Carthage Industries in Soma SPOILERS

[Bigbob]

I've been fairly obsessed with Soma and keep finding new things. It's almost approaching Kojima levels and I think most people finish Soma and don't realize some of the most complex stuff in the story. I've spent countless hours researching this game.

I did what he believe is a thorough analysis of the story here:

Spoiler below!

https://forum.psnprofiles.com/topic/4553...nt-1242517

For purposes of this thread I wanted to emphasize the Carthage stuff presented in the game.

In the story of Soma Carthage accomplishes the following:
-Gets 3 employees secretly on the staff. Mark Sarang, Julia Dahl, and Johan Ross. Lasky is on the clip board next to where you update the security chip Brandon Wan had and is listed as Carthage Project Manager, but is not listed later when you see only the first three names on a computer.
-Mark Sarang comes up with the idea of continuation.
-Julia Dahl covers up an evacuation attempt of Tau.
-Carthage introduces the WAU AI unit.
-Johan Ross convinces Pathos 2 to remove all restrictions on the WAU.
-The Failsafe on the black boxes is CRTH4 (reference to Carthage) and the WAU monitors the black boxes.

Julia Dahl ends her audio logs with the phrase Delenda Est.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delenda_Est

["Delenda Est" is a short story written by Poul Anderson, part of his Time Patrol (1960) series. The title alludes to the Latin phrase Carthago delenda est ("Carthage must be destroyed") from the Third Punic War.

Renegade time travelers meddle in the outcome of the Second Punic War, bringing about the premature deaths of Publius Cornelius Scipio and Scipio Africanus at the Battle of Ticinus in 218 BC, and thus creating a new timeline in which Hannibal destroys Rome in 210 BC. This meant that western European civilization came to be based on a Celtic-Carthaginian cultural synthesis (rather than Greco-Roman, as in actual history).]

Given the similarities it is very obvious imo that the writers of Soma took some inspiration from this short story. It's unfortunate that they buried the references behind audio logs and emails that takes so much effort to piece together because it's easily my favorite piece of the story.

I've been listening to Let's Plays and found this interesting. As far as I can tell it's not in the ps4 version as this Let's Play was on pc. It also might have been patched out.

At 42:40 in this video they access Julia Dahl’s laptop.

https://youtu.be/EtA60aemvaA

In the 3rd recording before her head explodes is subtitled, but not voiced "No need for the company to be worried, if she does decide to go into the Abyss, she won't make it far. She's not... Arghhhh".

What caught me off guard is why is Dahl still talking about the company? This is after the comet. After Ross came up dead from the Abyss. After Herber tells her she's going into the Abyss to find site Alpha. Dahl should know the surface is destroyed.

The 3 reports in her computer are "undelivered". Carthage was on the surface and should be destroyed. It could lend some weight to the time travel theory. Ultimately it's just something the writers left open ended but it's fun to contemplate.

Now today I found out that Carthage Industries is something from Star Citizen. I'm curious if it's some kind of cross over or just pure coincidence?

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/orgs/CARTHAGE

[Abion47]

That's not an official Star Citizen faction or company. It's an organization (basically like a group or clan) that is player created and operated. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that it's not a crossover.

As far as the theory that Carthage is behind a lot of stuff, I've been making that same argument for a little while actually. You can see the following threads talking about some of my reasoning:

- https://www.frictionalgames.com/forum/thread-53451.html
- https://www.reddit.com/r/soma/comments/5...r/ddebbns/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/soma/comments/5...s/dckkh34/

The unvoiced subtitle at the end of Dahl's report is one of several pieces of evidence that, if it were properly included, would all but prove this theory's validity. As it is, it's almost like FG tried to remove a lot of stuff that explicitly points to Carthage overshadowing everything.

[Bigbob]

Someone deleted their post. Thanks for both responses. I figured out spoiler tags from the deleted post.

I've been reading those threads and it's nice to see the community has picked up on the Carthage stuff.

[Romulator]

Yeah, I deleted my post because it doesn't contribute in any way to the conversation. :p