Ghost Song (part 2)
So, the lore. The story behind the planet, and why it's so ruined and full of wonders and horrors in not-remotely-equal measure.
2. Warhammer 40k Only Wishes It Could be this Batshit
Over the course of the five in-game days that the Deadsuit spends shooting zombies and gathering ship components, she makes the acquaintance of a being named Saymund. He's not forthcoming with information, at least at first, but he does tell you that he and his brother are the last survivors of this planet's native civilization.
He also recognizes your rig as a deadsuit and, based on that, asks if you're a bounty hunter. If you are, he says, then he's going to have to aerosolize you. Nothing personal.
Fortunately, while the Deadsuit doesn't remember who she is yet at this point in the game, she's pretty certain she's not a bounty hunter. Saymund is quite eager for company that aren't bounty hunters in need of disintegration, so you and the surviving members of the Gambler clan are a rare pleasure for him.
Also, during most of the first few times you meet Saymund, he's in a certain subsurface area near the Gambler crash, filled with ominous red eyelike devices, an enormous red door that no weapon in the game can blast open, and this music.
He only tells you a little bit at a time, and only as you make real progress toward repairing the Gambler. The reason for his reluctance is never explicitly stated, but by the end it's pretty easy to infer.
Also, this is where the story gets crazy.
I actually thought that Saymund was supposed to be a babbling lunatic for a decent stretch of the game, until his account received outside confirmation.
...
The planet Lorian was once home to a fantastically advanced humanoid civilization. I say "humanoid," but there are implications throughout the game that the galaxy of Ghost Song might actually be one of those distant future posthuman radiation settings; I'll get back to this possibility and why it's important in the final part of this review. For now, what matters is that Lorian was incredibly technologically advanced and prosperous, and that there was a man born there by the name of Jezicoe. Jezicoe was wealthy and powerful. Reading between the lines, it's likely that he was a political leader of some kind, a king or a megacorp tycoon or something of that nature, and that he may have had a figurative or literal cult following. Anyway, Jezicoe was also a genius in his own right, and a great patron of Lorian's scientific and technological development. And, one day, he and his scientists made the discovery of a millennium: ghosts were real.
Lorian's people were not superstitious. Many refused to believe the evidence when it was presented. Jezicoe and his followers were not discouraged so easily, though. They kept studying these apparent post-corporeal continuations of consciousness. They found that, whatever they were exactly, these ghostlike remnants only lingered around their place of death for a short time before flying up toward Lorian's sun. A specific region of Lorian's sun, actually.
This discovery prompted Jezicoe's group to devise sensors that could penetrate deeper into the star than anyone had bothered to scan before. They found that within that region of their sun, hidden behind thousands of kilometers of burning hydrogen, there was a titanic wormlike creature. They also discovered that the ghosts were all being sucked down its throat.
Subsequently, it was discovered that every star in the observable universe had a giant worm - a creature that came to be dubbed a gornah - hiding inside of it, and that all sentient beings who died anywhere for any reason had their ghosts eaten by the closest one.
Panics were spread. Existential crises were suffered. However, at the same time, plans were planned. And egos - vast, overfed egos - were indulged. That Jezicoe truly wanted to save the souls of the galaxy's dead, I don't doubt. That alone makes him much better than our own world's ruling elites. His decision to make his own soul, specifically, the lynchpin of how to go about this, I cannot make nearly so charitable assumptions about.
The game gives the Deadsuit's occupant a brief look back in time at that fateful event. I find it worth mentioning that our one representative example of Jezicoe's ingroup is an attractive, probably much younger, woman who worships the ground he walks on.
They "killed" his body in a particular manner, using instruments developed by observing the ghorna, and shunted what was released into a set of receptacles. Two thirds of what had been Jezicoe were housed in robotic constructs. Deadsuits. The final third of what could be called his "ghost" was allowed to fly free and be pulled into Lorian's star and down the gornah's gullet.
Whatever gornahs normally do to the ghosts they swallow - whatever imprisonment or digestive process or who even knows what - it couldn't do it this time. The ghost was still tethered to a pair of physical objects far away on the planet.
It choked on him.
Officially sanctioned, fully-canonical depiction of Ghost Song's backstory events.
The worm wasn't killed, but it was unable to ingest any more ghosts as long as the obstruction remained. With the hardiness of Jezicoe's deadsuits, it could remain pretty much indefinitely.
The three parts of Jezicoe, it is explained, were not equal or equivalent to one another. They contained different aspects of him. The game never says what exactly went into each third, but it gives the player some clues.
One part of him kept all his memories, and acts more or less person-like. This one was installed in a humanoid deadsuit, presumably so it could continue living Jezicoe's life and/or leading his faction. It named itself Saymund.
The second part of him was sent into the gornah's throat. The game never lets you see or interact with this part of Jezicoe. It's anyone's guess what aspects of his identity it contained.
The third part of him was housed in a hulking, nigh-indestructible titan of a deadsuit. Implied to be the strongest part of what emerged when they killed his original body, and explicitly given the strongest hardware. It toiled singlemindedly, from its "birth" onward, toward the salvation of the galaxy's dead. Its mind, despite having a vast computer-enhanced intellect at its disposal for problem-solving purposes, doesn't seem able to keep very much else besides that in it for very long at a time. This entity was simply named the Construct. Ingame, Saymund refers to it as his "brother."
You can occasionally spot him wandering around studying a nanotech mutation, or staring appraisingly at something in the sky. Get too close, and he'll shut your suit down with a glance before finishing his business and teleporting off, and you won't manage to laboriously reboot yourself until after he's gone.
The ghosts of the Lorian system were now free to wander where they willed. They seemed to like roaming around underwater, in particular, where they sometimes cause eerie lights to appear and flit around in the murk; Saymund claims that the pressure makes it easier for them to imagine they can feel something again, but he doesn't truly know that. When pressed on the subject by the player, he seems slightly sheepish when he admits that he's never actually figured out how to communicate with the free-floating ghosts. And rather defensively asserts that he's still sure that they'd prefer this to the worm. A few of them, he says, have been observed flying away from the Lorian system. He wishes he could warn them that the other stars all have gornahs with unclogged throats in them, but he cannot.
Anyway. Some time after Jezicoe's experiment, exotic meteorites began to strike Lorian. Where they landed, strange, sickly yellow flora bloomed. And then, from that flora, vicious insectlike monsters and infectious flying spores were born, and the bodies of the dead near them rose again under the command of a hostile alien force. These creatures, dubbed the roslock, infested the planet so quickly that no one was even sure what was happening before they were entrenched and laying siege to Lorianite civilization.
Much of Lorian's population was either killed, or evacuated the planet. What became of the refugees since then has been lost to history, or at least to the history Saymund knows about. Saymund and Construct were among those who remained and fought the roslock. They turned Jezico's old organization into an army, his scientific and industrial resources repurposed for war. Eventually, and at great cost, the roslock infestation was contained. Some parts of the planet seemed like they could be salvaged.
Then, an army of bio-robotic demons teleported onto the planet. They identified themselves as the "devil-stalkers," and demanded that Saymund and Construct die and unclog the worm at once.
The second stage of the war, against the devil-stalkers, destroyed all that remained of Lorian's civilization. Knowing that their own continued survival was the only thing keeping the gornah muzzled, Saymund and Construct prioritized their own survival above all else (convenient, wasn't it, that Jezicoe arranged for things to be that way?). They upgraded themselves with new weapons and defences, unleashed new plagues of autonomous weapons, sheltered in new and more advanced bunkers. The devil-stalkers were finally broken, reduced to a few wounded and exhausted stragglers skulking in the nanotech-and-roslock-infested wilderness.
Saymund warns you to run away if you ever see a living one. According to lead developer Matt White, while there were plans early on in development for devil stalkers to be highly challenging optional bosses, the final version of the lore has the stalkers being so much stronger than your Deadsuit that you'd have no realistic chance of outfighting one.
Saymund and Construct were the only survivors remaining on their side.
...
Left unsaid is whether any of the last Lorianite holdouts were tempted to give in to the enemy's demands and started looking at Construct's infrastructure in a way that he and Saymund didn't like. Thinking about it, it seems likely that some did.
Did I mention that Saymund only parts with bits of his story gradually, after repeated encounters, and is reluctant to go into any detail at all about some parts of it? Yes, well.
...
The broken stragglers of the devil-stalkers pleaded for the two to please just kill themselves so they could declare mission accomplished and go home. Construct, who had done the bulk of the slaughtering and of the technological innovation that enabled it, ignored them and went back to studying the forces behind all these waves of monsters. Saymund, being far more conversational than his brother, cordially invited the devil-stalkers to cope and seethe until their batteries run out and they all starve to death among the ruins. They took him up on it.
In the centuries following the defeat of the devil-stalker army, bounty hunters have occasionally trickled into the infested nightmare-ruins of Lorian. Many of them are consciousnesses housed in deadsuits, similar to the ones invented on Lorian, but clearly coming from different tech bases. There's a massive bounty on Jezicoe, and a person only needs to kill one of his postorganic selves to unchoke the gornah and claim it. However, these bounty hunters have never come as close to actually achieving this as the roslock and devil-stalkers did. Saymund can obliterate most comers by himself. For the rare few who are too strong for him, Construct emerges from the lab-fortress and makes the interruption in his work stop existing.
When a bounty hunter dies, its body or deadsuit usually gets taken over by nearby roslock and twisted into some flavor of boss zombie in short order. A few deadsuits, left by failed bounty hunters (or perhaps in some cases created by Construct to prolong the last few Lorianite warriors' participation in the war; it's never specified if they produced additional deadsuits during the war, but it seems likely that they did), have managed to avoid this infestation and are strewn around the ruins, half-buried and in varying levels of functionality, if only someone were to install another ghost in them.
...
Now, the big question that's still left after all this is why you're even on this planet. Saymund only tells you near the end of the game, after you've already gathered all the ship parts and have only one thing left to take care of.
The reason that ships like the Gambler have been crashing all over the planet for the last few centuries is because of a sensor system that Saymund and Construct set up to track the movements of ghosts in the low-orbital region, as a minor part of their day-to-day monitoring. It hasn't really been too relevant to their actual projects for quite some time.
An unintended side-effect of this sensor system causes the ship AI's used by certain lower-tech civilizations to malfunction.
Saymund has been having second thoughts about some aspects of their work, for reasons that you can probably infer. Construct had no patience for this, and has since thrown him out of the fortress and will no longer speak to him unless there's an emergency. The controls for the sensors are inside of the fortress.
That's the source of conflict for the primary plot. That's what your deadsuited Gambler crewwoman needs to do. Turn off a tertiary sensor device and make sure it stays off for at least an hour or so.
...
What's that? You want to take part in this war among the space gods? You want to end the Lorian stalemate? You want to so much as get a look at the gornah?
Hahahahahaha who the fuck do you even think you are?
