Much of the Many's personality can be summed up in the first psionic message they send to the player. The Many live long enough to leave a parting message, warning the player to "beware the machine mother". Eventually, the player reaches the chamber containing the Many's Brain and destroys it. Late in the game, the player uses an escape pod on the Rickenbacker to launch himself into the body of the Many. The crew members affected by the Many are usually distinguished by their morphed voices in several audio logs that are encountered by the player. They refer to SHODAN as "The Machine Mother", claim that they have become more powerful than she, and repeatedly request the player (a cybernetically enhanced human, and thus straddling the line between flesh and machine) to embrace his biology instead of her technology. The relatively calm, soft voice of the Many can be contrasted with SHODAN's chaotic, metallic speech patterns, and the Many spends much time preaching the beauty and warmth of the flesh while denigrating the coldness of metal and machine. All three voices speak as one, although at times one is slightly ahead or behind of the others, and they alternate speaking over each other. Its voices come across as a mix of a deep, threatening male voice, a calm, gravelly male voice and a higher, emotionless female voice. The Many, being a psionic hive mind, have the ability to broadcast psionic signals and messages across vast distances, and contacts the player directly several times throughout the game. The Many was going to use the Von Braun to spread throughout the galaxy, including Earth, where it intended to incorporate all life, including humanity, into its collective, as it has done with Von Braun's and Rickenbacker's crews. The Many itself, growing quickly, eventually began clogging the insides and enveloping the outsides of both ships (appearing like a large worm), and manifested a Brain deep within itself. Crewmen under the Many's psychic influence seized control of Von Braun's security systems (including XERXES, the ship's main OS), turning them over to the Many's purposes, and began capturing or exterminating any remaining resistance, sending some to be consumed to further increase the Many's biomass. Within days, a large portion of the crews of both the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker had been infected, while most of the two ships fell under the control of the Many. Soon, a large number of annelid eggs were shuttled from the planet and stored there. Korenchkin ordered the Hydroponics Deck of the Von Braun cleared of all personnel without any explanation to the crew. There, both captains and the majority of their party fell to the Many's influence.
Eager to claim credit for the discovery of extraterrestrial life, the commanding officers of both ships, captains Anatoly Korenchkin of TriOptimum and William Diego of the UNN Navy, led the exploration party to the planet. In reality, they were not aliens, but beings akin to the mutants that SHODAN first engineered on Citadel Station, with forty-two years' worth of extra refinements.įive months into the trip, sensors aboard the Von Braun and its attached escort vessel, the UNN Rickenbacker, received an apparently intelligent signal from Tau Ceti V. The crew of the Von Braun first assumed that the Many were some form of extra-terrestrial, alien life form which originated on Tau Ceti V. Twelve years after Beta Grove crash landed on Tau Ceti V, humanity's first faster-than-light ship, the Von Braun, was launched on its maiden voyage as a joint venture between TriOptimum Corporation and the Unified National Nominate. The annelids developed a hive mind, becoming a monolithic entity which called itself "The Many". After thirty years of traveling through space, Beta Grove crashed on the fifth world of the Tau Ceti system, where the creatures thrived and evolved further. During the events of the Citadel Station incident, the Hacker jettisoned Beta Grove, one of the four wildlife groves aboard Citadel Station, which SHODAN had been using for experiments with bio-engineered viruses.Īs the grove hurtled through space, the mutagenic virus and mutated creatures stored aboard Beta Grove evolved at an accelerated rate, eventually becoming a species of parasitic annelids with distinct personality, telepathic mind control, and genetic modification abilities.
The Many are a creation of the malevolent artificial intelligence SHODAN.
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