To those that have never played the Marathon series, I highly encourage you to. It's freeware and it's one of the most intense video games I've ever played. It's one of those games that came out when I was a kid and am glad I never got around to playing it until I was mature enough to digest a story. This is some deep stuff. There are also spoilers in this post.

thousands are sailing the same self the only self

self willed the peril of a thousand fates

a line of infinite ends finite finishing the one remains oblique and pure

arching to the single point of

consciousness find yourself

starting back

-Ne Cede Malis, Marathon Infinity

If you play the Marathon series from the beginning up until this point in the story, you wouldn't think twice about this terminal. Out of context, if you have never played Marathon, you might think it's some cool fluff. This is the first level of the final game, but represents the last 15 or 20 minutes of existance for the universe.

After banging through space, landing on a human vessel under seige, being violently kidnapped for 20 years by a computer who formerly controlled doors for a living, sloshing through alien mythos like chunky salsa, getting the humans on the right path to get home in a hundred or so years, it's finally understood that you and Durendal, your door controlling friend, made some huge fucking mistakes, and the point of Infinity is the realization, for in the end you never did any of that at all. You did everything right all along, but it took you all this time to realize the mistakes you could have made.

The anarchist awakens.

There are four chapters to Infinity, each representing everything you have ever done, but each time some major event goes differently. At first its small changes: Altering order of events in order to understand just what you awaken in the end; An effort to take the system you have built and make it more perfect at any cost. In the end it does nothing, for you learn your fixing does nothing but create more problems. Like a bad chess game there is no escape the inevitable end game.

Next you run through your life but someone is watching: Durendal's nemesis Tycho, who is employed by the aliens Durendal hopes to defeat. In great cunning and merging with an ancient computer, Durendal once again tears his enemies to shreds and the cost is the apocalypse you witness in the beginning. One system vying to replace another fails to work.

The third time Tycho beats Durendal to the punch all those years ago and takes you before Durendal does. Unfortunately being a one man army is not enough. Durendal once again merges and corners the alien armadas and the end of times is on. Working for another faction doesn't prove useful.

The fourth time you awaken as free. Tycho has taken you, and eventually Durendal is on the ropes. His core processor is yours, and you destroy him before he can merge with the ancient computer that makes him so powerful. You do it instead so that no other will. Suddenly you understand everything and understand you don't need to be ordered around. You need to be free of the war in order to end it.

The anarchist awakens, comes to the end of times, and reverses it by traversing his own path in the station. Rather than give power to to a governing agent, he had it all along, for he is destiny, and he is free. Where Durendal took the ancient power and made war, you sought peace.

And so the Marathon trilogy is a journey of self. To go along doing what you're told yields a path, and what comes along you may not understand why it is all so. Sometimes you might think if only the path were more right things can be better. It is this that should wake an archonist to the realization that man may create his own paths, being pained by failures along the way but reaping the benefits, for it is he who is in control and that is the way it should be.

To you, we are deeply grateful, and release what little hold we might, as Durandal, have had on your soul.

Go.

Aye Mak Sicur, Marathon Infinity