Headscratchers / Iconoclasts

• After Elro killed Grey, by all rights he should be a wanted criminal. He should have gone off the grid entirely trying to get away from One Concern and Agent Black. Instead, he continues to live in Settlement 17 with his wife and daughter, and still goes to work at the same job where he murdered a high-ranking agent.
  • To be slightly fair, Elro is almost certainly lying to his family about going to work, but it's still odd that he puts his family into that much danger. As shown with Mr. Andress, the husbands, wives, and children of sinners are not punished for a family member's sin. Elro was friends with an agent and knows a lot about the Concern; he should know better than to go back home and recruit his sister to do private practice in his house while wanted by the people currently occupying Settlement 17.
  • Judging from Elro's discussion with his wife, he's been on the lam this entire time, and that he's been lying to everyone about his situation. He pops into his home to give the appearance that everything's okay. Given that the Concern wants to give the appearance that their Agents are invincible, putting him on a Wanted List for "murdering an Agent" would likely be demoralizing to those in City One and the believers of the Concern. So they swept it under the rug and gave the Agents the order to kill him, but with due discretion. After all, he has the means to kill them, and it would be terrible if the Isi caught wind of his methods. That said...given the writing, it's equally possible that Konjak didn't think of Elro's assassination of Gray until late in development, by which point it was too late to redo earlier scenes to reflect that.
• Just what was the "big secret" that Agent Black hinted at before the Agent White fight? Was it that there was another ark ship at City One? Because that doesn't make sense, if only due to the fact everyone in the game is at least somewhat aware that they're colonists from another world.
• How does GENERAL Chrome, a (the?) general, not know about the giant tower his military is running, but Black does?
• Why does Royal get no response from betraying his own side and actively fighting against One Concern? He publicly derails an entire train right after meeting us!
• What do people know about the Starworm? There are pictures of it hanging around. Was it just chilling out for centuries next to the moon before deciding to check the planet out and/or refuel?
• Why does the religion/government require ivory as the world's sole energy source, disallowing research into all other potential sources like solar or wind, but the Starworm (who is worshiped and presumably started their religion) doesn't want them to use ivory? Shouldn't ivory be the only thing they aren't allowed to burn?
  • They actually have researched into other fuel sources, and have working prototypes, but according to documents they were waiting until they had finished their genocide of the Isi before they made any switch as they predicted their military capabilities would be reduced to a fraction both during and after the switchover. They seem to have just completely misjudged both how much Ivory was remaining and how long fighting the Isi would take, and by the time of the game they consider abandoning the planet the only option. As for the other point, it seems they never actually got any coherent messages from the worm. They just made up the tenants of their religion, including the glorification of Ivory use.
• If One Concern knows mining ivory ultimately causes celestial bodies to structurally implode (which they definitely do know, since they already did it to one of the moons) why keep mining it from the planet and explicitly disallow all other energy sources from being used?
  • For the same reason real life oil companies keep drilling for oil despite global warming; shortsighted-ness. They know of alternatives, but the chaos of the switchover and the reduced military ability that would come would foil their plans of genocide regarding the Isi, so they were stalling but misjudged how much Ivory they had left and how long defeating the Isi would take. By the time of the game, they now believe that the planet is doomed anyway, so they see now reason to change since they think they can just abandon it anyway and survive and may as well keep using Ivory
• OC mining ivory from a moon first implies they're aware of the structural collapse danger it poses, but then why resort to mining their own world when they still have a whole second moon to draw from first? Banning other forms of energy and consciously choosing to hollow out the material holding their planet together makes it seem like they actively want an apocalypse to occur as quickly as possible.
• What are the blue eyes? Alien-made? Natural? Are they supposed to be on the Starworm? If so, why do they look like parasitic tumors?
• Why was this artificial planet being run (built?) in the first place? Player explanations describe it as a gas station or tanker, but if it's merely a storage tool, why make trees and oceans? The moons both hold ivory too, so are they also tankers? Just without trees for some reason? Are these structures natural or artificial?
  • It seems as though the planet and moons were natural bodies made entirely of Ivory before they were discovered and mined, presumably by the Birdman species. They assigned the Omega Controller to manage the planet and maintain the Ivory reserves, and the Controller uses the Ivory reserves to also terraform the planet to make it suitable for life (maybe to make it easier for the Birdmen to set down and refuel?) This also had the side effect of making it possible for the human colonist ships to land and populate it. Ivory is mutagenic; it reacts unpredictably when exposed to non-Ivory life, as seen with the 'Isi seeds' (i.e real seeds from Earth) and the ascended humans. It makes sense that the Omega Controller can use it to create a facsimile of life out of Ivory.
• How is everyone immediately alerted the world is ending? Do they see the Starworm coming? Then how is there still the at-least-hours necessary to activate a rocket and travel to the moon to visit it before it even leaves the lunar surface? For context, it takes over two days to reach Earth's moon.
• What does the average person know about their own world or religion?
• Apparently continents move around regularly so there's no way to make a complete world map, but One Concern is trying to hide this fact? Why? Knowledge that landmasses move wouldn't affect them in any way. People are already aware One Concern can direct earthquakes at specific houses of people who dissent!
• Elro: "People don't just go to the freakin' moons!" Uh, don't they? Even clueless settlement-dwellers mention Concern hits up the large moon for ivory all the time—space travel apparently being a fast but expensive trip. As a card-carrying member shouldn't he know people visit the moon regularly?
• One Concern mentions being too afraid of the Isi to risk falling behind them technologically, yet the moment they locate their settlement, they blast through the defenseless place and chase them all into safe-rooms where they can only wait to be rescued, and flee with their bunker to a new location again. The Isi even mention having zero remaining defense robots, and far weaker ivory extraction tech. One Concern doesn't know seeds can kill agents yet, so why are these dozen pirates in a sealab any threat to the world's unified army?
  • Because the ivory mining the Isi has done has contributed immensely to the ivory shortage. The Concern were prepared to manage their remaining ivory beforehand, but the Isi threw a wrench into that.
  • They're competing for ivory with worse tech, but certainly aren't any military threat. They get wrecked so completely that it's strange OC was ever afraid of falling behind them somehow.
• Late in the game we're shown corpses being turned into ivory. Why does no one mention this before or after? Is it common knowledge that ivory is just raw human biomass?
  • It seems to be more of a sludge composed of ivory and half-dissolved human remains. Humans do not seem to naturally contain any ivory, as it is mentioned that the blue eyes that take over Ivory-based machinery do not touch humans... EXCEPT for those like Black that are already infused with Ivory.
• At the end of it all, the Starworm was a glorified space truck and the ivory was originally meant to fuel spaceships. How did the settlers make such an egregious mistake? There must have been some refueling equipment around or something to clue them in.
  • How were they supposed to tell without being able to read the language? Besides, that stuff was all far underground and it's likely the first colonists didn't even notice it. It was only those who took over the mining operations (i.e the Concern) that discovered things like the Controllers and planet spines by accident, then seized control of them to control the settler populace. Also, cargo cults exist in real life.