[SPOILERS] SOMA unsolved mysteries thread

[Abion47]

Imogen Reed ends up at Upsilon as the sole survivor from the expedition to board the Curie, after she gets there from Omicron in order to cut off the power, in an effort to shut down WAU, as seen in the last part of the Transmissions series.

There was no expedition to the Curie. The final chapters of the Transmission series were all about the survivors of Lambda escaping to Theta. Vanessa Hart successfully made it to Theta (which apart from Reed investigating the Vivarium is the only part of the Transmission series that the game directly references). Reed went to Upsilon to shut off the power as a way to possibly stop the WAU.

She succeeds in cutting off the main power, turning the station to backup (battery) power. After a short time the WAU "shrieked" (sent a powerful burst of EMP) causing the blackboxes of everybody still alive and not trapped yet in Aker's mind coral to overload and explode, decapitating them.

It's difficult to say when exactly Reed's mission to Upsilon took place, but Hart reached Theta on or shortly before Dec 20, 2103 (the date when she was assessed by Dr. Masters), which would imply that Reed would have died around then as well.

A supporting fact would be to look at the downtime itself, which the game reports as being 143 days. That would put the time of the station's deactivation (and therefore Reed's death) on Dec 18, 2103, which is consistent with my previous conclusion as being when Hart reached Theta.

The EMP did not happen until Jan 16, 2104, nearly a month later. These two events are, therefore, unrelated.

Also, the EMP event was not station wide. It affected only Omicron.

Reed's death is shown in the first death screen (before transitioning to Simon-3 / the pressure suit).

This is in direct contradiction with her death as depicted in the Transmission series, in which she suffocated by disabling the power at Upsilon, which stopped the air pumps from working. (Which, as I point out later, isn't compelling evidence in and of itself.)

Incidentally, Raleigh Herber's death in the Simon-3 death screens is contradictory to her actual death as well. The death screens show her being corrupted by structure gel and tearing her head in half, but when we find her body, she is nowhere near any structure gel (hence the requirement to find some more) and her death was caused by the blackbox exploding and taking her head off entirely.

The death scenes are just traumatic sequences of images. Seeing as Reed's depicted death conflicts with her suspected actual death and Herber's depicted death conflicts with her confirmed actual death, it's therefore safe to assume that the death images aren't intended to be canonical.

After Reed's death, the WAU apparently used a small helper robot (found disabled in the room where Simon wakes up) to drag Reed's body to the Pilot Seat and removed its own cortex chip assembly and battery pack and stuck it to Reed's body with its last powers.

This is not all it would've had to do. Assuming the location of Reed's death, it would've had to also remove her head, stick her back in a diving suit, and saturate her body with structure gel. Also, remember the robot at Omicron? It dies the instant it's cortex chip is removed. The helper bot would not have had time to implant its own cortex chip and battery pack into Simon/Reed after they were removed.

Furthermore, assuming that my previous guess at Reed's death date is correct, this would've had to happen after Amy Azzaro and Carl Semken locked down Upsilon (that happened on May 4, 2013). The helper bots cannot open the door locks (which was the point of the locks in the first place), which meant if it was a helper bot that moved Reed into the Pilot Seat, it would've had to use a vent. The only vent in that room, however, is blocked up with structure gel and debris.

The bot you are referencing specifically would be wholly unsuited for this job. It is a QUALIA-model robot, which is designed for underwater use (as is almost every other helper bot, for that matter). It doesn't have any capacity whatsoever to move around outside the water, so it couldn't possibly have been the one to actually put Reed in that chair.

Maybe the WAU made Simon in order for him to reactivate the Upsilon geothermal plant, because if he hadn't done that, the backup power would have failed in 13 days (as shown on the Omnitool setup console) and so the WAU would shut down, killing all the humans it was keeping alive along with it.

The display that showed 13 days of remaining backup power was a log from May 9, 2103 - a full year before Simon woke up. While this is an odd detail, it does prove that the WAU was not actually in danger of running out of power (otherwise it would've done so a long time ago).

Before Simon restores power to the Upsilon geothermal plant, Catherine was probably in a dormant state, and regained counciousness once the plant is powered. She was probably shut down once Reed turned the power off.

This one might very well be true. It's unclear when Catherine's scan got placed inside that robot, but the one sure thing was that she woke up for the first time when Simon turned the plant back on. (As did Carl Semken, incidentally.)

What I think is more likely, however, is that Catherine's and Carl's scans were placed into those robots the moment the power was turned on. It couldn't have been before as they behave as if they are just waking up for the first time, and it couldn't have happened while the power is down because... well... the power was down.

An interesting thing about K8 is that everybody sais that if the player stuns it and takes its tool chip you basically kill it...well this is not entirely true! K8's personality is stored on the tool chip, just like Catherine is stored on the Cortex Chip.

Yeah, no. A tool chip is precisely that - a tool chip. It holds programs and subroutines needed for interfacing with the various ports and panels around Pathos-II. It does not house an AI. (If it did, why would they even need a cortex chip?)

The AI for K8 is a rudimentary one that is onboard the robot itself, just like how the Omnitool has a default AI before Catherine's cortex chip is plugged into it. So yeah, knocking K8 out with the stun gun is most definitely killing it. (In a sense, anyway. The K8 is a fully automated helper bot, which means it doesn't actually have a unique personality. If you ran into another K8, they would behave exactly the same.)

Ross was directly involved in developing the WAU along with Sarang. He was the AI psychologyst that programmed the WAU's "logic gates" in order to make it a almost sentient super-advanced AI.

Ross and Sarang did not develop the WAU. Carthage developed the WAU. Ross, Sarang, and Julia Dahl were merely tasked with monitoring it and reporting on its behavior, as well as keeping the rest of Pathos-II in the dark about its location and true nature.

And it seems Ross is also capable of some sort of levitation, as seen when Simon takes the elevator to the Abyss, and Ross stops the elevator at the middle of the descent and climbs aboard it.

The elevator stops because the power goes out, dude.

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As another example of how the canonicity of the Transmission series is shaky at best, consider this. When Reed died, the display for backup power showed that it had 201 days of backup power in reserve. Like I mentioned above, the log from a year prior to Simon waking up showed 13 days of power remaining. This would put Reed's death on Nov 3, 2102. However, we also have record that Catherine scanned Reed on Jul 31, 2103. Seeing as Catherine cannot scan a dead body (or if she somehow could, that would mean retrieving her body from the depths of Upsilon and dragging it back to Theta), one of these two sources is just plain wrong on a major detail. And since the game is the primary source of all things canon, that means the Transmission series cannot be trusted as a good source. So while we can look to the videos as hints about what happened, we can't use them as proof for when or how.

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Alright, now that I've addressed those points, I can talk about the questions themselves:

1. How does Imogen Reed's body end up in the pilot seat at Upsilon?

This is, in fact, quite a mystery as to how the WAU got Reed into that chair. As you can probably guess from my previous response, I find a lot of inconsistencies with current popular theories as to how it happened, both with how it was done and why the WAU would even want to. However, I do have a theory on this myself that I think explains not only this question but also a vast number of other confusions and inconsistencies regarding the WAU:

It wasn't the WAU that put Reed in that chair. It wasn't even the WAU who created Simon in the first place. It was Carthage.

If you think about it, the presence of Carthage meddling at Pathos-II would explain everything - why the WAU suddenly took a hard left turn with its behavior, how the WAU got ahold of the Vivarium and people's brain scans, why the WAU killed everyone at Omicron seemingly against its core purpose... everything fits. And there are bits and pieces all over the station that allude to Carthage being the archetypal shadowy industry that controls things from the shadows: the Carthage global installation map (which admittedly is only in data files, not the game itself), the WAU itself, the fact that Ross, Sarang, and Dahl were all secret Carthage operatives as opposed to publically known representatives, the Carthage name plastered on a vast number of robots, parts, and supplies (matched only, perhaps, by the Haimatsu name).

I get Occam's Razor thrown at me for this a lot since there isn't really any solid evidence to directly support it, but at the same time, I feel like Occam's Razor could be applied in the other direction as well. Most predominant theories assume various things about the WAU that are either untrue or are riddled with inconsistencies. My theory, however, is the only one I've seen that also doesn't have any evidence disproving it.

2. Catherine seems surprised by the state of PATHOS-II. ("This place is in ruins. All the cameras show static. It's... it's so strange.") What has she been doing all this time?

The scan of Catherine came from when she scanned herself for the ARK project, which happened on Jul 4, 2103. Her scan was placed inside a robot, which woke up on May 9, 2104. The Catherine that met Simon had missed 10 months of the most catastrophic goings on at Pathos-II, so it's understandable that she would be surprised.

3. How does K8 save Simon when Simon falls off the edge of Delta?

By catching him and carrying him back to the plateau, I'd imagine. Keep in mind that K8 isn't some toy drone. It was built to actually do industrial work at the bottom of the ocean. It's motors aren't going to be some cheap Made In China crap, so while it's probably not going to replace a forklift (That would be the BULL robot), it's going to be capable of some lifting.

4. Why does the WAU try so hard to repair Johan Ross' corpse - so hard that, due to blackbox interference, Omicron's staff have blood coming from their eyes and noses?

The answer for this one depends on your opinion of what the WAU actually is.

If you assume that the WAU has an attachment to Ross, then it's trying to save him because it likes him.

If, like me, you think that the WAU is just a program with a purpose, however, then it's trying to save him because that's what it's fundamental programming, it's "prime directive" - keep people alive. In that regard, it's easy to think that the WAU would consider saving a life more important than keeping people comfortable.

5. Ross has several extraordinary abilities, some of which he displays while trapped in a glass cage:...

The telepathy/teleportation/intelligence/manipulation of electronics are actually easy to explain. The mutation of the structure gel gave him the ability to send out electromagnetic waves, which allows him to communicate/manipulate blackboxes (telepathy) as well as computers (manipulation of electronics). He's not the only WAU creation with this ability - the Jiangshi works in the same way (albeit without the intelligence aspect).

The invisibility and teleportation are explained by this too when you consider that Simon is himself a robot. When his cortex chip gets hit with the electromagnetic waves, it temporarily shuts off for a few seconds. This would have a similar effect as when Catherine is unplugged for a while and then plugged back in - time would skip during the moments Catherine was deactivated, and from her perspective, it's like she instantaneously jumped straight from one terminal to the next. So from this perspective, you can see that Ross isn't actually teleporting - Simon is just losing patches of time, giving him the appearance of teleportation.

Resistance to abyssal pressures is a bit odd, but it's not necessarily a mystery. Ross' body was mutilated beyond recognition, and is just oozing with structure gel. Compare this to how deep sea creatures survive the crushing depths - they can survive because their internal pressire is the same as the external pressure. Ross' body could very well function the same way now - since his internals are comprised of structure gel instead of water, his internal pressure can be much higher without crushing himself.

As for the intelligence, that one isn't easy to answer. It, again, depends on what kinds of assumptions you make about various things. In my case, I think that Ross is on a similar page as Catherine, that his intimate knowledge of the WAU's workings coupled with a strong force of will to accomplish his mission makes him better able to come to terms with his new existence without it driving him insane.

6. Why doesn't Ross escape from his cage sooner?

He had no reason to. His mission was to "kill" the WAU with the uncalibrated structure gel, but once everyone died, that mission could not be fulfilled. It wasn't until Simon showed up that he was able to have hope again, and when Simon found the uncalibrated gel, it was finally time to leave. (As to why Ross didn't escape to kill the WAU himself is unclear. Perhaps his transformation left him without the physical strength or manual dexterity to carry the jar of structure gel to Alpha. Perhaps the WAU held some influence over him via the structure gel. Perhaps he was just too sentimental to the WAU that he couldn't bring himself to do the deed.)

An alternative explanation is that maybe he didn't know he could break the cage. The response from Ross upon Simon being ready to go into the abyss was very much an emotional one. Maybe it was this exclamation of joy and hope that caused Ross to unwittingly set off a shockwave powerful enough to shatter the glass.

Yet another alternative explanation is that, given my previous explanation of how Ross' teleportation works, since you cannot see Ross other than the times that he "teleports" in and out of there, it's possible that he isn't actually trapped, and can actually leave whenever he wants. But like I said in the first explanation, he can't leave without the structure gel and, for whatever reason, also can't leave with the structure gel. So he's trapped in Omicron by his own mission until someone comes along who can complete it for him.

7. How does Robot Girl get from the power room to the infirmary?

...She walks?

8. Why do creatures in the abyss have human faces?

A couple possibilities:

1] It's well documented that the structure gel has properties of joining two objects together. In the case of biological matter, the gel fuses them together siamese-twin style. The human faces on the deep sea fish could be the result of a human face getting fused onto the side of a fish.

2] The structure gel came from the WAU, and the WAU's every action is centered around the goal of preserving human life. When the gel becomes fused with life that is not human, perhaps it shapes itself into resembling a human face as an echo of the WAU's purpose.

9. Why is Yoshida deterred by eye contact?

This one I'm not sure can be answered by in game lore, seeing as we know very little about Yoshida as a person. Maybe he was shy. Maybe living isolated at Tau for so long without any supplies or real help from the above stations turned him into a recluse. Maybe he's just weirded out by Simon's appearance.

The only real explanation that I can give you here is because that's how his entity's AI in the game was designed.

10. What is the Leviathan?

The easiest way to answer this question would be to look at different forms of life in the abyss of the Atlantic Trench. Seeing as I'm not a marine biologist (and even if I were, we know embarrassingly little about anything in the abyssal parts of the ocean), I couldn't even guess as to what animal the Leviathan originally was. So the best I could say about this one is that the Leviathan is a large worm/eel/leech type creature that was mutated beyond recognition by structure gel in addition to turning it aggressively feral.