The Messengers

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This article is about one of Layla Hassan's files. You may be looking for group of unidentified Isu.

The Messengers were notes documented by Layla Hassan in 2017 detailing her thoughts on hearing the recording "The Empirical Truth" while reliving the genetic memories of the Medjay Bayek of Siwa.

Shortly after establishing contact with Shaun Hastings and Rebecca Crane in 2020, Layla reviewed the Portable Animus HR-8 logs of her "time" in Ptolemaic Egypt and rediscovered her notes on the six recordings made in various Temples by unidentified Isu messengers. A week before meeting the pair in New England, North America, Layla sent the files to Rebecca with the offer to contact her if anything caught the Assassin's interest.

Files

Isu Messengers IIsu Messengers IIIsu Messengers IIIIsu Messengers IVIsu Messengers VIsu Messengers VI

Rebecca,

Before we meet at the site, I want you to see these.

Last week, I reviewed the logs from my time with Bayek and came across some old notes. In the "years" I explored Cleopatra's Egypt, I stumbled across six Isu temples, most of which were buried beneath pharaonic tomb sites. Each temple contained an Isu message clearly meant for one with the ability to read genetic memories. I was the lucky one. I don't believe they were intended for Bayek himself, as he seemed wholly unaware of the messages as they played. They may have been encoded in a way that only someone with an Animus could see them.

It's been a few years since I last heard these messages, so my memory is foggy. But the notes I scribbled down have a clarity that I trust. Might be something to all this. I don't know. Often I grasp outside of my area of expertise. I am enthusiastic but often wrong. Let me know if something else strikes you.

Layla

*

Message 1 (Excerpt):
"Layers upon layers of reality, each bledding into the next. Which is real, and which is not? What if none are real? What if everything you know is false? We ran thousands of simulations, searching for the right version, searching for Desmond. Each one of them felt real. But there's no way of truly knowing, is there? Not for sure. Anything can be simulated, and finding the answer could mean erasure."

Teasing the Assassin maxim "Nothing is true..." Must be careful not to confuse truths with facts however, a language game you will always lose. Though we may stumble in our attempts to interpret it, the world, the universe, reality, what have you, it is always "out there". I believe that, simulated or no.

We could imagine a dozen nested simulations, and each one, on the level of itself, would constitute a full reality. Wolfram, via Conway, suggests that the universe is a giant cellular automata.

And further, there is a point where the difference between simulated and real is meaningless. If the universe were a simulation, what would it matter? The simulations qua simulation itself would be weal, and therefore everything within it would be real within the confines of the simulation.

Say a scientist were able to simulate pain by inducing only a few neurons to fire, no physical harm. "I am in pain!" the subject says. "No, you only believe you are," says the scientist. This is meaningless, as is this: "You thought you were in pain, but you were mistaken."

Message 2 (Excerpt):
"No surprise. You were designed to have boundaries, after all. And one cannot speak of that which one cannot conceive. The Code. Equations that define life. They are nestled deep within every star, and every mote of dust. Every second that passes is a word, a symbol. All part of an intricate yet simple language existing within the framework of time itself. Is is the one rule which applies to us all. Immutable, inescapable."

We know this: humans were the instruments of an earlier species, the Isu. Resist the temptation to say superior. Different. They were better suited to some tasks, ill-suited to others. Possessed of a mind that we cannot know. But that does not get us anywhere. What is it like to be an Isu? What is it like to be a bat?

The implication that the Isu could "read" time is interesting, but if humans could read time, would it necessarily be in the same manner and for the same purpose? Whether constructed, or evolved, or a little of both as wee are, we cannot be said to have been "built" to achieve the same ends. A round disk on its edge is a wheel; on its side, a plate. How we use something can determine its value and its perceived purpose.

Message 3 (Excerpt):
"Break the code. Break the node. These walls tell of a tragic story. A story we transcribed on our structures, on our artifacts. A story we could not alter. A mystery, defying us, in plain sight. We tried. Our scholars and scientists. Poets and physicists. Bright minds. Rebellious hearts. They all tried so hard to bring about change. They... We all failed. None could change what we discovered, the stories written into the walls of these rooms. The reader has no power. He is but an observer. But the author... the author invents the future. The author owns the future."

The Toba catastrophe, a super-volcanic event paired with a mass-coronal ejection, was the beginning of the end for the Isu. It changed the earth's environment, lowered its available oxygen levels, and generally fucked things up. The Isu never recovered. By our estimates, the last remaining Isu died just a century after the catastrophe. From that point forward, humans—their creation—ruled the roost.

This disaster was not unforeseen. Isu scientists had known about their impending doom for years, perhaps decades, before the catastrophe occurred. To protect themselves, they worked feverishly to find a solution. Six methods they tried, but due to a toxic combination of hubris, political infighting, and bad luck, all six failed. The final method proved the most promising and was nearly complete when tragedy struck. It was this method that Desmond Miles revived when he saved the world from a second solar flare in December 2012.

This voice laments the compounded failures of their species to save themselves, bit the truth is broader than that. They, with Desmond, saved us. Success deferred.

Then this message, break the code, break the node. Insistent, and very puzzling.

Message 4 (Excerpt):
"Linear continuity is a simulations that allows for variations. Within the linear continuity, there are nodes. Chokepoints. Moments where algorithms converge the flows of superposed possibilities to a single moment where only one absolute truth is possible. Paths are fluid, continuous. Nodes are static, changeless. And the wave function collapses the paths into notes which branch out. Again, and again, and again. Can you feel the wave collapsing, trying to course-correct Desmond's act of defiance? The incoming node needs the world to end. The algorithms have been carving the flow of possibilities towards that end for over one hundred years now. Collapse the wave."

Well outside my area of expertise. Must contact someone who knows this shit better. But what it seems to be saying—the structure of spacetime the universe is built in such a way that certain events of clusters of events are compelled to occur. A bottleneck through which spacetime flows, and one nearly impossible to avoid There is something about this catastrophe, the one Desmond averted in 2012, that compels it to return, indifferent to out fear or pain. It is a tidal wave, rippling across the sea of space. It crashed once against the dike, and that stopped it for a time. But the seas rears back for another strike, and another, and another.

That gives some clarity to what is happening now, all around us. But it remains unclear how to change it. Especially from within an Animus, a simulation within a simulation?

Message 5:
"Reality is a mathematical model which gets solved over and over again by the observer. Your thoughts are computations. And they render this world for you to call your own. Not all processors are alike. Different brains produce different realities. The variations go from the subtle to the drastic. Your mind defines how much you can taste. How much yuo can feel. How much you can understand. Perception defines perspective. We designed you and made sure to engineer your senses so you could perceive just what we needed you to. Neither more nor less. There are parts of time we preferred you to remained blind to. It was a necessity."

If we could suddenly "see" time, that would not guarantee the same perception the Isu possessed. Let us speak of time as an entity, if we may. Let us say that time is a perceivable fact in the same way light is a perceivable fact. The ability to "see" this fact in no way guarantees sympathetic view. There are creatures stumbling around this earth that read light differently than we do, and for different purposes. Humans see in a well-known spectrum, ROY G BIV.

This sense of color is confined to the three cones we possess. Yet nocturnal creatures see with a different scope, for a different purpose. Night-stalking, hunting, lurking. The evolved in concert with their needs are and now constrained by them, as are we. Light is only a fact seen askance and used differently by different species. To suggest that we might read time, is to imply we have a specific use for time.

The Message 6
"The next chapter is unstoppable. And yet, the greatest revolutions sometimes originate from the confines of impossibility, do they not? Reality is a simulation. Break the code. And in so doing, escape the inescapable. The Animus was humankind's first unconscious attempt to explain what it could not see. understanding genetic memories, an eye into history. Your Animus is different. As is the mind that imagined it. It could escape the code. It could make that leap and make possible a decision that defies the order of the things that are."

It is ridiculous to imagine that I could change the nature of reality "out there" from within the confines of an Animus, a simulation within this so-called simulation. But I believe I understand what this voice is telling me. My Animus is endowed with the ability to suggest alterations to days long past. But from any moment in time, I can extrapolate what MIGHT have been. Calculations of time. I am not confined to what was, but what could have been.

Yes, history is real, facts do matter. But from any moment in time I choose within the Animus, I can interrogate the memory. I can ask the world what if? What if Bayek and Aya had stayed together? What if Khemu had not been murdered? I can suggest these hypotheticals and watch how they unfold. Why would I want to? For knowledge, for a better understanding of what tragedies were avoided? It remains to be seen.

I am, in a sense, a reader of the calculations. As the Isu were in days past. Perhaps one day I will eb able to harness this talent to see into the future. To predict, to correct, to avoid. That would be worth something.

Appearances

• Assassin's Creed: Valhalla