u/Own_Television163

This is just some general, very loose speculation I've had in following the Philip K. Dick rabbit hole, (mostly) nothing concrete.

The cube is covered in a QR code-encrypted message.

During the cube cutscene, the lifepath taglines: NO FUTURE, TRUST NO ONE, and TURN BACK are projected directly onto our field of view.

If both messages come from the same source, why the two different media of transmission?

Why doesn't the cube just project its message at us like the taglines?

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I'm fully on the "Philip K. Dick is the key to FF:06:B5" train. So many of his works are absolutely influencing the mysterious aspects of Cyberpunk 2077.

As we know, the magenta moon is very much a VALIS reference. VALIS is magenta, and is a force of good, and beams its information directly to Horselover Fat (a PKD analog), and this is how it was projected to PKD in his Exegesis.

To me, this pushes the taglines into the Good/VALIS/Truth corner, since they are directly sent to the player.

Philip K. Dick also had a recurring character archetype: Palmer Eldritch, Jory from Ubik, President Ferris Freemont, who he described as "...an evil magician deity [that] is in control of our world and heads." These beings represent a kind of entropic-demiurgic trickster god of corruption, and their presence often leads to degraded, increasingly capitalistic/transactional, technological/artificial "dead" worlds in PKD's stories.

I think Gaunter O'Dimm is another expression of this character archetype in the CDPR multiverse. And I suspect the cube and its message is from this side of the conflict.

My interpretation is that the difference in communcation media stems from VALIS not being bound by the material world, and the Palmer/Gaunter/Demiurge being bound by the material world or dead matter?

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TL;DR: I think the cube and the moon are both talking to us in the cube cutscene, and the cube is badwrong.

This is kind of a "related information and possible inspiration" dump. Nothing concrete.

I was reading Philip K. Dick's '77 (1977 or 2077, you decide!) speech, "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others", and there's a portion where he's talking about parallel timelines and a god-like being he calls the Programmer-Reprogrammer (kind of the same being as Ubik in that story) who can alter past, present, and future:

"...I submit to you that such alterations, the creation or selection of such so-called 'alternate presents' is continually taking place...

Probably all we would have to go on would be vestiges of memory, fleeting impressions, dreams, nebulous intuitions that somehow things had been different in some way - and not long ago, but NOW. We might reflexively reach for a light switch in the bathroom only to discover that it was - always had been - in another place entirely. We might reach for the air vent in our car where there was no air vent - a reflex left over from a previous present, still active at a subcortical level. We might dream of people and places we had never seen as vividly as if we had seen them, actually known them. But we would not know what to make of this, assuming we took time to ponder it at all.

One very pronounced impression would probably occur to us, to many of us, again and again, and always without explanation: the acute absolute sensation that we had done once before what we were just about to do now, that we so to speak, lived a particular moment or situation previously - but in what sense could it be called 'previously,' since only the present, not the past, was evidently involved? Such an impression is a clue that at some past time point a variable was changed - reprogrammed, as it were - and that, because of this, an alternate world branched off, became actualized instead of the prior one, and that in fact, in literal fact, we are once more living this particular segment of linear time. A breaching, a tinkering, a change had been made, but not in our present - had been made in our past.

...Conceivably this could happen any number of times, affecting any number of people, as alternative variables were reprogrammed. We would have to go live out each reprogramming along the subsequent linear time axis. ...Thus, too, this might account for the sensation people get of having lived past lives. They may well have, but not in the past; previous lives, rather, in the present. In perhaps an unending repeated and repeated present, like a great clock dial in which grand clock hands sweep out the same circumference forever, with all of us carried along unknowingly, yet dimly suspecting."

This spurred a few thoughts:

1. Memories of past lives: No Future, Trust No One, Turn Back. Or even the persistence of changes between saves and characters.
2. You can alter "facts" in your saves' metadata JSON files. Here's the entry from one of mine:

​

"facts": [
                "player_drunk=0",
                "sq032_q104_ready=0",
                "q101_done=1",
                "q104_done=1",
                "q103_helped_panam=1",
                "sq012_fact_unknown_assassin=1",
                "sq032_q105_used=1",
                "q003_royce_dead=1",
                "sq018_done=1",
                "sq032_03_mikoshi_known=1",
                "sq012_done=1",
                "sq012_fact_agree_with_river=1",
                "sq032_q104_used=1",
                "sq018_03a_misty_invited=1",
                "sq012_fact_holt_killed_mayor=1",
                "q103_rogue_met=1",
                "q000_corpo_background=1",
                "sq025_done=1",
                "sq012_fact_warn_river=1",
                "sq032_q105_ready=0",
                "q003_meredith_won=1",
                "sq012_started=1"
            ],

I haven't done it myself yet, and haven't really figured out a method/order to approach it with yet. But your lifepath is one of these facts. There's a much larger, compressed save file that you can't really alter, so it's possible changes here might not have any real effect.

3. The 01 + 02 - 03 = 00 graffiti on the rock next to the Burning Man event could be a hint on how you need to manipulate the lifepaths/save data? It gives the lifepath taglines to us in a specific order.

4. PKD talks about different realities as "Tracks", specifically, "Track A", "Track B", and "Track C". With Track A being a miserable dystopia, Track B being our "real" Earth, and Track C being a paradise of sorts (he equates it to a Greek afterlife instead of a Christian one). This resonates with the 0312-2105-A/B/C mystery for me.

Hello, I just found out about Big Lobby mod and I’m trying to convince friends to play.

just curious if anyone had experience with the mod and knew any contracts that are still fun with 10ish people?

So, the 0312-2105A/B/C mystery is gaining some traction and how the highways marked that way converge on Megabuilding 03.

But something I don't see talked about is how there's a Trauma Team agent at the big Trauma Team vs. Tyger Claws firefight right outside Megabuilding 03 named "The Cheesevendor" (in relation to Tyromanta and tyromancy).

The Cheesevendor is known, I'm not claiming to be bringing him to light, but I don't see anyone talking about how these two items are probably related.

Curious if there are any modules out there that have some sort of astrological or astronomical connection, theming, motifs, etc.?