#ask-paradigm-shift

This is in regards to the architect/precursor race themselves.

In my mind, I can't help but go to how terrifying the warpers can be, and only imagining what kind of powerhouse an actual Architect would be. I would think they would be the most menacing creature to encounter pissed off.

I'm just imagining a situation where given that we have seen with the warpers that they can teleport an individual from a distance away from themselves, That maybe Architects could technically do the same thing, But maybe from a much further range, And maybe with a lot less restriction.

(Eg. Some idiot deciding to try and attack one thus may find themselves cut in half having been teleported halfway, through a wall type thing.)

Perhaps, a limiting factor in this maybe that they are of scientific thought process and thus more likely to analyze the situation and not act aggressively immediately. Perhaps with the intention to look over the situation and try and understand why an individual would act aggressively or intend an attacking position against them that is an intelligent race.

Or, it's dependent on their cultural stance on violence if perhaps they are peaceful? (Though, I have a hard time believing that they are peaceful entirely, Even if intelligent, given that they've already shown capacity for military equipment, Aka, the development of weaponry housed in observation, at the various laboratory locations in the first Subnautica. Though it can be argued that perhaps the weaponry came from other races though, is heavily suggested that alterra has not come in contact with another sentient intelligent life form despite having traveled to several worlds.

Or perhaps maybe functional factors can be considered they need there to be clear visual clearance from one point to the next?

What is the Architect cultural stance on violence? That is a great question! I'm not sure Architects are really what you would call a peaceful species, but it depends on how you define peaceful. I think they probably get along fairly well with each other, especially in comparison to humans, because they have the Network and a communal attitude. Their society socializes them not to even think of themselves as individuals even though they have the capacity for individuality (for example, Al-An made the decision on his own to disobey an order from the Network), so they're more communal than even the most communal society on Earth. They would have to adopt society wide goals and ambitions instead of individual goals and ambitions. That's going to make them cooperate with each other and avoid violence against each other. In that respect, they are a peaceful species.

However, the way they treat other living things exhibits a disturbing lack of care for the bodily autonomy of other creatures. I don't think that they're hostile to other species exactly, I think they simply do not see other species as having the same worth as their own people. Just look at the way they treated the Sea Emperor Leviathan. Sea Emperor Leviathans are a sapient species; they're intelligent enough to communicate with each other, and even with other receptive alien species. What the Architects did to the Sea Emperor Leviathan was quite literally a crime, and could easily have been avoided if the Architects had tried to cooperate. Kidnapping, non-consensual medical experimentation, and infanticide are not peaceful actions. If Sea Emperor Leviathans hadn't been on the verge of extinction, and instead had a society capable of retaliation, the Architects' actions could easily have sparked a war.

So why didn't they try to cooperate? Two possible reasons: either they didn't identify the Sea Emperor Leviathan as sapient, or they didn't care. Neither of these have good ramifications. If they didn't care, that means their society simply doesn't see other sapient species as people, and thus they treated the Sea Emperor Leviathan as a kind of clever animal by default. I think this reason is less likely, since they were desperate to find a cure, and would have tried to exhaust all avenues of research, including asking the Sea Emperor Leviathan how to hatch the eggs if they had the ability to communicate. If they didn't have the ability to communicate, but knew the Sea Emperor Leviathan was capable of communication, I think they would've spent more effort trying to communicate even if it was just to coerce the Sea Emperor Leviathan into cooperating. There's no evidence of that happening, so I think they simply didn't realize the Sea Emperor Leviathan was capable of communicating.

That begs the question why. Assuming that Architect telepathy and Sea Emperor Leviathan telepathy are not compatible, there are other ways of communicating, and other indicators of intelligence. Perhaps there was a failure of creative thinking on the part of the Architects–maybe the Sea Emperor Leviathan was acting incredibly different from how they expected a sapient species to act, and they couldn't imagine a life form like this being intelligent so they assumed it wasn't. Perhaps it was caused by a failure of empathy–the Architects couldn't put themselves in the place of the Sea Emperor Leviathan, so they never made that crucial realization. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the Network stunted the Architects’ ability to be empathetic. If you're constantly handed the thoughts and emotional state of everyone else you interact with, you never have to work to figure it out for yourself, so you never develop the skill.

Regardless, their actions weren't peaceful in that instance, but that was kind of an emergency situation. What about normal interactions with other sapient species? We can infer a little bit about their attitude from the alien relics that we find in various places in the original Subnautica game. They seem to have been studying other species, including humans. Assuming that the world of Subnautica is based on Earth as it exists right now and not some alternate history, why doesn’t the game mention any records of aliens contacting humanity in the 1200s? Sure, maybe records got lost or dismissed as hoaxes, but I think it’s more likely that the Architects tried to keep contact with humanity (and other species they were studying) to a minimum to avoid contaminating their results. (I can’t remember off the top of my head what this kind of research error is called, but the one example I can think of is that time researchers put bands on bird legs only to discover that birds with colorful bands were considered more attractive mates.) 

Anyway, I think Architects had a study-from-afar attitude about interacting with other species, regardless of sapience. And if they needed more up-close study, I can easily see Architects taking the same kind of approach with other sapient species as they did with the Sea Emperor Leviathan (possibly originating ancient alien abduction conspiracy theories.) This isn’t really hostility so much as it is a lack of empathy for their subjects, but it can absolutely be construed as a kind of violence.

The conversation Al-An has with Robin about pets is also a good example of Architect confusion about the difference in appropriate treatment between sapient and non-sapient creatures, and how consent is supposed to work. 

Al-An: We also keep various creatures as pets. Robin: Really? How does a species that uses the genes and bodies of other creatures view pets? Al-An: They are curiosities that bring some sense of presence and energy. They are also test subjects to be evaluated for potential genetic enhancements. Robin: That’s not a pet Al-An… that’s a data point. Like you said, it’s literally a test subject. Al-An: You do not think they can be both? Robin: There’s a distinction. Pets are something that you care for simply for the pleasure of doing so. Al-An: Would humans consider me to be your pet? Robin: No, I said “pleasure,” Alan. This is more like a job. Al-An: Where I come from, you might be a pet. Robin: I find that thoroughly disturbing.

Basically, I don’t think Architects have a concept of consent; they don’t consider themselves individuals, so individual opinion isn’t really important. Plus they’re a pseudo-hive mind that already knows each other’s thoughts and feelings, so why would they need to ask for consent, ever? Combine that with their stunted sense of empathy, and you end up with a lot of systemic violence in the form of scientific ethical violations without any hostility attached.

The interaction about pets also gives us a clue about why Architects studied other species. They incorporated the traits of other species into their own vessels as part of their apparent goal to advance their own species. It's implied that they adapted traits from non-sapient animals, but it's never outright stated that all the species they took DNA from were non-sapient, since a bunch of the species were unrecognized, so who knows. Maybe when the Kharaa hit they were in the process of studying humans so they could steal our thumbs.

I also think they were studying the technology of other sapient species, and using it to enhance their own technology. Most of the alien relics in the original Subnautica game have significantly different design principles than you would expect from Architects. Some of the relics (like the leviathan sized tracking implant) are probably Architect relics that were important to the study of Kharaa, or the prototypes of tools used to study Kharaa, but why are there a bunch of unrelated relics there too? Some of the relics, like the human sword, seem to be there as trophies, or museum pieces. (I have a half developed theory that the structure of Architect society is shaped by a strong impulse to archive, memorialize, and display items of importance, but that’s probably an entirely different post.) I think some of the relics may have been relics they took from other sapient species and then used as prototypes to adapt their own versions of. I think that may actually be the case for the alien rifle. It doesn’t really look like something Architects would build, and it isn’t really adapted to their claws either. That’s not to say that they can’t build weapons, but I think most of the things they use as weapons are likely things that have multiple uses, like a laser designed as a cutting tool.

(The doomsday weapon doesn’t seem like a weapon of war so much as a safeguard to make sure that a civilization-ending bacterial infection doesn’t escape containment. It’s like the sterilization tool you find in the Primary Containment Facility; it could be used offensively, but it’s more likely just there as a sterilization tool on a catastrophic scale. I don’t think Architects are really interested in mass destruction. They’re too interested in studying things to destroy them. Their architecture is even as minimally invasive as possible, mostly using caves instead of clearing land to build.)

Now, this may be a biased view since we only ever find out about Architects through the lens of exploring their scientific research facilities and talking to one guy who’s a scientist, but I think it’s fair to assume that we can make more generalizations about Architects than we might otherwise because they’re a pseudo-hive mind. It seems to me that Architects had a species-wide project of creating their own biomechanical evolution, and it was a huge driving force for their exploration and scientific study. If this project was as important to Architect society as I think it was, that means they were likely to approach situations from a stance of scientific learning. So yes, that means they would likely have tried to find out why someone attacked them rather than responding with immediate retaliation. I think they were likely to analyze the situation and try to resolve it in a way that preserved the greatest range of possible future choices.

Regarding Architect capabilities versus Warper capabilities, and whether architects can teleport someone from a distance, I don't think they do that ordinarily. Warpers were designed for quarantine enforcement, so they were given tools that specifically allowed them to do their jobs, including things that would help with crowd control. And yes, these are tools that Architects made and could conceivably have installed in their own vessels, but I think they designed their own vessels for versatility unless they had a specific job they knew they'd need to do. They could already teleport themselves across the room if they needed to, or use their tractor beams to grab something, why would they install specialized equipment just to teleport other living beings around unless that's something they knew they were going to need to do? 

Besides, if some idiot decided to try and attack one, why couldn't they just pick the idiot up with their tractor beams the way Al-An picks up Robin? Or pick up their gun if they had one. Yeah getting teleported halfway through a wall would be dramatic, but is it the most efficient solution? Probably not.

It all looked fine and quiet, the world felt much like Earth, if Earth had an odd set of lifeforms and quite a lot of post-apocalyptic left overs of human society, and if the forests didn’t have things like robot creations overtaken by nature.

Despite that, all was fine, that until the clouds, which covered most of the cloudy, semi murky sky, didn’t slowly started to shift themselves, in a way no wind current would do, it was as if an unknown force was moving them or they were given sentience and were working to organize themselves. The result was no animal shape on the sky...no...it looked like a human shape, WAY too accurately formed, massive in size...and then it moved...it moved, tilting its head, moving its arms, it was like god itself decided to manifest to look at him.

The sky looking down at him only lasted a couple of minutes until it deformed, turning back into the ordinary sky. A flash went out behind him, and with it a voice.

“I have not seen an outsider that hasn’t been dragged into this place by me in quite some time...how curious...are you lost, individual?” the voice felt cold, cold like metal, deep, yet with this soft touch to it, though regardless mater, with a British accent, sounding like a  mix of Posh and Cockey, called Estuary.

The entity that spoke was perpetually emitting this faint glow, his pupils, almost impossible to see past the permeating glow that made his eyes look like two stars affected by Chromatic Aberration effect, but if he could see his pupils, he would see no ordinary circles, stead, odd, pin-squid like pupils. His hair dark gray, showing sighs of aging, added with the unnatural discoloration of a large patch and along it several little white hairs, even going to the beard and eyebrows. If that and the scars on his face were not distinctive enough, he was tall, 7′2 or more, as one could clearly see he was wearing thick high heels, oddly enough with a shape one wouldn’t find that much comfortable to be using everyday.