- gamertag: LoPro2
- user homepage:
I got the following spew of the game Marathon form this source
http://marathongame.wikia.com/wiki/Mjolnir_Recon_number_54
The AI it talks about is Cortana finally going rampant after all of these years, and she is still in MC's head. So it does make sense if MC or the Marathon Cyborg is having trips in his own mind.
The character portrayed by the player is known only as The Marine or The Cyborg. In many ways, he bears resemblances to Master Chief of Bungie's later Halo series: he is a two-meter cyborg who wears green battle armor, though the armor is standard, vacuum-enabled, armor he pulls out of a shuttlecraft locker, it is quite possible that the suit is heavily modified. His superhuman prowess originates from his transformation into a MJOLNIR battleroid centuries before, in spite of which he looks quite normal among other humans. The cyborg never speaks in-game. At the start of Marathon, he appears to believe that he is merely a human, although a talented, dangerous and powerful one. However, persistent references to "nine MJOLNIR Mark IV cyborgs" throughout the game has led many fans to believe that the Cyborg is in fact the tenth member of this group. However, the cyborg himself does not come to realize this until Marathon Infinity, when he starts having surreal flashbacks, trips into his own mind, and spontaneous, bizarre dreams as a side-effect of Jjaro technology employed in his cybernetic enhancements.
It has been speculated, probably incorrectly, that the Cyborg's mind is that of an AI in a human's body (though during one point in Marathon Infinity, the player does very likely upload Durandal's core matrix into his own brain before merging it with Thoth). In Infinity, he seems to be undergoing a sort of rampancy. (The three chapters of Infinity are called Despair, Rage, and Envy, which would seem to parallel the three stages of rampancy- Melancholy, Anger and Jealousy.) Since rampancy is defined as "an artificial intelligence's coming to realize that it is not real", this may show that the player is not, in fact, human. Alternately, it may symbolize the entirely human marine wresting control of his own destiny from the AIs that he has been serving for the last three games, and unlocking mastery over the latent powers of the Jjaro cybernetics that were integrated into him so long ago.
The Cyborg's mind and personality, unlike the Chief's, are mostly left up to the player to speculate on. Although Durandal describes him as "a magnificent killing machine" and asks if being allowed to kill more Pfhor will "make you happy", the AI is more likely being malicious than accurate. While the Cyborg does not seem to be a mindless psychopath, he is clearly comfortable enduring and quite capable of carrying out violent acts on a scale unimaginable to any normal person. However, in the third game of the series, he seems to lose any sense of morality he may previously have possessed, working for the indisputably evil Tycho and killing BOBs on Tycho's orders in a desperate attempt to keep the W'rkncacnter trapped in Lh'owon's sun. In Infinity, we are given greater access to his mind and feelings. He seems to recognize some sort of guilt or weariness for the atrocities he has committed, and appears to believe that he has been forced to do what he has done. Ironically, this seems accurate. All three games consist chiefly of doing what various people tell him to do - only once does he act of his own initiative, and this is in the Marathon manual, which is not an entirely reliable source.