I recently started replaying War in Heaven, and was once again sucked into the world that the team have created, hoovered up every bit of lore that had slipped from my memory again, read everything I could find here in the forms, on the wiki, and in game. My brain was primed, full of all the little bits and pieces of lore and speculation that have been written, and then I went to work on Monday morning and my iPhone's shuffle threw the first song from a heavy metal album by a band called Scar Symmetry on - Morphogenesis, from the album Holographic Universe...
.. and something just clicked. Something in one of the lines in Morphogenesis had me thinking about Aken Bosch, and the actions he took in the Second Incursion:
Gone forever, we are done with worldviews mechanical
None shall ever be a slave to thoughts inside their heads
Mind is the master, Morphogenesis
This structure remained untrodden, a new reality
So what did I do? I loaded the whole album, and started listening some more (because what else am I going to do at 6:30am on a bus in to work), and then I started noticing other things that synced (in my head at least) with aspects of FS2 or BP (both AoA and WiH):
From "Timewave Zero":
All is gone now, atone
Linear time overthrown
When you find it's all a lie
All worlds will die
Time was all mine, I know, read the signs that I've shown
If you read between the lines
You'll know once the end comes
From "Quantumleaper":
I'm nothing and all things
I drift between dimensions
I'm lifeless, immortal
Collapsed duality
My language is wordless
A silent scream to your ears
Enigma in plain sight
Time/space anomaly
Quantumleaper
Found unfound
Voice of reason
Lost its tongue
...
I'm right here and nowhere
Upon me rests creation
I am wave and lepton
The eerie paradox
Wrong focus, wrong methods
This way you'll never get me
Exclude flesh, include mind
And drift along with me.
From "The Missing Coordinates":
A psi-experiment to seek out the enemy
Unleashed abilities obscured within the self
Trace the site, start to decode
I seek signal lines, go through the grid and back again
And then I'm finding the withering light in me
Senses waking up again
Given coordinates reveals the place we search
The field contains all info in states where time is still
Sites to view and things to know
I use forgotten skills to soar this grid and re-access the soul
And then bits and pieces from "Fear Catalyst" that seemed to me to describe Noemi's personal journey in Tenebra:
As you pray like victims
Sworn to fulfill duality
Victimized by your duty
Your awakening incomplete
Seething, seething
Breathing fear within
Seething, seething
Breathing fear within
Fear will be one with the unknown
And once awake you will find you got it all wrong
Accumulate and find the things you lack
To stimulate the change of track
Fear never binds you and never will
Religion holds you and blinds you still
As the sage, a victor
Called to end all duality
Terror turns into beauty
Find awakening incomplete
(...)
You come alive and feel this way
Never will life betray you again
Only have the self to blame
Never will life betray you again
And finally, the first lines of "Ghost Prototype II: Deus Ex Machina":
And then we found it all caged inside a dream
All-seeing eye sees afloat
Soon it will see no more
Now I'm well aware that there's a high probability that this is all purely coincidental - after all, the concepts that WiH touches on are based in projections of future human capability based on the current mathematical and physical knowledge we have of the universe and assumptions based thereupon, and those concepts have inspired music and film and book for a long time, but I was amused and slightly amazed at just how well various elements of the album lined up to this.
Just thought it was fun to point out, and see if anyone else has come across other media (music, books, games, films) where there have been similar parallels.