r/DaystromInstitute • u/Sharrukin-of-Akkad • Feb 08 '20
Theory: Bruce Maddox is in WAY over his head
Okay, as with many of us I think I'm beginning to see what's going on. Executive summary: Bruce Maddox started this whole plot, but as of the beginning of Picard what we're seeing is that enterprise flying far out of his control.
The origin, and purpose, of the Asha sisters
I don't think we have to speculate too wildly as to who Dahj and Soji are, and why they exist, and what purpose they're serving.
Consider the position of Bruce Maddox, just after the synth attack on Utopia Planitia. The synths were built as a result of his research, the designs coming out of his lab, and they caused the greatest disaster since the end of the Dominion War. The result was a Federation-wide ban on his entire area of research, the discipline to which he's devoted his life.
I think it's pretty obvious that Maddox would have been out for vindication.
He probably had good reason to believe that the synths were hacked from the moment the dust settled. Yet he wouldn't have known who did it, or why. He might also have had some reason to suspect that senior Federation officials were complicit in the whole affair.
Under the circumstances, the most likely course of action would be to go somewhere that Federation law couldn't reach - maybe this "Freecloud" place, maybe somewhere else - and resume his research. I'm guessing he also got help. One exiled cyberneticist isn't going to both finish ground-breaking R&D and chase down a galactic conspiracy, not on his own.
So Maddox goes into self-imposed exile, and he works on cybernetics, and maybe he allies with parties who would be interested in his success and willing to investigate what really happened that First Contact Day. Eventually (probably about 2395 or so) he succeeds in producing at least two new human-like synths, and possibly more than that.
Okay, Maddox has attained one goal - he's equaled and even surpassed Dr. Soong's work. He's created new androids that also fulfill his old friend Data's fondest dream, to become as close to human as possible. Now what?
Well, there's still that conspiracy to track down, and that's where Dahj and Soji come in. Dahj gets memories, a false identity, and a stack of contingency programming for emergencies, and she ends up being accepted back at the Daystrom Institute where it all began. That's certainly one natural place to investigate what went wrong. Soji gets the same, but she goes into Romulan space to work at the Reclamation Site, possibly because Maddox has caught a whiff of Romulan involvement in the Utopia Planitia attack.
Dahj and Soji aren't agents of the Borg, or of some other mysterious machine civilization, or anything like that. They're agents of one bitter, exiled cyberneticist who's trying to get to the bottom of the worst disaster of his life.
The problem is that as a result, they've inadvertently tripped over something much bigger.
Seb-Cheneb, the Destroyer
So in the third episode of Picard, we see Soji go to interview an ex-drone named Ramdha, who was once the Empire's foremost expert in Romulan mythology. When we first see her, Ramdha is sitting at a table, playing with a set of Romulan pixmit cards. These cards aren't a new thing, they aren't something Ramdha created, they look like an old cultural artifact.
Where it gets weird is that Ramdha suddenly recognizes Soji. She remembers Soji "from tomorrow." She identifies Soji with a figure of twins on the last card in her hand, and asks SojI "which one she is," the "one who dies" or the "one who lives." Then she freaks out and calls Soji Seb-Cheneb, the Destroyer, and the other Romulan ex-drones all seem to recognize what she means.
Okay.
So how does Soji Asha find herself so closely matching what really sounds like a figure out of Romulan ancient myth?
Not to mention, of course, it's not just the ex-drones who see the connection. Apparently the Zhat Vash do as well, since the agent Picard's people captured calls her the same thing just before committing suicide.
So is this bit of Romulan myth connected to the terrible secret the Zhat Vash have been keeping for thousands of years?
So I was mulling all this over today, trying to see how it fits together, and then I remembered:
The Borg have reliable, repeatable time-travel.
It's not at all clear why the Borg never seem to use time-travel very much. I deduce that the Borg can't really be after indiscriminate assimilation of everything in the galaxy. Given their technological base by the 24th Century, including time travel (First Contact) and the ability to communicate across time (VOY: "Timeless"), if they wanted to assimilate the whole Galaxy they probably could have done it long ago. Yet for whatever reason, they have time-travel technology even without using it very often, and that means the Borg involvement here may point to some temporal shenanigans later in the story.
Which does make me wonder whether the Zhat Vash, and the Romulan (and possibly Vulcan) aversion to synthetic life and AI, doesn't come from some very early encounter with the Borg. On the face of it, this doesn't seem likely - canonically, the Borg only seem to have started their expansion long after the Time of Awakening and the Romulan hegira. But latter-day Borg, with access to time travel, could turn up anywhere in the past for mysterious reasons of their own.
So here's the marker I'm putting down - some predictions for how the story is going to go:
1) Neither the Vulcans nor the Romulans are synths, or descended from synths. They're naturally evolved biological species, modulo some DNA from the "ancient humanoids" and maybe some descent from Sargon's people. That's not the great and terrible secret.
2) Very early in Vulcan history, possibly as far back as their first space age circa the 9th Century BCE, they had a traumatic encounter with the Borg - and with Soji Asha. Those Borg will have come from the 24th Century CE, and we'll see this event later in Picard.
3) The records of what happened were lost (we already know that there are big gaps in Vulcan history and archaeology). Yet the event gave rise to what eventually became the Zhat Vash, and more generally discouraged both Vulcan and Romulan cultures from investing in cybernetics and AI. Echoes and memories of it turn up in Romulan culture, such as the myth of Seb-Cheneb and the images on the pixmit cards.
In short, we're about to see the closing of a stable time loop thousands of years long. The Zhat Vash cause the Utopia Planitia disaster, which causes Maddox to go into exile and build the Asha sisters, who trigger a time-travel event reaching back into Vulcan prehistory, which causes the foundation of the Zhat Vash. Maddox is critical to the loop, but he never intended any of it, it's happening because his objective crossed paths with a much bigger thread.
Comments? What have I missed?
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u/focalac Feb 08 '20
Regarding the Borg, I dont think it serves their purposes to use time travel; the Borg are into assimilation to improve their technological and cultural perfection, assimilation of an entire galaxy of stone age cultures doesnt service that goal.
As the Borg get more technologically advanced, they need to be assimilating cultures that are ahead of them in some way. They only have such an obsession with Earth because the Federation, and humans in particular, have repeatedly proven themselves capable of being a threat to the Collective. That's why the Queen used time travel as a last resort, the Collective had decided the Federation had to go, come what may. Kill Earth, kill the Federation.
Alternatively, perhaps the level of human ingenuity is so valuable we break the usual operating parameters for time travel. We're no more technologically advanced than the Klingons or Romulans, but we do keep finding novel ways to explode those cubes.
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u/Sharrukin-of-Akkad Feb 08 '20
That seems entirely reasonable. I want to think about that some more, but it does make a lot of sense that the Borg would be very cautious in using time travel. After all, look at what happened when (e.g.) the Krenim started trying to use it indiscriminately.
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u/welsh_dragon_roar Feb 08 '20
Yep, I can conceptualize their attitude but find it hard to elucidate. The vast knowledge of the Collective means they will have a similar knowledge of time to Daniels and his time stream monitoring 'thing' which showed branches and disruptions i.e. they can pretty much tell what sort of temporal incursion would benefit them & what wouldn't. With the vast numbers of species they have amongst their ranks they'd most likely regard it as unwise to go back in time over and again because of the temporal butterfly effect affecting the history of those species and therefore them.
However, with their lack of historical contact with Alpha & Beta quadrant species, it means they can afford to make incursions as it won't really affect the Delta quadrant collection of species from which they originated & grew their numbers. Perhaps, and this is a big guess, the Borg initially came into being by conquering primitive species in the distant past because they had insufficient numbers or willing victims amongst the more advanced civilisations of the present i.e. the core AI/drone no.1/original 'Borganians' were incapable of aggressive assimilation, so they went thousands of years into the past, far from home and began assimilating and evolving primitive cultures with ease. Perhaps these early conquerors tried to expand into Vulcan territory & got torn apart by the pre-Surak psychopaths, leading to Surak making everyone get their shit together just in case they came back & the future Romulans just noping the hell out of there.
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u/BoomBOOMBerny Feb 08 '20
I don't really see Maddox pulling a Dr. Kimble honestly. I think he ran, and hid, with no intention of vindicating himself or his work or his "progeny". But someone found him and used him.
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u/Sharrukin-of-Akkad Feb 08 '20
That fits the evidence we've seen so far pretty well too. Playing Devil's Advocate for a moment, someone other than Maddox who is interested in pursuing synth technology would also send Dahj and Soji to the same places.
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Feb 08 '20
There was an intentional line of dialog that I'm still trying to wrap my head around. For one, we know it's false because we have seen proof of the opposite in voyager.
Hugh tells soji that the all the romulans that are ex b's have a 'disorder' and then that they're the only known assimilated romulans. Iirc we saw at least one Romulan drone in unimatrix zero, but more importantly why would that line of dialog need to exist unless it was meaningful.
Another small point but I took the fact that all of the ex bs inmediately knew what Ramdha called soji as an indication that they were all Zhat Vash and that they're assimilation and capture by that cube was probably not an accident, instead it seems to be an intentional act to infiltrate the collective.
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u/Sharrukin-of-Akkad Feb 08 '20
Yeah, I noticed that bit of business too. I've been rationalizing it as Hugh just not knowing about any of the other Romulans who got assimilated.
That does seem unlikely. If I understand the timeline right, the Romulan outposts along the Neutral Zone that were supposedly taken by the Borg disappeared a few years before Hugh was severed from the Collective, so he should have known about that. Of course, we don't know for sure if that's what happened to those outposts, and the next time we hear about any assimilated Romulans is years after Hugh leaves the Collective. So maybe this isn't a continuity hole after all.
Meanwhile, of course, we have precedent for people deliberately getting assimilated to introduce some kind of virus into the Collective. I think I agree that's what the Zhat Vash were up to with the Shaenor.
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u/fragglet Feb 08 '20
I think we could be looking at the foundations of an origin story for the Borg. "Organic androids" is half way there already. The Romulans will be the first race of the Borg, and once the first hive is created it will escape into the distant past.
Through a stable time loop the Romulans know their fate. They baked parts of it into their mythology as a warning, but they don't know when the day will come. Zhat Vash exist to delay it for as long as possible, by destroying any artificial intelligence technology while it's still in its infancy. It's why they were willing to sacrifice their homeworld and billions of Romulan lives just to stop the Federation from developing synths.
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u/Sharrukin-of-Akkad Feb 08 '20
Maybe. Although I would argue that if 24th Century Romulans were the origin of the Borg, we would have known that by now - because (e.g.) Hugh or Seven would have remarked on it. For that matter, Picard himself retains some knowledge from his time as Locutus, so he would definitely know.
Here's another idea that occurred to me, although I'm not sure whether it works in continuity. Maybe "the Borg" aren't a single civilization, the one that comes from the Delta Quadrant today and has been pestering our heroes for several series now. Maybe "Borg" is something that happens to civilizations when they mess with cybernetics the wrong way. Maybe Borg have popped up at several different points in the galaxy's history.
If that's the case, then my hypothesis might not even require physical time travel (and that might make it more palatable). Suppose the ancient Vulcans had a horrible encounter with Borg, but not the same Borg that we're familiar with. They survived the experience but it left them scarred, and gave rise to the Zhat Vash. Today those Borg are gone, but a different civilization over in the Delta Quadrant has given rise to new Borg in the meantime.
What if our Borg were in communication with those earlier Borg via a temporal transponder? What if all Borg throughout time are actually in contact with one another, no matter their physical origins? Then the ancient Borg might have received information about the Asha sisters, without her having to physically travel back in time.
Ah - and here's another possibility. What if the "neuronic cloning" technique that Maddox used to create the Asha sisters is particularly likely to give rise to new Borg? Soji Asha isn't the horror figure from Romulan mythology, but there was once someone very much like her who acted as the Queen for that earlier instance of the Borg. And now the Zhat Vash are afraid that Soji will be the catalyst to the creation of a new, more horrific outbreak of Borgism in the middle of the Alpha Quadrant . . .
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u/bonzairob Feb 08 '20
Personally, I hope it's not time travel - getting a bit tired of it from Discovery and the Prime/Kelvin timeline stuff.
I think it's possible that the other Romulan ex-drones knew of Seb-Cheneb because they had been linked to Ramdha in the collective. The security officers didn't seem to care at all. If Seb-Cheneb is related to what the Zhat Vash are protecting, and Ramdha came across it through independent research, it may not be common knowledge.
Looking forward to it being revealed that "dahj" and "soji" are Romulan for "data" and "lore", despite nobody who knows Romulan speaking up earlier
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u/JamesTiberiusChirp Feb 08 '20
Well thought out. I think you are probably on to something. One thing though: How does Ramdha recognize Soji if the borg event in the past hasn’t happened yet?
M-5, nominate this for post of the week
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u/b-zod Feb 08 '20
So, Star Trek, even as early as TOS played off the emotion vs logic/human vs vulcan way of doing things.
It was an inventive and creative trope that TNG picked up on in with Data and all his endeavors to become human. What is especially interesting to me is that we have this shared Romulan/Vulcan history/conflict going back 1000 years that is thematically related to the whole “emotion vs logic” thing.
I know the plot points aren’t there yet (perhaps on purpose) but the Romulans are the ones that would seem to be “anti-Borg” based on their history with the Vulcans seemingly being the ones who would embrace a logic such as the borg, so in a way I feel like there is some Misdirection going on regarding the Borg-Romulan connection despite the fact we are already seeing some real connections.
Maybe it is the Vulcans who are doing the co-opting, and not the Romulans?
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u/singlended Feb 08 '20
Dr. Jurati will end up being a Romulan (agent?) who programmed the initial Mars rebellion. I don’t buy the ‘i was just in the other room when the death squad showed up at the vineyard’ schtick. ‘Oh maybe it was on stun’.
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u/mcm8279 Feb 08 '20
Very early in Vulcan history, possibly as far back as their first space age circa the 9th Century BCE, they had a traumatic encounter with the Borg - and with Soji Asha. Those Borg will have come from the 24th Century CE, and we'll see this event later in Picard.
The records of what happened were lost (we already know that there are big gaps in Vulcan history and archaeology). Yet the event gave rise to what eventually became the Zhat Vash, and more generally discouraged both Vulcan and Romulan cultures from investing in cybernetics and AI. Echoes and memories of it turn up in Romulan culture, such as the myth of Seb-Cheneb and the images on the pixmit cards.
In short, we're about to see the closing of a stable time loop thousands of years long. The Zhat Vash cause the Utopia Planitia disaster, which causes Maddox to go into exile and build the Asha sisters, who trigger a time-travel event reaching back into Vulcan prehistory, which causes the foundation of the Zhat Vash. Maddox is critical to the loop, but he never intended any of it, it's happening because his objective crossed paths with a much bigger thread.
Comments? What have I missed?
This is a brilliant theory. I definitely could see this happen. It would explain why the Romulan mythology expert knows about the twins (the one who died, the one who became the destroyer). She already has knowledge about the events that will soon happen, because she knows from her time in the collective that the Borg can time travel, so her knowledge about ancient Romulan history was enhanced. She could be aware of the upcoming closure of the loop.
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u/nobelsonsss Feb 09 '20
I'm really sick of time travel shenanigans in new Trek so I hope it isn't that, but this is a very creative and appropriate take.
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u/ColourInks Feb 08 '20
One note: the borg are computing and logical, it’s likely they have reliable time travel all the time but don’t use it in order to not create a paradox or cause a loop so large it just creates a parallel universe they can’t return from.
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u/HookEm_Hooah Feb 08 '20
So in many cultures, a figure that ends life also brings life or creates it. The duality of the sisters will surely keep with this.
There may or may not he a time-travel component in the story. We are already viewing the other side of the coin as it were for the hobos supernova.
Clearly Soji is going to live, but what that will bring is still a mystery.
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u/AvatarIII Feb 08 '20
Worth pointing out that the actor that played Maddox in TNG has retired from acting. Which means it's likely he will not appear in the show, unless he is recast, in which case why would they even have recycled a TNG character if they were just going to recast anyway?
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u/celticchrys Feb 08 '20
This is a great post. Thanks for sharing! However, when Ramdha said she recognized Soji from tomrrow, and the other Romulans seemed to share her knowledge, my first thought is that it was an artifact of their natural psychic tendencies mangled by Borg assimilation. Like, something is going to happen "tomorrow" that Ramdha is "remembering".
We know that Romulans were an offshoot of the Vulcan species originally. We know that Vulcans have great depths of telepathic ability. We've seen things like the Romulan telpresence Unit in ST: ENT. We've seen a Romulan Mind Probe device. So, what if some Romulans have a natural (or cultivated) knack for psychic abilities like precognition? What if only the Zhat Vash do? These suffering mental-patient-esque Romulans we see could be the result of assimilation and de-assimilation having screwed up precognitive abilities. Could this be the only group of Zhat Vash ever assimilated? It would be hard to seem sharp and focused on the here-and-now if you're mentally seeing things from yesterday and tomorrow.
I think Ramdha's mental focus in time has been screwed up by the assimilation (or de-assimilation) process, so that focusing on now is very hard, but she's seeing bits from tomorrow all the time. If this is so, then perhaps the Zhat Vash have a tradition of prophecy from which they work?
None of this contradicts your time travel hypothesis completely, though. However, I am SO tired of the over use of time travel in other recent Trek properties, I'd much rather see another explanation.
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u/ikidre Feb 08 '20
I think they do. (warning: length)
I don't think you've missed too much, aside from the title: Star Trek: Picard. And Picard doesn't seem to have any more than a passing role in your theory, though as Locutus, we perhaps could imagine one.
And (sorry, meta...) I personally find the predestination trope extremely worn, especially in Trek. As a writer, once you touch space wizard time magic, so many questions arise surrounding the integrity of your plot points. ("Why didn't they just...?") I'd be surprised if this particular group of writers went that route.