The Camerata are a group of four powerful and influential individuals in the city of Cloudbank. Secretly established to circumvent the official administration and democratic nature of Cloudbank by enforcing artificial stability upon the ever-changing city, the group and its activities drive the plot of Transistor.
Members[]
- Sybil Reisz, social planner
- Asher Kendrell, OVC Editor
- Grant Kendrell, Administrator
- Royce Bracket, mathematician
History[]
| Spoiler warning! This article contains major spoilers for Transistor. |
The Camerata was founded by long-time friends Grant Kendrell and Royce Bracket, who had tired of supporting a system under which any part of Cloudbank could be changed at the majority's whim, leaving no permanence for works they had taken pride in. The group was initially Grant's idea, formed after Bracket showed him a powerful artifact he'd discovered, the Transistor. It was always intended to be very small; Grant in particular never intended its ranks "to exceed a number to be counted on one hand." They later recruited Asher Kendrell, who met Grant through interviewing him about Cloudbank's largely undocumented history, and Sybil Reisz, whose reasons for joining the Camerata are unknown. Asher used his editorial work for the OVC to cover up the Camerata's actions, while Sybil acted as a spy in the social arena, gathering information on the group's targets. They stored much of their work on the Transistor and the Process at the Kendrells' office high on Bracket Towers, and also took advantage of Royce's estate on remote Fairview Island, where he had gained access to the Transistor's Cradle.
The group used the Transistor to "integrate" the Traces of various individuals of influence, "subjects of a certain status, whose utter disappearance could be explained away," killing each victim in the process. Each integration armed the Transistor with a new Function derived from the victim's unique point of view, building a tool with which the Camerata intended to subvert Cloudbank's consensus-based governance by unilaterally guiding the city's development as they wished from behind the scenes, giving the people "what they didn't know they wanted" instead of permitting them to express their own fickle desires through voting. The Camerata would integrate a number of victims during a span of under 10 months, with a memo from Royce dated 08-21-66 listing Niola Chein, Wave Tennegan, Maximilias Darzi, and Shomar Shasberg as potential targets. The Camerata also safely recorded their own Traces and extended their operations to individuals who got in their way or whom they considered threats to their goals; when the rash of disappearances and internal cover-ups drew notice from former OVC Chairwoman Lillian Platt and famous forecaster Henter Jallaford, the Camerata integrated them as well, and they took advantage of the offline-pending-investigation northwest edge of Goldwalk District to further their operations.
Shortly prior to the events of the game, Sybil nominated Red as target of the Camerata. Though Sybil had previously been loyal to the organization, doing her job "to perfection", her nomination of Red was in fact an attempt to get rid of Unknown, who she believed had been turning Red against her. According to her Function File, Sybil is very likely to have misled her colleagues to believe that Red would be alone in the Empty Set on the night of her assassination attempt.
While Sybil's plan to have Unknown take the fatal blow in Red's place succeeded, Unknown's lack of data in Cloudbank's records caused the Transistor to malfunction, teleporting Red and Unknown's body to Goldwalk along with itself. This caused Grant to be signed off as the Transistor's primary User and broke the weapon's connection with the Cradle, freeing the Process from Camerata control and allowing it to begin to reduce the city and its inhabitants to a "blank slate" state of uniform corruption.
After the failed assassination, the Camerata dispersed. The Kendrells fled to their office in Bracket Towers and Royce returned to Fairview Island, but Sybil remained at the Empty Set and was infected by the Process.
Events of Transistor[]
Red, having inadvertently because the new primary User of the Transistor, is desperate to reverse Unknown's integration, learn the truth about the Camerata, and stop the Process from ravaging Cloudbank. Upon returning to the Empty Set, she confronts and defeats Sybil, whom she finds almost entirely transformed by The Process, and Sybil's Trace provides a lead to Grant and Asher Kendrell.
Red later arrives at Bracket Towers, where Asher communicates with her via Terminals as she ascends the building's Process-ridden levels, unhappily disclosing the Camerata's goals and role in the Process's unintended escape and explaining that Grant cannot speak for himself because he has been "unwell" since losing control of the Transistor. As his condition progresses, Grant chooses to commit suicide before Red reaches the office, and the bereaved Asher follows him, releasing a public confession of the Camerata's crimes and leaving a farewell message to Red before doing so. The notes and experiments found in the Bracket Towers office provide Red and Unknown with more context for the Camerata's original goals, and Grant and Asher's Traces tell them where to find its fourth member, Royce Bracket.
Back at Goldwalk, Red and Unknown are met by Royce's Proxy, which he uses to communicate with her as he leads her to the Cradle on Fairview Island. Showing none of Asher's regret over the deaths of the city's population, Royce views the destruction of the city as an opportunity to reshape its architecture with the Transistor, free of the constraining needs and whims of its inhabitants. Although truthful in his assertion that returning the Transistor to the Cradle will resume its control over the Process, doing so transports both Red and himself to a location apparently contained within the Transistor, providing each of them with apparent copies of the weapon and, according to Royce, the "unpleasant" necessity for one to defeat the other in order to escape.
If Royce defeats Red, the game ends abruptly as he departs to reshape Cloudbank with the Transistor. If Red defeats Royce, he remains trapped within the Transistor, completing the destruction of the Camerata.
Trivia[]
- The fact that Unknown knows the organization's name, despite its secrecy prior to the game's events, may imply that its members introduced themselves as the Camerata at the Empty Set before attempting to kill Red.
- While Sybil Reisz first appears on an OVC advertisement for Cloudbank Fashion Week, the Camerata as an organization is named and its other members seen for the first time as Red first traverses Goldwalk's Expressway.
- The group's logo appears to represent the Transistor resting in the Cradle, with a diagonal line touching their intersection point and emerging as part of the Process.
- Greg Kasavin has noted that there were things the Camerata did not understand about the Transistor, so they could not have anticipated its unusual reaction when it made contact with Unknown.[1]
- In an early version of the game, the Camerata was composed of five people instead of four.
- The group's logo resembles the electronic symbol for a NPN bipolar junction transistor.
- The group's name is a reference to the Florentine Camerata, a real-world group in late Renaissance Florence.[2] The Florentine Camerata were a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals that would meet to discuss trends in the arts, who were highly critical of the contemporary music of their time and believed that the improvement of music would improve society as well. In a more general sense, a Camerata, literally chambered in Latin and comrade or dormitory in Italian, is a small chambered music ensemble or choir.
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