So with what we're learning about the subminds do you think that means that Malahayati is who hunted Felwinter and killed the Iron Lords or is that Rasputin as a whole? My thought is that in D1 it very much seems that that part of Rasputin is sectioned off - exactly as they're treating subminds now, for survival - and adding to that the fact that we retrieved Malahayati from the lunar seraph station with Felwinter's memorial in it.
I'll caveat this by saying I'm traveling during Week 2 and won't have a chance to play Destiny till Saturday at the earliest, so if there's new Week 2 info pertinent to the question, I don't know it.
An interesting question, and one that runs into a lot of fundamental unknowns about subminds. I don't think it was Malahayati in the Cosmodrome because we've met her before, pre-Collapse, and although she identifies herself as a submind she also speaks as if she were separate from Rasputin, more like an aide or deputy than one facet of a whole. So if we had been talking to her all along in the Cosmodrome I would have expected her to identify herself as, well, herself, not as Rasputin.
But that just raises more questions. What are subminds? This season treats them as fragments Rasputin sectioned himself into to survive when his central network was shut down. But when the warsat network fragmented during the Dark Ages the Earthbound part of Rasputin still identified himself as Rasputin, both to us and in his internal messages. So it's not just a network thing. And it’s not just a personality thing or post-Collapse Rasputin's incredible powers of denial and compartmentalization would have made one whether he wanted to or not. So submind creation is more deliberate. Was Malahayati therefore a distinct consciousness he intentionally spun off, like Felwinter? Is the Malahayati we're retrieving now the same as the one who existed during the Golden Age, or did she stop existing at some point and then get recreated?
I suspect the latter, if for no other reason than Rasputin the drama queen constantly declaring "I am alone.” The original Malahayati might have been killed during the Collapse - I can see a Rasputin submind getting hit with a noetic contagion and forcing him to sever its connection to protect the rest of himself - or he could have simply...re-absorbed? reclaimed? it. Post-Collapse Rasputin might have judged subminds a risk, especially if they couldn't all be corralled into MIDNIGHT EXIGENT, or wanted to consolidate his severely-diminished resources. Either way he kept the "pattern" of Malahayati somewhere in him (”those names live in me”?). It was a known-good solution for a semi-autonomous entity. Similarly the "kernel" proto-AI used by CB Corp was an early self-contained component of his self, like a standalone code module now absorbed into a bigger project.
I’m working on the theory that the Pyramid Fleet “killed” him by locally warping the vacuum permittivity constant to make space opaque to radio (the way it did in the Marasenna) and disrupting communication between all Rasputin’s warsats at once, causing his whole network to disconnect simultaneously. So when that happened he fractured, intentionally or not, not along regional boundaries but along these pre-existing faultlines in his consciousness - Malahayati, the proto-mind, the other subminds we’re going to meet. He cleaved apart into pieces that had once functioned semi-independently and could therefore disconnect again with the least overall damage, like a signpost hit by a car snapping along the breakaway bolts. So Malahayati was recreated.
I don’t think rebuilding him is going to be as simple, by the way, as “merge subminds, receive Rasputin.” I think both Clovis and Ana are wrong in thinking about him like a jigsaw puzzle to be reassembled. But that’s for another, much longer post.
