debate as to where exactly it occurs in the brain, making it difficult to predict under what circumstances one can predict such effect.
Lastly, P versus NP. The P versus NP problem is an unsolved problem in computer science which basically asks: “If the solution to a problem can be quickly checked for correctness, can the problem solved quickly?” By “quickly”, the question actually means the existence of an algorithm that runs in the so-called polynomial time, which is a time to complete the task that can be described by a polynomial expression in the size of the input for the algorithm itself. The general class of questions for which some algorithm can provide an answer in polynomial time is called "class P" or just "P".
Using Wikipedia’s example, Sudoku is in NP because it’s not quickly solvable but once you know the answer, such answer is quickly verifiable. As mentioned before, “P = NP?” still remains unsolved and is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in New Hampshire to carry a US$1,000,000 prize for the first correct solution. So… is any of you willing to try? Thus, as you can see, all these examples (apart from, maybe, Cicada 3301) tie in with the idea of the human brain / processor / perception not allowing the observer to fully or easily comprehend something because – in the AC narrative – it was designed without the sixth sense. After all these instances and also after namedropping the Schrödinger's cat example (which we’re not going to get into… for now) the Narrator goes on to state for the nth time that all depends on what the humans perceive and what the aforementioned faraday cage for their mind prevents them from understanding… but finally, in the last line of the message, just as in segment 3, there are some words of hope. As a matter of fact, the Isu narrator asks Layla to think, to let her mind “be free”, to explore the borders of the reality she perceives and, doing so, to break free from her faraday cage. Through the reverse audio part of this message she even asks her to “Overload your mind’s capacity”. All in all, and once again, the Isu are asking Layla to transcend the human design and limitations that they themselves imposed over humanity. Once again, though, they’re not saying how… yet. Analysis of the picture
The picture is made up of four elements: the four figures on the top right and top left, the sound wave at the top / center of the picture, the gigantic cicada symbol in the center of the picture, and the symbols or I should say formula at the center of the cicada figure. The four figures on the top right and top left are four examples of the so-called impossible objects, which are basically optical illusions that consist of two dimensional figures that are interpreted by our subconscious as 3D objects even though they are not (and couldn’t exist as such). More specifically they would be, from left to right, a Penrose square, a Penrose triangle, an impossible infinity symbol and an impossible cube.
The idea is these symbols are tying in to the concept of how humans can perceive reality and how easily their perception can be swayed from the actual truth or directly isn’t able to fully comprehend the reality, which is one of the main themes of the fifth Isu message. The sound wave at the top of the picture is… one of the still “unexplained” mysteries of the picture, at least for what I know, and I wasn’t able to “decipher it” up until now. I’d say that I’d agree with redditor bool0011 from Russian fanpage ACInitiates in saying that, following the themes of the text of the message, the sound wave could correspond to one of the unexplained sounds that the narrator mentioned such as Upsweep or Julia.
The gigantic cicada symbol is, as many fans pointed out to us, the symbol of the Cicada 3301 group that I mentioned earlier in the article or, to be more specific, is a representation of one of the puzzles that the 3301 group asked people to solve in 2013, which you can see here and – if you like mindfucks - you can expand on at this link:
Finally, the tiniest visual element of the picture which is located at the center of the huge cicada symbol and is possibly the most interesting. Or the most boring, depending on the points of view. It’s the Schrödinger equation, or to be more precise, it’s the Time-dependent Schrödinger equation written in Dirac notation.
Oh yeah, more quantum physics. Aren’t you happy? The Schrödinger equation is a mathematical equation that describes the changes over time of a physical system in which quantum effects are significant. It “basically” is an equation used to make a mathematical prediction as to what path a given quantum system (atoms, molecules, subatomic particles etc.) will take following a set of known initial conditions, and thus describes the time-evolution of the system's wave function. As you might have guessed, this equation has the same objective and the same result as the wave function collapse method that I described in the previous article of the series, as they both try and describe how a quantum system and more specifically its wave function will evolve in time – and thus, in the AC lore, it’s considered as part of the only two ways trough which humans can understand “the language of time” as mentioned by the Isu Narrator in Segment 4. Compared to the probabilistic and discontinuous change brought about by observation and measurement in the wave collapse method, Wikipedia mentions that the Schrödinger equation describes the time evolution of a system in a deterministic and continuous way. In general, as we mentioned in the latest article of the series, quantum systems exist in superposition of several basis states that evolve according to the Schrödinger equation. However, when a measurement is made, the wave function collapses - from an observer's perspective - to just one of the basis states. After the collapse, the system again evolves according to the Schrödinger equation.
The famous Schrödinger's cat thought experiment – that is also mentioned in the message by the Isu narrator - is the best way to describe that. In such experiment a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. Considering this a quantum system, the cat can be considered simultaneously alive and dead as those are superposed basis states that are all possible with their probability. When one looks in the box (the observer making a measurement) he / she will see if the cat either alive or dead – and that’s the wave function collapse from his / her perspective. After that, the “system” will evolve again, as we mentioned before. In the same way, then, the Isu narrators are trying to describe time in a way that can be understood to humans and more specifically Layla, although, as we mentioned, they make it seem more like the algorithm of time itself that actually forces the possibilities towards some specific events that are meant to happen, before branching out to new possible paths that will have to forcefully reach other “choke points” and so on. Conclusion The fifth Isu message in Origins is once again about perception and perspective, and thus about the different kinds of realities that can be experienced depending on the different points of view / thoughts / brains. There are, though, several kinds of information that the human brain cannot process because it was designed by the Isu that way and the elements shown in the visual part of the message can be an example of that. The Isu are asking of Layla to overload her mind’s capacity, to break its Faraday Cage, to overcome the fact she’s missing a sixth sense that would have allowed her to comprehend the Code and Time. Will she be able to do that? She’d better be, there’s an impending new catastrophe aimed at the Earth… And that’s all for this article! One more message (or two?) and we should finally understand what the Isu are asking of Layla! Stay tuned here on Access The Animus and while you’re at it, let us know what you think about this article in the comments below!
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