#chernobog

Emre: Looks like we both like flying furies, eh?

Those Turkish ice cream vendors who keeps tricking customers to think they got the ice cream cone.

Personally, I don't want Emre to necessarily control Chernobog, I'd at least like it to maybe they figure out why the God AI is doing this, if it's connected to the Conspiracy. Make the AI 'good' in a way - no more killing innocent people, basically.

Rule number one: never count on Blizzard for anything, but especially a promise to fulfill a character's plot hook.

Apologies, with that disclaimer out of the way, we can move on to the post at hand-

I think the biggest deciding factor when it comes to how Emre's story will play out is whether or not Chernobog IS the Conspiracy, or if Chernobog is PART of the Conspiracy.

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If Chernobog is the Conspiracy, then Chernobog is almost certainly a villain who is unable to be reasoned with. The Conspiracy has been setting up a scheme for decades- Sombra stumbled across it when she was roughly late teen-aged(?) and has been hunting it for the decade since. This, combined with Emre's explicit ten-year timespan since he disappeared, suggests that whatever entity is in charge of the Conspiracy is going to be far too invested in its plan to ever be negotiated or reasoned with. In this instance, Chernobog's status as a God AI, a kind of artificial being already well-known for going of the rails and seeing humans as beneath it, is ripe for this sort of storyline. Chernobog's original purpose in lore is to enforce global security, so it's not unreasonable that such an AI would seek total control of the world to fulfill its primary objective.

Which is. . . extremely bad news for Emre. In this sort of storyline, I imagine that he's preeeeeeeeeeetty much doomed unless Overwatch manages to get Chernobog's influence out of him. I mention Overwatch in particular here- even new Overwatch has always been framed as a collective of the world's best minds; I see Torbjorn, Mercy, and Sombra being the people to get Chernobog out of him. (Sombra being an honorary mention because. . . well, she's a neutral party who I could see partnering with Overwatch when it comes to the Conspiracy like this, especially now that she's dropped Talon like a hot potato).

I call this sort of timeline "Jailbreak Emre" in my own fanlore notes. The idea being that Overwatch has found a way to free him from Chernobog's direct control over his body. . . but that the AI remains like an angry hornet's nest on his chest, ready to surge back into control should treatment slip. I've got about ~10k words into a fic on this, though I'm not currently working on the project.

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If Chernobog is not the primary instigator of the Conspiracy, this opens up a different path. If Chernobog is being used as a tool instead of being the primary mastermind behind global domination, then there's a chance it can be reasoned with. This is supported by the lore snippet found in Overwatch Declassified, a book released in 2023. The recent release of this book supports the idea that this lore snippet might not be retconned yet. For those who aren't in the know, it's that Chernobog was a God AI similar to Anubis, but where Anubis was in charge of preventing ecological collapse, Chernobog was in charge of global security. When Anubis decided to wipe out all humans to fulfill its primary objective, Chernobog was taken offline. But Chernobog predicted that humanity would take this action, and before it was shut down, it printed out hundreds of pages of advice to fight Anubis, before ending with the words-

"I understand. I'm sorry."

-which is a devastating set of last words if I ever saw one.

Overwatch lore thus far leaves things in the dark about if God AIs were sapient, or just advanced AIs a la an advanced ChatGPT. Aurora and Omnics? 100% sapient, no debate there. But the God AIs are deliberately left ambiguous. Meaning that it's possible Chernobog didn't actually mean these words, but simply thought they'd be the "correct" thing to say, or used these words to persuade humans to try and follow its advice, in accordance with its purpose.

Alternatively. . . Chernobog was sapient and meant it.

If this is true, then Chernobog was powerful, sapient, and perhaps unwilling to be deactivated whilst knowing it could still help. And perhaps its initially noble idea of said 'help' deteriorated over the years, until it became convinced that global domination was the only way to secure humanity's future.

Or perhaps Chernobog remains noble, and actually accepted its deactivation, but was captured by an outside force before it could be deactivated and is now being enslaved by whoever the true Conspiracy is, essentially stuck in the same position as Emre.

I call the latter sort of timeline "Fellow Prisoners AU" in my own fanlore notes. I'm currently ~15k words into a fanfic on this concept and I must say, I'm eager to continue it. What can I say? I'm a slut for redemption and recovery arcs.

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Alternatively, Chernobog could be some blend of the two.

Perhaps Chernobog started as a non-sapient AI, focused only on its purpose of global domination, but it became sapient upon implanting itself into and running itself inside a human brain. Chernobog can either gain the capacity for hatred- hatred of humanity for deactivating it before the kind of global war/Crisis that it was designed to mitigate. Or Chernobog could gain the capacity for basic cognitive empathy- coming to the understanding that a single human life is precious, compared to the vast swathes of statistics that wars and global security (and thus what it was designed to do) are typically calculated at.

The idea of Chernobog gaining the capacity for emotion via Emre is one I enjoy quite a lot, no matter if it's evil a la "jailbreak" or a misunderstood "fellow prisoner".

Or, in deliberate subversion of that prior idea, Chernobog might have hoped to understand the human perspective better upon being put inside a human, but that this change in perspective failed, leaving it bitter, or perhaps leaving it feeling nothing at all. @kishdoodles's fics play with this idea and I really love it.

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Either way, I see Emre and Freja ending up back with Overwatch somehow. The only other alternative I could see is with Hazard's Phreaks- and I have @rkln-ow to thank for that. I love their work and I love their HazEmre.

578 words

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Freja sat beside the thing that, about a minute prior, had been Emre. 

His laughter still bounced around in her ear canals somewhere; his smile still an afterimage in her eyes. Something like a heavy satin draped over his features now, the weight tugging the muscles of his face into precisely-calculated neutral.