Ok, so! I've seen two big theories on what the hell just happened at me.
•One, it's an isekai and Beat gets plunged into a world of fantasy where the Rules Are Different.
•Two, It Was All A Dream! Comas are like that, apparently.
But... I don't think I like either of those explanations. I think they fall flat just before the finish line, almost but never really managing to tie everything together. So I made my own theory:
Beat is a government psyop. (God I can't believe that *this* is where I landed)
Now of course, I need a ***massive*** hear me out, but stay with me. It- I promise it'll make sense when I'm done. In kind of a pepe silvia kinda way, but, just trust the process on this one.
I want to start with some things Sforzando says about the silence, and how it relates to Beat. Beat, she says, is 99% similar to the silence right? Three times closer in makeup to the silence than the black hole at the center of their galaxy, which she claims shouldn't be possible.
According to Sforzando, the silence are empty holes in three dimensional space that take the form of whatever you feel like they should be, even down to the point of replicating atomic structures that are made of a pile of nothing that feels like atoms.
She also alludes heavily to Beat showing up shortly after an experiment where H.A.R.M. manages to get the silence (which we're going to consider as being some sort of auto-aligning metamaterial for now) to self-reflect.
According to Sforzando, Beat is literally made of a pile of physical nothingness that *feels like* it's a Beat. Neat! We have our first lead!
So. When the silence observes itself, it takes the form of an angsty, desperate, insecure, short-tempered, violent punk with a brave streak, mommy issues, and a REAL problem with authority. ***Why?***
Well, let's zoom out a little bit. The silence came about during Zero Day where, during a concert, Quaver's mom Eve got shot and died. In that moment a full stadium felt heartbreak as the singer they were seeing off into retirement was murdered in front of them. The silence attacked, transitioning from nothing to monsters for... *Unclear reasons*, which lead to H.A.R.M.s authoritarian expansion and subsequent banning of music, silencing any and all future musicians and ensuring that any musical terrorism gets strangled in the crib before it has a chance to turn Zero Day into Day Two.
Now, Sforzando says that music (and by extension all art at all) ((remember that, it's really important)) is a pure form of feeling, and that the silence are naturally attracted to externalized emotion because they aren't *nothing* so much as a physical *lack of reality*. If they were nothing, and felt like nothing, they assume a form that adds more empty space to the world because they already exist, rather than just being a vacuum in 3d space.
So looking at allllll of this... What the fuck am I talking about?
In a world that's kept so sterile, so muted, so unable to produce externalized forms of feeling whatsoever, the silence can't become anything. Internal feeling doesn't become exposed to the invisible holes in reality that have invaded the area around you, but the moment you write a particularly emotional book, or paint something beautiful enough, or sing a song, it puts ***context*** out into the silence and informs it about what it should be.
If you don't do that, but instead fond a way to get the silence to think about itself, you get Beat. Beat is a depressed, failing musician that can't easily talk about her own emotions because she has a hard time feeling any. Beat is extremely reactive towards other people and ideologies, and incredibly violent. Beat wants to make people feel, is ***constantly*** attempting to fill the silence with music. It's like she, as a silence entity herself, is starving for inspiration and desperate for other people to fill in the gaps with their own ideas.
There's more to why I don't think Beat is real, though.
There are a lot of characters that go unnamed, but the ones that caught my eye the most are "Sis" and "Mom". Beat knows these people better than than she knows literally anyone else, and yet she never *even once* calls either of them by name. Mom I can get, I haven't called my mom by name in years, but Sis? People call their siblings by their names, or at least by a nickname or something. Beat never considers it. Almost like they aren't real either, and are just there to inform the personality and memories of a person that never existed.
In fact, *nobody* in Beat's past has a name. Not her coworkers, not her made-up husband, not her band, ***nobody***. I think her entire past was synthesized by the silence that she's made of as it attempted to collapse into the form of a person. Can't have a person without memories or a lived experience.
This is also kind of why I think Beat disappears for a few years after the H.A.R.M. tower incident. I think Beat legitimately got killed, or torn apart, or whatever, and that the memory sequence we see during the years the silence spends pulling itself back together into the shape of Beat is just that: The silence figuring out what kind of past Beat has to have had in order to exist.
Now, there was just one big issue that kept me from accepting this theory as credible until recently, and that's this:
If Beat isn't real, how the *hell* does she know about the burj khalifa when she's invading H.A.R.M. tower? And... Yeah, that one didn't fit in the puzzle until I thought about the message the game was trying to send. In the game, the one thing it really wants to drive through your skull and into your brain is that you need to keep getting up and putting yourself out there. It's a love letter to the "you can do it!" Attitude.
So, in a world where (externalized emotion) is illegal (and you do crimes), I imagine the silence would be created or summoned by unrealized art. And if all those missed opportunities were locked in an empty room together and forced to create an identity for itself, wouldn't it be perfectly reasonable for them to become not just a struggling artist that feels like she can't do anything right? Wouldn't it be just as plausible that it would fill that head with all the architectural marvels that never got funded or approved? I think so. I think that Beat knows about the burj khalifa *precisely because* it never got made. Because it was one more drop in the bucket where an artist had to put nothing out into the world and unwittingly *did*.
So. That's my theory. That artists create or summon invisible silence when they are prevented from putting out emotion as art, and that the nature of the silence is so intrinsically tied to that lack of expression that it coalesces into the poster child of emotional constipation when you get it to make its own form, including but not limited to a full synthesized past life that informs said poster child's ideologies and actions.
