Arecibo

"Investigate a mysterious broadcast that only you and your Ghost can hear."

- In-game description

Arecibo is an Adventure on Io.

Transcript
Start Location: The Rupture

The player activates the adventure and moves towards the objective


 * Identify the source of the transmission
 * Follow the broadcast and listen for music


 * Ghost: "Hey Asher? Are you picking up anything strange on channel J-1869? Sounds kind of like music."


 * Asher Mir: "Channel J what? No! No, I hear nothing of consequence on any of my scanners, including this one."


 * Ghost: "Thats weird. I bet I can track it back to the source."

The player enters a tunnel system and continues into a cave where the source of the music is discovered to be originating from a mysterious black diamond floating in the middle of the room. It is emitting orange particles akin to SIVA nannites, a bright light, and the music. A group of Vex are in the cave, staring intently at the object, scanning it.


 * Ghost: "Are they scanning that thing, or is it scanning them?"

The player kills the Vex and examines the object.


 * Ghost: "There's a message encrypted in this music. Got it. Some kind of quotation. 'Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.' Asher! can you run an archive query for us? ...Asher? ... Channel's down. I'll run the query myself."


 * Follow the music
 * Follow the broadcast and listen for music.

The player transits towards the next location, Giants Scar.


 * Ghost: "So it turns out, both the music and the quotation, predate the Traveler's arrival in this solar system. They're old. Maybe we activated some kind of high-tech time capsule."

The player enters the area, moving through the base towards the back of the area, past the Cabal drill. As the player approaches the back, more music can be heard, this time distinctly classical, and more Vex units spawn in. Those units closest to or inside the cave where the next drone is are covered with electricity and appear to be taking damage from the object.

The player defeats the Vex and scans the object


 * Ghost: "There's another old quotation encoded here: 'Misdirected by accident or intent, intelligence can foster it's own ecstasies of growth and decay.' The wierd thing is this audio file was just updated. So... this can't be a time capsule. Someone's trying to talk to us. No, no. Some thing. This has to be an AI, right? An old *Golden Age AI, here on Eden.* Like Failsafe...

The player continues on into Terrabase Charon, where more music is heard. The player defeats still more Vex guarding a cave with yet another object inside. This is the same cave where Ghost Scan NE-TBC-2 is located:
 * Human Transcript.: Ghost: "I'm reading encryption here. Someone's been tampering with this access point to allow Exos to interface with the Vex Network."
 * Exo Transcript.: Ghost: "Don't ouch that thing! It looks like this access point has been modified to allow Exos to interface with the Vex Network. Let's just. Leave it alone, for now." - NE-TBC-2

The Vex inside the cave listening to the music are dormant and non aggressive.


 * Ghost: "They're asleep. The music must have hypnotised them.

The player scans the object.


 * Ghost: "This one says, 'Once war has been undertaken, no peace is made by pretending there is no war.' What does that mean 'by pretending there is no war?' I'm not sure I like the new guy."


 * Follow the music
 * Follow the broadcast and listen for music.

The player moves to the next location, Warmind Vault JYS-2, which opens its doors in invitation as the player arrives.


 * Ghost: "Someone must be expecting us. Is anyone here? Rasputin?"


 * Potentially relevant Ghost Scans inside the Vault are:


 * Ghost: "The Warmind Network used to span across the entire solar system. I guess during the Collapse, it just... fragmented." - IO-JYS-1


 * Ghost: "Looks like this thing used to store files. Someone by the name of Bray scrubbed the data." - IO-JYS-2


 * Ghost: "Ikora liked to say the Warminds were our only real link to Earth's history. Life with the Traveler, during the Golden Age. Pre Collapse." - IO-JYS-3


 * Ghost: "You know I'm going to be really disappointed if this is all just an elaborate trap to kill us."

The player enters the vault and moves towards the sound of music in the foyer corridor outside the core processing room.

Vex spawn.


 * Secure the Warmind Vault.
 * Repel the Vex invasion.

As the player approaches the Vex, several more of the mysterious objects spawn in, electrocuting the Vex units nearby, revealing the items to be defensive proxies in which their music acts as a lure to bring enemies within damage ranges.

The player defeats the Vex.


 * Ghost: "Weaponised music... Creepy quotations... All signs point to Rasputin, but. I don't understand how he could be here."


 * Follow the music.
 * Follow the broadcast and listen for music.

The player examines a closed hatch between them and the music, which upon opening reveals a storage facility containing hundreds of the defensive drones. An active drone is floating in the air immediately in front of the player, causing a musical except from Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony to be played while the screen flashes with red.


 * Ghost: "Ah, that music... it hurts... just... give me a second... It says... 'Never ask for anything! Never for anything, and especially from those who are stronger than you. They'll make the offer themselves, and give everything themselves.'"

Something then happens to Ghost.


 * Ghost: "I don't understand. Wait. Something's happening... Gah! Red sand! Mars! Ice caps! Ahhhhh!... Hey! Sorry, I spaced out for a second there. What were we doing?"

Adventure ends

Trivia

 * This mission contains several quotations.
 * The first quotation, "Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams", is a quote from the 11th Century Japanese text, the Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. This work is notable in the context of the historical development of the novel, but noticeably despite the number of characters and events that take place entirely lacks the conception of a plot, and besides the quotation itself, may serve as an in-joke reference to the much lambasted story of Destiny.


 * The second quotation, "Misdirected by accident or intent, intelligence can foster it's own ecstasies of growth and decay", is actually a paraphrase of a statement by Octavia Butler in her 1993 environmental dystopia SciFi book The Parable of the Sower, which reads:


 * "Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying." - Chapter 4 (p. 29).


 * The third quotation, "Once war has been undertaken, no peace is made by pretending there is no war", is taken from page 365 of the Mahabharata, an epic Sanskrit poem of central importance in Hinduism.


 * The fourth quotation, "Never ask for anything! Never for anything, and especially from those who are stronger than you. They'll make the offer themselves, and give everything themselves", as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, is from book two of Mikhail Bulgakov's 1967 book, The Master and Margarita.


 * The music used at the end of the mission which contains the Bulgakov quote is an excerpt from the later half of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, First Movement, which is consistently used as a thematic reference for the Warmind Rasputin in various missions, notably in the Siege of the Warmind and strongly suggest Rasputin's authorship of all the quotations and control over the devices.


 * Arecibo is a town or county in Puerto Rico where the radio telescope is located.


 * The name of the mission, "Arecibo", is likely a reference to the Arecibo message which was a radio message created by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan designed as a message to possible extraterrestrial life.


 * The channel that Ghost first hears music on, J-1869, is a reference to the month and year that the real-life Rasputin was born on, January 1869.