I too was interested in who was doing this; while I didn’t find the answers I was looking for, I did find another neat coincidence: Phantom and Gaardus were both Matoran who were experimented on by Nynrah Ghosts. Perhaps the exiles that messed around with Gaardus are the same Ghosts who did Phantom, and Phantom is the reason for their exile. Phantom’s timeline is mostly unknown; it is possible he was experimented on before Gaardus.
As for how much they knew: I don’t think it was very much. They probably knew that the procedure would remove/tamper with certain parts of the AI, but I don’t think they knew the exact science, or the nature behind it. Just like how a lot of early human technology was developed without knowing how it worked, or why.
Potentially true, and I am quite fond of it being a sort of “we don’t know why this works, but it does” situation. But there’s also the possibility that it was someone who had died and been to the Red Star before. The fact that Gaardus remembered he had been to the star means that at least some of the victims who went there were conscious for at least some part of the process - perhaps someone early in the universe history got sent there and was smart enough to figure out what was going on.
Incidently, this also really hammers home why TSO never repeated the experiment - the mechanism was broken. So if he tried it again, the subject would never have even been sent back from the star in the first place, because of the glitch. He’d just be killing off his Dark Hunters.
This just brought to my attention a weak spot in the theory: If Sentrakh is the one jamming up the system, then wouldn’t the Kestora recognize him as the last to leave, not Gaardus?
EDIT: actually, there’s an explanation.
The Kestora are shown to be very literal and robotic, since they were never Awakened. Since, as my theory states, the system in the Red Star has not officially completed Sentrakh’s return, the Kestora probably don’t recognize him as having “left”.
So Gaardus would have left as normal, then I suppose that that means Sentrakh was next in line, and he jammed it.
The Kestora see Gaardus as the last “clean” exit, and so they blame him.
Even if that blame doesn’t make sense to you and I, the Kestora are clearly thinking in a fourth dimension: when their machine that let them heal people broke, their response was “let’s just murder everyone who comes through”.
As for the rest of your point, you are absolutely correct. Maybe he did even try it again (after writing the Dark Hunter book), and then they never came back.
I actually feel there’s a much simpler way around that.
Perhaps the experimental procedure on Sentrakh had nothing to do with manipulating the star, but instead the breakdown was a side-effect of what happened - maybe whatever rendered him “undead” caused the Star to have a bit of a meltdown in deciding whether or not to revive him. Basically shoving an integer into a boolean, from a programming perspective - it asks “Is this person dead?” and expects a “Yes/No” but gets a “um, maybe” from Sentrakh and so it freaks out.
This sort of thing breaks real computers all the time, it’s incredibly simple and plausible, and completely removes Sentrakh from the ring of “likely” culprits, because he didn’t make it to the star to begin with.
It also explains why the star broke a short time after Gaardus left, rather than straight away, which I believe was mentioned somewhere…
(This does bring back the question of why TSO never tried again, but again, there’s every chance that they simply weren’t able to streamline the process any more and scrapped the project.)
My theory states that him jamming the Red Star is the definition of his undeath, not a result.
I still think my way is simpler:
Gaardus got sent back, and it all went according to plan
The Kestora tried to send Sentrakh back at some point afterwards, and he jammed it.
From their perspective, Gaardus was the last one who made it back, so they blame him.
While this could work, it starts to introduce a new concept to the canon, of someone being revived without their body being sent up. You said it yourself: the strength of this theory is that it is based entirely on existing canon, without using any unprecedented “what if this could happen…” scenarios. (Unless you want to use Jaller and/or Takanuva’s unexplained revivals in Mask of Light as a precedent… That would really be connecting the 8th-dimensional dots.)
Whether or not Sentrakh’s body went up, this could still be true. Maybe they went days between sending people back, if the deaths were infrequent enough.
One thing I will say though is that having his AI go up, but not his body, would explain how they got separated in the first place, in order for the teleporter to be trying to send his personality on its own.
The Red Star revives people. We don’t know how it detects who is dead, to my knowledge - but it’s probably automatic.
So it’s used to periodically checking around the universe, spotting corpses, and going “Yep, that’s dead. Beam it up!” I believe it’s been confirmed that the process isn’t instantaneous, so it either has a delay period or it only checks every so often.
What I’m suggesting isn’t that the star tried to revive Sentrakh without teleporting him or anything strange like that. All I’m saying is that because the process that rendered him obedient made him undead, when the Star did whatever it does to find dead people, it checked him and was like “Wait, what’s this, it’s not alive or dead aah” and got all frozen, breaking the system.
He didn’t get revived or teleported or anything at all. Just the fact that an MU inhabitant existed in that weird half-living state was enough to break the Star’s computers.
Okay, I see what you were suggesting now. But still:
This doesn’t quite fit with my theory. My theory says that his state of “undeath” is the real-world interpretation of part of him being in the Universe (alive) and part of him being on the Red Star (dead). His undeath didn’t cause the Star to break; the Star breaking led to his state of being “undead”. In fact, this is the cornerstone of the theory. This whole thing started with me thinking “maybe ‘undead’ means he’s in both places at once”, and then I realized that this could be linked to the Star breaking.
Then, as for what broke the Star, it was that the experiments prevented his mind from being put back into his body (or at least the personality part); when his body got sent back, his mind was stranded, and the Red Star got caught in a loop of trying to send it back, and refusing to teleport anyone else until Sentrakh was completely off of the Star (mind and all).
This also fits with your analogy of computers. I don’t really know the exact terminology, but the computer is basically being told to do an impossible task, and refuses to move on until it is done.
EDIT: another thing: if it really was his “state of undeath” that broke the computers, then the intake teleporter wouldn’t work either. But it does work. Only the return teleporter is broken.
If anything, this non-boolean input would only break the intake teleporter.
You make a good point about the intake teleporter. These theories could coexist, I feel, though. The “undeath” was always described a side-effect of the original intent - making him obedient. But he could still be undead by your definition.
What if the process was something like a small-scale version of what Makuta did? Imagine something like this:
The DH experiment basically involves creating an obedient “personality” and shoving it into an existing body.
In order to do that, there can’t be a personality in the body already (“two spirits can’t occupy the same body” according to Teridax) so the original Sentrakh had to go.
The hunters “kill” his AI using some sort of mental technique (we know stuff like this is possible in Bionicle with psionics and stuff), but before he gets sent to the star, they fill in the void with the blank, “zombie” AI.
But what happens to the original mind? It’s dead, so the Star registers that in need to find his body in its “storage” hold (or wherever it keeps them until it’s ready to work on them) and fix-up his brain.
Yet it can’t, because Sentrakh’s body isn’t on the Star. It’s still in the MU, and the star - not detecting that he’s “dead” - hasn’t teleported his body up yet.
This leaves Sentrakh having never visited the Star, yet still being “undead” by definition of being literally partially alive and dead at the same time. His body is very much alive - but his brain is a blank substitute, and his real mind is dead, and causing the Red Star to have conniptions.
This satisfies all the criteria of both theories and the canon, I believe:
Sentrakh is concretely “undead” by the definition.
Making him “undead” was a side-effect of the process needed to make him obedient (and doesn’t require any knowledge of the Star itself).
Gaardus was the last one to actually visit the Star, but Sentrakh still broke it.
The intake teleporter still works fine, sucking up dead bodies. But the Star isn’t doing anything when they arrive because it’s waiting for Sentrakh’s body.
That’s definitely a little closer. The problem I see with it is that is suggests that the Dark Hunters were intentionally trying to replace his personality. But we know that his lack of memory came as a surprise even to The Shadowed One.
I don’t know the specifics, but there’s the general layout of how I see it:
The goal was to make him more loyal. They knew that this experiment would do it, but they didn’t know how.
Then, his personality was basically barred from his own body; not intentionally, but that’s what accidentally happened.
Then, he died, and his body and complete mind were sent up to the Star.
The Kestora fixed up whatever killed him, and loaded his body and mind into the teleporter
But then, due to the experiment, his personality wasn’t allowed back into his body, so it stayed in the teleporter when his body was sent back. (Think of how the Shadow Leeches barred Light from the Shadow Matoran)
Even after the body is gone, the teleporter recognizes that part of him is still on the Star, so it enters the loop.
But, at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s necessary to actually explain all of this; no matter how we slice it, we are getting a little close to introducing new, pointlessly trivial, canon, rather than just playing off of general concepts of existing canon. (Not even the original story would have gone into this much detail)
I think it’s sufficient to say “The experiment resulted in his mind being trapped on the Star while his body was sent back after dying”, and leave it at that.
Well, it could have come as a surprise to TSO if he hadn’t been kept up-to-speed on what the DH’s were doing. But moreover, I think it’s fair to assume that their knowledge of AI wasn’t sufficient to know what would/would die with his brain/spirit. They might have expected memories to be retained, or even have been attempting to fill in only part of his mind but accidentally got rid of the whole thing.
To some extent, making him loyal would have changed his personality, so they definitely were trying to tamper with his mind to some extent - but there’s also plenty of potential reasons they might not have expected it to pan out quite the way it did.
Did you read the explanation for Tuyet’s revival in Reign of Shadows?
In all seriousness though, I agree that we’ve kind of hammered the idea out as much as you feasibly can. I was trying to establish whether or not it could exist without contradicting existing canon facts/inferences, and I’m pretty convinced there’s at least a few ways you could cut it where it would quite neatly satisfy all the criteria - which one of those possibilities is best is up to the individual and their headcanon.
What does the “undead” state currently enjoyed by Sentrakh entail? If he had been killed in the Matoran Universe, would he have been revived on the Red Star?
Thing is, if you are undead, you’re not dead and you’re not alive, which means you can’t go to the red star.
Doesn’t exactly prove/disprove this theory, but it does confirm that Sentrakh’s undead nature prevents him from being revived normally…
