The Country

The Country is a reference within Transistor about a place that has not been touched by the technology of Cloudbank or its inhabitants. In theory, this is the place which all people of Cloudbank wish to travel to, "but never come back", according to Royce Bracket. While citizens of Cloudbank colloquially use the term to indicate both a distant real location and a conceptualized afterlife, it can also serve as a description of a place within the Transistor.

Accessibility of the Country within the game

There are three moments in the game which can be considered to be the Country by the standards of the word's definition; a very rural, natural place almost untouched by humans.

The first moment is the final battle with Royce Bracket, which is a place similar to a farm-field. This field takes place within the Transistor, or a machine in connection to the Transistor and the mainframe of the Process.

The second encounter with a place that can be considered the Country is the last Credits screen, in which Red meets her lover. It shows a farm building in the background and the two characters in a wheat field under a brilliant blue sky.

The third encounter occurs any time Red reaches a game-over. The game-over screen features a triangular view of a blue sky dotted with fluffy clouds and a landscape from which white silhouettes of wheat stalks sway in the breeze. Unlike her other trips to places resembling a countryside, Red, visible as a small white silhouette, appears unclothed, associating the image with the partial silhouettes of others' Traces in Trace Banks but also with a more significant form of death than their imprisonment there.

Possible Meanings

• If the Country is in fact the Afterlife, or heaven to be more specific, it supports Royce Bracket's theory of "the people of Cloudbank wishing to travel to this place, but never come back" and the customary Cloudbank farewell to the deceased, "See you in the Country." Cloudbank citizens' one-way trips to the Country, discussed among themselves as a normal choice which can be undertaken voluntarily, may imply a custom of voluntary suicide in which citizens possess a right to "leave" Cloudbank by choosing to die. Since the game provides no more information about the Country to which these people are believed to travel aside from reports that individuals such as Henter Jallaford have retired there, this is open to discussion. However, some casual Cloudbank references to the Country seem less allegorical; there are travel destinations outside Cloudbank, and not all mentions of the Country seem to imply an irreversible or even significant trip.
• Another meaning of the Country is a part of the Transistor or the overall mainframe of the Process accessed by the Transistor. Those places are actually shown twice in-game, first during the final battle, and second during the credits. However, this meaning is still open to discussion as there are several references to the Country from people who should not have any prior knowledge regarding the Transistor or the nature of the Process, most prominently in one of Red's songs, 'We All Become', which was clearly written and performed before she lost her voice, i.e. before she first came into contact with the Transistor.
• A third, somewhat less popular suggestion is that the Country is actually the real world, as opposed to Cloudbank's apparently virtually generated world. Some people claim that the wheat field and farm seen in the end credits are places in the real world, indicating that everyone who died managed to escape the digital world of Cloudbank. This theory is unlikely as the Traces of multiple people remain in Cloudbank instead of escaping, and the mechanism through which Red and her lover escaped remains unexplained.

Trivia

• Within the context of the game, the developers "don't know anything beyond Cloudbank" other than the Sandbox and the Country. Greg Kasavin does confirm that Cloudbank's citizens do consider the Country "a real place where people go."