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Number Crunching

Minimum population range aboard the Zariman: Between 5,000 and 10,000

We'll assume that the Zariman population had to be large enough to form a self-sufficient colony in case of long delays or being cut off from the Origin System. This range would be genetically sustainable, even without any genetic backups they might have brought along, and able to weather possible setbacks and catastrophes. I imagine the amount would lean closer to the upper limit.

Assumed number of people aboard the Zariman based on minimum range: 7700

Because the Seven are like that.

Possible minimum size of the Zariman overall: New York City's Central Park if stood upright from north-south, adjusted for appropriate factors.

Chosen for the ease of visualization and as a space that would accommodate both the infrastructure of a ship designed to withstand interstellar Void travel and the living quarters, storage, and resources of nearly 8,000 people.

From north to south, or top to bottom, Central Park is about 2.5 miles or 13,200 ft. From west to east, or left to right, Central Park is about 0.5 miles or 2,640 ft.

Central Park is approximately 1.3 square miles in total. The population density of New York City is about 27,000 people per square mile, so if we take Central Park as a rough analogue of the Zariman's size and multiply it by the desired variables, this leaves room for habitation and everything else necessary to facilitate the journey and its goal.

So we'll take that as a baseline and round down to account for the Zariman's nature as a colony ship on a dangerous journey, as opposed to a typical city: for every 25,000 people aboard the Zariman, you would need approximately 1 Central Park of square mileage.

Minimum number of children aboard the pre-disaster Zariman: 700-800

22% of 7,700 people is 1694 children - 22% is the current percentage of children in the total U.S. population.

Albrecht mentions that Euleria wrote The Tales of Duviri specifically for the children of the Zariman, because she was concerned about them being exposed to the Void. I imagine the idea of children aboard the Zariman was contentious for a few reasons: namely, their increased vulnerability to the Void (the Void's increased vulnerability to children?), but also the desire to maintain at least some appearance of caution and care (at first - see how Executor Tuvul's broadcasts shifted in tone over time). Children would have been a necessary component of building a colony, but they are also more of a liability and logistical complexity, so I think it would have been desirable to keep the number manageable. The percentage would likely be lower than 22%.

10% would place the minimum number of children at 770, which is right around the average number of students at a public high school in the U.S. We'll consider this the logistically desirable amount.

Possible numbers of Tenno - factors to consider:

Were there more warframes than Tenno, or more Tenno than frames?

It would have been easy to produce more warframes, but impossible to produce more Tenno. As of Follie's release, there are 64 base warframes. Even if new ones are rolled out 3-4 times a year for the next decade, the total number of original frames would only be around 100. So, we're going to assume that Tenno outnumbered base frames.

What number would have made a fighting force capable of both repelling the Sentients and eliminating the Orokin?

In fighting the Sentients, the Tenno had the might of the Orokin's forces behind them. In killing the Orokin, the Tenno acted alone. But one Tenno was worth many Dax in terms of force multiplication.

Calculating the lethality factor, or things that would have reduced the number of Tenno between Void-jump accident and present day:

A percentage of children aboard the Zariman would have died during the accident and the chaos that followed.

Before Margulis stepped in, the Orokin would likely have culled the initial number of children rescued from the ship, any who were too out of control or deemed unfit.

The Old War would have probably thinned Tenno numbers as well - they are powerful, but not invincible, and clearly had combat training and experience outside of frames. While the warframes act as a proxy, the connection between Tenno and frame is metaphysically deeper than that. I would imagine that the strain and brutality of the war would have had a strong impact, and enough in some cases to trigger deadly complications (aneurysm, heart failure, suicide, etc).

Possible numbers of Tenno vs. lethal complications:

Looking at the minimum number of Zariman children, let's assume that 25% of 770 children died as a result of the Void-jump accident. About 578 children would remain.

Out of that 578, let's assume that 5% were considered immediately unmanageable by the Orokin. This would give us a remaining total of 550 children.

We'll assume that 10% of the Tenno were lost to the Old War or to further Orokin culling, which means that roughly 500 Tenno remained by the time they entered the long dream.

What About Maximums?

If we use Central Park as a minimum for the Zariman's size, then Manhattan Island can serve as another easy-to-visualize maximum.

Other counties in the U.S. are geographically larger, so along those lines, Manhattan is considered "small," but the island is easily identifiable from space.

Manhattan's population density has fluctuated between 74,000 people and 100,000 people per square mile, and currently houses an approximate total of 1.6 million people, and more than that during peak work and tourism hours. It's one of the most densely populated areas in the U.S.

Orokin society was able to produce enormous structures in space. However, I believe that Manhattan-sized would be the upper limit and that Zariman ships would be smaller. Better to make many colony ships whose losses could be more easily absorbed, rather than incredibly massive ones that would cause a staggering loss of investment if something happened. Since there were other Zariman ships, I think trending smaller makes the most sense.

So, if using Manhattan for broad comparison, the Zariman's maximum capacity would probably sit at 1 million people, give or take.

Putting It Together

But we aren't going to use maximum capacity as a metric for the 10-0's one and only trip. That would be an absurd commitment of resources to a pioneering voyage.

I actually quite like 7,700 as a total number of people aboard the Zariman. It feels like a ritualistic number. It's a large amount of people, but it's also small in the grand scheme of risk and population numbers, and selective enough that propaganda about being sent on a special mission is convincing. It's not a huge risk of investment or logistical nightmare, and it's a reasonable amount for a coherent ship culture to develop, spread, and then transform into unrest and discontent.

Duviri and Thrax are a key example of this as well.

I don't think Thrax was even capable of being anything other than what he was - a manifestation of trauma - until the Drifter understood Duviri's true nature. After that, Thrax is able to act in unexpected ways and shows small stirrings of change (like in Eight Claw), and we are able to see glimpses of better things in Duviri here and there.

But that wasn't possible until the Drifter understood that Duviri was an extension of themselves, and understood what they were putting into it and how to take the first steps past that. And Duviri is almost all Drifter, with some other influences sprinkled in (very notably kindness from Euleria and Albrecht), so it's able to reflect and embody small bits of kindness and wonder in the midst of its endless loops.

Jury's still out on what, if any, degree of difference there is between the Man in the Wall and the Indifference, but I'm going to use the terms interchangeably for now.

The Man in the Wall, unlike Duviri, came from Albrecht at his worst, and has been shaped primarily by the Orokin.

One of my favorite bits of writing is in Albrecht's logs when he's talking about the nature of the Orokin. "We are haunted by nothing," he says, and it's a literal statement of how the Orokin's immortality has warped them. But the Indifference is also the metatextual Nothing that haunts the Orokin. Not just the long, patient shadow of the end of all things, but the living embodiment of the consequences of their actions, the consequences that inevitably rebounded upon themselves and everyone else, no matter how much they tried to stave that off.

The Indifference is the consequence of the Orokin's imperialism and domination and violence and experimentation, concentrated thematically into a single body part - the fingers, replicated again and again and again, and used to empower terrible things. That consequence is still spilling over and raging and catching everything in its blast radius because the rusted gears of the Orokin Empire are still turning in perpetuity, long after the Orokin are dead, in what followed in their footsteps, Corpus and Grineer and Sentient and the few Orokin stragglers that keep raising their heads.

Voruna's Leverian is particularly striking with the concept of the Void's reflectivity.

So I think Wally CAN'T be anything other than what it is, not yet. It's not like a human being grappling with choice. To whatever degree, the Man in the Wall is the Void. It's a manifestation of the wounds that the Orokin inflicted upon both worlds, material and Void, and all it can do right now is replicate those injuries over and over and over again.

It's easy to empathize with Albrecht's reaction to what he saw and experienced in his trip into the Void, because he's a (relatively) regular human. Curiosity and fear aren't his crimes. Being Orokin is.

I think that's absolutely the point, that the fear was understandable and the finger-slicing was accidental, until Albrecht proceeded to double down and made it into a heinous act, when it didn't have to be. His crimes against the Man in the Wall, knowing and unknowing, are things that he has done or aided in doing to others or turned a blind eye to, and are a reflection of the Orokin's crimes as a class, like the cruelty inflicted against warframes: abandonment, theft, torture.

And Albrecht is keenly aware of most of this.

He regrets what he's done and is aware how much he has catastrophically fucked up, but I think he is in a similar kind of despair state as Wally. He acts as he knows how to act, as an Orokin would, still leaving a trail of pain in his wake even when trying to do good, and he doesn't think of himself as capable of doing differently. And so he doesn't, because he kind of does believe in ontological evil and has grafted that concept onto himself. But he is not ontologically evil, because that doesn't exist, and he has to learn to let that go in order to truly change.

It's possible that Wally can't actually change until Albrecht does, like Thrax and the Drifter.

I'm not sure if Albrecht really understands the depths of Wally's rage, that it's also likely personal (you woke me up into this, you created me, you abandoned me - things along those lines); I'd have to revisit some things and ponder.

But Albrecht at least knows that the danger the Indifference poses to the world exists solely because himself and the Orokin.

Also, importantly, I think the Man in the Wall is furious about existing at all, which is aligned with the game's focus on mothers and fathers and children.

On some level, Albrecht had a hand in bringing Wally into existence, and is its father and creator, which ties neatly into Albrecht's role as a missing/absentee father and grandfather and into the Orokin's role in creating and shaping their miserable little successors (Corpus, Grineer, Sentient).

A lot of Warframe is concerned with the act of creation and its consequences - the horrible act of creating warframes, the loving act of creating a child and that act being manipulated and warped into something awful, the manipulation of genetics, the strange and terrifying creation of new kinds of life with sapient pathogens.

Wally is a manifestation of all of that too - the awful consequences of life itself born into a rotten, pain-filled world, and the endless toxic waste of suffering that the Void can't help but reflect. Hence Wally's seething hatred of parents in particular, for committing that crime over and over again, and for the world as the Orokin created it and left behind. And it would be LOT of nasty metaphysical sludge that the Orokin and what they created oozed out into the Void. Not something that is easily shaken off.

So of course Wally longs for silence and stillness, for everything to stop and end. And not just because that is simply the Void's basic state.

The other half of the equation, to counterbalance the despair that Wally embodies, is naturally the Operator/Drifter: their kindness, their compassion, their willingness to look at the world and demand better, their capacity to carve out and defend little islands of goodness. Albrecht can't be the counterbalance because he is full of the same despair and because he is a source of it for Wally. No revenge on Wally's part, or giving act or apology on Albrecht's part, would enable Wally to become more than what it is, more than a thematic specter of the Orokin's consequences, more than a force of nature.

The Man in the Wall needs a reflection that isn't Albrecht and isn't the Orokin, a reflection beyond hurt and violence, and I think that's exactly what the Operator and Drifter are narratively building to.

I've been thinking about what Albrecht's 5D chess plan might be.

He is currently leading the Indifference on a chase throughout time, which ironically seems to be strengthening it. I'm wondering if Albrecht's plan is to lure the Indifference into becoming materially "real" enough to be defeated. He's created the Vessels, essentially giant biomechanical mechs, for the Operator to use - just as Ballas et al created the warframes.

Albrecht thinks that Operator/Drifter are especially empowered and suited to face the Indifference, and that they need to feel enough love/connection to resist being overcome by it, and that they need sufficient firepower to win. So it would be a matter of getting things into position to facilitate this great fight, but before the Indifference became too strong to defeat, making it a very dangerous race against untime, so to speak.

The thing about Operator/Drifter is that they are positioned as foils to Albrecht, right down to filling the hole he left in his family. They are following in his wake, befriending and caring for people he's hurt and abandoned. The first and only thing they've done with the Vessels is to correctly clock what was required to defend the labs from Wally - not violence, but gentleness, in an echo of how transference calmed the warframes.

A bit more "out there" speculation:

From the way time is described as the Strands of Khra, it almost seems as if the Indifference is entangled within those strands. I've had the thought that the chase may be meant to lure Wally into becoming even more entangled and/or stretched thin, and thus vulnerable. Leading to a situation in which Albrecht envisions Operator/Drifter giving up their now-individual selves to merge back into one person and thus collapse a metaphorical wave function of possibility on top of Wally to destroy it.

Or something. Who knows.

But Driftop are primed to aim for a secret third option. (Three versions of them are walking around, after all, not two.)

So I can see Albrecht's plan both failing and then ironically succeeding anyway.

Maybe Wally gets enough of an edge to surge ahead in the race, and gets a bit too strong before things are "ready."

Or a scenario where Albrecht's plan does succeed, in that Operator/Drifter are in position to defeat the Indifference/collapse the wave function/whatever, only for them to refuse and pursue the secret third option.

The secret third option is, of course, being niceys. In the same vein as Drifter going from anger to understanding and pity when looking at Thrax and really seeing what he is, as Drifter refusing to kill a defeated Rusalka or abandon the Hex, as Operator defending the labs with a gentle touch, as Operator calming Umbra, as Tenno getting through to the warframes not with violence or power but with love.

I think what Wally and Driftop ultimately need to do is beat the shit out of each other long enough to actually hear each other.

Taking the Cavia and the Man in the Wall as narrative blueprints for each other (beings who were suddenly awakened into traumatic awareness because of Albrecht, and subsequently abandoned)... the Cavia could speak, but only in Voidtongue, and no one could understand them until the Operator arrived. Wally can communicate with words, sure, but I think it's also too enraged and lost in the sauce to actually communicate. We can get an idea of why it's so pissed from what it says and how it responds to things, but it's all filtered through venom and violence.

I think there's a reason why the voca manifest as moans and screams. I think the Void has been screaming for a long time, only no one has really been capable of hearing or understanding.

And the Operator may have some idea already, considering the encounter in the labs. But knowing that a different approach to handle the Indifference might be necessary is not the same as knowing how to get there.

I think the Indifference's "weakness" to love is partially because it hasn't really experienced love and care, except for what we've seen in the smallest gestures from the Operator (an offered light). Wally is certainly too maddened to seek that out or accept it, or to listen to anyone or anything at this point, but the Tenno are able to "see inside a broken thing and take away its pain." The Operator has to figure out how to reach the Indifference, and the Indifference has to be able to listen.

I can see a titanic battle turning into the world's most epic transference sequence, and Driftop being faced with the task of taming what is essentially a wild animal, similar to the Orowyrm fight. With the task of being a different, steadfast, and kinder reflection of humanity, in order to gift the Man in the Wall with personhood beyond what's been imposed on it by the nature of the Void and the actions of the Orokin. Self-recognition through the other, etc.

And thematically, that would represent what Operator/Drifter have consistently been trying to do. Looking at the ugliness of the world and accepting that this is the world and the circumstances you've been given. Finding a spark of something better within the awful, and giving it a voice and a chance to emerge.

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I'm admittedly biased towards thinking this way, because I hate when fiction assigns Evil to distinctly non-human/cosmic/eldritch beings, and thus abdicates moral responsibility for bad human behavior and suggests that ontological evil exists. It does not. It is man who is evil, because man creates the conditions for evil to exist.

I also think Eleanor's dialogue about being unnerved by the Indifference is goofy. Which is fine as a character trait, but it felt like the player was being cornered into agreeing with her. I simply don't feel scared or bothered by the apparent "indifference" of the universe beyond me or how small I am. I find it deeply calming and reassuring that such a vast world exists beyond me and beyond humanity.

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But I would hope Warframe is heading in this general direction otherwise, since aside from the wonkiness of live service game limitations and a few weird writing choices, it's been consistent in presenting ideas like this about the Void as reflection and the specifically human nature and construction of evil.