[Dragaera] it's late and i'm a little punchy

[Scott Schultz via Dragaera]

> The Orb would not be "wrong" about who the next emperor should have
> been; and it would not have had "a bug". Its normally processing was
> disrupted from outside at a critical moment, causing a system crash. Basically,
> Adron DDOSed the Empire.
> 
> Majikjon

I rather enjoy that image, heh.

However, let's assume that Paarfi really does have inside information and that his version of events is largely correct. How could it have happened that way?

Strictly speaking, it wasn't Adron who mucked everything up. It was Mario. He was the one who hard-crashed the Orb. I can see a couple of different scenarios at that point:

1) The Orb does NOT consult the Cycle. Rather, it does a hard reset and starts the Cycle over with House Dragon as "House Zero". Adron then does his hacking attempt that ends up hacking the Empire into oblivion.

Or

2) Adron does indeed DDOS the Orb and overwrite its internal records with $cyclePhaseCurrent = "Dragon". Unfortunately, because it's in the process of rebooting, the Orb initializes $houseRuling = $cyclePhaseCurrent, assuming that $cyclePhaseCurrent was, in fact, set by the Cycle. Bad assumption. Commence feedback loop.

I tend to read a lot into Aliera's remarks in _Taltos_, maybe more than is intended, but it appears to me that Adron was not attempting to steal the Orb, he was attempting to destroy it, or at least destroy it's link to the Cycle. Paarfi just puts a more genteel polish on things that may actually be what you could call a cover-up of the true events. I wonder what Khaavren would have to say about it?

For reference: Excerpt from _Taltos_
---
Aliera nodded, and I saw a tear in her eye. She said very quietly, “It is the reign of a reborn Phoenix, isn’t it?”
Morrolan nodded, seeming to understand.
“I told him it would be,” she said. “A Great Cycle—seventeen Cycles; it had to be a reborn Phoenix. He wouldn’t listen to me. He thought it was the end of the Cycle, that a new one could be formed. He—”
“He created a sea of chaos, Aliera.”
---

What I read into this is that Adron was not merely attempting to hasten the Cycle into its next phase. He was trying to undo the Cycle entirely. Adron knew about the divide-by-zero or Y2K bug in the system and was trying to exploit it to reset the entire Cycle to something more suited to his purposes. He just didn't count on the Orb being in a reboot sequence when he did it. (Assuming that Mario really did hard-crash the Orb.) Maybe he was attempting to destroy the Orb and it lashed out in self-defense. It's been compared to a Great Weapon in that respect.

Whatever happened, I think that there's far more to the story than what Paarfi would have us believe.