Game Theory - This Cat KILLED The Human Race! (Stray)

Episode Date: April 23, 2023

Have you played the cat game yet? I'm amazed it took this long, honestly. In the game you play as a cat helping a world of robots fight a consuming threat called the Zurks. By the end - spoilers - you have saved the day. Except... you haven't. Maybe. That's what we are talking about today. Did the cat REALLY save the world? Let's find out!

So let me get this straight. You just play as a cat. Yeah, that's it. It's great. Haven't you ever wondered what it's like being a cat? No. Oh, come on. I have a cat. He sleeps. A lot. And when he's not sleeping, he's just a jerk. What? Skip is a sweetheart. Observe. But that was just a...

And again. I... And again. Okay. Okay. I get it. And again. Oh, internet. Welcome to game theory. The most perfect show in all the internet. Sorry. Sorry, that last pun was a cat-tastrophe.

But don't worry, I'll stop, I'm just kidding around. Woo! Okay, now that the bad puns are out of my system, let's talk about stray, shall we? Following in the grand tradition of keyboard cat, Nian cat, grumpy cat, and Garfield, stray is the internet's latest cat obsession. In it, you control a nameless stray cat

roaming around a cyberpunk city that you quite literally fall into. It's a good thing that cats always land on their feet. We're also joined by a drone named B-12. So if the cute cats don't get you, then the cute little robots will. a variety of pushing things off ledges, scratching on doors, and park-horing around the city, you know, typical cat stuff, you unlock B-12's memories and the lore of the world, uncovering the truth of this underground city and what happened to the humans that once lived inside it.

It turns out the surface had become a barren wasteland, so in order to survive, the humans fled to these underground cities, creating robots called companions to assist them. Eventually, a plague developed, which wiped all the humans out. According to a note on the wall, this was around 2,544,875,556 days ago, or nearly 7 million years in the past. In the absence of humans, the companion robots begin to evolve into sentient machines and develop their own society. But our friend, B12 here is different. He's special.

A big reveal of the game is that B12 isn't just any robot, but rather a human scientist, a scientist who uploaded their consciousness to the network. This therefore makes them the last living, quote unquote, human being. Kind of a bummer then that in the end, B12 has to sacrifice themselves in order to override the city's security and open access to the surface, which apparently is no longer barren, but instead full of green plants and armies of cats. The final shot of the game is our stray feline friend walking off into the sun, as the electronics system at the edge of the underground city comes flickering back to life. And roll credits.

I mean, guys, all you had to do is give me a game where I, le cat, get to purr and rub my face on things. I don't think anyone was expecting this much lore when they saw a big cat, cat on the thumbnail. But we're talking a post-apocalyptic world, a plague, seven million years of history? With all this, what more could a gamer want? Oh wait, I know. A theory. Because while everyone else is gushing over how cute the game is and how nice the ending is, I'm sitting here thinking that this cat, a cute little floof ball, yeah, he just doomed the entire world. And it all comes down to that final shot of the game. The computers outside the city flickering on as our cat walks away.

Now, pretty much everyone I've seen play this game has theorized that this is a sign that B12 isn't actually dead. That in using the network to open up the city, B12 may have sacrificed their robot body, but managed to upload their consciousness to the network and now lives on inside the city's systems. And you know what? That is a perfectly valid explanation that honestly, I can't disprove. Me though, I also have a perfectly valid explanation that can't be disproven. And mine is a whole lot darker while tying up some loose ends that never get addressed in the game.

I don't think those screen flickers are B12. I think it's something way worse. I believe that by opening up the city, we've actually wound up killing the planet a second time. And all the clues are there inside the game already pointing us in this direction. One thing that I haven't brought up yet in our analysis of stray are the Zerk, these horrifying flesh creatures that chase after our little flu-fit various points throughout the game. We learned that the Zerk began as a bacteria developed by humans to eat away the garbage that was piling up in the underground city. Now, what's cool about this is that it's actually something that scientists are working on right now.

In Japan, they've actually found a bacteria called, Ideanella Sikyanis, which has developed the ability to eat plastic. Let's just hope that our scientists build in better safety precautions than what we see in Stray. Because once the humans all day out, the Zerk suddenly grow out of control, evolving to the point where it no longer eats just trash, but everything in its path, including metal, which is going to pose a direct threat to all our robot friends. Fortunately, we learned that the Zerk have one weakness.

UV light, which means that when we open the city up to the light of the sun at the end of the game, we effectively eradicate all the Zirc in sight, watching them pop faster than a 13-year-old's pimple problem. We've beaten the monsters, the robots are safe, it's a happy ending for everyone, right? Yeah, not quite. You see, that heartwarming cutscene kind of glosses over the most horrifying moment

that happened earlier in the game. Down in the sewers, hidden away from any sunlight, is the biggest infestation of Zerk, complete with fleshy walls, bulging birthing pods, and huge eyeballs. Again, not some I expected from a game whose main selling point is become cats. But this too has backing in science.

It's been suggested that bacteria might have the ability to operate as a neural network, acting like the sort of hive mind that we see in the sewers in Stray. Bacteria can also develop more societal behaviors, with different bacteria performing different tasks. Some of the most notable are biofilms that form sticky sheets that can attach to non-living surfaces

and mixobacteria that form bulbous pustules, just like the fleshy walls and birthing pods of the Zerk that we see in the game. But the thing that most people are forgetting is that the biofilms and giant eyes that we see in the sewers of stray aren't affected by UV light like the rest of the Zerk. You can swing your cat's UV weapon around all you want, but no matter how close you are or how long you hold the button down, the eyes continue to just stare at you. They cannot be killed. They have evolved beyond their weakness to UV light.

So while the ending of the game wants us to believe that we've eradicated all the Zerk with the UV light of the sun, that's just not true. The strongest of the Zerk are still alive down there in the sewers. impervious to the same weakness of their smaller bacteria brothers. But okay, at least they're stuck in the sewers, right? Well, you would be right if it wasn't for one important detail. This guy right here, hanging from one of the walls in the sewers. That right there, my friends, is a robot.

We've specifically been told that the zirks eat metal. We see him try to consume doc when you open the door for him. We see the rest of the robots act terrified when we first arrive in the city because they think that we're a zerk trying to devour them. And yet, this robot here is in the middle of the middle of the door. Zerk activity. He is literally surrounded by the stuff, and yet he's still alive. He hasn't been consumed. Why? Well, it's because the Zerk clearly don't want to eat him. Instead, they want to learn from him. He's being kept down here as a prisoner. But to understand why, we have to

turn our attention back to our new friend, B-12. As I've already mentioned, B-12 is a human consciousness that's been downloaded into a drone body, the quote-unquote last surviving human. Prior to this, their consciousness was stored and alive in something called the network. Not much is known about the network. What we do know is that B12 was in it for so long, it somehow made him able to hack into most systems of the city and translate the language of the companion robots. The only other thing we know is that B12's human form was able to upload their mind to the network via a white pod looking like this. But that raises an interesting point. We see B12's pod in their lab at the start of the game, and yet there's a second white pod here. Clearly

B12 is not the only person that has uploaded their consciousness into the network. In fact, what if I told you that most of the other robots in this world act like humans because they are humans? Or at least have human consciousness inside of them. In the same village where we find the second white pod, we encounter a robot who tells us that they love the smell of fresh paint, only to then remember that they can't smell anything. That's not something that you would fake to appear more human, nor is it something that an AI is just going to naturally develop over time. They are recalling an actual memory here, just like we see B12 recalling actual memories throughout the game. By collecting one of the memories down in Midtown, we see B12 talk about how they loved getting burgers from a particular place where the server's name began with an M.

If you go to the restaurant in Midtown, the server in the burger joint is called Matt B. The human consciousness that's inside of that server robot remembered his name. The memory is buried deep, but it's there, somehow influencing current actions. These robots didn't just evolve like the game tries to tell us. They're all humans that have downloaded their consciousnesses into robot bodies. They've existed for so long that they've forgotten that they've forgotten that they've. were once human. It's why they eat food when they weren't built with digestive tracks. It's why they get haircuts despite not having any hair. Their human habits still take

effect despite the memories having faded millions of years ago. In fact, we outright see confirmation of this in B12's lab. Take another look at the room where we see B12's pod. The pod isn't the only thing that's in there. It's connected to a bunch of wires, all of which are then connected to a robot that's sitting right next to it. The network was not meant to be B12's final destination. Nor was the drone that he wound up in. Instead, they were trying to upload themselves to that companion bot. Except, we know that the transfer process didn't work out completely. They wound up inside the drone instead.

Which brings us all the way back around to our unfortunate robot friend that's imprisoned to the wall of the sewer. Because if you look closely, you can see a lot of cables coming out of that robot and going into computer monitors. Active computer monitors. If humans were able to connect themselves into the network and transfer into the robots, then it's possible that this is what the Zerk are after as well.

The hive mind can use this imprisoned robot to access the network, to learn from it, to potentially upload itself into the network, or to take it a step further, to download the hive mind into an army of robots, allowing them to traverse the landscape during the day, to reach facilities where they can then experiment and improve the Zerk's capabilities, to make them completely resistant to UV light. That is why the monitor flickering on at the end of the game is so ominous. It's not B-12, it's the strain of Zerk from the sewers. The only thing they needed was the ability to circumvent the city's security, and we did exactly that for them.

By opening the city, we gave them the key that they needed to escape, and in the process, we've doomed all of society. Didn't I tell you at the beginning of the episode? Cats are jerks. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching!