Right around the time it becomes possible for him to clone his deceased gf, Pria, I think, yeah, he goes a little nuts.
Imagine the poor girl -- her entire existence is for the purpose of recreating an old man's romantic resurrection fantasy, a kind of Frankenstein-meets-Persephone sex slave. I expect he starts hitting on her when she's around 14-15 or so, and what's she going to do? He's a faction leader and she's a clone of his ex-, denied even her own identity.
That she has none of Pria's memories and no doubt finds Lal utterly repulsive probably pushes him over the edge, as he can't bring himself to actually use force against "Pria" (who at this stage of her life probably has more in common with Anne Frank than Lal's dearly departed).
The way I envision the story from there, rather than commit rape -- statutory or otherwise -- Lal goes on a military rampage, attacking anyone who "violates the ideals of the U.N.," which is pretty much everybody by the time Santiago's building the Cloning Vats and Zakharov's conducting retroviral engineering experiments in the servants' kitchen.
"Pria" changes her name to "Starr", defiantly individualist if a tad overbalanced, escapes to University territory, and lives to write the following graffito on the inside wall of a Hab Dome:
quote:
I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld.
When I die, they will put my body in a box and
dispose of it in the cold ground.
And in all the million ages to come, I will never
breathe or laugh or twitch again.
So won't you run and play with me here among the
teeming mass of humanity?The Universe has spared us this moment.
After a brief career as a lesbian rock musician she meets "The One" -- much to her surprise -- and settles down. "Biology is destiny," and Starr is the marrying kind, though she would poke my eyes out for saying it. Her band plays at her wedding, but none of the groom's guests get lucky, because the rest of the band really are all lesbians.
Err, some other factions did some stuff, too, but nothing as interesting as Pria's clone ...
I picture Yang becoming a control-freak isolationist largely averse to outright war who falls behind technologically and fades into obscurity. Mandarin China all over again.
Santiago goes slowly sane -- the nutball who mutinies on the Unity isn't the same person who launches Planet's first satellite into orbit. She gets her butt kicked by Deidre, though.
Deidre's conversations with Planet I gather lead her to lose more and more of herself to the Planetmind until she finally Transcends and merges with the beast. Then it's pretty much game over for everyone else.
Who's left ... Morgan and his people make a huge pile of money, but before he can put his plan for economic domination into action he steps on someone's toes -- I'd guess Santiago -- and folds like wet cardboard.
Miriam fights Zakharov for a while but after some early victories is eventually forced to mellow as Zak repeatedly defeats her.
Zakharov races Deidre to Transcendence until the Lab Three Incident drives him mad with anger toward Planet, at which point he digs up every cap, stalk, and rhizome of fungus within his territory and, ignoring the Centauri fork entirely, researches the Singularity fork instead. He's in the best position of the game, militarily, technologically, and economically dominant, when Deidre pulls the rabbit out of the hat and transcends.
Is that 7? Yup. That's how I see the story going down, and AFAIK it agrees with the bits from the game.
And Alien Crossfire NEVER HAPPENED. Those factions were totally gay.
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Topic: Videogames are good for something (Read 7402 times)