Origins of the Mysterons
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Origins of the Mysterons
by chrisbishop » Thu Jul 15, 2004 3:57 am
Originally posted on MSN forum 12/03/2004
There are many theories about the Mysterons - their origins, what they are, what they're really up to, if they can carry on their initial threat (ultimate destruction of life on Earth), their powers, etc. Some of those theories are official and other not that official. Are the Mysterons we know about the original race, or the last remnants of a computerised intelligence left there by the 'original' Mysterons, who had left the Solar System afterward - as stated in some of TV Century 21 related medias? What are your thoughts on the subject?
Inquiring minds want to know...
There are many theories about the Mysterons - their origins, what they are, what they're really up to, if they can carry on their initial threat (ultimate destruction of life on Earth), their powers, etc. Some of those theories are official and other not that official. Are the Mysterons we know about the original race, or the last remnants of a computerised intelligence left there by the 'original' Mysterons, who had left the Solar System afterward - as stated in some of TV Century 21 related medias? What are your thoughts on the subject?
Inquiring minds want to know...
Chris Bishop,
Webmaster and administrator of http://www.spectrum-headquarters.com
"This is an operational base, not a rest centre!"
Webmaster and administrator of http://www.spectrum-headquarters.com
"This is an operational base, not a rest centre!"
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chrisbishop
- Colonel
- Posts: 1773
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 1970 1:00 am
- Location: Canada
by DocDenim » Thu Jul 15, 2004 4:02 am
Memo to Col. Chris;
Further to loss of material on the previous forum, I do have some portions of a few discussions that I happen to have downloaded. (Mostly to do with Mysterons, which is why I'm under this thread.)
If anyone would be interested to see it resurrected, I could either forward it to the Adminstrators, or post it as a cut-and-paste. Perhaps other members may have some material downloaded as well that they'd be willing to share....
Ciao all!
Doc Denim
Further to loss of material on the previous forum, I do have some portions of a few discussions that I happen to have downloaded. (Mostly to do with Mysterons, which is why I'm under this thread.)
If anyone would be interested to see it resurrected, I could either forward it to the Adminstrators, or post it as a cut-and-paste. Perhaps other members may have some material downloaded as well that they'd be willing to share....
Ciao all!
Doc Denim
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DocDenim
by DocDenim » Thu Jul 15, 2004 4:19 am
Proceeding with the Colonel's permission......
Portions of a wonderful debate from the "Old Mysterons" thread from the previous forum. Many thanks to all contributors, sorry we're missing the earlier bits of it, but perhaps it will jog a few memories....
I don't really recommend you try to read it all at once!
Also hoping it will format properly and not be all skewed silly in the download.....and hoping Col. Chris can fix it if it does.
***************
****************
Doc Denim
Hey all!
Where was I? That last “back shortly” wasn’t very short! Time is the enemy! We were still doing some theorizing. (and I lost the thread, it took me a while to find it again!) Anyway....
I think I will probably be rambling just a bit, but here’s some of the things I think and why I happen to think them, and I will (seriously!) try not to get too complicated.
Firstly, I’m not actually trying to put down anyone else’s theories - some of these ideas are quite good - the virus one, for example, especially since we are postulating that the Mysterons may well be a machine intelligence, which is a hypothesis I happen to agree with. Not quite so sure about the ‘last emotions’ because in many cases the last emotion might well be mind-numbing terror, and not all that useful for taking forward into the next reconstructed phase. Just a thought. But yes, I will agree that that Mysterons find a ‘blank mind and/or no will’ helpful, when it comes to setting the ‘program’ for a reconstruction’s mission. Definitely they pick and choose their victims for their knowledge and/or usefulness - but I think once the construct is ‘tasked’, the Mysterons sort of sit back and watch the show play out - still in a passive sort of contact with the construct, but not necessarily feeding it minute by minute instruction. I think that can in large part account for Scarlet’s on-again, off-again sixth sense, assuming, and I do, that he’s got a ‘role’ as a passive data collector for the Mysterons: i.e. - if he’s ‘sending’, and the other reconstruction is ‘receiving’, then there will be a certain amount of ‘interference’ if Scarlet and the construct are in close proximity. However, if the construct is running on ‘autopilot’ so to speak, Scarlet can be standing right next to one and not know it. Scarlet also seems to have the most acute premonitions, or attacks of nausea when he’s around big, inanimate Mysteron reconstructions - like the Angel aircraft in Seek and Destroy, or Delta Tango in Winged Assassin; the Mysterons themselves are in the driver’s seat in those instances, and the ‘influence’ is a more constant ‘hands-on’ job for them in those cases. In the instance of Flight 104 (which has been chatted about a lot lately) the plane itself wasn’t a reconstruction that Scarlet could have ‘picked up on’. (Someone might have noticed a wrecked plane too.) The Mysteron’s influence in that case was confined to the cockpit controls and was perhaps just far enough out of Scarlet’s immediate proximity for him to have noticed it.
Moving on: as to the origin of a reconstructions ‘raw materials’ - well, yes, they have to come from somewhere, as the Mysterons just don’t seem to recycle originals, they seem to like to leave the evidence lying around to be discovered, sooner or later. I happen to like the ‘other dimensional’ resources, because it just presents the fewest problems. Bear with me here, I need to organize these thoughts:
If the Mysterons are just drawing on local matter (and that’s not impossible, more in a moment) then that means they have to gather it, stream it around, revamp it and place it, all in the space of a few seconds, if not instantaneously - I would think that would leave a sort of local ‘pothole’ if the materials are gathered from the construct’s immediate vicinity, and if taken from further afield, would have to ‘stream in’ at high velocities - which makes me think that it would be noticed - rather like we tend to notice lightning and the thunderclap it produces whenever lightning does strike. And that’s just a split second electrical discharge - very ephemeral stuff, not like trying to sneak in, say, a 170 lb. person, or a many thousand-tons of airliner - it would be like a hard radiation storm that would fry anything animate and peel the paint off of anything else it touched…the air would glow! And if they do manage to ‘stream’ the stuff in quietly and invisibly, then they have to be using some ‘other dimensional’ route to do so, and then we’re right back to the idea anyway.
Still— and this is something that Doc Brown and I touched on the other day— it may well be possible to literally pull ‘matter’ from thin air, if we can assume that the Mysterons are taking their raw matter from another (for real!) out-there-all-the-time source: that being virtual particles, which physics more or less demands have to be there, even though we can never catch them because of quantum mechanical uncertainty. (In a nutshell - any vacuum is actually comprised of a seething foam of matter/anti-matter particle pairs, that pop in and out of existence before anyone can ever ‘catch’ them at it, and it is the exchange of these virtual particles that generates the ‘forces’ that hold the universe together - strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational forces. I am not making that up) IF the Mysterons know how to ‘capture’ the matter-side of those virtual pairs, and funnel off the antimatter, then they have the ‘stuff’ that they can use to build their constructs, without ever having to go somewhere else to get it. But they do have to deal with the anti-matter, one way or another, and again, there’s where the proposed interdimensional conduit comes in handy. (That’s that part I am making up.) And as if that’s not enough, certain mathematical models of our time-space continuum also predict that we don’t actually live in four dimensional space-time, but that we live in eleven-dimensions - seven of which are tightly rolled up at a sub-atomic quantum level where we cannot access them. (That’s the Multiverse, BTW). But, if the Mysterons can access those quantum dimensions, then it would go a long way towards explaining how they manage to vanish into thin air, or pop reconstructions out of it - they take an unseen pathway. And I do very much like Doc Brown’s suggestion that the Mysterons may well be using any spare anti-matter kicking around to ‘detonate’ their reconstructions when that’s a useful thing for them to do.
So, just to summarize, here’s a list of the things that I have found the interdimensional filed connections, conduits and resources can be used to ‘explain’: (At least, to my own satisfaction. Never mind that I use this stuff in upcoming fan-fics.... I have reasons and I can’t give them away quite yet!)
- the fuzziness of the Mysteron complex on Mars - it’s warping off somewhere else.
- just what was that ‘special effect’ that Scarlet and Brown were subjected to before their Saloon crashed? (I think that’s the template scan)
- where exactly the ‘green rings’ are beaming in from -because we never ever see the ‘source’ just the effect (not quite a ‘spotlight’)(I think this is the ‘placement’ scan - we only see this after the fact.)
- anti-matter detonation of reconstructions, without the necessity of bombs on their persons (thanks Doc Brown!)
- split second materialization of reconstructions (popping in)
- the infamous vanishing act that Black has been witnessed to perform on occasion (popping out)
- moving stuff invisibly, by dematerialzation or by brute force (signposts, oil valves, etc.)
- imperviousness of reconstructions (and Scarlet too) to X-rays (due to presence of interdimensional force field)
- Scarlet’s less-than-reliable sixth sense (‘intermittent field interference’)
- why we don’t see ‘dead’ reconstructions - the raw materials are returned to origins to satisfy conservation laws
And I’m sure I had a few more, I just can’t seem to remember them at the moment. But if anyone else can think of any, I’d be happy to hear them! I just find it’s a really useful set of hypotheses! Accept or reject as you will! There’s really no right or wrong to this stuff - ‘Nuff said (probably too much!) Everyone have fun!
Ciao! (And like Doc Brown said before, I hope someone is still awake out there.....)
Doc Denim
Portions of a wonderful debate from the "Old Mysterons" thread from the previous forum. Many thanks to all contributors, sorry we're missing the earlier bits of it, but perhaps it will jog a few memories....
I don't really recommend you try to read it all at once!
Also hoping it will format properly and not be all skewed silly in the download.....and hoping Col. Chris can fix it if it does.
***************
Doc Brown
Re: Old Mysteron Agents
« Reply #8 on: Nov 2nd, 2003, 2:34pm »
Or perhaps they literally dematerialize, much as we’ve seen Captain Black do from time to time. There’s an hypothesis that Mysteron recreations are brought into existence from matter transferred from a parallel dimension (hi there Denim) in deference to the laws concerning conservation of matter. If so, it would seem reasonable (or at least plausible) to assume that once they’ve outlived their usefulness, their masters return that matter to its original universe – particularly if the original duplication is causing the Mysterons to expend energy maintaining the dimensional link throughout the time that the recreation is in existence.
I suggested in another thread that Captain Black’s apparent ability to vanish into thin air could be just a reversal of the “mysteronisation” process, in which his molecules are dissipated to prevent capture, and reassembled elsewhere, probably fairly close nearby, since mysteronised recreations always seem to come into existence close to the location of their originals. This same process could be applied to the redundant reconstructions, but without the subsequent reintegration stage.
[Incidentally, we do know that the Mysterons can "move" an object by dematerialization and subsequent rematerialization: we saw Captain Black shift a diversion sign a few metres like that in "Expo 2068". To be compatible with previous hypotheses about Black's own ability to vanish we'd have to assume that the diversion sign had been previously mysteronised, but I don't see a problem there: he could have previously booted it down the cliff to achieve that.]
There’s a practical point to be considered as well, which is that if the bodies were not “retrieved” once the Mysterons lost interest in them, they’d be objects of the most intense scientific study by Spectrum’s forensic specialists in an ongoing project to understand what makes them tick, so to speak. I imagine the Mysterons wouldn’t want that to happen; hence the suggestion that they cause them to “disappear”.
We haven’t seen this happen, it’s true – but then we haven’t seen any dead reconstructions lying around either. Comments, anyone?
« Last Edit: Nov 2nd, 2003, 3:08pm by Doc Brown »
marion
Cloudbase Captain
Re: Old Mysteron Agents
« Reply #9 on: Nov 2nd, 2003, 4:17pm »
I have to agree with Chris here - (who was kind enough to agree with me!) I think that once the Mysterons have finished with an agent ? either because they have completed their task or they
have failed and been captured/destroyed by Spectrum - they turn off their connection and (I quote) "The agent then is exactly like a puppet with cut strings (no pun intented!) and fall to the ground, dead. An empty husk, if you will. " An empty husk would be of little interest or use to Spectrum scientists. I cannot see that the Mysterons would waste their time and energy maintaining contact with something they no longer needed. The fact that they (in a comic story) retrometabolised the inhabitants of a military cemetary proves that they can pick and choose who or what they use to
carry out their plans. The only necessity is that the subject is already dead. (I also remember a story where they recreated dinosaurs) I still see them as entities who hold human life ? if not all life ? as cheap and they have little or no regard for what they destroy or who they hurt in pursuit of their objectives. I prefer the theory that they recreated Paul Metcalfe before he was quite dead and in so doing recreated his will to survive and thrive. Once they cut the connection to him - as he fell from the car-vu - somehow he retained the additional power of retrometabolism and was able to revive and return to Spectrum. I am sure Spectrum were terrified of him to start with - dead men walking and all - and he must have had a hell of a job convincing them that he was 'innocent' of the crimes he committed as a Mysteron.
Perhaps there remain times when they still doubt him? That would be a burden he might carry forever.
« Last Edit: Nov 2nd, 2003, 4:19pm by marion »
Doc Denim
Re: Old Mysteron Agents
« Reply #10 on: Nov 2nd, 2003, 10:42pm »
Back again! and the debate goes on....
Marion and Doc - I am SO enjoying this.......you're both so thought-provoking!
(Hey Brown - glad to see you embracing certain portions of the hypothesis so near and dear to my heart....) (I happen to like it because it seems so capable of 'explaining away' pretty much
every inconsistency I've applied it to. More later....but if you think of one that it won't cover, let me know.)
Meanwhile: I think that Mysteron reconstructions usually manage to come into existence close to the originals, because that's (obviously) the best place to put them, so as not to arouse the
suspicions of any locals who would no doubt wonder why Victim XYZ suddenly vanished from the room and turned up a block away without a good reason. But that doesn't mean they can't bump the originals off and then put the copy somewhere else, especially if there are no witnesses, and there aren't usually. (I do this in an upcoming fan?fic chapter, actually, so I'm all in favor of it.)
As to the vanishing signpost, I don't imagine that they would have had to destroy the original, not just to move it a few feet. We've also seen the Mysterons turn valves on oil rigs, trip sailors with bits of rope, reset timers on atomic devices and fly planes/hijack trucks without ever having to demolish them first. And again I will fall back on my exact and absolutely identical theory - matter and energy are matter and energy, it doesn't make a difference where it originated, to 'move' it in three dimensions is going to take some sort of a force - and yes, it will take some sort of effort on the Mysteron's part to do that, whether by dematerialization or just a change of co-ordinates in this continuum. *We* don't know how to do it with invisible force fields and interdimensional conduits, but there has to be (as you've suggested) a plausible mechanism
whereby that can occur. (Perhaps the 'dematerialzation' is a controlled sort of 'quantum tunneling' effect. I'm not going to explain that, you'll have to look it up. Virtual particles -
perhaps harnessed and manipulated - are potentially very useful in this regard as well.)(No, I did not make either of those things up. It's the standard model in physics.)(Darn useful model, too.)
As to the 'bodies' left over in the aftermath, I would be surprised if they would reveal anything useful. Exact and identical ? it would just be another perfectly 'normal' corpse. But I still think that the Mysterons take away and conserve whatever they can, because the whole Universe operates on conservation laws and I don't suppose even the Mysterons are above them. (There's just no free lunches out there! At least, not since the Big Bang, anyway.) Sorry if I sound like a broken records (remember those?).
As far as the comics - well, I just never saw any. I don't like the idea that the Mysterons need 'dead' things to take control. It doesn't make any sense. Just another of those inexplicable
inconsistencies - which you can still have and make a decent story out of. But it's so much more fun when the pseudo-science is good enough to make it seem (even very remotely) Possible......
And again, as far as the 'copied' Mr. Metcalfe: of course (!) he's still got the will to survive and thrive. He'a an Exact duplicate, with retrometabolic benefits, courtesy of his friendly neighbourhood Mysterons. (to 'somehow maintain the retrometabolism' needs a bit more explanation. I'm very interested in any other theoretical mechanisms or hypotheses about that!) But ad hoc assumptions just won't do.) The Mysterons will kill him off from time-to-time,
just to make sure that Spectrum will always trust him - but it will be a few fan-fic stories yet before they actually find out what the Scarlet-Construct is all about----
I forgot to mention this the other day, too: but since you've mentioned dinosaurs it has occurred to me again. If the Mysteron's true objective were to destroy all life on Earth, surely they could
do it with methods far less complicated than a War of Nerves. It surely isn't beyond their capabilities to pluck a big rock out of the asteroid belt in the Martian backyard, give it a good heave-ho and -poof - baby - we're with the dinosaurs for sure. Back to the primordial slime in one wallop. No, it's like Chris said in another thread - it's rather worrisome that we may well be interesting lab specimens for them... but if that's all that's saving us, well then, may the fascination long continue.....
(As to the 'alien entities' - How do those song lyrics go? "it's so easy to hurt others when you can't feel pain....") (Besides, they still have the data - no one is truly dead yet ? not in the Mysterons' mechanized opinions.)
Carry on folks!
Doc Denim
Chris Bishop
Colonel
Re: Old Mysteron Agents
« Reply #11 on: Nov 3rd, 2003, 12:08am »
Hi, Doc, as always interesting theories presented (a bit complicated to understand at first, I never read any books on physics, so it won't surprise you that I often have to read the explanations a couple of times before grasping the concept. . )
Okay, for me to accept your theory about Scarlet being yet another controlled tool used by the Mysterons to gather information - for them to 'kill him' so he would keep the trust of Spectrum -
until the Mysterons would finally reveal its real purpose after a few stories - is only acceptable in a 'dark story' settings like in one I had read lately. It's fine there, and it makes for a wonderful story, and I would LOVE to see what YOU are personally preparing for us (although I would advice NOT to present all your cards - keep us surprised, when the story will be out, please! ) While it is perfectly conceivable, I, personally, don't agree with that theory.
Speaking for myself, I prefer to abide to the theory where a struggling to survive, not quite dead Scarlet was indeed duplicated - and in the process had his will to survive copied too. Now controlled by the Mysterons, after he failed to his mission, they abandoned their control, and his will, already copied in this new body, took control back. Consider the Mysteron control as a virus on a computer, preventing the regular program to continue. Eradicate the virus and the program, if not destroyed, may run again. Now, you won't see me disagreeing that this reconstruct, aside from the capacity of retrometabolism, is in any way different with its original. To the contrary. This new Scarlet, free of the Mysteron influence, able to use his own mind, contrary to any other replicates, is also able to pick up some of the Mysterons signals - his not so reliable sixth sense. We can argue why there are times it does work, and others where he doesn't.
Now, consider that if the Mysterons have to kill a person to reconstruct him/her, it might be to get better control over his/her mind and body. Whatever happens when this mind is still functioning when the duplication process began, might be what exactly happened with Scarlet. So, when they mysteronised a dead person, they need a blank mind in which to imbue their instructions. The memory of that person has been copied too, some of the emotions (Cerise stipulated once that the copied emotions might very well be the last emotions the victim felt
before being killed), and certainly its knowledge - at least, what the Mysterons needed for that person to do the mission they wanted of him/her. Now considering this, I think the theory that
the duplicate 'cease to exist' when its mission is completed (whether as a success or not), is very acceptable.
For the Mysterons, humans are but tools to use, just as a plane, a car, a valve, an atomic bomb... Considering that the Mysterons might just well be sentient computers, they might not
have the same value for human life as we have - they might not comprehend it as the same. Humans may well be as some mechanisms for them - bio-mechanism, made of flesh, bones and blood, but mechanisms anyway.
About matter being used and replaced. I think I understand what you're meaning to say. But why go into 'another dimension' when there's plenty of matter to go around in our own? For the Mysterons, it's simply a question of transforming it to their purpose. Air is matter; water, ground, our flesh and blood, the keyboard we're using, the chair we're seated on, any object, They
can simply take the molecules out of the air, transform them (using that science that is their own, those so-called 'powers we can't begin to understand'), and transform that matter into another kind of object of person they had previously scanned. The philosopher’s stone, you may think, but that doesn't sound so much like alchemy when you think about it - it is possible for us human to, say, remove or add a molecule to water or air, and thus transform it. The
Mysterons just go further. They, after all, have a vaster knowledge than we have.
That's the theory that I'm abiding too. Mind you, nobody have to accept it, but I do hope it's a valid one. At least, as valid as your own. Granted, it has missing parts in it - and maybe we can attribute that to our human ignorance versus the Mysterons' vast knowledge! - but I'm still searching to fill in the gaps - hoping to have some enlightenments and helps from anyone who might want to offer further theories and explanations.
I don't dismiss all in the theories you presented us, mind you. To the contrary, it's as valid as any other, very well thought of, and there's a lot to consider in it. And I do hope you'll tell us more about it...
What was it that was said in another topic already? Oh yes...
Don't anybody be worried! Nobody's going to be lynched or burn to the stake for conflicting theories ! We need to continue the debate if we want to compare notes!
****************
Doc Denim
Hey all!
Where was I? That last “back shortly” wasn’t very short! Time is the enemy! We were still doing some theorizing. (and I lost the thread, it took me a while to find it again!) Anyway....
I think I will probably be rambling just a bit, but here’s some of the things I think and why I happen to think them, and I will (seriously!) try not to get too complicated.
Firstly, I’m not actually trying to put down anyone else’s theories - some of these ideas are quite good - the virus one, for example, especially since we are postulating that the Mysterons may well be a machine intelligence, which is a hypothesis I happen to agree with. Not quite so sure about the ‘last emotions’ because in many cases the last emotion might well be mind-numbing terror, and not all that useful for taking forward into the next reconstructed phase. Just a thought. But yes, I will agree that that Mysterons find a ‘blank mind and/or no will’ helpful, when it comes to setting the ‘program’ for a reconstruction’s mission. Definitely they pick and choose their victims for their knowledge and/or usefulness - but I think once the construct is ‘tasked’, the Mysterons sort of sit back and watch the show play out - still in a passive sort of contact with the construct, but not necessarily feeding it minute by minute instruction. I think that can in large part account for Scarlet’s on-again, off-again sixth sense, assuming, and I do, that he’s got a ‘role’ as a passive data collector for the Mysterons: i.e. - if he’s ‘sending’, and the other reconstruction is ‘receiving’, then there will be a certain amount of ‘interference’ if Scarlet and the construct are in close proximity. However, if the construct is running on ‘autopilot’ so to speak, Scarlet can be standing right next to one and not know it. Scarlet also seems to have the most acute premonitions, or attacks of nausea when he’s around big, inanimate Mysteron reconstructions - like the Angel aircraft in Seek and Destroy, or Delta Tango in Winged Assassin; the Mysterons themselves are in the driver’s seat in those instances, and the ‘influence’ is a more constant ‘hands-on’ job for them in those cases. In the instance of Flight 104 (which has been chatted about a lot lately) the plane itself wasn’t a reconstruction that Scarlet could have ‘picked up on’. (Someone might have noticed a wrecked plane too.) The Mysteron’s influence in that case was confined to the cockpit controls and was perhaps just far enough out of Scarlet’s immediate proximity for him to have noticed it.
Moving on: as to the origin of a reconstructions ‘raw materials’ - well, yes, they have to come from somewhere, as the Mysterons just don’t seem to recycle originals, they seem to like to leave the evidence lying around to be discovered, sooner or later. I happen to like the ‘other dimensional’ resources, because it just presents the fewest problems. Bear with me here, I need to organize these thoughts:
If the Mysterons are just drawing on local matter (and that’s not impossible, more in a moment) then that means they have to gather it, stream it around, revamp it and place it, all in the space of a few seconds, if not instantaneously - I would think that would leave a sort of local ‘pothole’ if the materials are gathered from the construct’s immediate vicinity, and if taken from further afield, would have to ‘stream in’ at high velocities - which makes me think that it would be noticed - rather like we tend to notice lightning and the thunderclap it produces whenever lightning does strike. And that’s just a split second electrical discharge - very ephemeral stuff, not like trying to sneak in, say, a 170 lb. person, or a many thousand-tons of airliner - it would be like a hard radiation storm that would fry anything animate and peel the paint off of anything else it touched…the air would glow! And if they do manage to ‘stream’ the stuff in quietly and invisibly, then they have to be using some ‘other dimensional’ route to do so, and then we’re right back to the idea anyway.
Still— and this is something that Doc Brown and I touched on the other day— it may well be possible to literally pull ‘matter’ from thin air, if we can assume that the Mysterons are taking their raw matter from another (for real!) out-there-all-the-time source: that being virtual particles, which physics more or less demands have to be there, even though we can never catch them because of quantum mechanical uncertainty. (In a nutshell - any vacuum is actually comprised of a seething foam of matter/anti-matter particle pairs, that pop in and out of existence before anyone can ever ‘catch’ them at it, and it is the exchange of these virtual particles that generates the ‘forces’ that hold the universe together - strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational forces. I am not making that up) IF the Mysterons know how to ‘capture’ the matter-side of those virtual pairs, and funnel off the antimatter, then they have the ‘stuff’ that they can use to build their constructs, without ever having to go somewhere else to get it. But they do have to deal with the anti-matter, one way or another, and again, there’s where the proposed interdimensional conduit comes in handy. (That’s that part I am making up.) And as if that’s not enough, certain mathematical models of our time-space continuum also predict that we don’t actually live in four dimensional space-time, but that we live in eleven-dimensions - seven of which are tightly rolled up at a sub-atomic quantum level where we cannot access them. (That’s the Multiverse, BTW). But, if the Mysterons can access those quantum dimensions, then it would go a long way towards explaining how they manage to vanish into thin air, or pop reconstructions out of it - they take an unseen pathway. And I do very much like Doc Brown’s suggestion that the Mysterons may well be using any spare anti-matter kicking around to ‘detonate’ their reconstructions when that’s a useful thing for them to do.
So, just to summarize, here’s a list of the things that I have found the interdimensional filed connections, conduits and resources can be used to ‘explain’: (At least, to my own satisfaction. Never mind that I use this stuff in upcoming fan-fics.... I have reasons and I can’t give them away quite yet!)
- the fuzziness of the Mysteron complex on Mars - it’s warping off somewhere else.
- just what was that ‘special effect’ that Scarlet and Brown were subjected to before their Saloon crashed? (I think that’s the template scan)
- where exactly the ‘green rings’ are beaming in from -because we never ever see the ‘source’ just the effect (not quite a ‘spotlight’)(I think this is the ‘placement’ scan - we only see this after the fact.)
- anti-matter detonation of reconstructions, without the necessity of bombs on their persons (thanks Doc Brown!)
- split second materialization of reconstructions (popping in)
- the infamous vanishing act that Black has been witnessed to perform on occasion (popping out)
- moving stuff invisibly, by dematerialzation or by brute force (signposts, oil valves, etc.)
- imperviousness of reconstructions (and Scarlet too) to X-rays (due to presence of interdimensional force field)
- Scarlet’s less-than-reliable sixth sense (‘intermittent field interference’)
- why we don’t see ‘dead’ reconstructions - the raw materials are returned to origins to satisfy conservation laws
And I’m sure I had a few more, I just can’t seem to remember them at the moment. But if anyone else can think of any, I’d be happy to hear them! I just find it’s a really useful set of hypotheses! Accept or reject as you will! There’s really no right or wrong to this stuff - ‘Nuff said (probably too much!) Everyone have fun!
Ciao! (And like Doc Brown said before, I hope someone is still awake out there.....)
Doc Denim
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DocDenim
by ChakatSwiftwind » Thu Jul 15, 2004 4:25 am
Some intreasting and slightly insightful idea's. Myself I do wonder if the Mysteron's are a form of energy being. Perhaps the evolved so far inadvance of mankind that the need for a coporial form was evolved from.
If they are a computer intellegece then how can they affect matter. Perhaps its a mix of the two. In the first episode they don't show a mysteron but a computer teminal of some sort.
I do wonder if it is possible that the Mysteron city in "Crater 101" was the smae sort of computers. Perhaps the Mystrons sent on the computers to make planets suitable for them. This would explain a great deal.
Howeve it does bring us back to how they the mysteron's as a computer intellegence can 'reverse matter'. I think a energy being would have no problem in doing this. But what do you think of that Doc?
ChakatSwiftwind
If they are a computer intellegece then how can they affect matter. Perhaps its a mix of the two. In the first episode they don't show a mysteron but a computer teminal of some sort.
I do wonder if it is possible that the Mysteron city in "Crater 101" was the smae sort of computers. Perhaps the Mystrons sent on the computers to make planets suitable for them. This would explain a great deal.
Howeve it does bring us back to how they the mysteron's as a computer intellegence can 'reverse matter'. I think a energy being would have no problem in doing this. But what do you think of that Doc?
ChakatSwiftwind
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ChakatSwiftwind
by DocDenim » Thu Jul 15, 2004 4:30 am
Stand-by for another long Siobhan-blather for Inquiring Minds Everywhere, as promised in the adjacent "Parlour Tricks' thread....
(Note to Colonel Chris: Move to documents, if it’s really too long!)
Well, to start out, I guess I’d best admit that many of the of the following suppositions and material falls under the general heading of ‘Sheer Speculation’. Most of this came to mind - over a very long time - because I like to have ‘background info’, nominally based on various tidbits of information presented in the CS series, even if I never actually use it in my various scribblings. The ‘Mysterons” as living organisms (whether as either corporeal or energy beings) just never come into any of my fan-fic. The “Mysterons” that I deal with as they appear in my CS tales (and that’s what all of this is aimed at - self-indulgent fan-fic) are the computers and the machinery those beings left behind when they picked up and moved on, at whatever point in the Martian past they did, perhaps intending to return someday, seeing as they didn’t turn their defense and maintenance systems off when they departed. (So, to repeat, just for absolute clarity, henceforth when I say ‘Mysterons’ I’m referring to the digital intelligence that inhabits the Martian Complex, and not to any ‘living being’.)
So, I’m going to loosely catagorize the following material, some of which will sound familiar, as various bits and pieces have already appeared as portions of forum discussions in the not too distant past, but which I am trying to resurrect and reformat into some sort of coherent dissertation, which, hopefully, will all hang together at the end. As always, everyone is free to disagree with me, for I am not, in the final analysis, anyone in particular that needs to be listened to.....
And with just one Warning: fan-fic spoilers contained herein! and without any further ado than that, Siobhan presents as promised:
So, Just What is A Mysteron, Really? (Part I)
Mysteron: A military acronym, short for “Mysterious Persons”, assigned by the World Space Agency to the unknown source of certain anomalous radio signals detected by Martian orbiter probes; a military team of investigators was sent along with the civilian exploration team on board the Zero-X during its mission to Mars. (Yes, for those who have noticed, a cross-over point that will eventually link CS with TB’s.)
A Possible Historical Scenario: Once upon a time, there was a very advanced race of pacifist beings that settled on the fourth planet of our solar system, a quiet out of the way world in the galactic backwater, seeking, perhaps to escape some sort of alien persecution, perhaps just for a change of venue. These very advanced beings evolved and existed in multi-dimensional space-time, straddling space and linear time, hyperspace and non-linear time. They built a city rooted in three dimensions, and constructed technologies and artificial intelligences in which to archive their data and experiences. For both protection and maintenance, they developed something that would one day become known as retrometabolism - a way and a means of preserving themselves and their works from any sort of alien aggression, persecution or attempts at genocide. Eventually, these beings vanished - whether they evolved to a higher dimension yet, died out or just moved on remains a matter for speculation, but their city and its guardian machinery was left behind, patiently awaiting their return, maintaining a quiet vigil over their adopted planet.
Circa 2068: At about this time, the ‘machines’ on Mars have attained some level of self-awareness, if they didn’t have it all along, still patiently straddling both this and that other dimension where physics and time run and flow a bit differently, and conscious to some degree of their noisy little neigbours, but pretty much disinterested any further than that. (As was so eloquently outlined by Doc Brown in a recent of former posting, I hope he’ll append it to this post, because it’s worth seeing again). But being a machine intelligence, they just don’t understand biological life forms. “They” in fact is a bit of a misnomer - for Mysterons don’t come as individuals - the Mysterons are a collective consciousness, multi-faceted but still one. The ‘facets’ themselves are either sectors of the original program, variations thereof, or they are life-forms that have been scanned, terminated and retrometabolized, ‘digitized’, if you like, and absorbed into the whole. (One can speculate as to why the process at all, but I like to assume it’s a kind of pacifist ‘prime-directive’ not to permanently remove other possibly intelligent or otherwise worthy life-forms from the universe until it is deemed absolutely necessary.) So there is always the potential for the Mysterons to add a new facet to the collective whenever a Construct is created. For technical reasons, due to the physics involved, the original life-form has to be destroyed (this discussion to follow) before that Construct can be ‘realized’ in three dimensions, but as an exact duplicate is created in its place, the machines simply don’t view it as any sort of a loss. However, the assimilation of new and possibly radical input is governed by the fact that a Construct has to evolve towards synthesis with the main program, and this happens in stages.
What it has to do with Captain Scarlet the series in general: (and here we get into a few sub-categories, and start to refer to things that we actually saw on-screen):
The MEV: When the MEV with Captain Black and crew arrived at the Mysteron’s crater on Mars, they crossed a proximity threshold that tripped a more or less automated ‘standard’ greeting and sent the machine intelligence into evaluation mode. They were not particularly surprised to see the earth-folk on arrival, but seem to have seriously misjudged the possible consequences of making what was interpreted by the human crew as a hostile action in ‘taking a closer look.’. Perhaps if they had been more interested in their not always so friendly neighbours, they might have anticipated that we often shoot first and ask questions later. Captain Black erred (rather seriously) in ordering the destruction of the Mysteron Complex, and when he did, he engaged the Mysteron’s Recovery and Defense systems.
The War of Nerves: Whether the machines are programmed with an interdiction against excessive retaliations/genocide, or if the response to the destruction of their complex includes an investigation of the aggressors before total retaliatory measures are executed remains a speculative thing - but the entire War of Nerves seems to me to be a ‘programmed’ reaction, as evidenced by their unwavering habit of announcing their intended actions against the Earth. This may be because the original beings that programmed the machines were truly pacifist and reluctant to respond fully in kind, preferring to conduct their wars in the most civilized and restrained manner possible. Or this may be a result of having found in Black’s mind a heart-felt belief that we are indeed our own worst enemies, and perhaps without any real ‘war’ experience of their own, the machines found it a logical solution to throw us back at ourselves using Captain Black (and his military background and expertise) as their point-man.
Captain Black: Is not, I repeat, NOT a Mysteron reconstruction. A part of the Defense system’s response is to evaluate the enemy - and the digital intelligence has seized control of Captain Black’s body, and invaded his mind. His mind is not, however, necessarily under their direct control. Captain Black serves as a kind of ‘think-tank’ and a “barometer’ for them. They are able to tap and pull knowledge from Captain Black’s subconscious, perhaps even to use his unconscious thought processes to seek, evaluate and execute (using Captain Black as their instrument/agent) their various plots of revenge for the unprovoked attack on their complex. Captain Black’s conscious reactions to those various plots may very well enable them to judge the merits of those vindictive actions prior to and throughout the execution of those same particular actions. It is also possible that Captain Black, trapped within his own mind, has caught on, and is, in his own way, trying to keep the casualties down and the entire War-of-Nerves managable for his ex-colleages by deliberately feeding ideas and information to the alien intelligence.
Captain Brown: In the opening salvo of the War of Nerves, Captain Brown (and Captain Scarlet) are killed and reconstructed by the Mysterons. Both ‘men’ are initially what I refer to as Phase I constructs - exact duplicates of the originals, other than that the Constructs have been “Tasked” to carry out the mission as announced in the Threat to the best of the Construct’s abilities. All Phase I ‘animate’ Constructs are linked directly to the Martian Complex on Mars via an interdimesional ‘conduit’ and the Mysterons, even if they are not feeding them minute-by-minute instruction, are aware of what they’re up to: such Constructs are their eyes and ears throughout each ‘Phase’ (threat-specific episode) of the War of Nerves. Phase I Constructs are the ‘Robot-Soldiers’ of the War, simply tools to be used to achieve the stated objective, either by their own initiative, or if ‘detonated’ asappropriate by the Mysterons at a time of their choosing. (Probably, as suggested quite brilliantly by Doc Brown, as a result of anti-matter funneled through to the Construct via the interdimensional link.)
Captain Scarlet: After the Phase I Scarlet-Construct fails in his mission to capture the World President alive and ‘dies’ in his fall from the London Car-Vu, he makes an amazing retrometabolic recovery and ‘returns to life’ after having been killed ‘several times over’ and is apparently no longer under the control of the Mysterons. (Hang on, here come the spoilers.) For at this point he is no longer a Phase I Construct. As a first step towards assimilation with the Mysterons, he is now a Phase II Construct, still linked directly and invisibly to the Mysteron Complex on Mars, and feeding data into the system for analysis, 24/7. At this stage the input is all one-way, screened as it comes in and scrutinized, dissected and studied - anaylsis that is done in the other off-in-the-blue dimension where time runs and flows other than it does here - which the machines also don’t view as a problem. And so on goes the War-of-Nerves (conducted in 3D and linear time, thanks to Captain Black) while the collective thinks about all of the data flow incoming from the Scarlet Construct, and which they can’t make much sense of because they lack the proper references and hard-wiring/software to begin with. So, to make everyone who feels this somehow compromises Scarlet’s role as a hero, rest assured that he is totally unaware of his status, and that the Mysterons don’t often take advantage of the fact that he could serve as a fly on the wall for them. He is The Key, their ultimate resolution to the War of Nerves, because, absolutely - make no mistake about this - he is now one of them, and the Mysterons have a Hidden Agenda which very much involves Captain Scarlet, but in no way diminishes his courage, integrity or loyalties to Spectrum, his friends or to humankind in general. The point is, he thinks he's still one of us.....and will continue to do so for quite a few fan-fics yet.
And I think that’s pretty much enough to digest for one post, though there is much (!) more to come yet. Stay tuned for Part II.....
Have fun! (Because this has been keeping me amused for decades!)
Doc Denim
PS - I am, of course interested in feedback - feel free to comment! But because there’s more to come, you may want to hold off until Part II is e-published here.....ASAP!
(Note to Colonel Chris: Move to documents, if it’s really too long!)
Well, to start out, I guess I’d best admit that many of the of the following suppositions and material falls under the general heading of ‘Sheer Speculation’. Most of this came to mind - over a very long time - because I like to have ‘background info’, nominally based on various tidbits of information presented in the CS series, even if I never actually use it in my various scribblings. The ‘Mysterons” as living organisms (whether as either corporeal or energy beings) just never come into any of my fan-fic. The “Mysterons” that I deal with as they appear in my CS tales (and that’s what all of this is aimed at - self-indulgent fan-fic) are the computers and the machinery those beings left behind when they picked up and moved on, at whatever point in the Martian past they did, perhaps intending to return someday, seeing as they didn’t turn their defense and maintenance systems off when they departed. (So, to repeat, just for absolute clarity, henceforth when I say ‘Mysterons’ I’m referring to the digital intelligence that inhabits the Martian Complex, and not to any ‘living being’.)
So, I’m going to loosely catagorize the following material, some of which will sound familiar, as various bits and pieces have already appeared as portions of forum discussions in the not too distant past, but which I am trying to resurrect and reformat into some sort of coherent dissertation, which, hopefully, will all hang together at the end. As always, everyone is free to disagree with me, for I am not, in the final analysis, anyone in particular that needs to be listened to.....
And with just one Warning: fan-fic spoilers contained herein! and without any further ado than that, Siobhan presents as promised:
So, Just What is A Mysteron, Really? (Part I)
Mysteron: A military acronym, short for “Mysterious Persons”, assigned by the World Space Agency to the unknown source of certain anomalous radio signals detected by Martian orbiter probes; a military team of investigators was sent along with the civilian exploration team on board the Zero-X during its mission to Mars. (Yes, for those who have noticed, a cross-over point that will eventually link CS with TB’s.)
A Possible Historical Scenario: Once upon a time, there was a very advanced race of pacifist beings that settled on the fourth planet of our solar system, a quiet out of the way world in the galactic backwater, seeking, perhaps to escape some sort of alien persecution, perhaps just for a change of venue. These very advanced beings evolved and existed in multi-dimensional space-time, straddling space and linear time, hyperspace and non-linear time. They built a city rooted in three dimensions, and constructed technologies and artificial intelligences in which to archive their data and experiences. For both protection and maintenance, they developed something that would one day become known as retrometabolism - a way and a means of preserving themselves and their works from any sort of alien aggression, persecution or attempts at genocide. Eventually, these beings vanished - whether they evolved to a higher dimension yet, died out or just moved on remains a matter for speculation, but their city and its guardian machinery was left behind, patiently awaiting their return, maintaining a quiet vigil over their adopted planet.
Circa 2068: At about this time, the ‘machines’ on Mars have attained some level of self-awareness, if they didn’t have it all along, still patiently straddling both this and that other dimension where physics and time run and flow a bit differently, and conscious to some degree of their noisy little neigbours, but pretty much disinterested any further than that. (As was so eloquently outlined by Doc Brown in a recent of former posting, I hope he’ll append it to this post, because it’s worth seeing again). But being a machine intelligence, they just don’t understand biological life forms. “They” in fact is a bit of a misnomer - for Mysterons don’t come as individuals - the Mysterons are a collective consciousness, multi-faceted but still one. The ‘facets’ themselves are either sectors of the original program, variations thereof, or they are life-forms that have been scanned, terminated and retrometabolized, ‘digitized’, if you like, and absorbed into the whole. (One can speculate as to why the process at all, but I like to assume it’s a kind of pacifist ‘prime-directive’ not to permanently remove other possibly intelligent or otherwise worthy life-forms from the universe until it is deemed absolutely necessary.) So there is always the potential for the Mysterons to add a new facet to the collective whenever a Construct is created. For technical reasons, due to the physics involved, the original life-form has to be destroyed (this discussion to follow) before that Construct can be ‘realized’ in three dimensions, but as an exact duplicate is created in its place, the machines simply don’t view it as any sort of a loss. However, the assimilation of new and possibly radical input is governed by the fact that a Construct has to evolve towards synthesis with the main program, and this happens in stages.
What it has to do with Captain Scarlet the series in general: (and here we get into a few sub-categories, and start to refer to things that we actually saw on-screen):
The MEV: When the MEV with Captain Black and crew arrived at the Mysteron’s crater on Mars, they crossed a proximity threshold that tripped a more or less automated ‘standard’ greeting and sent the machine intelligence into evaluation mode. They were not particularly surprised to see the earth-folk on arrival, but seem to have seriously misjudged the possible consequences of making what was interpreted by the human crew as a hostile action in ‘taking a closer look.’. Perhaps if they had been more interested in their not always so friendly neighbours, they might have anticipated that we often shoot first and ask questions later. Captain Black erred (rather seriously) in ordering the destruction of the Mysteron Complex, and when he did, he engaged the Mysteron’s Recovery and Defense systems.
The War of Nerves: Whether the machines are programmed with an interdiction against excessive retaliations/genocide, or if the response to the destruction of their complex includes an investigation of the aggressors before total retaliatory measures are executed remains a speculative thing - but the entire War of Nerves seems to me to be a ‘programmed’ reaction, as evidenced by their unwavering habit of announcing their intended actions against the Earth. This may be because the original beings that programmed the machines were truly pacifist and reluctant to respond fully in kind, preferring to conduct their wars in the most civilized and restrained manner possible. Or this may be a result of having found in Black’s mind a heart-felt belief that we are indeed our own worst enemies, and perhaps without any real ‘war’ experience of their own, the machines found it a logical solution to throw us back at ourselves using Captain Black (and his military background and expertise) as their point-man.
Captain Black: Is not, I repeat, NOT a Mysteron reconstruction. A part of the Defense system’s response is to evaluate the enemy - and the digital intelligence has seized control of Captain Black’s body, and invaded his mind. His mind is not, however, necessarily under their direct control. Captain Black serves as a kind of ‘think-tank’ and a “barometer’ for them. They are able to tap and pull knowledge from Captain Black’s subconscious, perhaps even to use his unconscious thought processes to seek, evaluate and execute (using Captain Black as their instrument/agent) their various plots of revenge for the unprovoked attack on their complex. Captain Black’s conscious reactions to those various plots may very well enable them to judge the merits of those vindictive actions prior to and throughout the execution of those same particular actions. It is also possible that Captain Black, trapped within his own mind, has caught on, and is, in his own way, trying to keep the casualties down and the entire War-of-Nerves managable for his ex-colleages by deliberately feeding ideas and information to the alien intelligence.
Captain Brown: In the opening salvo of the War of Nerves, Captain Brown (and Captain Scarlet) are killed and reconstructed by the Mysterons. Both ‘men’ are initially what I refer to as Phase I constructs - exact duplicates of the originals, other than that the Constructs have been “Tasked” to carry out the mission as announced in the Threat to the best of the Construct’s abilities. All Phase I ‘animate’ Constructs are linked directly to the Martian Complex on Mars via an interdimesional ‘conduit’ and the Mysterons, even if they are not feeding them minute-by-minute instruction, are aware of what they’re up to: such Constructs are their eyes and ears throughout each ‘Phase’ (threat-specific episode) of the War of Nerves. Phase I Constructs are the ‘Robot-Soldiers’ of the War, simply tools to be used to achieve the stated objective, either by their own initiative, or if ‘detonated’ asappropriate by the Mysterons at a time of their choosing. (Probably, as suggested quite brilliantly by Doc Brown, as a result of anti-matter funneled through to the Construct via the interdimensional link.)
Captain Scarlet: After the Phase I Scarlet-Construct fails in his mission to capture the World President alive and ‘dies’ in his fall from the London Car-Vu, he makes an amazing retrometabolic recovery and ‘returns to life’ after having been killed ‘several times over’ and is apparently no longer under the control of the Mysterons. (Hang on, here come the spoilers.) For at this point he is no longer a Phase I Construct. As a first step towards assimilation with the Mysterons, he is now a Phase II Construct, still linked directly and invisibly to the Mysteron Complex on Mars, and feeding data into the system for analysis, 24/7. At this stage the input is all one-way, screened as it comes in and scrutinized, dissected and studied - anaylsis that is done in the other off-in-the-blue dimension where time runs and flows other than it does here - which the machines also don’t view as a problem. And so on goes the War-of-Nerves (conducted in 3D and linear time, thanks to Captain Black) while the collective thinks about all of the data flow incoming from the Scarlet Construct, and which they can’t make much sense of because they lack the proper references and hard-wiring/software to begin with. So, to make everyone who feels this somehow compromises Scarlet’s role as a hero, rest assured that he is totally unaware of his status, and that the Mysterons don’t often take advantage of the fact that he could serve as a fly on the wall for them. He is The Key, their ultimate resolution to the War of Nerves, because, absolutely - make no mistake about this - he is now one of them, and the Mysterons have a Hidden Agenda which very much involves Captain Scarlet, but in no way diminishes his courage, integrity or loyalties to Spectrum, his friends or to humankind in general. The point is, he thinks he's still one of us.....and will continue to do so for quite a few fan-fics yet.
And I think that’s pretty much enough to digest for one post, though there is much (!) more to come yet. Stay tuned for Part II.....
Have fun! (Because this has been keeping me amused for decades!)
Doc Denim
PS - I am, of course interested in feedback - feel free to comment! But because there’s more to come, you may want to hold off until Part II is e-published here.....ASAP!
-
DocDenim
by DocBrown » Thu Jul 15, 2004 4:34 am
Hi there again Doc Demin - did I hear my pen-name mentioned? I've just been trawling the archives, and I think this must be the posting that you mentioned in your paragraph that started "Circa 2068...". I've edited it very slightly to remove references to the original thread in which it was included:
<< The point about the Mysterons monitoring Earth’s communications is absolutely crucial, isn’t it, since if they’d been paying attention they’d have had a pretty good idea of what to expect from us by the time we arrived*. But then, if they’d been paying attention, they’d also have been aware of the immanent arrival of Black’s mission and the reason for it. So they weren’t paying attention. But as already pointed out, they weren’t particularly surprised to see us either. It seems to me that the easiest way to reconcile those two observations is to assume that they simply weren’t very interested. That would fit in with the idea of them possessing a machine intelligence as opposed to sentient intelligence as we would understand it – because a sentient intelligence would have long ago identified us as a threat to their own survival, and taken steps to neutralise that threat, whereas a machine intelligence might not. It raises an interesting question about whether any species – sentient or otherwise - can survive without an instinct for self-preservation that includes the ability to identify threats to itself and react accordingly, either defensively or offensively. I imagine it could, if it developed in an environment in which there were no threats – and there would have been no threats to the Mysterons for countless aeons prior to mankind crawling onto dry land out of the oceans.
But then, almost by definition, the Mysterons don't think the same way we do, so perhaps that argument doesn’t hold water. Perhaps the key question to ask is what motivates the Mysterons to act as they do**. I mean, what do they hope to achieve, other than to make us very angry? What they actually said was “the ultimate destruction of life on Earth” – so why bother with the cat-and-mouse tactics? It seems to me that that’s the real question to be addressed. Presumably there’s something in their nature – or that of their creators – that favours taking the scenic route as opposed to just driving down the motorway. Unless they’re lying, of course. Or overreacting a little in the heat of the moment. (Can’t say I’d blame them under the circumstances.) Or perhaps the intention actually is to make us very angry. Rather a dangerous course of action, I’d have thought, but then, who can anticipate how the Mysterons think? We can anticipate the thought processes and actions of a dog or a cat without having to assume intelligence in them because being living creatures ourselves we can empathise with them, sharing common experiences. An extraterrestrial intelligence is another ball game altogether.
[* As a complete aside, I’ve been watching the recent spate of documentaries on Mars over the last couple of weeks, what with the Beagle and now the Spirit Mars Rover. One of them a couple of nights ago was cheerfully explaining about how we could set about terraforming the place by pouring greenhouse gases into its atmosphere – and we’re working out how to do that before we’ve even got there. I groaned in disbelief - I mean, that’s what we Earthmen are all about, isn’t it? See something interesting, get financial backing to mount an expedition so we can exploit it for all its worth, grab the booty, make a fortune and move on. Isn’t economics wonderful? "They too are curious about the universe we live in." You bet we are - there's wealth and power beyond the dreams of avarice in them thar planets.]
[** Has anybody seen that fabulous scene in “Galaxy Quest” where the Captain of the NSEA Protector (read USS Enterprise) is being dragged around by some ghastly stone monster as an immediate precursor to being crushed to a pulp, and his alien second-in-command Doctor Lazarus (read Mr Spock) is telling him over the communicator to try to understand its motivations? Just occasionally the only motivation you need to understand is that the godforsaken thing wants to kill you – perhaps that philosophy ought to be applied to the Mysterons too.] >>
As you recommend, Doc, I'll defer throwing my hat into the ring on the points you've raised until after your next posting. There is so much material here to be chewed over that I need some thinking time - probably rather a lot of it!
DocBrown
<< The point about the Mysterons monitoring Earth’s communications is absolutely crucial, isn’t it, since if they’d been paying attention they’d have had a pretty good idea of what to expect from us by the time we arrived*. But then, if they’d been paying attention, they’d also have been aware of the immanent arrival of Black’s mission and the reason for it. So they weren’t paying attention. But as already pointed out, they weren’t particularly surprised to see us either. It seems to me that the easiest way to reconcile those two observations is to assume that they simply weren’t very interested. That would fit in with the idea of them possessing a machine intelligence as opposed to sentient intelligence as we would understand it – because a sentient intelligence would have long ago identified us as a threat to their own survival, and taken steps to neutralise that threat, whereas a machine intelligence might not. It raises an interesting question about whether any species – sentient or otherwise - can survive without an instinct for self-preservation that includes the ability to identify threats to itself and react accordingly, either defensively or offensively. I imagine it could, if it developed in an environment in which there were no threats – and there would have been no threats to the Mysterons for countless aeons prior to mankind crawling onto dry land out of the oceans.
But then, almost by definition, the Mysterons don't think the same way we do, so perhaps that argument doesn’t hold water. Perhaps the key question to ask is what motivates the Mysterons to act as they do**. I mean, what do they hope to achieve, other than to make us very angry? What they actually said was “the ultimate destruction of life on Earth” – so why bother with the cat-and-mouse tactics? It seems to me that that’s the real question to be addressed. Presumably there’s something in their nature – or that of their creators – that favours taking the scenic route as opposed to just driving down the motorway. Unless they’re lying, of course. Or overreacting a little in the heat of the moment. (Can’t say I’d blame them under the circumstances.) Or perhaps the intention actually is to make us very angry. Rather a dangerous course of action, I’d have thought, but then, who can anticipate how the Mysterons think? We can anticipate the thought processes and actions of a dog or a cat without having to assume intelligence in them because being living creatures ourselves we can empathise with them, sharing common experiences. An extraterrestrial intelligence is another ball game altogether.
[* As a complete aside, I’ve been watching the recent spate of documentaries on Mars over the last couple of weeks, what with the Beagle and now the Spirit Mars Rover. One of them a couple of nights ago was cheerfully explaining about how we could set about terraforming the place by pouring greenhouse gases into its atmosphere – and we’re working out how to do that before we’ve even got there. I groaned in disbelief - I mean, that’s what we Earthmen are all about, isn’t it? See something interesting, get financial backing to mount an expedition so we can exploit it for all its worth, grab the booty, make a fortune and move on. Isn’t economics wonderful? "They too are curious about the universe we live in." You bet we are - there's wealth and power beyond the dreams of avarice in them thar planets.]
[** Has anybody seen that fabulous scene in “Galaxy Quest” where the Captain of the NSEA Protector (read USS Enterprise) is being dragged around by some ghastly stone monster as an immediate precursor to being crushed to a pulp, and his alien second-in-command Doctor Lazarus (read Mr Spock) is telling him over the communicator to try to understand its motivations? Just occasionally the only motivation you need to understand is that the godforsaken thing wants to kill you – perhaps that philosophy ought to be applied to the Mysterons too.] >>
As you recommend, Doc, I'll defer throwing my hat into the ring on the points you've raised until after your next posting. There is so much material here to be chewed over that I need some thinking time - probably rather a lot of it!
DocBrown
-
DocBrown
by DocDenim » Thu Jul 15, 2004 4:39 am
Doc Brown!
Yes, that was exactly the one! Thank you - it's very relevant, and I could hardly have said it better myself!
Greetings Again All;
So, What is A Mysteron, Really? Part II
Where was I? Ah, yes, I’d just shocked and appalled everyone by saying that Captain Scarlet is a Mysteron - but I really don’t want anyone to get all tied up in a knot over that, because in the long run it’s going to be a very good thing. Besides, I LIKE the Mysterons, as baddies go, they’re quite charming - complex and convoluted and not nearly so heinous as they seem. And they do have a hidden agenda that I’ll have to tell you something about. (More spoilers, that means.)
And so here’s a bit more about my particular versions and I will try not to ramble too much; here are some Nuts and Bolts to chew over:
I have already mentioned that I think the Mysterons (as a digital intelligence) don’t come as individuals - they’re One but Multi-faceted. So while the machine intelligence may be running separate sub-routines with different functions, they’re all hooked into the central matrix. The ‘Voice’ just for instance, would be the facet that handles communications. Which, boiling it down, means that there’s a sort of plurality involved with the Mysterons, but not necessarily a ‘we’ as humans would perceive it. Humans really do confuse them - for the Mysterons have not yet connected with the concept that human minds operate ‘individually’ - as a collective, Individual just isn’t in their dictionary. Much of human experience is ‘common’, and the Mysterons misinterpret that as the ‘main program’ for the species. They may recognize separate thinking but don’t realize that it’s independent thinking - let’s see if this analogy for that makes any sense: take the human body just for example; it’s comprised of trillions of indvidual cells, all of which work on the same general prinicples, but which are nonentheless differentiated, serving various functions, but all contributing to the smooth operation of the whole system. Cells die and are replaced, things carry on pretty smoothly, and such ordinary losses don’t even register with us on a macroscopic level. Sometimes things go wrong - age, disease, viruses - and the whole does it best to maintain things through a certain amount of inbuilt regeneration, self-regulation, some conscious effort and varying degrees of on-going maintenance. It’s not a perfect comparison, but to the Mysterons, that’s rather what things look like on planet Earth - that we all operate as separate, independent entities (imagine 6 billion plus programs interacting) just doesn’t enter their machine-driven imaginations. That, in turn, means that they just don’t ‘Get Us’ at all, even though they are watching Captain Black as his mind spins and jumps and reacts for them, and even though they’re getting 24/7 input from Scarlet II, they simply can’t make sense of it - They Do Not Empathize - because being machines, they just don’t have the biology to comprehend what motivates us. But they are trying, and I think they have been from almost the outset of the War of Nerves.
What makes her think that, they all now wonder.
Well, it took me a while to work it out, but in the very first episode of the CS series, the Mysterons say that they’re going to assassinate the World President. Well and good, they do give it at least one solid go - Captain Brown very nearly taking the Prez with him when he detonates - but after that, they seem to back off. Gary Younger manages to save his own butt, is taken to Cloudbase where that is reviewed (in the presence of Scarlet I, that’s important) and is then sent off with Captain Scarlet-the-Mysteron, to some other place of maximum security. But the Mysterons seem to have changed their minds about killing him by that point, because there was nothing at all stopping Scarlet from just crashing his jet to accomplish that end, had that still been their aim. But Captain Black comes along to remind Scarlet that they must have the World President alive. Why? What for? Whatever changed their collective mind? Did they suddenly (via Scarlet I’s input) figure the WP as truly the top dog, who could take care of himself without the rest of them? Perhaps decided that if they wanted to talk to anyone, it had better be Gary because he (nominally) is in charge of the Whole? Whatever the case, they didn’t get the chance, because Captain Blue stopped Scarlet from getting away clean with the Prez, so no matter what the Mysterons were planning to do with him - alive and presumably uninjured - we never do find out. Perhaps the Voice wanted to have a little chat via Captain Black, to clear things up. But that didn’t work, so pretty much immediately, they went to Plan B - and decided to assimilate Scarlet for whatever insights Scarlet as a Phase II Construct might be able to provide them.
And also - here comes another big spoiler - to give the humans (by giving them a Phase II of their very own) some insights into what the humans could perhaps be doing to understand the Mysterons better. They Gave Scarlet Back. Which should have been the First Clue. That we would jump to some totally irrational conclusion that ‘fate’ restored Captain Scarlet and that he would be accepted back into the fold with not nearly enough of the right questions asked must have really stumped them. Even when it keeps on happening, long enough that those around Captain Scarlet actually come to think of it as ‘normal’ in his case. So on goes the War of Nerves - with not much resolution in sight as far as the series managed to go. Which is where fan-fic has to pick up. And pretty soon, Scarlet won’t be the only Recovered Reconstruction - which will be the Second Big Clue. Though, long run, it’s going to take Three before Spectrum finally catches on to the entire gist of the Hidden Agenda and the fan-fic truly gets convoluted.
So, what is this Hidden Agenda, you ask? Very briefly, without giving it all away, the bare-bones gist of the Hidden Agenda is that the Mysterons themselves are trying to end the War-of-Nerves - but they can’t. They are a Machine Intelligence, and They Can’t Alter Their Own Programs to Do It. So what they need to do is set their human adversaries up into a position where the humans can get into the Martian Complex and disable the Defence systems - then they can sit down and talk like civilized beings about the whole situation. (It’s where TB’s come into the Saga - I need TB3 to go to Mars for me.) But this is really a tall order, very much a Catch-22 for the Mysterons, because the clues they drop (in the form of various recovered reconstructions) also have a way of sabotaging the effort, simply because they’re always feeding data into the Mysterons’ systems and the defense facet can always circumvent Spectrum’s attempts to end the War. (That mysterious Operation Sword that colonel White mentioned was for this reason doomed to fail - because Scarlet was in on it. Just as he was in on the secret probe that they managed to (pointlessly) soft-land on Phobos. Once more, nobody connected....)(And it occurs to me too, that the Lunar Complex could also have been a ‘dry-run’ for a visit to the Mysteron Complex on Mars, too.)
And, again - I would call that quite enough to think about for now! I will spare everyone a Part III, since from here on, it just gets into spilling the specifics of the fan-fic that will eventually resolve the War of Nerves, Siobhan-style.
Ciao All! Enjoy!
Doc Denim
PS - Unsubtle hint - she is still looking for willing co-authors to work on the Hidden Agenda Saga....
Yes, that was exactly the one! Thank you - it's very relevant, and I could hardly have said it better myself!
Greetings Again All;
So, What is A Mysteron, Really? Part II
Where was I? Ah, yes, I’d just shocked and appalled everyone by saying that Captain Scarlet is a Mysteron - but I really don’t want anyone to get all tied up in a knot over that, because in the long run it’s going to be a very good thing. Besides, I LIKE the Mysterons, as baddies go, they’re quite charming - complex and convoluted and not nearly so heinous as they seem. And they do have a hidden agenda that I’ll have to tell you something about. (More spoilers, that means.)
And so here’s a bit more about my particular versions and I will try not to ramble too much; here are some Nuts and Bolts to chew over:
I have already mentioned that I think the Mysterons (as a digital intelligence) don’t come as individuals - they’re One but Multi-faceted. So while the machine intelligence may be running separate sub-routines with different functions, they’re all hooked into the central matrix. The ‘Voice’ just for instance, would be the facet that handles communications. Which, boiling it down, means that there’s a sort of plurality involved with the Mysterons, but not necessarily a ‘we’ as humans would perceive it. Humans really do confuse them - for the Mysterons have not yet connected with the concept that human minds operate ‘individually’ - as a collective, Individual just isn’t in their dictionary. Much of human experience is ‘common’, and the Mysterons misinterpret that as the ‘main program’ for the species. They may recognize separate thinking but don’t realize that it’s independent thinking - let’s see if this analogy for that makes any sense: take the human body just for example; it’s comprised of trillions of indvidual cells, all of which work on the same general prinicples, but which are nonentheless differentiated, serving various functions, but all contributing to the smooth operation of the whole system. Cells die and are replaced, things carry on pretty smoothly, and such ordinary losses don’t even register with us on a macroscopic level. Sometimes things go wrong - age, disease, viruses - and the whole does it best to maintain things through a certain amount of inbuilt regeneration, self-regulation, some conscious effort and varying degrees of on-going maintenance. It’s not a perfect comparison, but to the Mysterons, that’s rather what things look like on planet Earth - that we all operate as separate, independent entities (imagine 6 billion plus programs interacting) just doesn’t enter their machine-driven imaginations. That, in turn, means that they just don’t ‘Get Us’ at all, even though they are watching Captain Black as his mind spins and jumps and reacts for them, and even though they’re getting 24/7 input from Scarlet II, they simply can’t make sense of it - They Do Not Empathize - because being machines, they just don’t have the biology to comprehend what motivates us. But they are trying, and I think they have been from almost the outset of the War of Nerves.
What makes her think that, they all now wonder.
Well, it took me a while to work it out, but in the very first episode of the CS series, the Mysterons say that they’re going to assassinate the World President. Well and good, they do give it at least one solid go - Captain Brown very nearly taking the Prez with him when he detonates - but after that, they seem to back off. Gary Younger manages to save his own butt, is taken to Cloudbase where that is reviewed (in the presence of Scarlet I, that’s important) and is then sent off with Captain Scarlet-the-Mysteron, to some other place of maximum security. But the Mysterons seem to have changed their minds about killing him by that point, because there was nothing at all stopping Scarlet from just crashing his jet to accomplish that end, had that still been their aim. But Captain Black comes along to remind Scarlet that they must have the World President alive. Why? What for? Whatever changed their collective mind? Did they suddenly (via Scarlet I’s input) figure the WP as truly the top dog, who could take care of himself without the rest of them? Perhaps decided that if they wanted to talk to anyone, it had better be Gary because he (nominally) is in charge of the Whole? Whatever the case, they didn’t get the chance, because Captain Blue stopped Scarlet from getting away clean with the Prez, so no matter what the Mysterons were planning to do with him - alive and presumably uninjured - we never do find out. Perhaps the Voice wanted to have a little chat via Captain Black, to clear things up. But that didn’t work, so pretty much immediately, they went to Plan B - and decided to assimilate Scarlet for whatever insights Scarlet as a Phase II Construct might be able to provide them.
And also - here comes another big spoiler - to give the humans (by giving them a Phase II of their very own) some insights into what the humans could perhaps be doing to understand the Mysterons better. They Gave Scarlet Back. Which should have been the First Clue. That we would jump to some totally irrational conclusion that ‘fate’ restored Captain Scarlet and that he would be accepted back into the fold with not nearly enough of the right questions asked must have really stumped them. Even when it keeps on happening, long enough that those around Captain Scarlet actually come to think of it as ‘normal’ in his case. So on goes the War of Nerves - with not much resolution in sight as far as the series managed to go. Which is where fan-fic has to pick up. And pretty soon, Scarlet won’t be the only Recovered Reconstruction - which will be the Second Big Clue. Though, long run, it’s going to take Three before Spectrum finally catches on to the entire gist of the Hidden Agenda and the fan-fic truly gets convoluted.
So, what is this Hidden Agenda, you ask? Very briefly, without giving it all away, the bare-bones gist of the Hidden Agenda is that the Mysterons themselves are trying to end the War-of-Nerves - but they can’t. They are a Machine Intelligence, and They Can’t Alter Their Own Programs to Do It. So what they need to do is set their human adversaries up into a position where the humans can get into the Martian Complex and disable the Defence systems - then they can sit down and talk like civilized beings about the whole situation. (It’s where TB’s come into the Saga - I need TB3 to go to Mars for me.) But this is really a tall order, very much a Catch-22 for the Mysterons, because the clues they drop (in the form of various recovered reconstructions) also have a way of sabotaging the effort, simply because they’re always feeding data into the Mysterons’ systems and the defense facet can always circumvent Spectrum’s attempts to end the War. (That mysterious Operation Sword that colonel White mentioned was for this reason doomed to fail - because Scarlet was in on it. Just as he was in on the secret probe that they managed to (pointlessly) soft-land on Phobos. Once more, nobody connected....)(And it occurs to me too, that the Lunar Complex could also have been a ‘dry-run’ for a visit to the Mysteron Complex on Mars, too.)
And, again - I would call that quite enough to think about for now! I will spare everyone a Part III, since from here on, it just gets into spilling the specifics of the fan-fic that will eventually resolve the War of Nerves, Siobhan-style.
Ciao All! Enjoy!
Doc Denim
PS - Unsubtle hint - she is still looking for willing co-authors to work on the Hidden Agenda Saga....
-
DocDenim
by FlicCity » Fri Jul 30, 2004 1:13 pm
Hi, everyone. I have my own unique ideas about the Mysterons, and I'm going to explain them at length. Anyone got three hours to read this post? Good, let's begin. (And if any of this post should be somewhere else, let me know.)
The History of the Mysterons
The Mysterons were originally a corporeal (physical) race. Their thought processes were/are comparable to ants -- there were several 'colonies', and each colony was at war with all of the others.
As they evolved, several of the colonies began to develop extensive control over the physical world.(I never claimed that my theories were scientific!) They used these new abilities to defeat the weaker colonies one by one. Eventually there was only one colony remaining, which continued evolving to the point where their physical bodies were discarded as unnecessary.
This one colony was therefore alone for centuries. During this time, it slowly developed to the point where its desire for contact with others outweighed its fear of them -- but the other Mysterons had already been wiped out...
The Mysteron Colony
Each Mysteron is a separate part of the colony's mind/personality. Therefore, one Mysteron is the aggressive instinct; one Mysteron is the intelligence; and so forth. The 'leader' of the Mysterons is the part of the group mind which is capable of making descisions. The other parts are only able to provide information and suggest possible courses of action. (The scene in the first episode where the Mysteron asks whether or not to greet the humans is roughly equivalent to when a human asks themself whether they are sure of a descision they've already made.) The loneliness persuaded the Mysterons to speak to the humans; however, the aggressive/paranoid part of the mind is probably still a major influence (witness their not attempting contact themselves), and it is possible that it influenced Captain Black's hasty assumption (if you felt that something was hostile, would you trust it pointing something at you?)
However, since the Mysterons do not understand individuality -- what they consider to be individuals, we would consider to be parts of a single individual -- they would automatically assume that this attack was guided by the 'leader' of the Earthmen. It would be ridiculous for a colony to have two leaders, so they must believe that Captain Black's attack was not only known about by the President, but guided by him personally. This is why the attempts to talk peacefully with them never worked. From their point of view, those speeches would have been gross hypocrisy.
The Mysteron Complex
Now we reach the part of my theory that answers another question; why did the Mysterons react so badly to having their complex destroyed, when they were able to rebuild it instantly?
Just because they have evolved beyond the need for bodies, that does not automatically mean that they do not need a source of energy within this dimension. I believe that the Mysteron Complex was built as a processing station, drawing energy from the Sun and converting it into a form that the Mysterons could use. The pulsator was this energy in solid form. When the complex was destroyed, they probably lost a great deal of their stored energy -- some in the actual destruction, and some in the recreation of the complex. This means that Captain Black's attack would be equivalent to destroying acres of farmland, and the places that used those raw materials, both at the same time.
Captain Black
The Mysterons would find it simple to separate Captain Black's mind from his body. This would leave them with a 'puppet', (no pun intended) and a source of information about the 'Earthmen colony' as they must think of humans. The information which they gather from Captain Black would probably be less than useful, as they would interpret it to fit their own psychology. (Example: Spectrum as a specialised colony, led by Colonel White -- extrapolation -- Colonel White must be a subsidiary of the President if he is trusted to give orders.)
Captain Scarlet
(Here's where my theories get weird.) There is one question which other theories seem to avoid -- why would the Mysterons develop a method of recreating living beings? The same method cannot be used on animate and inanimate objects, surely -- it must be different for the living beings to remain living. And why do they always create the 'new' one immediately after destroying the old one? And my answer is...
Two of the smaller colonies developed an interest in co-operation before the rest of their kind. However, they were unable to function well together, because of the two leaders disagreeing. (Bear in mind, for the Mysterons this would be tantamount to schizophrenia.) In an attempt to find a way around this problem, they developed a unique method of 'suspended animation'. One of the leaders was killed, and its 'template' was recorded and stored. The other one then ruled both of their colonies for an agreed period of time, after which the 'template' was used to recreate the first leader.
However, the method proved to have unexpected consequences. When they attempted to 'reform' the leader, they found that the 'template' had degraded past use. In panic, they revived the other leader -- and found that its mind had not survived the process.
The process was therefore considered unsuccessful in its original aims. This meant that it was used when the Mysterons replicated Scarlet and Brown because they wanted a body with no connection to a guiding mind, and the process seemed certain to result in this. They 'collected' Scarlet's and Brown's minds/souls at the point of death to aid in the deception of Cloudbase and the President, and placed them in a one-way system -- nothing gets in, everything gets out. This is how the captains were able to react so normally, and why Captain Scarlet could never remember his lost hours -- for him, they never existed.
When Scarlet fell to his death, the Mysterons removed their attention from the replicant, and released Scarlet's mind. Since the process had been designed to work on Mysterons, and had failed, it never occurred to them that its original purpose would succeed on a human who had not been prepared for it. Since then, they have been better prepared to stop this from happening again (the reason why Scarlet is the only replicant to recover from their control instead of dying when his mission was ended).
The Mysterons also cannot destroy Captain Scarlet and recreate him again, as the method speeds up the metabolic rates to the point where they become retro-metabolic. If the Mysterons did attempt it, the 'new' Captain Scarlet would literally burn out. They also cannot use their previous templates; the method as I have envisaged it means that, in a very real sense, the template is a part of Captain Scarlet. (This section should probably be moved to another thread. Someone tell me which, please?)
Gods, that's a long post. Any responses to it?
The History of the Mysterons
The Mysterons were originally a corporeal (physical) race. Their thought processes were/are comparable to ants -- there were several 'colonies', and each colony was at war with all of the others.
As they evolved, several of the colonies began to develop extensive control over the physical world.(I never claimed that my theories were scientific!) They used these new abilities to defeat the weaker colonies one by one. Eventually there was only one colony remaining, which continued evolving to the point where their physical bodies were discarded as unnecessary.
This one colony was therefore alone for centuries. During this time, it slowly developed to the point where its desire for contact with others outweighed its fear of them -- but the other Mysterons had already been wiped out...
The Mysteron Colony
Each Mysteron is a separate part of the colony's mind/personality. Therefore, one Mysteron is the aggressive instinct; one Mysteron is the intelligence; and so forth. The 'leader' of the Mysterons is the part of the group mind which is capable of making descisions. The other parts are only able to provide information and suggest possible courses of action. (The scene in the first episode where the Mysteron asks whether or not to greet the humans is roughly equivalent to when a human asks themself whether they are sure of a descision they've already made.) The loneliness persuaded the Mysterons to speak to the humans; however, the aggressive/paranoid part of the mind is probably still a major influence (witness their not attempting contact themselves), and it is possible that it influenced Captain Black's hasty assumption (if you felt that something was hostile, would you trust it pointing something at you?)
However, since the Mysterons do not understand individuality -- what they consider to be individuals, we would consider to be parts of a single individual -- they would automatically assume that this attack was guided by the 'leader' of the Earthmen. It would be ridiculous for a colony to have two leaders, so they must believe that Captain Black's attack was not only known about by the President, but guided by him personally. This is why the attempts to talk peacefully with them never worked. From their point of view, those speeches would have been gross hypocrisy.
The Mysteron Complex
Now we reach the part of my theory that answers another question; why did the Mysterons react so badly to having their complex destroyed, when they were able to rebuild it instantly?
Just because they have evolved beyond the need for bodies, that does not automatically mean that they do not need a source of energy within this dimension. I believe that the Mysteron Complex was built as a processing station, drawing energy from the Sun and converting it into a form that the Mysterons could use. The pulsator was this energy in solid form. When the complex was destroyed, they probably lost a great deal of their stored energy -- some in the actual destruction, and some in the recreation of the complex. This means that Captain Black's attack would be equivalent to destroying acres of farmland, and the places that used those raw materials, both at the same time.
Captain Black
The Mysterons would find it simple to separate Captain Black's mind from his body. This would leave them with a 'puppet', (no pun intended) and a source of information about the 'Earthmen colony' as they must think of humans. The information which they gather from Captain Black would probably be less than useful, as they would interpret it to fit their own psychology. (Example: Spectrum as a specialised colony, led by Colonel White -- extrapolation -- Colonel White must be a subsidiary of the President if he is trusted to give orders.)
Captain Scarlet
(Here's where my theories get weird.) There is one question which other theories seem to avoid -- why would the Mysterons develop a method of recreating living beings? The same method cannot be used on animate and inanimate objects, surely -- it must be different for the living beings to remain living. And why do they always create the 'new' one immediately after destroying the old one? And my answer is...
Two of the smaller colonies developed an interest in co-operation before the rest of their kind. However, they were unable to function well together, because of the two leaders disagreeing. (Bear in mind, for the Mysterons this would be tantamount to schizophrenia.) In an attempt to find a way around this problem, they developed a unique method of 'suspended animation'. One of the leaders was killed, and its 'template' was recorded and stored. The other one then ruled both of their colonies for an agreed period of time, after which the 'template' was used to recreate the first leader.
However, the method proved to have unexpected consequences. When they attempted to 'reform' the leader, they found that the 'template' had degraded past use. In panic, they revived the other leader -- and found that its mind had not survived the process.
The process was therefore considered unsuccessful in its original aims. This meant that it was used when the Mysterons replicated Scarlet and Brown because they wanted a body with no connection to a guiding mind, and the process seemed certain to result in this. They 'collected' Scarlet's and Brown's minds/souls at the point of death to aid in the deception of Cloudbase and the President, and placed them in a one-way system -- nothing gets in, everything gets out. This is how the captains were able to react so normally, and why Captain Scarlet could never remember his lost hours -- for him, they never existed.
When Scarlet fell to his death, the Mysterons removed their attention from the replicant, and released Scarlet's mind. Since the process had been designed to work on Mysterons, and had failed, it never occurred to them that its original purpose would succeed on a human who had not been prepared for it. Since then, they have been better prepared to stop this from happening again (the reason why Scarlet is the only replicant to recover from their control instead of dying when his mission was ended).
The Mysterons also cannot destroy Captain Scarlet and recreate him again, as the method speeds up the metabolic rates to the point where they become retro-metabolic. If the Mysterons did attempt it, the 'new' Captain Scarlet would literally burn out. They also cannot use their previous templates; the method as I have envisaged it means that, in a very real sense, the template is a part of Captain Scarlet. (This section should probably be moved to another thread. Someone tell me which, please?)
Gods, that's a long post. Any responses to it?
-
FlicCity
- Cadet
- Posts: 28
- Joined: Tue Jul 27, 2004 11:36 am
- Location: Earth
by hazel » Fri Jul 30, 2004 7:05 pm
Response? Not right now - I need time to think about it. But first reaction - fascinating! It seems pretty plausible to me. You've obviously given this a fair bit of thought.
Oh, and as far as I can see, this post is in the right place. No need to move it anywhere.
Oh, and as far as I can see, this post is in the right place. No need to move it anywhere.
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hazel
- Cloudbase Captain
- Posts: 903
- Joined: Mon Jun 21, 2004 10:15 pm
- Location: London, UK
by Cobalt » Fri Sep 14, 2007 1:17 pm
Hmm quite an intreasting read, I won't go into the whys and werefors of Scarlet and co. Lets take a look at the what the Mysterons say as the MEV comes into sensor/scanner range.
"THE FIRST OF THE EARTH SPACE TRAVELLERS HAVE ARRIVED. THEY TO HAVE A CURIOSITY ABOUT THE UNVIVERSE WE LIVE IN. WE MUST WELCOME THEM LET US TAKE A CLOSER LOOK."
This shows that Mysterons must be intellegent and that they were not acting in a malevolent way as Capatin Black suspected. It can be argued Black and the MEV crew were tired at this time and acted out of fear in impulse.
"EARTHMEN, WE ARE PEACEFUL BEINGS, AND YOU HAVE TRIED TO DESTROY US. BUT YOU CANNOT SUCCEED. YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR THIS ACT OF AGGRESSION. THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE MYSTERONS. WE KNOW THAT YOU CAN HEAR US EARTHEMEN. OUR RETALLIATION WILL BE SLOW, BUT NONETHELESS EFFECTIVE. IT WILL MEAN THE ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION OF LIFE ON EARTH! IT WILL BE USELESS FOR YOU TO RESIST US, FOR WE HAVE DISCOVERED THE SECRET OF REVERSING MATTER, AS YOU HAVE JUST WITNESSED."
Now here it's getting a bit odd to me, we have a so called peacful race that basicaly just handed out a threat of genocide against Earth and it's inhabitants. Hardly peaceful....
Perhaps this threat was more of a lesson to Earth why I'm not sure. One thing I disagree with is the thoughts that the Mysterons are a machine/computer intellegance. They say 'beings' not machine or computer.
It's alos shown as in 'white as snow' that the Mysterons can infulance objects that have not been destoryed.
It's possible that the Mysterons are really have evolved from a Corporeal being into some form of Energy beings.
"THE FIRST OF THE EARTH SPACE TRAVELLERS HAVE ARRIVED. THEY TO HAVE A CURIOSITY ABOUT THE UNVIVERSE WE LIVE IN. WE MUST WELCOME THEM LET US TAKE A CLOSER LOOK."
This shows that Mysterons must be intellegent and that they were not acting in a malevolent way as Capatin Black suspected. It can be argued Black and the MEV crew were tired at this time and acted out of fear in impulse.
"EARTHMEN, WE ARE PEACEFUL BEINGS, AND YOU HAVE TRIED TO DESTROY US. BUT YOU CANNOT SUCCEED. YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR THIS ACT OF AGGRESSION. THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE MYSTERONS. WE KNOW THAT YOU CAN HEAR US EARTHEMEN. OUR RETALLIATION WILL BE SLOW, BUT NONETHELESS EFFECTIVE. IT WILL MEAN THE ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION OF LIFE ON EARTH! IT WILL BE USELESS FOR YOU TO RESIST US, FOR WE HAVE DISCOVERED THE SECRET OF REVERSING MATTER, AS YOU HAVE JUST WITNESSED."
Now here it's getting a bit odd to me, we have a so called peacful race that basicaly just handed out a threat of genocide against Earth and it's inhabitants. Hardly peaceful....
Perhaps this threat was more of a lesson to Earth why I'm not sure. One thing I disagree with is the thoughts that the Mysterons are a machine/computer intellegance. They say 'beings' not machine or computer.
It's alos shown as in 'white as snow' that the Mysterons can infulance objects that have not been destoryed.
It's possible that the Mysterons are really have evolved from a Corporeal being into some form of Energy beings.
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Cobalt
- Cadet
- Posts: 23
- Joined: Mon Sep 10, 2007 5:01 pm
- Location: UK
by Marion » Fri Sep 14, 2007 3:57 pm
Cobalt says:
They wouldn't be the first to do that though - its not unusual for the aggressors in any conflict to claim they were provoked into acting out of character.
The Martian Map from the TV21 annual that I posted earlier this week
http://spectrum-headquarters.com/v-web/ ... php?t=1086
states that the original Mysterons left the planet in 1901 -and left behind their complex - in working order.
I know the annuals are not always deemed reliable, but surely (she said more in hope than certainty) they wouldn't say something that was absolutely wrong on purpose?
Now here it's getting a bit odd to me, we have a so called peacful race that basicaly just handed out a threat of genocide against Earth and it's inhabitants. Hardly peaceful....
They wouldn't be the first to do that though - its not unusual for the aggressors in any conflict to claim they were provoked into acting out of character.
The Martian Map from the TV21 annual that I posted earlier this week
http://spectrum-headquarters.com/v-web/ ... php?t=1086
states that the original Mysterons left the planet in 1901 -and left behind their complex - in working order.
I know the annuals are not always deemed reliable, but surely (she said more in hope than certainty) they wouldn't say something that was absolutely wrong on purpose?
A disinclination to sparkle...
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Marion
- Cloudbase Captain
- Posts: 2970
- Joined: Mon Jun 21, 2004 10:21 pm
by Cobalt » Fri Sep 14, 2007 9:13 pm
Marion wrote:Cobalt says:Now here it's getting a bit odd to me, we have a so called peacful race that basicaly just handed out a threat of genocide against Earth and it's inhabitants. Hardly peaceful....
They wouldn't be the first to do that though - its not unusual for the aggressors in any conflict to claim they were provoked into acting out of character.
The Martian Map from the TV21 annual that I posted earlier this week
http://spectrum-headquarters.com/v-web/ ... php?t=1086
states that the original Mysterons left the planet in 1901 -and left behind their complex - in working order.
I know the annuals are not always deemed reliable, but surely (she said more in hope than certainty) they wouldn't say something that was absolutely wrong on purpose?
Hmm some of the stuff from the comics and annuals fitted nicely I think but others didn't. I mean according to OCS hihg voltage will kill Mysterons and Scarlet. But in 'Killer Whales' it's shows Scarlet holding onto a high voltage power cable in that water. I'm not sure that many of the writers had even seen the show.
I'm not sure the Mysterons are computers Marion. Such words as 'beeings' don't fit a computer even if it is an AI construct. I think the Energy beings fits better to what we know and anderson has said on two occassions that he prefears that the Mysterons are engery beings.
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Cobalt
- Cadet
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by Marion » Fri Sep 14, 2007 9:59 pm
Computers could be thought of as 'energy beings' - MIne definitely has a mind of its own... 
A disinclination to sparkle...
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Marion
- Cloudbase Captain
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by Parker Gabriel » Sun Dec 16, 2007 4:19 am
My own treatise, Mysteron Reversal Of Matter, contains my ideas on the subject.
'Nuff said--by me, at least.
'Nuff said--by me, at least.
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Parker Gabriel
- Major
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