Braid is a story that focuses on the development and deployment of the
atomic bomb, and the irreversible impact it had on all human conflicts
thereafter. At the very same time, it deals with the very human story
of a relationship breaking down due to one person's obsessive need to
control this power. Finally, at certain points, the perspective of the
bomb creator as a child comes through.
The
main source for all of this comes straight from the passages of the
texts found in the epilogue screens, all of which are laid out openly
below. Each screen has an alternative passage laid out, which only
appears once Tim is located behind an object in the foreground. The
italicised text is the alternative.
----------
QUOTE
The boy called for the girl to follow him, and he took her hand. He
would protect her; they would make their way through this oppressive
castle, fighting off the creatures made of smoke and doubt, escaping to
a life of freedom,
The boy wanted to protect the girl. He held
her hand, or put his arm around her shoulders in a walking embrace, to
help her feel supported and close to him amid the impersonal throngs of
Manhattan. They turned and made their way toward the Canal St. subway
station, and he picked a path through the jostling crowd.
His
arm weighed upon her shoulders, felt constrictive around her neck.
"You're burdening me with your ridiculous need," she said. Or, she
said: "You're going the wrong way and you're pulling me with you." In
another time, another place, she said: "Stop yanking on my arm; you're
hurting me!"-----
I'm coming back to this one in a
second. For now, take note of the location (Manhattan), and the
somewhat schizophrenic splitting of events hinted in the alt text.
Three women are shown speaking; the first being the spurned partner,
the second being that of the bomb, the third being that of the mother
of a persistent child.
----
QUOTE He worked his ruler and
his compass. He inferred. He deduced. He scrutinized the fall of an
apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. He was
searching for the Princess, and he would not stop until he found her,
for he was hungry. He cut rats into pieces to examine their brains,
implanted tungsten posts into the skulls of water-starved monkeys.
Ghostly,
she stood in front of him and looked into his eyes. "I am here," she
said. "I am here. I want to touch you." She pleaded: "Look at me! But
he would not see her; he only knew hot to look at the outside of things.Again;
I want to come back after the big reveal. But the search for the
'Princess' is important, and the description of a man obsessed with
observing, with deducing but never really knowing.
---
QUOTE
He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging
from a thread. Through these clues he would find the Princess, see her
face. After an especially fervent night of tinkering, he kneeled behind
a bunker in the desert; he held a piece of welder's glass up to his
eyes and waited.
The desert unarguably being that of New Mexico;
the bunker, the safe observation point for one of the single most
important landmarks in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
QUOTE
On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a
pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies split.
One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the
World...[1]
The above paragraph is a direct quotation (hence the
footnote) from Robert Jay Lifton's The Broken Connection, of which you
can read some of right here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=WPiLtmZrG...esult#PPA371,M1He
describes in painful detail the explosion of the nuclear bomb, the
first cry of a newborn world. Robert Jay Lifton himself was a
psychologist, notable for his work around the effects on war and
genocide on the human condition.
QUOTE Someone near him said: "It worked."
Someone else said: "Now we are all sons of bit@hes."
The
famous words of Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge, uttered directly after the
successful detonation of the first nuclear bomb, the "Trinity Test."
QUOTE
She
stood tall and majestic. She radiated fury. She shouted: "Who has
disturbed me?" But then, anger expelled, she felt the sadness beneath;
she let her breath fall softly, like a sigh, like ashes floating gently
on the wind.
She couldn't understand why he chose to flirt so closely with the death of the world.The
alternative text, written from the viewpoint of the bomb itself. The
direct aftermath of the explosion, the fallout, and a failure to
understand why anyone would want to bring such a thing into the world.
QUOTE
The candy store. Everything he wanted was on the opposite side of that
pane of glass. The store was decorated in bright colours, and the
scents wafting out drove him crazy. He tried to rush for the door, or
just get closer to the glass, but he couldn't. She held him back with
great strength. Why would she hold him back? How might he break free of
her grasp? He considered violence.
They had been here before
on their daily walks. She didn't mind his screams and his shrieks, or
the way he yanked painfully on her braid to make her stop. He was too
little to know better.
She picked him up and hugged him: "No,
baby", she said. He was shaking. She followed his gaze toward the
treats sitting on pillows behind the glass: the chocolate bar and the
magnetic monopole, the It-From-Bit and the Ethical Calculus; and so
many other things, deeper inside. "Maybe when you're older, baby," she
whispered, setting him back on his feet and leading him home, "Maybe
when you're older."
Every day thereafter, as before, she always walked him on a route that passed in front of a candy store.John Wheeler's It-From-Bit theory describes that
"...
every it--every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime
continuum itself- derives its function, its meaning, its very existence
entirely--even if in some contexts indirectly--from the
apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices,
_bits_."(If we were being really analytical, Quantum
theory also has things to say around (at a base level) multiple worlds
existing at the same time, in alternative states.)
The Ethical
Calculus "refers to any method of determining a course of action in a
circumstance that is not explicitly evaluated in one's ethical code."
Not too much of a leap to state that the deployment of nuclear
technology at the end of World War II was one of the biggest ethical
dilemmas encountered by mankind.
The Princess is the bomb,and
we are being told the story of a man so focused on the development and
harnessing of an immensely destructive power that it inevitably falls
out of his hands, and into the wider world. One of the pre-word books
reads;
"This improvement, day by day, takes him ever-closer
to finding the Princess. if she exists - she must! - she will transform
him, and everyone."It is, simultaneously, the story of a
relationship so burdened by a man's obsessive, inquisitive nature that
the search for his 'Princess', his power is the one thing that drives
them apart. More;
"Through all the nights that followed, she
still loved him as though he had stayed, to comfort her and protect
her, Princess be damned."The hub, the city burst into
flame at the title sequence as the brightest of lights burns in the
background, could easily be seen to be Manhattan.
(IMG:http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/1994/cam0656ha0.th.jpg)
Again,
mentioned in the epilogue texts, and quite significantly, the placing
of two very distinctive towers in the background of the attic screen.
(IMG:http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/2132/cam0659ep8.th.jpg)
One
of the paintings also shows a World War II era poster on the side of a
building located on a busy U.S. street, as a young man stares
mournfully into flame.
(IMG:http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/4327/cam0658gj8.th.jpg)
The
Princess, somehow harnessed and shackled, looms ominously in the sky,
overshadowing everyone and everything with a threat, a power that can't
be taken back. Can't be reversed.
(IMG:http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/7671/cam0657yr0.th.jpg)
Stolen from another forum; the flags at the end of each world are nautical flags.
World 2: N
World 3: U
World 4: L
World 5: X
World 6: K
N: No
U: You are (standing into/approaching) danger
L: Stop instantly
X: Stop carrying out your intentions
K: You should stop, I have something important to communicate
The warnings directed towards a man intent on bringing an indescribable power into being.
Think
about the ending. A purging wall of flame chases Tim and the princess,
all the way up to the point of Tim is found lurking outside a bedroom
window. At this point everything reverses; Tim is now chasing her, not
following. She is now trying to trap and block Tim from ever reaching
her, not aid his progression. Instead of trying to escape the hands of
an aggressive knight, he is now the one figure that takes her away from
Tim's 'ridiculous need', his obsession with control.
And the
one point that rounds all this off - in the pursuit of the eighth star,
Tim finally manages to reach the upper half of the screen, and come
into contact with the princess herself. What happens?
She explodes.
