Warframe is known for incorporating absurd and disturbing twists into its story. But with this revelation at the end of the Solaris story, no one saw it coming!
Warning, spoilers! The following paragraphs reveal a bit about the Solaris, but a major spoiler starts after the second heading.
Who are the Solaris? If you first land in the Fortuna colony on Venus, the bizarre Solaris people stand out immediately. They are workers who must labor for the greedy Corpus corporation. Each Solaris has been in debt to the corporation for generations, as unpaid debts are passed down to the descendants.
A vicious cycle of debt: The poor souls are trapped in a vicious cycle of liabilities forever and must repay them through hard work. However, this never happens, as the corporation ensures that one never earns enough to become debt-free. Workers on Fortuna can only dream of a healthy “work-life balance.”
The strangest cyborgs ever
But it gets worse, as the relentless and hard work in the terraforming factories on Venus requires the Solaris to replace large parts of their bodies with mechanical prosthetics. The end result is an almost complete cyber body called the “Rig.”
The most extreme feature of this “upgrade” is that the Solaris even have mechanical robot heads, while some limbs still seem to be human.
A bizarre and disturbing sight – especially when the Solaris still seem to have many typically human traits. They scratch itchy spots, wearily trudge to their workplace, and hum catchy work songs during their toil.
Body on installments: Every Solaris is thus transformed into a disturbing cyborg upon entering the workforce. However, such a mechanical body also costs money and is provided by the corporation. If one fails to meet their quota, the Corpus takes the “Rig” away again.
The unfortunate workers then become nothing more than a brain in a jar after such a “forced expropriation,” vegetating in some warehouses in darkness and isolation until hopefully someone pays off the debts.
The life of a Solaris worker is thus a complete misery of slavery and total oppression under a completely amoral capital and industrial complex, in which the poor souls do not even own their own bodies.
But there’s an even more disturbing secret, which one learns only much later.
WARNING: A massive spoiler begins here!
The bizarre secret of the Solaris
In the course of the story in the new Fortuna update of Warframe, you help the poor Solaris and fight against the Corpus corporation. This way, you gain more and more respect from the Solaris workforce until they eventually trust you enough to reveal their last secret.
Once you reach the last level of reputation, during a conversation with the revolution leader Vox Solaris, this happens:
What the hell did you just see? As seen in the video, the Solaris carry their most valuable possession close to their hearts: their heads! The unusually bulky torsos of the Solaris rigs securely house the head and face of the workers, their only and thus most valuable possession.
Once you have gained the ultimate trust of the enslaved, the Solaris will always greet you “face to face” and you will encounter rows of disturbing images of living and speaking heads sitting in the chests of their bearers!
The true meaning of the Solaris song: The catchy theme song of the workers also takes on a new light, as the line “Hide the Heart of what we are” now takes on a whole new meaning. The Solaris carry their selves close to their hearts. The head and heart are essentially one and are hidden away.
This makes the notion of “forced expropriation” even more gruesome. Just imagine massive storage shelves full of disembodied heads and faces that must endure for eternity in darkness (also a line from the song). Like an extremely dark version of the heads in jars from Futurama.
Warframe becomes even weirder: Digital Extremes has once again managed to achieve it: The story of the Solaris has added another level to the general “weirdness” of the setting. An accomplishment that many players, after the more extreme revelations from past story updates like Sacrifice or The War Within, thought was hardly possible.
It remains exciting to see how the tragic and disturbing story of the Solaris continues and whether in the game their cruel fate can eventually be changed in later updates.
If this revelation is too extreme, you can calm down with the following activity:
