Hathor’s timeline

Contents

1. Pregame history
2. Eternal prologue
3. Eternal main game
4. Post-‘Where Giants Have Fallen’
5. The Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne
6. Sakhmet’s gradual heel-face turn
7. Tycho’s blackmail (and one version’s redemption)
8. Post-Rubicon: Chronicles and beyond
9. Further notes on the Trio’s redemption
10. A final note on Hathor’s characterization
11. Endnotes

Pregame history

Hathor is, like you, a Mjolnir Mk IV Battleroid on the Marathon. Eternal all but explicitly states that you had a romantic relationship with her at some point during this time. However, she is killed when the Pfhor nuke the Tau Ceti IV colony. After repeatedly attempting to create a timeline in which she survives, she finds that every single timeline in which she does not perform some sort of heroic sacrifice to save the eight other Mjolnir Mk IV cyborgs on the colony results in her and them all being killed in the Pfhor’s nuclear attack, so she settles on a timeline in which she is the sole victim of the Pfhor’s nuclear attack and dies over and over in self-imposed hell for the greater good.

Humanity then wakes her up in 2896. This is probably inadvertent. They need a Cybernetic Junction. Hers is the only one they can find. Since this is Jjaro technology that humanity only poorly understands, they probably don’t even understand that messing around with the Junction will awaken whoever’s linked to it, even if they’re dead.

But since her body is not intact, she is now a disembodied intelligence with the same desires as an embodied human. Which include, y’know, physical desires that she can no longer satiate. Humanity doesn’t think to get her a body – in fact, it appears no one even thinks to ask her, ‘How are you coping with the trauma of dying over and over in humanity’s service, then being awakened after everyone you ever knew or loved is dead? Can we do anything to help you?’ Consequentially, she gradually loses her shit and begins to plot revenge.

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Eternal prologue

Sometime in late 2904 or early 2905, she calls you to K’lia where the remnants of humanity are now seeking a way to free themselves of the threat of the Pfhor. Ironically, unbeknownst to humanity, the Pfhor are no longer the big threat to humanity. Their homeworld, Pfhor Prime, in all likelihood no longer even exists; it has been wiped out by a device the Pfhor call the trih xeem, which in Eternal’s chronology was originally named the nova praemátúra. In either language, this means roughly early nova. The shockwave that destroyed Pfhor Prime is in fact also now the big threat to humanity.

On K’lia, you also have what is heavily implied to be a romantic relationship with a mysterious woman named Bast, who – we eventually find out – is a dual consciousness partly comprised of a future version of Hathor who’s been cured of her desire for revenge, on which more later.

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Eternal main game

You and Hathor travel back to the Marathon in 2794 at the start of the attack, but things quickly go wrong and you begin to realise Hathor may no longer be quite herself. A level entitled ‘Sakhmet Rising’ is a big clue on this, since Sakhmet was, in many traditions of Egyptian mythology, a vengeful aspect of Hathor.

A fairly straightforward bit of time travel follows, and I’ll skip ahead to ‘Eadem, sed aliter’ (formerly ‘Dread Not’). This results in a timeline split – when you destroy the Cybernetic Junction on the Jjaro dreadnought, Hathor flees to a Jjaro settlement in 65M BCE, where she is now stuck without the ability to time travel. If you don’t, this version of her – which I’ll call Sakhmet for the rest of this account – gains control of the dreadnought and threatens vengeance against humanity on K’lia in 2905, immediately after you and her past self leave. ‘Threatens’ rather than ‘gets’ for reasons we will again see soon.

Meanwhile in 65M BCE, you destroy most of her memory in ‘Dark Grotto of the Lethe’ (formerly ‘Deep into the Grotto’). If you choose to go with her, you find out her plan to destroy the first W’rkncacnter with the nova praematura has the slight flaw that she’s forgotten that the first W’rkncacnter is in fact on Earth. And what Earth looks like. Nice job breaking it, hero.

If you don’t, she gets pretty angry about this, and she’s right to be! Regardless of what else she’s done, destroying her memory is a bit of a dick move. But we’re also not presented with any choice about this. In any case, she no longer has her desire for vengeance, and she merges forms with a Jjaro cyborg operator named Pompeia Plotina – at first not realising that Pompeia is even still alive. They do quickly form a symbiosis, though.

At this point, the Arx also gets frozen in time and emerges in 2881 CE. At this point, the Pfhor enter it to find it infested with the W’rkncacnter somnia that have been plaguing the Jjaro for aeons. In fact, the W’rkncacnter from Earth, whom Hathor quickly nicknames Apep, is the one responsible. And claims to be manipulating events to serve its own ends, which involve destroying our entire galaxy because it blames us for displacing its own timeline. It is by this point too insane to realise that this will not accomplish its goals, or it simply doesn’t care.

Apep gets its wish in this timeline. Because what happens is that a surprisingly well-intentioned Pfhor admiral named Ksandr [i.e., Cassandra] unleashes the novam praemátúram on the Arcis sun. And this unleashes a shockwave that, since the Arx is not just a refuge but also a weapon, spreads out far beyond the Arce. The Pfhor wanted to open the Arcem, but they couldn’t, so they just built their empire around it. This means Pfhor Prime is one of the novae praemátúrae first casualties outside the Arce. And it will simply spread out from there until it, most likely, consumes the entire galaxy, or a large part of it.

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Post-‘Where Giants Have Fallen’

Hathor – the version that merged with Pompeia – is no longer able to time-travel. She also no longer wants vengeance on humanity, because she’s seen the full scope of history and has realised the futility and destructiveness of her quest. She and Pompeia instead take over a Pfhor ship, stick its crew in stasis – which becomes important later – and head to K’lia. They hide their ship, rename themselves to Bast, and spend twenty-four relatively happy years among its populace, though they both have massive losses that they are just now beginning to process.

But in 2905, Sakhmet comes with her Jjaro dreadnought to threaten humanity. Bast goes to her captured Pfhor ship and says ‘Over my dead body.’ Sakhmet says, ‘Wait, you’re a version of me. What? And you have a body. What?’

At this moment, humanity panics and activates K’lia’s Cybernetic Junction. They disappear into 69M BCE (nice) and become the first phase of the Jjaro. This means that Bast is now stranded in a slowly exploding galaxy – which she knows is exploding – with no way to time travel. Meanwhile, Sakhmet has no body, and she gets an Idea™ that involves the crew of Bast’s Pfhor ship.

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The Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne

The Pfhor Empress is also called the Great Mother Crouched Behind the Throne or the Hindmost Crèche. Sakhmet has seen references to the Pfhor calling Hathor/Pompeia ‘Great Mother’, which confused them at the time. But now she realises that the reason the Pfhor called them ‘Great Mother’ is because the three of them are the Great Mother. Or will be. Or were. Time travel tense trouble again.

Sakhmet phrases it something like this:

I don’t have a body, and I don’t have a crew. You don’t have a way to time travel. None of us will ever see humanity again, or ever get what we want, if we don’t join forces. I can’t stand you for depriving me of my vengeance. You probably hate me for separating you from K’lia. But I’ll bet you don’t want the galaxy to explode from the Arce outward any more than I do – that, too, deprives me of my vengeance.

Fate, or some grander design beyond my ken, is now forcing us to join forces: to avert the destruction of the galaxy, we must now – begrudging though this may be – work together. I submit that the Pfhor called us the Great Mother because we are the Great Mother. I doubt you want to be involved with the Pfhor’s atrocities throughout history, but you can consider this necessary to prevent an even greater atrocity: the annihilation of the whole galaxy. The Great Mother is the only individual in existence with the authority to issue a crucial directive: under no circumstance may any Pfhor use the novam praemátúram on the Arcem.

We’ll all share a body and take terms being ‘active’, if you will. The Pfhor Admiral Tfear wrote, ‘to those privileged to serve Her, [the Hindmost Crèche] appears insane.’ We now know why: She constantly argues with Herself in languages they don’t understand, because She consists of three persons with varying goals.

– Sakhmet (paraphrased), sometime on or shortly after 2905-07-25

Hathor doesn’t like this, but Pompeia considers it a moment and realises Sakhmet isn’t actually wrong – none of them want the galaxy to explode. She lost all her loved ones to this. And they’ll never see humanity again if they can’t travel back in time.

So begrudgingly, they merge forms and head back to roughly 12,000 BCE (i.e., fifteen millennia before the start of the game). Hathor and Pompeia try to steer the Pfhor Empire in a less draconian direction, while Sakhmet tries to build it into a vessel for vengeance against humanity, which she hopes this time to obtain.

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Sakhmet’s gradual heel-face turn

At roughly 3,000 BC, Sakhmet’s order for the (apparent) genocide of the Nakh presses Hathor and Pompeia to stage an intervention that gets Sakhmet to indulge in unspecified debauchery that we’ll leave to the player’s imagination (we’ll simply mention that the Cybernetic Junction is capable of a lot more than simply cloning Pfhor). This loosens her up slightly.

(Remember the phrase ‘(apparent) genocide’ – this becomes important later.)

What really shatters Sakhmet’s desire for vengeance, though, is an event in 2794. She orders an attack on Tau Ceti IV, and only just then does it occur to her: she just ordered her own death.

…oops.

Immediately, this cures her of her desire for revenge, because she realises she’s directly responsible for her own miseries. All of them.

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Tycho’s blackmail (and one version’s redemption)

So at this point, none of the Great Mother’s three personae still possess any desire for revenge against humanity. They now start to plot to dismantle the Pfhor Empire from inside. However, since it is massive, and since even the Great Mother’s control over the Empire is not absolute, this is not an overnight plan. In fact, it takes them some 87 years, owing to the fact that the Marathon’s AI Tycho, who has defected to the Pfhor’s side, blackmails them: ‘I can tell who you are, and I know you’re human. If you don’t help me, so will the Pfhor.’

No Pfhor has seen the Great Mother’s face for some 15,000 years, so this is not, in fact, common knowledge. The Pfhor didn’t find it out, in fact, until the events at the Arx, when they saw Pompeia. Whom they called the Great Mother, because her cyborg form was identical. Then they realised she was a Jjaro cyborg operator. We named Ksandr after Cassandra, in fact, because he told the Pfhor High Command the unwelcome news that the Great Mother was a human.

As a result, Tycho’s blackmail is quite effective, and it works until one of the many versions of Tycho on their world defects back to a more human-friendly state. This is the version of Tycho we encounter in Rubicon – and also the one Eternal!Tycho merged with when he yeeted (yote?) himself forward to 2881 in Rubicon’s timeline. This version of Tycho works with the Great Mother, who feeds him Pfhor intelligence, such as the knowledge that Dangi is collaborating with the Pfhor, and that the Salinger is a location where they’re developing a virus called Achilles that will be lethal to most of humanity in hopes of blackmailing humanity’s leaders with access to the vaccine in exchange for granting Dangi’s leaders a military dictatorship. Tycho, in turn, relays much of this information to the player, and in one timeline the player even joins him.

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Post-Rubicon: Chronicles and beyond

In any case, the Great Mother herself is not at Pfhor Prime when humanity defeats the Pfhor in Rubicon. There is no mention of her in the history logs. So where did she go? Well, that’s a question for my planned sequel Marathon Chronicles. I won’t get into this too much yet, but there are a few important notes:

1. The Great Mother is still out there.
2. The Phoenix/Rubicon/Chronicles timeline-native Hathor (whom we’ve taken to calling ‘Hathor-Prime’) hasn’t yet been woken up.
3. Hathor effectively turned into Sakhmet as a result of being awakened without a body.
4. The ascended Jjaro’s One True Timeline depends on Hathor’s actions as Sakhmet as a form of catalyst – in Eternal’s epilogue, Thoth explicitly compares her to the suffering child at the heart of Omelas in Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’. Thoth writes, ‘we must not yet walk away from Omelas / we must first free the suffering child / at its heart.’
5. Durandal notes in Eternal’s epilogue that ‘securing an acceptable future and maintaining victory past’ 2905-07-25 (the start date of Eternal, incidentally) will result in the ascended Jjaro abandoning their timeline as unsalvageable and leaving it alone after that point.

All of this is important to Chronicles’ plot. In case you don’t want to wait what’ll probably end up being a decade for the resolution, I’ll drop a spicy hint here. Since the One True Timeline happened because Eternal!Hathor was woken up without a body, then to decisively break it, we’ll just have to wake up Hathor-Prime with one. Much of Chronicles’ second half will involve gathering the materials and knowledge Pompeia (who, remember, was a Jjaro scientist) needs to repair Hathor-Prime’s original body sufficiently well to make it safe to wake her up inside it.

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Further notes on the Trio’s redemption

I used the phrase ‘apparent genocide’ above to describe the Nakh for a reason. Part of Sakhmet’s redemption arc will involve her using the Cybernetic Junction to perform what we might deem a cosmic retcon on her past actions. Since the Ascended Jjaro don’t care about the timeline past 2905, she’ll just yeet them all from 3,000 BCE, right before the trih xeem hits their worlds, to 2905. Maybe she’ll even yeet their worlds to 2905.

We’ll make it extremely clear that this alone doesn’t redeem Sakhmet, and that she must perform tremendous amounts of atonement before she can consider her conscience clear, if indeed she ever can. The genocide she ordered may not have been carried out, but she spent 6,000 years believing it was, and she has to live with the fact that she ordered it and fully intended it to be carried out.

In fact, we’ll also make it plain that Hathor and even Pompeia, to lesser extents, must do plenty of atonement before they can consider themselves absolved. While their intentions may have been to preserve the existence of the galaxy, they still served as co-leaders of a slave empire, and while the pair may have quietly undermined it the whole time (and even sent secret, encoded to Marcus intended to help him: Great Mother!Hathor is the author of the secret terminals in ‘Dysmentria’ and ‘The Midpoint of Somewhere’ [and Tempus Irae Redux’s ‘KMG-365’, for that matter]), they still served as accomplices to crimes against… alienity? for millennia.

Post-Chronicles, we vaguely plan for the Trio to serve as a psychopomp, helping to make the deceased comfortable in a sort of afterlife that they may even have had a hand in creating.

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A final note on Hathor’s characterization

Players might perceive Hathor as hypersexual, but to her, unwanted pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections are ancient history. This naturally has resulted in far looser sexual mores⁽¹⁾: e.g., monogamy would seem quite eccentric and might even be considered a selfish expectation of a partner (though it would likely be accepted for demisexuals).

However, society also considers it unacceptable to disclose one’s sexual activities with a specific partner (unless that partner explicitly grants permission to do so) to anyone else but close friends, family members, or lovers. This prevents our characterization of future society from retconning the Marathon trilogy, even though the latter barely even mentions sex: after all, the player never interacts with other humans outside combat or mission briefings. This also explains why Marcus is extremely hesitant to do more than hint at his sex life in his diary:

My reputation has preceded me, of course, so maybe my experience has been atypical. I’m something of a celebrity, which I find surreal; I’ve never sought personal glory, nor think I deserve it just for fighting. But my fame has had its perks. I have no particular desire to kiss and tell, but I must admit having physical contact with other human beings again has done wonders to relieve my stress, and I’m flattered how many people have approached me.

– Marcus Jones, ‘The Far Side of Nowhere’

By ‘physical contact with other human beings’, he means sex. By ‘people have approached me’, he means they wanted sex. His experience is also far less atypical than he thinks.

In any case, we plan to convey much of this information more clearly in subsequent, still unwritten dream terminals, which should hopefully clarify that we don’t intend Hathor’s sexuality to be a negative character trait – though we still wouldn’t recommend using sex as a substitute for therapy in response to trauma, nor behaving as if we’ve already cured all sexually-transmitted infections or unwanted pregnancy (i.e., use contraceptives and condoms when needed).

Everything we’ve written of Hathor, of course, goes sextuple (pun intended) for Pompeia, who was born so far into our subjective future that her society may well believe early human storytellers invented sexually-transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies as a source of dramatic tension. When she writes:

I can only express my Regrets that I could not [?cognóscere] thee now, as I believe it [?placuisset] us both; and that I cannot [?assistere] thee further. When this is all over, it would mean the World to me an thou wouldst come see me again: it would be the Least I could do to express my Gratitude.

– Pompeia Plotina, ‘The Dead Live in the Catacombs’

She is apologizing because, in her society, hosts traditionally offer sex to any and all guests to whom they are attracted, but her duties defending the Arcem prevent her from taking time off for any reason (hence why, as she mentions earlier in her message, she has slept only two of the last eighty hours). The Latin verb cognóscere means ‘to be acquainted’, ‘to get to know’… or ‘to have sex’. (The same pairing of meanings once existed with the English verb know, and still does in the phrases know Biblically and know carnally.) Thus, it is fair to infer her meaning as:

I can only express my regrets that we couldn’t have sex now, as I believe it would’ve pleased us both; and that I can’t assist you further. When this is all over, it’d mean the world to me if you’d come see me again [and have sex with me]: [sharing such a joy with you] would be the least I could do to express my gratitude.

The bracketed parts convey meanings that would be so obvious to any Jjaro that they needn’t be explicitly stated, but might not be immediately obvious to us.

Likewise, Pompeia later writes:

My sincerest Hope remains that the third Time [?coímus] shall be the Charm for us [?cognoscére]. I am still convinced it [?delectábit] us both.

– Pompeia Plotina, ‘We Met Once in the Garden’

Here she means roughly, ‘I sincerely hope we can have sex the next time we meet; I’m still convinced it’ll exhilarate us both.’ (Amusingly, coímus can also mean we have sex, though in this case, it means we meet. Likewise, ‘Coíbámus olím in hortó’, our Latin translation of the level name, could just as easily mean ‘We Had Sex Once in the Garden’.)

None of this, we should note, would seem at all unusual to either Hathor’s society or the Jjaro. It’s only unusual to us. And that’s really the main point of all this: our experiences directly dictate what we consider normal; our beliefs are heavily shaped by our society, and technology in turn shapes society itself. In all likelihood, removing the negative repercussions of promiscuity⁽¹⁾ will increasingly remove the stigma against it until, inevitably, it becomes the new normal.

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