So I just finished the game and I have the unfortunate feeling of not entirely understanding what just happened when I put some genuine thought into it.  So here goes.

The "Earth Government" finds this monolith type stone on Earth, and decides to replicate it.  They haul it out to the middle of nowheresville, and proceed to do some experiments under a controlled environment.  They either create the hive mind and use the monolith to keep it under control or just study the monlith marker thing.

Along comes the CEC and the Ishimura to do a planet crack, and the colony lands and finds this marker thing, without the government initally knowing and responding.  They are drawn in by the markers thrall and remove it, unleashing the hivemind, or perhaps just the sickness which eventually morphed a bunch of bodies INTO the hivemind.

Irregardless...

My query comes from not only the question that my understanding of the plot is correct, but also the governments motives.  Why create the marker and then leave it out in space?  I seem to recall a text suggesting the military knew the details of the infection?  What happened the original monlith?  Is it also highly dangerous sitting in some Area 51 on earth next to the Ark Of The Covenant while creepy foreboding music plays...?

It was actually a plot by the Unitologists not the government. The church had infiltrated the government and that created the opporunity for them to do necromorph experiments on human populations. The Marker that was found in the game was probably placed there to be found so there could be a necromoph outbreak that could be studied. Why hide something on a planet thats being excevated? The church is trying to design an army of necromorphs so it would make sense that they would have to feild test something like this. Remeber in some of the logs it mentions the church was building a secret fleet of "mausoleum ships" and taking all the bodies of dead church memeber and preserving them and moving the bodies onto these ships... In secret. What would they need all those bodies for? hmmm. So they can create their necromorph army. I wouldnt be surprised if thats the plot of the next game. But, the monsters are under more control (perhapse with weapons and armor) and the church has its own hive-mind somewhere that they figured out how to put under their control.

But if  the church has so much power why not use the original Marker to spawn Necromorphs?  How did they manage to reverse engineer and get their hands on their own monolith if they didn't possess the original marker?  Why bother field testing the marker if the ultimate goal is ascending?  Placing the marker in the middle of future New York would get the ball rolling a whole lot faster.  The churches goal isn't domination and power, it's everyone dying.

"But if  the church has so much power why not use the original Marker to spawn Necromorphs?  How did they manage to reverse engineer and get their hands on their own monolith if they didn't possess the original marker?  Why bother field testing the marker if the ultimate goal is ascending?  Placing the marker in the middle of future New York would get the ball rolling a whole lot faster.  The churches goal isn't domination and power, it's everyone dying.

I guess we will find out in the next game. I think the church does possess the original marker, but they may have been trying to create new ones for the purpose of mass take over of all the earth colonies. Imagine if they had a lot of markers and sent one to every colony. Then once it made all the people go insane, send in the necromorphs to kill everyone and transform them. That would be more effective than taking over just one planet. I think the church is trying to mass a fleet for total domination of the humans. The master mind of the church might even be alien, like a master hive mind. The whole point of ascending is BS taught to the faithful and is just a religious control to get people to believe they have to give up their bodies intact to the church.



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"But if  the church has so much power why not use the original Marker to spawn Necromorphs?  How did they manage to reverse engineer and get their hands on their own monolith if they didn't possess the original marker?  Why bother field testing the marker if the ultimate goal is ascending?  Placing the marker in the middle of future New York would get the ball rolling a whole lot faster.  The churches goal isn't domination and power, it's everyone dying.



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I wonder why the imitation marker was able to spawn these horrible things, but the seemingly more malevolent original marker did not?

I don't buy that the church was behind the plot.  Kendra very specifically says it's a government cover up, that Unitology is phony.

ahhh this is confusing, i have to play the game to know the story.....too much politics, lol..

The necromorphs didn't start appearing until the Marker was taken from the planet. Until that time the colonists were only suffering the ill effects of being around such a powerful psychic presence, but no bad guys. The removal of the Marker caused a loss of control in part of the hive mind and from that you get the rabid necromorphs. The hive mind wanted the Marker back...to "make us whole again".  I assume patient zero was the bodies of the initial colony murder victims.  How they got infected, I'm not sure...

THIS Marker is not alien. It is a human creation based on a piece of alien technology found on Earth. They (the government at the time, the same government who denied Unitologists the truth of the REAL marker) brought it to this system to experiment with it and eventually abandoned the experiment because they unfortunately created the hive mind in a horrible accident that probably consumed hundreds of scientists lives, and just told people that region of space was forbidden.  Along strolls the CEC into illegal airspace not expecting to find anything, and during the colonies planet crack prep work, they dig up the marker, which the devout Unitologists believe is a sign from, god, or whatever.  Some commit mass suicide, some are murdered, those murdered(and infected bodies) are taken up onto the Ishimura.  Remove to a low flame.

It is very unlikely that your character knew anything of Nicole's death before you went out there. I think that you were planted on that mission as a distraction and didn't know it. Upon arriving and finding out that your girlfriend was dead it would have provided some chaos for Kendra to use to help slip away with the Marker. It would have been fairly trivial for Kendra to cut off the end of the message and in fact is the one that shows the full message to you at the end. She used you.