#ask me about rotational mixing in Pop III hypergiants

[sundayswiththeilluminati]

Eyes of Tomorrow

"I want to see it all, unhindered, and know it's mine to take." —Clovis Bray

Type: Rocket Launcher

Slot: Kinetic | Energy | Heavy

Element: Arc | Solar | Void

Perk: Eyes on All - This weapon is capable of tracking and firing at multiple targets simultaneously.

Trait: Adaptive Ordnance - Killing four or more combatants in a single volley increases the damage of the next volley.

Ornaments: Yesterday's Augur, Cyberoptics, Tyrant's Vision

Origin & Description: (Listen I have done my UTMOST for literal months to make this a short entry and I just can't. I have written and re-written and there's too much to cover. It's gonna be maybe the longest in the Compendium. So it's the first entry where I'm putting the latter part behind a cut. Sorry about that.)

Anyways I HATE IT. IT'S COVERED IN EYES AND I. HATE. IT. And that's only like ten percent because Eyes still hasn't dropped for me and thirty percent because Gambit invaders keep slaughtering my team with its obnoxiously effective six-rocket salvo. But that is part of it! Because Eyes of Tomorrow is hateable on so many levels. But for a lore nerd like me, the first and…thickest…? layer on which to hate this rocket launcher is the man who ordered its construction: Clovis Bray I.

At the dawn of the Golden Age Clovis Bray and his eponymous corporation, aka Braytech, played a key role in colonizing the newly-opened solar system. Ruined CB facilities and remnant tech are frequent targets for salvage and sometimes catalyze events like the rediscovery of SIVA or the reactivation of Rasputin's Hellas Basin complex. Yet despite his company's pervasive presence, Clovis Bray himself remained a distant, undefined character. We knew a bit about his son, Clovis Bray II (because of course he named his son after himself), and a lot more about his grandchildren Wilhelmina "Willa" Bray, Elisabeth "Elsie" Bray, Anastasia "Ana" Bray, and Alton "Alton" Bray (the boring one). Then in Beyond Light we plunged headlong into one of Clovis Bray Sr.'s greatest accomplishments and darkest crimes: the construction of the Deep Stone Crypt and creation of the neohuman androids known as Exos. And, uh…turns out it's a good thing we hadn't met him before, because he is a terrible person. One of the most brilliant, most consequential, and most horrific individuals of the Golden Age, Clovis Bray aimed for nothing less than becoming the immortal god-emperor of interstellar humanity, and any means necessary to achieve that end were okay by him - required, even.

You absolutely should read his personal journal, released with the Beyond Light Collector's Edition, plus the ending. But to summarize: Clovis was obsessed with legacy both intellectual and genetic. Like Oryx and Touch of Malice, Clovis sought immortality not through prolonging his own life, but through writing himself into the fabric of human thought and genes so profoundly that it would eventually, inevitably, keep coughing up new Clovis Brays. And he couldn't leave the transmission of his ideas to his children, since they might "mutate" his ideas, passing on some "faulty" copy of himself. No, it had to come directly from him.

But Clovis was being let down by the same biology he obsessed over. Even during the Golden Age the human lifespan could only be prolonged so much. By the time his journal begins Clovis has less a body and more a loose sack of pig-grown organs bathed in synthetic blood, and he wanted to ditch it as soon as possible. But though Golden Age scientists could take complete neural snapshots of living humans, they couldn't yet successfully upload those scans into new bodies. Attempts to do so started off well but degenerated, the minds becoming "rigid" and losing interiority. The uploaded mind descended into looping, repetitive thoughts and actions ending in complete neuron death.

Clovis knew the dangers firsthand because he'd inflicted it on his own son. Turns out all the genetic tinkering he did on Clovis II to give him lots of "advantageous" traits and benefits also gave him fatal familial insomnia. Whoops! And shortly after Clovis II's birth his wife Lusia wised up and dumped his ass, so Clovis I had no backups for his priceless bundle of legacy genes. So once Clovis II's condition kicked in and the standard cures failed, Clovis attempted to upload his son's mind into a prototype Exo body. For a little while it even seemed to work, but Clovis II's mind disintegrated the same way the others had until the body tore itself apart on the table, synthetic muscles writhing in long self-destructive spasms as his children watched him die. Yeah. There's a reason most of the Brays don't talk to Clovis.

That clearly wouldn't do, and Clovis had no intention of trusting his precious god-emperor brain to a stored scan to wait till others solved the problem. He had to crack the synthetic upload before his meat-sack finally gave out. But he'd also found a new angle to exploit: the K1 Anomaly on the Moon. The Anomaly had promised the scientists that listened to its whispers genius and power beyond their comprehension, and it happily promised Clovis that if he went to Europa, he would find all he sought and more. So he did, dragging along his poor granddaughter Elsie Bray, who never did anything to deserve this. Clovis had considered various approaches to rope all three of his granddaughters into the project (even he thought Alton was boring) but Elsie was the only one he could get his claws into. He'd figured out Elsie had inherited her father's fatal familial insomnia, and while she wanted less than nothing to do with her demented grandfather, the Exo project also looked like her only chance of survival. So she agreed to come along in exchange for Clovis keeping her diagnosis from the rest of the family, hoping she could at least limit the damage Clovis could cause.

On Europa Clovis hewed out of the ancient ice another veiled statue like the ones we found in the pyramid ship and the Black Garden. Digging up an immense, shrouded, whispering, gently moving black statue that even a glacier doesn't want to go near might cause a sane person to yell "nope!" all the way back up to orbit, so Clovis had to hide it from Noted Sane Person Elsie Bray, but he was happy to make friends with "Clarity," as he called it. He beseeched it for the answers he was promised, and it gave them to him - though not directly, because just in case this endeavor weren't fucked up enough already, let's drag the Vex into it! Clarity showed him a Vex gate that he duly built and opened to a Vex forgeworld, a massive early-universe star stoked into a nuclear furnace for heavy elements. It took some noodling around, but he figured out Clarity hadn't sent him there to theorize about rotational mixing in Pop III hypergiants. It sent him for the milk.

Spurred by Darkness, Clovis had begun to theorize that uploaded minds collapsed because they were too perfect. A regular human meat-brain has to do its thinking via messy, mistake-prone biological processes hacked together by random evolution. They have to constantly correct and filter out thousands of small errors. Exo brains didn't have those biological failings. Clovis theorized that without that noise the brain's own error corrections slowly crystallized the uploaded minds into nonfunctionality (for the record, a cool narrative take, but in no way actual neuroscience.) Vex radiolaria, or "Vex milk," the liquid suspension that serves as their preferred substrate, pooled in great quantities on the forgeworld. Radiolaria already comes with some strange properties, and when exposed to Clarity's withering influence it underwent a kind of denaturing: the Vex patterns "died" and the receptive radiolaria instead picked up some of Darkness' own attributes. Clovis believed this transformed fluid - his alkahest, the alchemical purifier - introduced into an Exo mind would seed random noise and provide the balancing influence that created a stable, viable synthetic brain.

And fortunately/unfortunately, Clovis was right. In the Destiny universe, life can't exist without both Darkness and Light. Light might be the instigator of life, the sower, but without Darkness, the reaper, the eternal arms race of predator and prey, that life either drowns in its own cancerous mutations or stagnates in perfect stability like the Exos did. So in the end it isn't much of a surprise that the alkahest of the exomind turned out to be a dose of Darkness. Clovis named the place where the alkahest flowed after its mythical counterpart, the Philosopher's Stone, and after a place where the dead came to be reborn: a Deep Stone Crypt.

Is it ironic that a man obsessed with unaltered legacy discovered immortality required forcing errors? Yes! Is this an irony Clovis I appreciated? Absolutely not. He was too busy experimenting on his fun new toys. It took a few more revisions to stabilize the Exos - adding false biological processes to stave off Dissociative Exomind Rejection, for instance - but then he got down to planning how to convert the entire human race to Exos forever indebted to him for their digital immortality. That meant first of all he needed more Vex, and who better to get those Vex than his new Exos! With their durable synthetic bodies and backup-able minds, they made perfect soldiers, especially since he could just reset their memories if they started asking awkward questions - or if they got infected by Vex-borne weaponized thoughts, which they did. All those ancestral dreams that plague the Exos of violent conflict, of barely-remembered warfare? They're real. All those glimpses of alien skies? They were there. And that Long Slow Whisper? It's the tiny fragment of Darkness speaking to each Exo. Clovis did all of it. They were just normal people who got scanned to escape incurable disease, or debt, or simple mortality; and Clovis made them war machines, the same way he tried to make Rasputin a war machine, the same way he wanted humanity to be nothing more than an extension of himself.

So Clovis kept the gate open. And somehow this dumb fucking genius didn't realize that if you can reach the Vex, the Vex can reach you*. It didn't take long for the Europa colony to detect infectious Vex patterns growing in the ice beneath them to go with the equally-twisting patterns seeded in their own minds, and to realize that the invasion had already begun. Elsie hopped bodies to better combat what she rightly viewed as a civilization-ending threat and, after settling in to her new digs, began performing "psychosurgery" to get the Vex out of the brains of infected personnel, all still without knowing about Clarity. But then she had a dream.

*To be fair, Crota made the same mistake, but also to be fair, Crota wasn't the brightest bulb in the Hive's hellish chandelier.

Clovis gave the Exos their ancestral memories of war, their dim recollections of another life, their draw to a place where they were "born." But he didn't give them the tower. All Exos share a persistent dream of walking through a field towards a distant tower. Sometimes the walk is peaceful. Sometimes it's a violent slaughter, killing their way through crowds of every person they've ever known. It's not a memory of Darkness; in fact it's more associated with Light. But Elsie had it, and then Clovis made the dire mistake of mentioning around her that others had had it too. That put Elsie's hackles up. What had he seeded in the Exo mind? What influence, exactly, had her grandfather invoked in pursuit of immortality? What bargain had he made? Had he left some lurking timebomb in them, committed some monstrous hidden crime? She wouldn't put anything past him.

Elsie Bray doesn't fuck around. The instant she realized something was fishy she burned back to the rest of the system too fast for Clovis to intercept her. She went to an institute for study of the Traveler and, with Willa's help, secured a "topological thought," a mote of paracausality, swiftly engineered into a weapon she could use to wipe out the Vex forgeworld and thus Clovis' supply of radiolaria. She messaged her grandfather, telling him that she was coming back to search the Crypt and if she found something she didn't like - such as an immense shrouded whispering black statue that even a glacier wouldn’t go near - she'd press the button.

Unfortunately Clovis managed to press the button first. A maser strike from orbit burnt Elsie-1 into a scorchmark on the ice before she could make it to the Vex gate. Clovis went into a spiral of denial and convinced himself it was okay, it was okay, he'd just rebuild her! Right! This was fine!! He hadn’t murdered his own granddaughter!! Everything was fine!!! He rebuilt Elsie's own frame and recopied her stored scan into it, blocking access to inconvenient memories, and sent her straight back into the fight. That second Exo is almost certainly the one we know as Elsie. So why mention the first one? Well, I have a hunch that somewhere out there in the story-space of Destiny, Elsie-1 might still be knocking around...

Either way, Elsie-2 also urged Clovis to close the damn gate already so they'd have a chance to stem the corruption before it, y’know, wiped out the solar system. Clovis countered with the "solution" of "decoy the Vex into attacking another planet and while Rasputin holds them off I’ll convert all of humanity to Exos." Somehow that didn't go over well. Elsie-2 had reached Done With Clovis’ Bullshit status in record time and might have gone the way of her previous incarnation if Clovis hadn’t then been disabled by another of his chickens coming home to roost. And that chicken brought the good drugs. Clovis started tripping on bespoke homemade hallucinogens cooked up by his own cells rearranged by a parasitic Vex pattern that had hitched a ride on the datalink with Clovis' assistant frame and into Clovis himself. For weeks he'd been holding conversations with a project scientist who never existed while the pattern salted itself through him in "a mess of tiny lenses growing in my deepest flesh." Now it at last revealed itself and demanded its goal: Clarity Control, "the garden's seed."

Clovis chose instead to ditch his poisoned body ahead of schedule, uploading himself and hopefully leaving the Vex construct trapped in his discarded tissue. The scan would copy him twice: one Clovis set as an AI to watch over the Crypt, the other uploaded into the custom synthetic body of his assistant. Immortality at last; he had it all. Of course it turns out that second upload told his original self to take a long walk off a short pier and then deliberately rid himself of the legacy Clovis had bent all his energies to preserving, but the AI settled happily into lording it over the Crypt...for the short time that it got to, since Elsie's second task after repelling the Vex invasion was to deactivate the AI and seal up the Crypt. Afterwards it may have passed into Rasputin's care; we know he had access and most Exos feel a distant link to the Warmind. But Rasputin knew what it was like to have Clovis Bray try to make you into a war machine, and kept AI-Clovis well-sequestered.

So the decades passed. Darkness came. The Golden Age collapsed. Rasputin dissolved himself into hidden fragments. The Exos survived, mostly. Some didn't, but woke again to find a hovering Ghosts welcoming them back. Alone among Guardians the Exos always remembered their name and number in their second life, etched as it was into their hardware. Centuries went by. No new Exos were being made, but by the same token they didn't suffer the privations that killed most humans during the Dark Ages, and so a significant fraction survived into the City Age. And the Crypt remained silent, hidden beneath the ancient ice.

Until Eramis, Kell of Darkness, came to Europa. Hunting through the ruins of the Europa colony, House Salvation found the trail of Bray Exoscience and followed it back to the Crypt itself. How could the resource-starved eliksni resist the chance to trade delicate flesh bodies for machined endurance? It was SIVA, but better; no splicing needed, no danger of nanite runaway. Synthetic immortality. All the machinery already in place, needing only to be adapted for the eliksni brain and body. And the eliksni specialize in adaptation.

Eramis dispatched her lieutenant Atraks to get the Crypt up and running while she hunted down Variks before he could warn the Guardians about House Salvation's plans. When Atraks reactivated the Crypt, she woke up AI-Clovis as well. Thus begins the Deep Stone Crypt raid, which is half stopping Atraks from building new Exos and half stopping AI-Clovis from blowing Europa to kingdom come mostly because he wants to. By the time we got there Atraks' team, amazingly enough, had successfully transferred not only her but also one of Eramis' oldest friends, Taniks (yes, that Taniks), into eliksni-form Exo bodies. We defeat Atraks-1 and Taniks-1 with brief interruptions for AI-Clovis to talk shit and do his utmost to incinerate everyone with nuclear fire before we crash his stupid space station right into his stupid Crypt. Sadly that didn't shut him up; he hooked in to a giant Exo-type head deep in the Braytech research complex where he's still muttering to himself. Elsie and Ana Bray turned up once to tell him they were taking his Stasis research (of course he was doing highly dangerous Stasis research) and he could fuck off, but otherwise he just sits there on his lonesome, presumably catching up on a couple millennia of current events. I'd like to drop-kick his big dumb head into one of Europa's many chasms, but so far the game hasn't allowed it. So far.

If AI-Clovis is going to make us ride a plummeting space station out of orbit while defusing his homemade nuke (yeah, that happens), the least he can do is cough up a nice weapon afterwards. Eyes of Tomorrow, the raid weapon of the Deep Stone Crypt, is a piece of heavy ordnance developed at the DSC to fight the invading Vex, since Clovis seems to have shared the Guardian belief that if a gun didn't solve your problems, you needed more gun. Eyes' tracking could lock on to up to four targets, but they were having trouble with the person holding it getting, y'know, murdered by the Vex. Hence Clovis insisted on a multirocket salvo so his cannon fodder could get all four rockets off before dying. Like Deathbringer, each shot from Eyes lauches multiple projectiles; unlike Deathbringer, whose orbs track towards whatever's closest, you can select its four targets beforehand. Nail all four targets and your next volley will deal even more damage, so in theory one can lock on to four red- or orange-bar ads, take them out in one salvo, then aim the boosted second shot at the yellow-bar they were protecting. It's not quite as dogged in pursuit as Truth, but it's still smart enough to turn a corner and hand-deliver a nasty surprise to people who thought they were in cover. But I still hate it, and still images don't convey the fact that all those little green electronic eyes on the front are constantly moving, googling around and looking at things, and it is the worst. I wish I could paste googly eyes over top of them, but that would probably ruin the homing or something. Leave it to Clovis to make even a sweet tracking-volley rocket launcher upsetting.

Destiny 2 Compendium Armarum Exoticarum

[ Ace of Spades | Ager's Scepter | Anarchy | Arbalest | Bad Juju | Bastion | Black Talon | Borealis | Cerberus+1 | The Chaperone | Cloudstrike | Coldheart | Collective Obligation | The Colony | Crimson | Cryosthesia 77K | DARCI | Dead Man's Tale | Deathbringer | Dead Messenger | Devil's Ruin | Divinity | Duality | Edge of Action/Concurrence/Intent | Eriana’s Vow | Eyes of Tomorrow | Fighting Lion | The Fourth Horseman | Forerunner | Gjallarhorn | Grand Overture | Graviton Lance | Hard Light | Hawkmoon | Heartshadow | Heir Apparent | The Huckleberry | Izanagi’s Burden | The Jade Rabbit | Jötunn | The Lament | The Last Word | Legend of Acrius | Leviathan’s Breath | Lord of Wolves | Lorentz Driver | Lumina | Malfeasance | Merciless | MIDA Multi-Tool | Le Monarque | Monte Carlo | No Time to Explain | One Thousand Voices | Osteo Striga | Outbreak Perfected | Parasite | Polaris Lance | Prometheus Lens | The Prospector | Queenbreaker | Rat King | Riskrunner | Ruinous Effigy | Salvation's Grip | Skyburner’s Oath | Sleeper Simulant | Sturm | Sunshot | SUROS Regime | Sweet Business | Symmetry | Tarrabah | Telesto | Thorn | Thunderlord | Ticuu's Divination | Tommy's Matchbook | Tractor Cannon | Traveler's Chosen | Trespasser | Trinity Ghoul | Truth | Two-Tailed Fox | Vex Mythoclast | Vigilance Wing | The Wardcliff Coil | Wavesplitter | Whisper of the Worm | Wish-Ender | Witherhoard | Worldline Zero | Xenophage ]