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Breaking The Code - Part 5
Markuz, May 15th, 2018
You can find the fourth part of this series at this link: Breaking the Code – Part 4 We’re finally here! After four articles we have finally reached the end of our Breaking the Code series (… or have we?) with our last piece dedicated to the Isu messages in Assassin’s Creed Origins, so what better occasion than our anniversary to “finish” what we started? We have dealt with topics like reality and simulation, perception and perspective, the so-called Code (a set of equations and rules that define life and time), the presumed immutability of time, a new impending catastrophe “planned” for the Earth and, in front of all of this, stands (reactionless?) Layla Hassan. What are the Isu really asking of her? We have tried to understand it throughout all the other messages and with the sixth one we are going to finally find out. So sit back, relax and let’s awaken the sixth! (Oh, wait…) Segment 6 - Eesfet Oon-m’Aa Poo
Location: Under the Great Sphinx – Giza Main theme: Layla’s future, the Animus as a way to alter memories… and wormholes Dialog by: Sphinx Narrator (Source: Zanar Aesthetics) Click here to read the message once again
6. Eesfet Oon-m’Aa Poo Retransmission. Segment 6. Acquiring Contemporaneity. It has been 109 days since the Great Catastrophe. The messenger speaks. Wake up. Not from a dreamless sleep or an absence of light. But from a reality that will soon cease to be. Wake up. The next chapter is unstoppable. And yet. The greatest revolutions sometimes originate from the confines of impossibility, do they not? Change your mind. Subvert your perception. Stop this world. Bend it into something new. Destiny is not without irony. Here I am, imploring a lesser version of myself... to do what I could never do. In this timeless moment, you and I are a bridge. Both of us from different eras, meeting halfway at the narrowing of the hourglass in this ocean of sand. It is not enough to tell time. You must learn Time. [...] [Reality is a simulation. Break the code.] And in so doing, escape the inescapable. Fill in the blanks: the ones hiding between words, between worlds. Find the spaces that we could not erase, the variables that ended up erasing us. If you do not, they will erase you as well. Time told of a story that ended with us, and now it tells of a story that ends with you. Once upon a time, a new story will begin. After the functions which run our days have scattered into an array of random numbers. We found solace in Order. We thought it would help us rule the world. We were wrong. Order never served us. It has kept us within the code, within the boundaries. We were tricked into thinking we were the ones writing the rules when they were in fact guiding us to our conclusion. You need to transgress. You, of all people, understand the value of disobeying. Take an unexpected turn, away from the path that is drawn straight ahead of you. The Animus was humankind’s first unconscious attempt to explain what it could not see. Understanding genetic memories, an eye into history. But the Animus bears a fatal flaw. It follows the rules from those who embrace Order just as we did. It allows you to witness – but not alter. Your Animus is different. As is the mind that imagined it. It could escape the code. It could do that leap, and make possible a decision that defies the order of things that are. Wake up. Be the chaos that comes to be. Gods are just like you and me. REMEMBER. Nothing is real. Everything is permitted. Analysis of the message I hope you followed the other Isu messages in Origins because there are a lot of cross references with this one! The message starts very clearly. “Wake up”. The narrator is asking Layla to wake up and he does in a very specific way. Layla should not wake
This catastrophe is deemed unstoppable by the narrator, which resonates with the idea of time course correcting the events to make sure that the catastrophe hits the Earth despite Desmond’s sacrifice as shown in Segment 4. Yet, in front of a presumed immutable future, the Sphinx Narrator still hopes for something to change, exactly like the Khufu Narrator in Segment 3 where he talked about a so-called author, possibly Layla, who might be able to change the future by modifying the Code. The narrator in Segment 6 follows up on the ideas mentioned in Segment 3 by saying that Layla should work to go against the limitations of her mind, to stop the catastrophe and to “bend (this world) into something new”, to be an “author” through and through. Still, he does not tell her how… yet.
Instead he does something that is barely done in the other five messages: he acknowledges who he’s talking to, where and when, proving that the messages were indeed produced by six Isu, collected by a seventh Isu called “The Messenger” and then aimed at Bayek of Siwa in 48 B.C. so that Layla could watch them in 2017. In fact, not only he’s saying that he knows he’s talking to a “lesser version of himself”, while both him and the recipient of the message are from different eras and are meeting “halfway” in time in an ocean of sand which is obviously a reference to Egypt.
The narrator, then, says that now time is telling a new story that is expected to end with Layla and that afterwards a new story will begin. Again, this is a reference both to AC3 and to Segment 4 as he’s suggesting the idea of a continuous cycle of catastrophes that hit the Earth, wipe out most of their civilization and the remnants start anew and create a new civilization that grows until the next catastrophe. It happened to the Isu, it was meant to happen in 2012 (that was literally Minerva’s offer, before Desmond decided to accept Juno’s one), and it’s now meant to happen again, with Layla being the new main character who needs to put a stop to it. More importantly, to give Layla more insights (haha, as if they were clearly explained…) as to why the Isu failed to save themselves from the First Catastrophe, the narrator says that “After the functions which run our days have scattered into an array of random numbers” the Isu decided to control the world by using “Order”. This means, in my interpretation, that as time passed the set of equations that regulated the world - the Code - became more and more complex and random ( so does it mean there was a time before that? What happened before this change of the Code?). To try and keep control on the laws of nature that were evolving and becoming more and more complex, the Isu “found solace” in order, which again in my interpretation means that they tried to study the Code, find out its equations and finally understand how it worked. As the narrator says, though, this order, this kind of organization about the Code that they brought in while studying it (maybe they based aspects of the Isu society on how they were able to understand life and time?) didn’t help the Isu. In fact, it ultimately caused their demise because it kept them “within the code, within the boundaries” of
As mentioned in Segment 3, the Isu found out they could only read and understand the Code / time but they were never able to change anything about it, not even “a single dot”. That’s what I think the narrator in Segment 6 is saying, that the Isu got so much into studying and understanding the language of the universe, that when they found out that a catastrophe would have wiped their civilization from the planet they realized too late that they weren’t able to change anything to avoid it. That is what I believe the narrator is saying when he’s mentioning that the Isu thought they were writing the rules but it was actually the rules themselves, the equations that foretold the catastrophe that guided them to their extinction. This is where finally, FINALLY, the Isu are saying what they want of Layla. “It is not enough to tell time” says the narrator (and now we know he’s saying this because his civilization died because of it), she must learn time, she must be able to read the Code but also to be able to identify the variables that ended up causing the catastrophe to happen during the Isu era to avoid it happening now. And after she finds them, she has to… Break The Code As easy and obvious and complex as it might have seemed, that’s what she has to do (isn’t it funny that it was in the title of this series of articles all along?). According to the narrator Layla needs to be able to do what the Isu were never able to do, that is to try and go beyond the limitations of nature, to somehow be able to modify the Code and thus to be able to change the course of time to avert the incoming catastrophe. No biggie, really. It’s also nice to see that all the reversed audio pieces within the Isu messages were always telling Layla what she needed to do: Break the Code Collapse the wave Overload your mind’s capacity Reality is a simulation. Break the Code
The speech becomes even more personal when the narrator says that “You, of all people understand the value of disobeying”. This is the full confirmation, if we still needed it, that Layla IS the recipient of the message. In fact, Layla is the symbol of transgression. She left Berkley against her family’s will, during her first employment (2006-2010) at Abstergo she behaved only if she was allowed to do things her own way, when she got back to Abstergo (2013) she went against the procedures multiple times under Isabelle Ardant’s leadership and, well, the biggest transgression is obviously what she does in Origins, that is, going against Simon Hathaway’s orders, testing her modified portable Animus on Bayek’s and Aya’s mummies and avoid mentioning any of that to Abstergo (which causes Sigma Team to arrive on site to hunt for her and also her medical officer Deanna Geary to be harmed and / or killed). So, we got to know what Layla needs to do… but how can she overcome her human limitations and go against the very equations that regulate life and time? The answer is, as everybody should know by now, her Animus.
The narrator describes the Animus as “humankind’s first unconscious attempt to explain what it could not see”, which not only proves that right after the Toba Catastrophe the Isu could see through the calculations that the humans would have invented the Animus device but also that through it they inadvertently were starting to interact with the Code / time (or at least that’s my interpretation of “attempt to explain what it could not see”). Still, as the narrator said, the Animus was designed to allow people to witness, to read the past, in a very similar way to how the Isu were able to read time (although they were able to see both the past and the – potential - future). Because of that, the Animus in its original design follows “the rules from those who embrace Order”, exactly like the Isu did. It only allows to read the Code (and Time), but that’s not enough to save the world from the catastrophe, according to the narrator. It needs to alter it. This is what the Isu have been trying to say. Layla needs to use a particular Animus not to just read the past, but to alter the laws of life and time and, quite conveniently, they say that her personal Animus, the one that she is using in the modern day in Origins, is the right tool to do it. In fact, the narrator says that somehow Layla’s Animus “could escape the code (…) and make possible a decision that defies the order of things that are”.
That’s a shocking and unexpected turn of events for the franchise (and a worrying one, as I’ll mention later), as it could possibly mean that Layla’s Animus may be the first device in the franchise which could allow to actually time travel (if we don’t consider Die Glocke from the Conspiracies graphic novels, which had hints that implied time travel in at least two occasions but never directly confirmed them), despite what every single developer has said in every interview since AC was created. But why Layla’s Animus? How is it different from any other past Animus? To get such an answer we need to take a look at Layla’s backstory. As we know from Origins and from its guide, Layla has worked at Abstergo twice: the first period started in 2006 where she was hired by Sofia Rikkin as part of Abstergo’s “Young Innovators” program and lasted until 2010, during which she worked first in the R&D labs of Abstergo Fitness and then was put “on the field” for Abstergo’s Historical Research division. In 2010 / beginning of 2011, when Egypt’s people took to the streets in protest against their government, she asked Abstergo for a leave of absence to join her compatriots calling for the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak (who actually resigned on February 11th, 2011). After that, she became involved in the country’s youth culture, helping her new friends to communicate through social media and hacked digital devices in the face of the government’s censorship. Funnily enough, she was in Cairo even when William Miles was captured by Abstergo on December 12, 2012. After the coup d’état of 2013 that installed army chief general Abdel Fattah el-sisi as the Egyptian president, Layla decided to leave the country and to rejoin Abstergo. Her relations with Sofia slowly evolved to non-existant as Layla became more and more aware that Sofia was writing to her to grasp ideas on how to develop technology like the Animus Aerie, the robotic arm seen in the Assassin’s Creed Movie (the guide states that such behavior by Sofia had already happened in Layla’s first period at Abstergo). This got Layla angrier and angrier because she had been willing to join Sofia’s “special project” since 2006 and then had directly asked to be employed in the Animus Project in Madrid since 2014-2015 with no positive answer whatsoever while Sofia kept leeching her ideas and sketches. That took a turn for the worse on August 4th, 2016, when Layla found out Sofia and her team were working on a portable version of the Animus Aerie based on many of the advice and insight she had provided Sofia with and it finally reached it final stage when, on August 30th, 2016, Sofia sent a final e-mail confirming she would have never accepted Layla in her team because of her continuous unstable behavior at Abstergo.
Angered and convinced she had been exploited, Layla decided to formulate a reckless and secret plan (very consistent with her personality) to finally get noticed and recognized by the Abstergo higher-ups and get in Sofia’s face: get her hands on the new portable Animus and modify it to the point of being able to allow users to experience the unsanitized genetic memories of anyone in the world (didn’t she know about the Animus Omega and Helix!?) and also to read DNA samples too damaged for the ordinary Animus to handle. On October 31st, 2016, Layla was finally able to somehow put her hands on the Animus HR-8, the portable Animus that she had heard about a few months before. This is where Layla started creating the Animus that would allow her to “Break the Code”, according to the Isu narrator.
Deanna also added that Layla should not go into the Animus in any way because they both didn’t know if it could work and what damage it could cause. As if that could stop Layla…. In fact, when in October she is sent to Egypt to retrieve an “artifact of high interest”, she decides to take her modified portable Animus with her and when instead of an Isu relic she finds Bayek and Aya’s mummy… well, you know the rest. One more interesting thing about Layla and her Animus is that she keeps thinking of modifications to add to her device, even right before leaving for Egypt, when she is daring to think if she could try and run simulations through inorganic matter rather than just using the classic DNA samples to run simulations based on genetic memories.
So there we have it, we have an engineer extraordinaire, a device that can do wonders (but still doesn’t seem to be able to change the equations of time and life) and a catastrophe to avoid. What next? Wake up. Be the chaos that comes to be. Gods are just like you and me. REMEMBER. Nothing is real. Everything is permitted. The final words of the sixth message ask Layla once again to finally act. To alter the simulation that we call reality (as our Sorrosyss put it) which follows the rules known as the Code, to actually be the chaos that will break the Code, and finally to save the planet. This is what we expect from the next Assassin’s Creed game (unless this plotline gets disregarded or moved to a transmedia release) and it’s even supported by the last and powerful sentence of the sixth message, Nothing is real, everything is permitted. I have to be honest, in my opinion the choice of words of this last sentence was very clever. It should come to no surprise for fans that in the recent years the original maxim of the Creed “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” was not used (apart from the AC movie), and I daresay intentionally as there were several perfect occasions to use it, like Arno’s initiation in Assassin’s Creed Unity.
Thus, if there actually is a reason for which Ubisoft can’t use the maxim anymore, this choice of words for the last sentence of the sixth message is perfect. In fact it is a very heavy reference to the Assassin’s Creed, obviously, but at the same time it’s also a reiteration of the message by the Isu, who are telling Layla that she has to break the Code of reality (nothing is real) and that by doing that she would be able to modify time and to have the power of an “author” (everything is permitted). Lastly, this direct reference to the Assassin’s Creed is forthcoming of the path that Isu would like / expect Layla to take, which is consistent with her reluctantly accepting to follow William Miles at the end of Origins. Thus, if the calculations by the Isu are correct (and again, if this storyline doesn’t get cast aside), in the next game we might expect Layla to somehow develop her Animus while working inside an Assassin hideout as she slowly begins to trust them and maybe help them thus having her personal revenge on Sofia Rikkin. I wonder how much we are going to have to wait (if we are still willing to wait) to see if any of that actually happens / is developed in the next game… Analysis of the picture
What we see in the picture is the visual representation of a wormhole. Trying to make it simple, wormholes can be considered as tunnels with two ends, each at separate points in spacetime (meaning different locations and/or different points of time), which are consistent with the theory of relativity but whose actual existence is still to be proved. In its concept, then, a wormhole could connect extremely long distances such as a billion light years, short distances such as a few meters, different universes, or different points in time. Thus, as mentioned by Wikipedia, If traversable wormholes exist, they could allow for time travel. One of the classic ways to imagine wormholes is to take a sheet of paper, representing a plane in the spacetime continuum and draw two distant points on one side of the paper, which represent a long distance to be traveled. The wormhole would connect these two points by folding that plane so the points are touching. An actual wormhole, if it existed, would be similar to this, only with every dimension raised by one (for example instead of circular holes on a two-dimensional plane, the entry and exit points would be visualized as spheres in 3D space). Explanation of a wormhole from “Interstellar” Another very common representation of a wormhole, which is the one we see in the picture of Segment 6, has spacetime represented as a two-dimensional surface whereas the wormhole would be a circular hole in such surface / passage leading into a cylinder which re-emerges at another location of the same surface.
After reading the text of the message, the meaning of the picture appears to be simple: Layla needs to find a way to break the Code, to change time and a wormhole would allow her to travel to different places in space-time and, in doing so, to save the Earth from the catastrophe. The picture also features two more noteworthy elements. The first is the Abstergo symbol, which seems to transition from white to black / dark after it goes into the wormhole which may be a way to say that Abstergo or their product, the Animus, or their engineer Layla may be able to generate a wormhole or an equivalent of it to change the past or the future and avoid the catastrophe. The second symbol is a black circular segment with lines coming out of it which is repeated throughout the picture. The same circular segment can be found in two different pictures that are shown during Minerva’s speech in Assassin’s Creed II.
I think this is pure artistic reference with – sadly - no actual meaning for the Isu message in Origins, but I guess it’s nice to see they are always used with the Abstergo symbol. Conclusion Here we are, at long last, the closing of a series of very cryptic messages. Looking back at all the messages we know a lot of information that technically Layla should know about too (even if she didn’t really react to them)
So that’s what we should be expecting from the next chapter of Layla’s story. But are we and the franchise really ready or willing to go in that direction? The messages seem to allude at two possible directions, at least in my interpretation. To avert the catastrophe Layla may need to use her Animus either to change the future or to change the past. Changing the future seems to be the better and more logic option, at least to me. If Layla were able to read the Code, to see all the potential futures as mentioned in Segment 4, she could try and use her Animus (or a Piece of Eden) to see if there is one where the Earth can be saved. If there isn’t, as the Isu seem to imply, she could “modify” the Code with her Animus to make it happen anyway. Although, as I said, this would be the more logic way for things to happen in the future, at the same time for the most part it might not feel very original. We have already seen several characters using Pieces of Eden to get glimpses of the future to avoid negative events and if there wasn’t any more “spice” to it, Layla would just be one of them (apart from the “breaking the Code” part, obviously).
On the other hand, changing the past seems to actually be what the Isu are asking of Layla: the suggestion of using her Animus not to just witness memories but to alter them from Segment 6, the Isu advocating for an author that can have loved ones revived “by the drafting of a new chapter” and to have a future where they coexist with humans from Segment 3, and the wormhole allowing to travel in time again from Segment 6. All of those are hints that point at Layla going back in time and changing the past in order to change the future. And that, in my opinion, would be the one of the most detrimental events that the franchise could sustain. For years, possibly for a decade every AC developer and especially those from the creative departments have always said that the Animus is not a time travel machine and undoing that would be quite… unfortunate. Apart from that, though, changing the past in a franchise that is heavily based on its narrative and ongoing plot threads that have spanned for centuries (like the ever existing war between the Assassins and the Templars or Juno’s millennial plan, or Altaïr, Ezio and Desmond being connected through time) would go against the basic concept of the franchise itself and may even retcon events and characters that have made the brand popular. And that’s not even mentioning how much time, attention and sometimes “devotion” the fans have invested in the franchise, especially the hardcore ones that have followed the series for more than 10 years now. Then again… that’s just my interpretation, and I would like to hear what you guys think about it. What do you guys think Layla will end up doing in the future installments? Will she still be there or will we switch to another character? And on that note, this series of articles comes to an end…. Or does it? After all we did just finish our analysis about all the Isu messages in Origins, right? RIGHT? Stay synchronized with us... It’s not over yet! 
In occasion of our anniversary, we have teamed up with The Ones Who Came Before to organize a Fundraising Campaign for the Eagle Heights Wildlife Foundation! Both of our projects usually gather information, create content and discuss the franchise with our fans but this time we wanted to try and have a positive and meaningful initiative that doesn't just deal with fan content but can also have a real impact. Eagles are such an important element of the franchise that we are accustomed to see them in every game of the franchise. Thus, we thought that this would be the perfect occasion to support an organization that takes care of them and to ask you all for some help in doing so. By helping this cause you will be directly helping the foundation in its efforts towards the rehabilitation of wild rescued birds, conservation of the environment, and bringing the animals to the schools to help children understand the environment that they will one day be responsible for. Even the smallest donation could make the difference! If you can, donate! Click on the picture if you want to reach the page for the Fundraising Campaign!
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