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The end of Destiny 2‘s Episode: Echoes Act 2 finally reveals the identity of the Conductor, a new threat on Nessus who has taken control of the Vex on the planetoid for spooky and nefarious reasons. The community has long suspected exactly who the Conductor might be, and with the cutscene that played at the end of this week’s story mission, we have our confirmation.
Spoilers for the Echoes Act 2 story mission to follow, so stop reading now if you still haven’t run through the mission.
As was a pretty easy guess at this point, this week’s cutscene revealed that yes, the Conductor is actually Maya Sundaresh. This is a character who has been a part of Destiny 2 lore for a long time, although she has never actually appeared on-screen in any real capacity until now. But Maya has been casting a shadow over Destiny 2 since the vanilla days, and was a big part of some of the best original Destiny lore from the game’s very start. Her appearance is a pretty big deal.
So Who Is Maya Sundaresh, Anyway?
As the radio transmission available in the HELM this week notes, Sundaresh was a scientist way back in the Golden Age, before the Witness showed up with its fleet and caused the Collapse that led to Destiny 2 as we know it now. She was a part of the scientific organization known as the Ishtar Collective, which was located on Venus and first discovered the Vex there.
The first bit of lore that introduced Sundaresh, as well as her wife, Chioma Esi, also introduced the Vex. The original Destiny Grimoire card about both subjects introduced Sundaresh’s research team, and how their study of a Vex construct led to them discovering it was simulating them studying the Vex construct. Sundaresh and her team discovered that the simulation was so good, it was functionally identical to reality, and the simulations were functionally identical to the researchers. Following down that path of logic, the team realized that they could be simulations–that the simulations were so complex and realistic that it was fully possible that though they believed themselves real, they were actually part of the Vex simulation. They also realized that the Vex could do anything they wanted to their simulations, including torturing them endlessly just to study what might happen.
The team decided to contact the AI Warmind, Rasputin, something too complex for the Vex to simulate, to determine if they were real or not–and if not, to ask it to rescue them from the simulation. In the end, Sundaresh and her team pulled more than 200 copies of themselves out of the Vex construct. After being freed from the Vex, however, all the simulated copies of the researchers voted to undertake a brave but risky mission: to explore the Vex information network. Later, it came to light that most or all of the copies were recaptured by the Vex.
The Sundaresh Copies
Nobody really knows what happened to all those original Sundaresh copies that were recaptured by the Vex–most or all of them were probably destroyed. But we know for sure the Vex made a whole lot more, and eventually found at least one that was willing to serve them.
We’ve seen evidence of the Sundaresh copies at work in the world in a couple of places. First, there’s the Inverted Spire Strike, where a Psion from the Cabal Red Legion attempts to take control of the Vex network. At the end of the mission, when the Psion, Kargan, is dead, Ghost talks about data logs in which Kargen was trying to gather Vex information about Otzot, another Psion Flayer, and a special device that the Psions used to try to see the future. Kargen’s attempts were blocked by another user, MSund12–a Maya Sundaresh copy.
Billionaire industrialist Clovis Bray also hired Sundaresh to aid his research team on Europa in his attempt to create Exos, but he discovered later that there was no record that the real Sundaresh had ever worked for him, and other people couldn’t remember ever seeing her on Europa even though Clovis was sure he had worked with her. It seems very likely that Clovis never actually worked with Sundaresh at all, but was actually being manipulated through the machinery keeping him alive by one of the copies.
Clovis used Vex technology, including Radiolaria, to create his Exos, discovering only too late that the Vex–likely with the Sundaresh copy’s help–had infiltrated everything in the Europa facility. That included the machines meant to provide Clovis’ failing body with donor organs. During one procedure, the Sundaresh copy revealed herself by using the automatic surgery robot to vivisect Clovis while he was still alive, and then wake him up in the middle of the procedure. Sundaresh and the Vex wanted information on Clarity, the Darkness statue Clovis was using in his creation of work Exo bodies, and the Vex attacked the Europa facility in an attempt to get it. The Sundaresh copy seemed to have infiltrated even into Clovis’s mind, nearly taking over his consciousness just before he was uploaded into an Exo body.
Sundaresh’s name has occasionally come up in other circumstances in relation to the Vex and their plans, but we don’t know what they’ve been up to before now. We do have some idea of what the real Sundaresh was doing, though.
Cayde And The Veil
As a famed researcher, Sundaresh took part in other endeavors outside of Vex research. She would later study the Ahamkara, employing the original Exo version of Cayde-6 as a bodyguard. Before the Europa events, she also worked with Clovis Bray on an AI project that combined Vex and Warmind technology to create Soteria, the AI that’s the focus of the Spire of the Watcher dungeon. And she helped develop the future-seeing device that led to the formation of the Future War Cult.
Maya, Chioma, and their researcher friends were aboard a colony ship, the Exodus Indigo, during the Collapse, but managed to avoid being destroyed when the ship fled to Neptune. There, they waited out the apocalypse that ravaged the rest of the solar system. The survivors created the city of Neomuna and considered Sundaresh to be their founder, and eventually, the Ishtar researchers there discovered a Darkness…thing, known as the Veil.
The Veil killed or negatively affected the first people to come into contact with it, and that included completely wiping the minds of all the Exos in that first group. Despite the horror, Sundaresh heard the Veil communicating with her and believed it was the Neptune survivors’ “salvation.” Studying it became an obsession. Sundaresh and Chioma created an interface that would allow people to make contact with the Veil in order to study and understand it–a device that would eventually become Neomuna’s Cloud Ark system.
But those early experiments proved fatal, killing any normal humans connected to the Veil. Chioma wanted to stop the experiments, but Sundaresh continued anyway, using the brain dead Exos to try a new way of understanding the Veil. In the process, Sundaresh also created a copy of her own mind and uploaded it into one of the dead Exo test subjects–a woman named Lakshmi-2–and the experiment caused Lakshmi-2 to reawaken, now at least a partial copy of Sundaresh with some of her memories.
Chioma would eventually discover Sundaresh dead in the “conductor” chair that was part of their apparatus for communicating with the Veil. She didn’t know exactly what happened to Sundaresh, but for the sake of Neomuna, she covered up how obsessive and unethical Sundaresh had become. The ins and outs of what happened to Lakshmi-2 Exo aren’t completely known, but she must have left Neomuna at some point, living through the Dark Age on Earth to eventually become the leader of the Future War Cult; she was later killed during the events of the Season of the Splicer.
The Conductor
That brings us to now. As explained in the radio transmission at the end of Echoes Act 2, the person in control of the Vex on Nessus is Maya Sundaresh. The Conductor version is either one of the copies that survived in the Vex network, a combination of all copies, or possibly even the original Sundaresh who seemed to have died on Neptune, having somehow uploaded herself to the Vex network. It also looks like she’s using either the original Lakshmi-2 Exo body from Earth or a copy of it, but either way, that could have implications for what’s going on in this new version of Maya Sundaresh.
There was a period when Sundaresh was a good person and a brilliant scientist, but the many versions of her have been twisted by a lot of different awful things, like her time spent with and working for the Vex, and getting her mind messed with by the psychic emanations of the Veil. The cutscene from the end of Act 2 gives a sense of this–the Conductor says she wants to use the Vex Radiolaria she controls to usher in a new Golden Age for humanity, but it sure sounds like she means to assimilate everyone into her network and control them in order to do it. Sundaresh wants to create a perfectly peaceful and prosperous world in which everyone is under her control.
How that shakes out in Act 3 is going to be fun to see, especially because of a few hints at things we’ve seen so far. When Saint-14 interacted with the Conductor, she was able to place doubts in his mind and forced him to his knees from a distance, likely because Exos were all created using both a combination of the Darkness and Vex Radiolaria, allowing her to take control of it to some degree. So it might not just be Vex machines that can come under the Conductor’s control, but Exos as well, and that could have some major implications for where the story is headed in the future.
In the meantime, though, Destiny 2 is finally paying off all those Maya Sundaresh references and lore entries that have been floating around for 10 years, and that’s pretty exciting.
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