Meta: Xi (RvB s14)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: suicide, torture

The only main character for s14 is our narrator for the season, VICk, the chaotic ‘Command’ of the Red and Blue teams who is also revealed to be an AI (implied in s5, confirmed this season). But who is VICk? In this post I will tinhat about VICk being the elusive unseen named AI fragment, Xi.

 

Because PFL inexplicably named the AI out of order vis-à-vis the Greek alphabet, it’s hard to track which AI did and did not exist. There is at least one AI name and two AI fragments unaccounted for in the diegesis, only mentioned in split-second detail shots. When Sigma is trying to determine which fragments are needed to reach metastability, one of his options is Xi:

The letter Xi also appears in the titles of the Recollection seasons replacing the letter E. Meanwhile, when Tex is going through Connie’s research, there are two AI fragments, Greed and Love, whose names are listed as Unassigned (Xi appears nowhere in that research). Most fans who have theorized about the identity of Xi align it with Love, although there is wide disagreement about who it might be: Yellow Church (or Locus implanted with Yellow Church), Florida, Caboose, Sheila/FILSS, Georgia’s AI, and VICk have all been proposed. Personally, I don’t think we need to read Florida or Caboose as secretly being AI to explain Xi, and while I can certainly appreciate such a chaotic tinhat theory as Locus-has-Yellow-Church, I think there are simpler and more plausible explanations. For me, the three leading contenders for the two missing AI are Sheila/FILSS, VICk, and Lopez.

On its face, the problem of identifying which is most likely to be Xi hinges on the difference between ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’ AI. As mentioned before, the Halo-verse differentiates between ‘dumb’ AI, computer-originated constructs incapable of sentience, and ‘smart’ AI, human brain scans that are theoretically capable of sentience (in philosophy these categories are roughly analogous to weak and strong AI respectively). Theoretically, any personality a ‘dumb’ AI accrues is due to machine learning and not an indication of sentience. Not only are these terms inherently ableist, but they also assume that value and ethical responsibility only inhere in the human-smart AI relationship, that calling them dumb AI absolves us of treating them with kindness and respect because they’re not ‘really’ alive. There is a humanist underpinning to AI research in the Halo-verse, where it’s assumed sentience, conflated with humanity, is the end goal of an AI. The RnB push back on this, especially Caboose, treating artificial beings as friends, but several of these characters raise provocative questions about what constitutes sentience.

According to a screen in 10x6, the “Indications of Sentience” are Creativity, Intelligence, Self-Awareness, and Intentionality—all traits Sheila/FILSS, Lopez, and VICk demonstrate at times. (These along with sapience and sentience [the ability to feel emotional or physical sensations] are more commonly thought to constitute consciousness, which seems to be synonymous with sentience in RvB.) To oversimplify, creativity is the ability to use divergent thinking to make something new and useful, self-awareness is the ability to recognize oneself and perform metacognition, intelligence is knowledge and the ability to learn (definitional to AI, it’s what the I stands for), and intentionality is the ability to understand what one knows and to think “about” something. This chart shows that sentience is not a useful metric for us because all three meet these criteria for sentience (as do Alpha and Epsilon):

	Creativity	Intelligence	Self-Awareness	Intentionality
Sheila/FILSS	Y (13x20)	Y	Y (5x18)	Y (8x17)
Lopez	Y (2x14)	Y	Y (17x11)	Y (6x9)
VICk	Y (15x16)	Y	Y (15x11)	Y (15x2)
α!Church	Y (Sigma)	Y	Y (1x17)	Y (Delta)
ε!Church	Y (13x20)	Y	Y (10x21)	Y (8x20)

 

By contrast, Freckles demonstrates none of these qualities. This shows that UNSC’s anthropocentric views on sentience performatively exclude AI despite evidence that several of these AI meet the criteria established. The RnB, meanwhile, accept them as complete, equal(ly ignored) members of the team. This has larger implications, but since our topic is tracking down Xi, we’ll need to base our conclusion on a different line of inquiry: which of them is the most like Church?

Sheila/FILSS is the least likely option. Gender aside, (Although there’s at least one female fragment, i.e. Tex, and a trans reading of Church is possible given events in the recovery unit, so it’s not a dealbreaker), she always addresses every iteration of Church as Director. She seems unable (or perhaps unwilling) to distinguish between them, and certainly doesn’t recognize them as part of herself (although all the fragments have this problem to an extent thanks to the torture). Her voice actor not being Burnie is also not disqualifying, but it does make it less likely. Personally, I think the biggest indicator is that neither Wash nor Epsilon remember Xi (or they would have tried to find it), so it must have been created/deployed after Epsilon, whereas we know FILSS existed before Epsilon. If FILSS was a known fragment, she would have been assimilated by the Meta. She’s also more diffuse than the fragments, more like an operating system than a physically-bound presence.

VICk and Lopez, however, we know were created (at least in their current forms) after Epsilon. Moreover, both are also voiced by Burnie, both exhibit suicidal behaviour, both are physically-bound unique instances, and both are closely associated with Church. I argue they’re both fragments—VICk is Xi, and Lopez is an unnamed fragment. In this theory, Xi, next in line for implantation after Epsilon, was instead assigned unimplanted to Florida to help him protect Alpha, and both Xi and the unnamed AI were sent to Blood Gulch with Alpha so they also would be safe and couldn’t be used as evidence. Lopez wasn’t viable enough to be named or identified in Sigma’s analysis, hence why Meta didn’t take him, and since he was tracking recovery beacons, he wouldn’t have been able to find FL in his/Tucker’s aqua armour and by extension his AI Xi.

Because Xi couldn’t be implanted, a dedicated terminal for him would have to have been constructed, which could be where we get the Virtual Intelligence Computer, or VIC. We know that VICk isn’t bound to the VIC because Dylan was able to remove him from it. He certainly wouldn’t be the first AI fragment to take on his own name: Church (Alpha, Epsilon), Tex (Beta), Gary (Gamma), O’Malley (Omega). (And this is a stretch, but perhaps the reason he adds a K to his name is a reference to the /ks/ sound of Xi.) The justification for VICk being the love fragment follows EruptionFang’s argument (although he considers Xi to be greed and assigned to Georgia, with VICk the unnamed fragment)—his speech in s15 is a parody of Epsilon's in s13 as he also sacrifices himself to save the world. Moreover, he often talks about his (fake) family, has more personality than some of the other fragments (though that’s partially the power cord being unplugged), and has an intermediate accent between the Director and Alpha (SERIOUSLY WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN WHERE THE FUCK THE DIRECTOR’S ACCENT WENT IN THE FRAGMENTS WHY DO NONE OF THEM HAVE IT WHY DOESN’T CAROLINA HAVE IT ROOSTER TEETH EXPLAIN—) The other elegant consequence of VICk being Xi and assigned to Florida is that it explains how cheery and creepily personable FL is. FL doesn’t talk throughout the flashbacks, but he makes Donut-level innuendos towards his subordinates when in Blood Gulch, perhaps showing VICk rubbing off on him like the other AI do.

Meanwhile, I argue Lopez is Alpha’s greed. In favour of Lopez being a fragment, Church can easily control Lopez’s body without conflict, and is in fact able to turn off the Spanish setting. This is either because Alpha has more control than Lopez, or because Lopez purposefully doesn’t initiate English.exe because he likes that no one can understand a word he says, making him superior to them. Either way, the fact that Lopez and Alpha shared a body for at least a season feels like a strong indicator they’re closely related. Moreover, Wash indicates in s6 that robot building kits are not standard Freelancer equipment, with the implication being it was put in Blood Gulch to house Church should Jimmy ever die. As the other two kits (Frankie Z. and Robot #2) didn’t have on-board intelligences, which fits with this purpose, the existence of Lopez is strange.

As for greed, he’s very possessive over the equipment he maintains, although partially this is because they keep fucking breaking stuff. Also, for most of BGC, he’s the villain along with Doc in their plans to take over the world. Lopez’s ambitions for a robot revolution are a central aspect of his early characterization. Then again, I could just as easily argue Lopez is the love fragment: he sings Sheila a love song and he clearly cares about his friends, however begrudgingly. I would argue that as the last fragment created, he’s also the weakest, as by that point there wasn’t much left of Alpha to break off. It’s plausible that greed was simply the easiest attribute to identify instead of being the actual core of his personality. Church and Lopez have very similar characterizations (jaded, sarcastic, depressed, bitchy), but Lopez is slightly more idealistic, as shown by Lopez 2.0 at his birth and again his revolutionary dreams.

The strongest counter-argument against Lopez being a fragment is the Lorenzo problem, although this raises larger questions about the Blues and Reds (BnR) in general. The BnR were sim troopers before the RnB and are the team on which they were modeled. They also have a robot, the Italian-speaking Lorenzo. However, if Wash’s assertion that robot kits aren’t standard Freelancer equipment is true, and the robots were bodies for Church, why do the BnR have a robot? A Doylist explanation is that the writers forgot and it’s funnier, but what is the Watsonian explanation? If the BnR were assembled that way by accident, why did they need a robot? Regardless, the existence of the Lorenzo AI throws a wrench in the idea that Lopez is a fragment.

(UNLESS LORENZO IS THE GREED AND LOPEZ IS SOME OTHER THIRD THING alright I need to turn off the galaxy brain)

 

Works Cited

EruptionFang. “The 2 MISSING Alpha Fragments & Sigma’s FLAWED Plan (Red vs Blue Theory).” YouTube, 10 Apr. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDngsdi0TlY