How this singular Gold and Gears occurrence might change everything we know about Dr. Ratio
…He might be thousands of years old, oh boy.
Ok, where to begin? Well probably with the occurrence that started it all:
Mechanical City, “Cogito Hair Salon”- Intellgencia Guild
This is where things get complicated.
You see, the Mechanical City is old as hell
This took place around the time of the First Mechanical Emperor’s war, who created the machine empire, which included the Mechanical City, something which occurred soon after the Borderstar Trade War.
Then, the Rupert 1 (the leader of this empire) sleeps, and this caused his empire to crumble, presumably the city alongside it:
Which according to these Xianzhou records, happened at this time
Then Polka Kakamond fought Rubert for a few more Amber Eras until she eventually succeeded in killing him, marking the end of the First Mechanical War.
Which resulted in the collapse of its empire, and presumably, the Mechanical City alongside it, Nanook, the youngest aeon, also ascended during this time due to the mess of the Emperor’s War and the remnants of the swarm.
Now, for the sake of my sanity, and this first scenario, I am going to assume that the Mechanical City fell alongside Rubert I when their empire collapsed about years ago, as although it’s likely Rubert II could have revived it, as you will see, it’s not necessarily relevant to this discussion (there are actually only two possible paths this situation could lead to).
If Amber Eras are on average this long
And the current year we are in is
Which is about this in Xianzhou years
Meaning that disaster in the Xianzhou happened around 3500 years ago (if Xianzhou years are the same length as Trailblaze ones, if they aren’t I’m not gonna think about that <3). Then, Polka Kakamond was alive around this time, and it took her several Amber Eras to finally kill Rubert, which I’m going to interpret several as ~5 and the length of these Amber Eras to be averaged out to be around 158 years long each, meaning Rubert died about 2700 years ago, give or take A LOT OF TIME because of the inconsistency of Amber Era lengths, the amount of Amber Eras, the fact that we don’t know when exactly Polka Kakamond decided to start trying to kill Rubert, or even when she was alive, etc.
SO, when you put it all together Dr. Ratio must be at least 1000 years old if he were to be able to be alive during this period of time to attend the Mechanical City within this occurrence.
Which changes everything, because presumably Dr. Ratio is a normal human and he should not be that old.
Oh dear.
However, before I ponder the implications of THAT, let’s explore the other possibilities.
This never actually happened.
This is by far both the most boring and most likely one for a lot of reasons.
a) There is an occurrence that definitely takes place in the preset exactly like it
This is Mechanical City, Cogito Hair Salon: Genius Society
And based on its description, it was clearly put in here to help the trailblazer navigate the Simulated Universe through the Intra-Cognition function, and the 4 Genius Society members depicted (Ruan Mei, Herta, Stephen Lloyd and Screwllum) absolutely did not travel back in time for this to happen, rather they seem to habe implemented it themselves.
Therefore, the occurrence with Dr. Ratio could be something similar: an event made up for the sake of navigating the Sim Uni, and not something that ever actually took place, I believe this and another solution I will introduce later are the most likely explanations for this situation.
b) The occurrence with Dr. Ratio is uh, weird
For lack of a better explanation in this, Dr. No5 is uh, tweaking. Meaning, the events taking place around him might not even be what’s happening in reality.
Or, the Trailblazer is in the Mechanical City, but Dr. No5 isn’t and the sim uni kinda just meshed the two together.
What also complicates things is that it seems like after he killed himself, No5 turned into a mechanical spinning top, meaning the Anti-Organic equation might have been the cause of his death? And I’m not sure if it’s still active in modern times.
Either way, the sheer levels of delusion radiating off of Dr. No5 leave to believe this scene isn’t entirely real, however I don’t think this explanation is all good honestly, it’s just something I wished to point out before moving on.
That’s not our Dr. Ratio
Apparently in the original Chinese, the characters used to denote Dr. Ratio are different to the way he is typically referred to, meaning that whoever this Dr. Ratio is, it might not actually BE him.
Now, I know absolutely nothing about how Chinese works, but based off the discussions I’ve seen around this particular detail, I think the general consensus is that the Ratio in this is more of a surname, and our Dr. Ratio either named himself after/is a descendant of this one.
Which would be interesting, and would mean we (I) would now have to scour future updates for his mention, but for now I’ll leave this option at that because like I said, I don’t know how any dialect of Chinese works at all, much less the original used in the game.
If someone reading this does, I would really appreciate clarification/confirmation/your opinion on this, so thanks in advance.
Finally, for my favorite explanation (and the one I think is what really happened), that being:
The Mechanical City still exists, and Ratio is in fact, some dude with a normal lifespan.
Let me cook.
So, based on what I showed you earlier, it’s heavily implied that the Mechanical City fell with Rubert during the First Emperor’s War around 2000 ish years ago alongside him.
However, what if I told you that isn’t necessarily true:
The IPC took it over.
Although this passage doesn’t mention the Mechanical City or even allude to it, it does mention thin how the IPC, with the aid of the Intellgencia Guild, began taking over areas across the universe, especially areas of inorganic life, following Nous’s prophecy, with the methodology of “Colonization Under the facade of development,” (the game straight up calls them colonizers LMAOOO).
Anyways, the IPC HATES inorganic life due to the Emperor’s Wars, and were about to pass an order to eradicate all inorganic life when Screwllum gained Nous’ approval and joined the Genius Society, and as we saw in the screenshot, they were, well, colonizing those areas and making it into their own.
So- who’s to say they didn’t do it to the Mechanical City? Why wouldn’t one of the most defining features of the Mechanical Empire now be under IPC control, even to this day?
Besides, inorganic life forms have no need for hair salons- they don’t have growing hair! But in a Mechanical City repurposed for people, yeah, a hair salon would make sense.
Thereofore, Ratio isn’t some thousand year old entity, rather he’s just in a location run by the IPC and Intellgencia Guild that happens to have thousands of years of history behind it.
Moreover, it just wouldn’t make sense for Ratio to be that old.
He has plenty of media about him documenting his life, and based on how recent those media are and how this passage is worded, I’m led to believe that Ratio aged like a normal person, and his middle school years didn’t somehow last an exponential amount of time.
Also, I feel like if he WAS that old we would have some actual clue pointing to it beyond a singular occurrence that would only ever point to that once you do all this digging.
Therefore, I conclude Ratio is not in fact immortal, and the IPC likely just colonized the Mechanical City, which is why it is still around today.
Finally, I sincerely hope you enjoy me going insane over this one stupid occurrence, and I would like to disclaim that I am no lore expert when it comes to the simulated universe, so if something I said in here was misinformation, please tell me! It seems as though Dr. Ratio is never beating the “just some guy” allegations lmao.
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