Hi. Hello. Please tell me about the Pryce-Maxwell parallels in TO:A.
Oh anon. Oh anon you don’t know what you’ve summoned.
First off, to:a (for those who don’t know) stands for Transmission Origin: Arke and is a canon-divergent Wolf 359 AU made collaboratively with @heycerulean and I. It follows a timeline approximately 7 years after the Hephaestus mission failed and it’s entire crew was killed, alongside Jacobi, with only Maxwell and Kepler returning mostly physically unscathed. The ARKE: INTL is a MASSIVE deep space exploration vessel that brought together the greatest tech companies around the world to develop it, including a team of computer scientists that worked on the development of an highly advanced AI, named Ithax.
For a time, early on in Ithax’s development, the team was headed by Alana Maxwell; who else could it have been? AI is Maxwell’s identifiable work, the greatest of her time, so of course she’d be in the project. However, Maxwell was extremely distanced from that work, leaving only the rotating team of computer scientists to work on Ithax, with only her overseeing it. But of course, the day comes that requires her to finally be fully present for a progress check—something that can’t be done through periodic updates over a private feed.
Maxwell is quickly filled with immense dread and grief upon meeting the early stages of Ithax. He reminds her too much of what was lost on the Hephaestus—Hera—and, unknowingly, plants a bug into his deep memory systems, the same as Pryce had done to Hera years before. This is perpetuating that very same cycle that Pryce caused, without Maxwell’s knowledge of it or not. Angry, grieving, regretful, Maxwell unceremoniously exits the project and goes off grid soon after.
Another director is brought in, along with a new cycle of developers—which includes Marijn Fierro de Reyes, who Ithax surprisingly responds incredibly well to, which eventually makes Marijn a permanent fixture on the Ithax project, and later leads him to take the role as the sole AI engineer on the ARKE: INTL.
The Pryce-Maxwell parallels really show in the moment where that little bit of data is accidentally planted into Ithax’s deep memory core. It’s born of malice, whether intentionally directed at him or not, just like Pryce with Hera. And the cycle will repeat. The bug causes issues for Ithax, for the Arke as a whole, and on a far larger scale than Hera was simply because of the magnitude of the scope Ithax has to cover, along with the fact that Ithax is also underdeveloped in some aspects. Situations will degrade, things will fall apart, and it will all go awry.
So yeah. Pryce-Maxwell parallels in to:a. Enjoy
