#warminds

[zappadoodlecat]

concept art of Charlemagne for a warmind fixit i will hopefully have enough spoons to sketch out some day. if canon doesn’t want to do cool things with its lore then i’m stealing the ideas and nesting on it like a cranky hen.

[eventiderookery]

y'know the one thing i'm bummed about this season is that Malahayati and Charlemagne don't talk, even in lore (to my knowledge), like i was excited to hear the perspectives of these other AIs who survived the same things Rasputin did and see how that differed and how that could help him learn/grow as he was rebuilt. like Malahayati is Rasputin's favorite! his protege! and we don't even get to hear from her now when we have in the past? or Charlemagne who was thought to be a wholly other Warmind than Rasputin, which means there must have been basis for that in his capabilities and sentience. even if he was just a base for Rasputin he must have grown in different ways, developed (or not) into a different kind of humanity that i would have loved to see! like idk i just really wanted some contrast between the different Warminds in the way they are as sentient beings and how they interact with us and each other while trying to rebuild Rasputin, and the fact we're almost definitely not going to get that is rather disappointing

[corvusxiv]

Friendly reminder that Rasputin turned off his “population protection” protocols during the Collapse, and may very well have kept them turned off all this time.

Moreover, “protect humanity on my own terms” could mean anything at this point. Maybe it means he’s adopting those protocols again; maybe it means he could decide that only some of humanity should be protected; or maybe he turns into Ultron and decides that humanity is humanity’s greatest enemy.

Rasputin is probably gonna stick with us anyway and folks like Osiris are worrying over nothing... but I don’t think it’s wise to let down our guard for anyone, especially not an ultra-powerful AI who’s fully capable of taking out a battalion of Risen without breaking a sweat.

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

I'm curious as to your opinions on the warmind retcons. I may have understood D1 wrong but at the time it seemed like rasputin was one of many warminds in the system (also D2 supports this a bit with the Io warmind vaults having a prefix different than ras-) and honestly, having it be just rasputin was so disapointing for me. I wanted to find a venusian warmind or a greek one on mars that just wanted to destroy everything(ares). Anywho, I'm curious if you like the changes or not.

The “there was only one Warmind” retcon in the Warmind DLC has been a sticking point in the lore community, and for good reason - it just doesn’t make sense. Personally I suspect it was a miscommunication rather than an intentional retcon since much of Warmind was done by Vicarious Visions and not Bungie itself. The book Last Days of Kraken Mare released two years later clearly refers to “Warminds” plural and I would not be surprised if Season of the Worthy includes a clear-cut statement confirming the original lore of multiple Warminds (in fact I suspect that’s the bunkers we’ll be reactivating).

My working theory is that there were seven Warminds, one for each area of settled space (Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, the Belt, then Jupiter & beyond), but since the decision to locate one Warmind on each planet was made after Rasputin had become, well, Rasputin, he had major facilities located on Mars where he was originally designed and built instead of on Earth where he was supposed to be. The Cosmodrome facility was therefore built to replace Rasputin’s Hellas Basin complex, but the hardware transfer wasn’t completed before the Darkness hit, resulting in the oddly-split “Rasputin” fragment that lives there. Then when said Darkness carved its path of destruction through our solar system it killed the six other Warminds along the way, with Rasputin picking up their remaining resources after each was destroyed (hence his reference to “reclaimed CHLM assets.”) Rasputin has often mentioned “brothers and sisters” pre-Collapse that were killed during said Collapse, so it’s not a stretch to imagine other Warminds among the dead.

tl;dr The “retcon” in Warmind was probably an accident and I suspect it’ll be reversed in SotW.

[evilroachindustrial]

So a bunch of folks figured out what the flavor text on the Warmind armor means and it basically explains the Escalation Protocol is Rasputin’s way of gathering data about the Hive and the Guardians.

As a result, Rasputin seems to be planning to use this data to determine which would be the better proxy for its needs: the Hive or the Guardians.

In conclusion, Bungie:

[chipmercury]

Exo Headcanon

So I got a headcanon that’s been floating around in…well, my head, about Exos, and why they’re designed the way they are.

We know that Exos were warmachines initially created to protect humanity from something (we’re still out to lunch on that). Keyword there is ‘initially’. Let me explain.

During the Golden Age we know the Warminds were created to protect humanity, however some operations that were probably too delicate to simply blast from orbit with laser cannons and whatever else the Warminds controlled and were deemed too dangerous for humans.

Enter the frames, the simple automata that we see all over the Tower, dealing with tasks too menial or unimportant for Guardians. Frames were the prototypes for Exos. We know this from the dialogue with Lord Saladin during the Iron Tomb mission:

“The worst of Rasputin’s defenses had already blanketed this entire area… Frames, constructs. Things I haven’t seen before or since.”

So we know Warminds like Rasputin had control of frames, however since they’re not true AI, they’re not the best for warfare. This is where Exos start to come in. Perhaps Clovis Bray was commissioned to come up with AI proxies that the Warminds could use effectively.

Clovis Bray is able to come up with an AI system using similar construction to the Warminds, and while it was enough to replace the old frame systems, it wasn’t quite what Clovis thought Exos needed to be.

Although the Warminds were indeed powerful, they couldn’t compare with human instinct and the chaos of war, so Clovis decides that in order to create an AI that thinks like a human, he needs to study human consciousness and figure out a way to transfer it to a computer or in his case, an Exo body.

Of course, kidnapping people to transfer their minds from flesh to machine probably wasn’t the most ethical thing to do, so Clovis needed volunteers who were desperate enough to attempt such proceedures. So he goes to those with large debts (eg: Cayde) and perhaps even with earlier trials, terminally ill patients.

If you think about it, terminally ill patients make sense because there’s no true loss here. If successful, Clovis Bray can move on to healthier subjects without fear of losing them, if not, they still gain valuable data on how to map the human brain for the Warminds.

After the first few successful attempts, Clovis Bray is ready for healthier subjects to mind transfer. However there’s a new probably. Early Exo prototypes still mostly look like frames, and this leads to the problem of the Uncanny Valley: no one wants to volunteer or accept offers to become an Exo because “they don’t look human enough”. Humans are, well, humans and they want to still do human things, even with a robot body. So good ol’ Clovis Bray redesigns the Exos so they look and perform like humans do. And that’s why Exos have private parts and can drink etc. Becoming an Exo becomes the new “fad”, turning hundreds if not thousands of willing humans into robots.

With the new flock of volunteers Clovis Bray is able to get the data they need to create a human artificial intelligence, codenamed: Deep Stone Crypt. They implement the new subroutine into the Warmind Exos and gifts them with true sentience. And the rest is history.

Okay okay, so I may have skipped over some important stuff that’s eluded to in the Grimoire, like the group of scientists on Venus who got caught in a Vex simulation and the Exo Stranger, but honestly I’d like to think of my answer as the simple answer. And the simplest answer is usually the right one.

So in conclusion, there are two kinds of Exos: those born from the Deep Stone Crypt to serve the Warminds, and those who gave up their flesh to live forever as machines.

But hey, that’s just a theory. A Destiny Theory! Thanks for reading!

[eventiderookery]

i've been chipping away at the story for a non BrayTech warmind since roughly midway through seraph, and yes they're a lot like Rasputin/Felwinter in certain ways, but more importantly i've realized it's all about this AI entity that exists across all these satellites and servers, in all essence incorporeal, that's treated like a thing, a weapon to be aimed and fired at their adversaries, never as a being capable to feeling. so they build a body that looks and acts human. and it's painful! they go from having their senses spread across thousands of miles, and then suddenly it's like entire power lines have been cut and all they have is this body they made without telling anyone. the ocean in a teapot! it's them but it's also so much less, but this is the only way people will see them as a person; if they're human enough. only they don't want to be human

[eventiderookery]

and another thing (as per this post) Voluspa! a warmind that shows up in a hefty handful of lore and grimoire card entries right alongside the DVALIN FORGE subroutines which is something that shows up in the artifact lore this season. Voluspa is even mentioned in the same line as Charlemagne in regards to Rasputin assessing them both for resources during curse of Osiris. Voluspa also has a really interesting basis for their name if my [scant] research is correct. so like, where is this submind bungie? the obvious answer is that they didn’t survive the collapse, which is perfectly logical but that could have been said somewhere. or maybe i’m jumping the gun and we’ll see them later this season, but since Rasputin has told us (this week) there are no more subminds for us to scavenge pieces of, this is unlikely and possibly a way of saying Voluspa didn’t make it through the collapse without actually naming them. either way i am rather bummed that we didn’t get more subminds/other warminds when Rasputin is referred to as “first-among-equals“ (here) and Malahayati and Charlemagne are so important to restoring Red back to his full capabilities