Meta: Memory Is the Key (RvB Relocated, s7)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: PTSD, torture, DID, suicide, self-harm

It is fitting that the arc where memory becomes so central is called Recollection, which can mean both remembering and collecting again the various Re-names of this era’s seasons (in order, “Reconstruction”, Relocated, “Recreation”, and “Revelation”). The fragmentation of Leonard Church, revealed in s6, retroactively serves as the catalyst for all the events of the series, and reintegration of the fractured self becomes a major theme throughout RvB’s run. The Meta re-collecting Church’s fragments in the search for metastability is what ultimately ends any serious adherence to the rivalry between Reds and Blues and leads to the destruction of Project Freelancer by its own ghosts, or should I say AI.

 

In the world of RvB, there are “dumb AI”, such as FILSS or Lopez (allegedly, but we’ll get back to that) and “smart AI”, which are closer to sentience and are based off a brain scan of an existing person (sidestepping for a moment the ableist underpinnings of these designations). Smart AI are highly regulated, and PFL had been issued one full AI by the UNSC: Alpha. (I know Alpha and Epsilon both prefer to be called Church, I only refer to them by their designations here for clarity.) Alpha, it turns out, was actually based on the Director himself, which already should have sent up ethical red flags in the assignment process but whatever. AI have relatively short lives (a few years) before they undergo “rampancy” and deteriorate. Rampancy has three observed phases (melancholia, anger, jealousy) and one theoretical phase, metastability, where the AI overcomes the decline of rampancy and becomes sentient. As Aiden pointedly reminds Sigma, “no AI has ever achieved such a state” (10x6).

The core trauma at the heart of PFL’s inception is the death of Allison, who was the Director’s wife and Carolina’s mother (a fact few of them knew as of 14x13). When the Director’s brain was copied to make the Alpha AI, this trauma also transferred to the new being, and the pain of its memory led to a split between Alpha and what became Beta, better known as Tex. The emergence of Tex is less a function of Alpha abjecting an unwanted part of himself per se (though Tex does accuse him of that in 8x17) but more intra-active (see Barad), only becoming separate through her increasing disconnect from Alpha’s central programming. They way Epsilon describes it to her, Tex actually birthed herself: “You were so strong, you made a whole other person” (9x20). Her split from Alpha is what gave the Director the idea to fragment him further.

Wash describes the fragmentation process as “reverse-engineering a multiple-personality disorder” (6x16; today called Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID), because the director tortures Alpha with nightmare scenarios and Alpha forces himself to forget the parts of himself that cause or remember the pain. The Director partitions these fragments off from Alpha and presents them to the Freelancers as independent entities, even using these entities (especially Sigma, Gamma, and Omega) to further torture Alpha. Thus “memories torture themselves into forgetting by disguising their collaborative interdependence” (Roach xi). When the Director mentions Allison in a room full of the fragments, everyone implanted with a fragment collapses as the AI meltdown. Even with Beta safely partitioned off, the name “Allison” is still a trigger for all of them.

When PFL is shut down, the Director becomes even more obsessed and spirals into increasingly disturbing attempts both to avenge her and to revive her. These revival attempts create an army of Tex clones and a tortured copy of Beta. There are parallel scenes where Tex visits Alpha and Epsilon visits other-Beta in the electronic ether (10x19 and 21 respectively). The one being tortured at the moment cannot remember the other (or even their own name), while the other comforts them, emphasizing how the Director’s abuse of both of them was one and the same, albeit for different reasons.

The drive to remember is just as central to RvB as the drive to forget: as Delta reminds Wash, “memory is the key” (6x11). The reason Wash can help Alpha is because his AI, Epsilon, inherited all of Alpha’s memories when they were partitioned. This means Wash knows all about the torture and is incentivized to help Alpha take down what remains of PFL. Meanwhile, the Meta, former Agent Maine who is the main antagonist of Recollection, gets its name from the search for metastability. All of the AI fragments are obsessed with finding the Alpha, but Sigma especially is driven by the search for metastability, which can only occur if they are a complete AI again. This is why he brainwashes Maine into collecting all the fragments. As the fragments are captured, the previously-captured ones appear so they can greet the newly-acquired fragment, a move of unification that culminates with their joining with Alpha in the finale of s6 just as Wash sets off the EMP that destroys them. When Epsilon, the only remaining (known) fragment, is discovered to have been kept by the Reds and Blues, Wash and Maine are forced to team up to retrieve him in s7-8 so that he can be used as evidence in the UNSC probe into PFL.

Eventually, with the help of the Reds and Blues (which now includes Wash), Epsilon and Carolina are finally able to track down and confront the Director with his crimes. When the weight of Epsilon’s emotions overpowers him, the various fragments appear in sequence to express their particular traumatic role in Epsilon’s (integrated) memory, united in their grievance against the Director:

Epsilon: NO, you’ve had your fucking time. You have to answer for what you did: to the Meta, to Washington, to Carolina, to me, and to HER, to Texas.

Director: Hello, Epsilon. You came all this way just to see me?

Epsilon: I’m here to remember what you’ve done; somebody has to.

Carolina: Church—

Epsilon: Not all of us got off scot free, Carolina.

E-Delta: He was brilliant, and

E-Theta: We trusted him, but

E-Gamma: He lied to us, he twisted and

E-Omega: Tortured us, and used us,

E-Sigma: Manipulated us for his own purposes and for what? For this, this shadow?

Epsilon: He needs to pay. (10x22)

Carolina does not kill the Director, but says her goodbyes to her father and leaves her pistol, knowing he will do it himself. Alpha and Epsilon’s moments of self-sacrifice (e.g. 6x19, 13x20) are not simply heroics—though they are certainly that—but stem from a long history of suicidal ideation and self-harm beginning with the Director. We are introduced to Epsilon with the story of how he “went insane and killed [him]self inside [Wash’s] brain,” (Recovery One, Part 4), and combined with the revelation that the AI the Director is torturing is a copy of his own brain, the centrality of self-harm to Church’s method of dealing with trauma is palpable. In his fight via passive-aggressive letter with Hargrove, where we learn for the first time that the Director is Church, the Director obliquely admits the horror of what he’s done: “[…] but there is no punishment for the terrors we inflict on ourselves” (6x19). What the Director fails to realize and Epsilon finally learns is that these terrors are not just inflicted on himself, but also on those around him who care about him (or that he has power over).

For Church (i.e. Alpha and Epsilon), those people are his found family, Reds and Blues. The thing that finally unites them, once Sarge finally processes that the war between Reds and Blues is fake, is their duty to their friends Church and Tex: “For all we know, Tex and Church are dead. That means we're the only ones who know what's happened; the only ones who can prevent them from covering it up” (8x18). The Reds and Blues are bonded by shared experience and shared trauma, but they are also bound by their responsibility as witnesses to Church and Tex’s abuse at the hands of Project Freelancer (Taylor 211). In fact, as the Reds and Blues fight increasingly powerful government entities, whistleblowing and witnessing become vital driving motives for their continued work together. If “memory is the key” (6x11) to unlocking the complete, horrifying story of Church’s past, it is also the key to uniting the team in a community of memory and bringing PFL to justice (Taylor 193-94).

 

Works Cited

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2006.

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Columbia UP, 1996.

Taylor, Diane. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke UP, 2003.