[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[Alardem]

To paraphrase the original pitch for A Machine For Pigs: "I live in an egg, laid by a pig. Everybody comes to me for suckles."

Has anyone tried to just lay there at the end and see if anything else happened? I wonder if the excision of the orb-destruction scene was what Frictional removed from the ending.

Also, I personally think the 'Stone Egg' either contains Mandus' dark half - or maybe an inhuman, primordial force waiting for a sacrifice of blood. What if Mandus saved nothing? All we know is that he and the Machine die as one being, that the Man-Pigs start singing, the 'city turning over in its sleep', and a church bell ringing out. There's nothing there to indicate whether London was saved, because Mandus is both buried and dead.

What if the Machine required Mandus himself as a sacrifice in order to fulfill its purpose of bringing about the new century? Unused sound files have the Machine begging its father for its 'life', but in the final product its rant about the twentieth century ends with him saying "they will make pigs of you all, and they will bury their snouts into your ribs and they will eat your hearts."

In short, what if Mandus' sacrifice is what brings about the future the Machine saw/the twentieth century as we know it? Or, considering that Amnesia is an alternate history, what if it brought about something far worse?