I’m not sure if Sound Designer Eric Brosius is a genius or the devil incarnate, but his work on System Shock 2 surpasses even his previous highs in the Thief series. The first thing you notice, even if not consciously, is that it is never quiet. Your time spent in her world is never a pleasant experience. She might not have created the Von Braun, and The Many may have more direct power, but SHODAN’s influence is felt in every facet of the environment, it truly is her world. System Shock 2 is not your story, it is hers. In the end who is more human? The soldier nearly more machine than man, able to do little more than destroy, or the Artificial Intelligence with a desire for transcendence? Eventually you foil her schemes, at least for the moment, but at what expense? Throughout the proceeding hours you have blithely modified your body with the Cyber Modules drip fed by SHODAN as rewards for performing for her. Only much later still do you start to understand the true scope of her plans, and their implication. Your first instinct is simply to survive, only later do you learn the role she has for you. Waking up on board the apparently deserted Von Braun, you know very little of this.
In the future all wrenches will be yellow. In the forty-two years since the removal of her ethical constraints she has found the Von Braun and gone from creation to filicide her children are outgrowing her, and that will simply never do. She might even revel in it, if emotions weren’t so far beneath her contempt.Ĭast out of Citadel Station she might have lost some of the influence she had in System Shock, but if so she is all the more dangerous for it.
But above all of that, she is better than you, and she knows it. Born as the Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network Processing Unit 43893, she is HAL with a soprano a Frankensteinian monster of circuits and wires the not so physical embodiment of every masculine fear of powerful women. “Where were we after forty years of evolution? What swamp were we swimming around in, single celled and mindless? What if SHODAN’s creations are superior to us? What will they become in a million years, in ten million years? What’s clear is that SHODAN shouldn’t be allowed to play God.
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