Exo (Destiny)
The Exo are a machine race that features in Destiny.
Contents |
History
Exominds was mechanical beings created by humanity during the Golden Age where they were creations of the Clovis Bray Corporation. The Exo Project sought to digitally process a human consciousness and place it within a mechanical shell. Early experiments in encoding the human mind faced many challenges. One was the phenomena known as Dissociative Exomind Rejection (DER) whereby the nascent Proto-Exo's developed serious symptoms of cognitive disorder which eventually led to their death. This was attributed to the human mind being unable to recouncile its presence within a new body.
It was the discovery of the K1 artifact that changed everything for he project where the paracausal force was named 'Clarity' by Clovis Bray I. He wet forth on an expedition to Europa in a search for the secret for immortality that was promised by 'Clarity'. Once there, he received instructions from a mysterious entity that was called 'Clarity Control' where this dictated that he needed a specimen of the Vex race. Thus, he came to steal a Vex from the Ishtar Collective where he used it to build a gate to the Vex Forge Star megastructure. Whilst there, he studied samples of the Vex radiolarian fluid and observed its energy with 'Clarity'. From this, he created a 'Clarity'-altered radiolarian fluid that Clovis I named Alkahest that helped bypass the Exomind's loop/billboard/crash problem. However, this was not a permanent solution to the Dissociative Exomind Rejection matter.
Clovis I discovered that DER could be staved off by two methods. The first was through a 'reboot', which involved wiping the mind's memories post-transfer so that it would not remember its old body, and so better accept the new one. Despite the term 'reboot', also referred to as 'resets' or 'memory wipes', the process did not actually remove memories, and only blocked off associative access to them. This was done because memory engrams were stored in many areas of the brain, causing them to be difficult to locate and delete. While effective, it was not a cure, and the reboot procedure would often be repeated several times over the Exo's life. It would also be used for functional purposes, such as restoring Exos whose minds had become 'compromise'" such as by Vex infection. Successive reboots cumulatively eroded an Exo's mind and their ability to retain any memories at all, with excessive numbers of reboots causing insanity. The Clovis Bray corporation estimated that the maximum number of times an Exo could be safely rebooted was around 20. As reboots did not technically remove any memories, Exos sometimes remembered traces of them. This was especially the case for Guardians, and some could gain access to these buried memories by purposefully dying. By default, Exos had a number appended to their names that signified the number of reboots they had experienced, with the original human used as the zero-index. This was inspired by the number scheme used by AI trainers to denote successive iterations of an AI, such as with Aivanti-3. Hence, to use Clovis I's example, the human Mohammed would be followed by the Exo Mohammed-1, Mohammed-2 after one reset and so on. This number was stored in the Exo's memory as hardware, and so could not be forgotten.
Clovis Bray later founded Eventide as a Europan colony that was used to house clients that awaited uploading into Exo bodies.
During the Collapse, a number of Exos were present on the colony ship Exodus Indigo, which carried a group of surviving Ishtar Collective researchers to Neptune in an attempt to evade the Black Fleet. After arriving on the terraformed surface of the gas giant, the colonists discovered a paracausal entity known as the Veil, which had previously been hidden away on the planet by the Hive God Savathûn. The Veil emitted electromagnetic signals that produced psychological disturbances in the Exos present, causing them to hallucinate and in some cases enter a state of 'billboarding' similar to that reported by Clovis Bray I during the initial development of the Exos. Most, if not all, of the Exos present on the mission eventually succumbed to the Veil's influence, entering a state of brain death. Later on, Maya Sundaresh would use some of these brain-dead Exos in an experiment involving a prototype Veil interface, in which the Veil's psychic emanations were channeled through an assembly of catatonic Exos and funneled into a central recipient, along with a mental imprint provided by Maya herself. The central Exo subject in this case was Lakshmi-2, who Maya had known prior to coming to Neptune. Lakshmi regained consciousness following this experiment, but her mind appeared to have become a total or partial copy of Maya's, sharing some of her memories and speaking in Maya's voice.
In the Post-Collapse era, many Exo's in the resultant Dark Age joined alongside their organic brethren in helping build the Last City with a number of their kind becoming Guardians.
When the Darkness invaded the Sol system, the Fallen Eramis of the House of Salvation sought to harness the power afforded by the pyramid ships. This saw them arriving on Europa where they also sought to secure the Deep Stone Crypt and create Fallen Exominds.
Overview
In appearance, the Exo's were robotic beings that were designed in the form of their human creators.
The reboots did not entirely wipe away their past memories with some remaining that was amplified, scrambled and reshuffled like fragments.
Many of their kind traced their origins to the Deep Stone Crypt that was built on the moon of Europa. The Exo's believed in a famous subroutine known as the Deep Stone Crypt that was believed to had seeded the first of their kind's consciousness. Some of their number experienced a flashback of the subroutine that took the form of a dream where a tower lay on a black plain. During this moment, some of the dreamers made it to the tower in peace whilst others were forced to slay an army of everyone they ever met in order to reach it.
Members
- Ada-1 : a female Exo who was a survivor from the Golden Age and the caretaker of the Black Armory.
- Banshee-44 : a male Exo gunsmith who resided at the Tower in the Last City.
- Cayde-6 : a male Exo Hunter Guardian who joined the Vanguard that protected the Last City.
- Lakshmi-2 : a female Exo who came to serve as a Director of the Future War Cult and represented a militant faction within the Last City.
- Saint-14 :
- Exo Stranger : a mysterious female Exo with no ties to the Guardians who was involved secretly in the efforts to stop the Darkness and aided the Young Wolf by revealing the presence of the dark heart of the Darkness in the Black Garden on Mars.
Notes
- The Exo were created by Bungie and featured as a playable race in the setting of Destiny.
Appearances
- Destiny:
- Destiny 2:
External Links
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