Rethinking Shards

I know I am way behind in terms of the investigation. I have an entire year of Prime universe to catch up on and it's not easy. So, whatever that I am posting here may just be totally off or worse, utter nonsense. Please bear with me.

Essex chat has been talking about shards after Enoch's and Carrie's demise. (And now, presumably, Lightman as well.) Essex was discussing the nature of shards and how it affects recursion or in Nemesis' case, non-recursion.

The general idea is that when a simulacrum turns into shards in the portal network as seen through the lens of our scanners, they are fragmented like the shards themselves. They are supposedly reassembled in anomalies where agents battle for the shards and allegiance of Niantic researchers.

But what if we are wrong?

Forgive me if I reference too much Ingress: The Animation. But, being trained as a linguist, I like the idea of intertextuality, trying to understand the meaning of a text with another text when there is ambiguity.

Likewise, when there is a mystery in Ingress, I like to draw on the multiverse of 1218, Prime and the Animation (and who knows how many more) in order to paint a coherent picture and hopefully, an accurate understanding on the nature of events happening in Prime right now.

I think we are watching the world of Animation in a similar fashion to Felicia's writings on what happened in 1218. In other words, RPE. I like to think that whatever we know in other Ingress universes is applicable or at least, relevant to Prime. Like intertextuality, I am mapping the individual worlds of Ingress to understand its multiverse as a whole.

In the Animation, Makoto sees Sarah as shards in a chaotic portal from outside the portal network. But, Sarah does not exist as fragmented shards in the Substrate. She was a whole entity fighting Brandt. Similarly, we might see Niantic researchers as shards, like Enoch in Kaohsiung. However, in actual fact, they are still whole entities while they exist in the portal network.

I am not sure if this makes any sense. But we have another example from 1218. During the Shonin Ceremony. When the 13Magnus Nest exploded, all Niantic Project researchers started disappearing and appeared as shards in the portal network, leading to the Persepolis anomalies. While Hank was enroute in an attempt to stop Jahan from reengaging the N'zeer, Devra appeared from the portal network (like Sarah did) and warned him. She was a whole XM entity when she did that. She was not a fragmented and incoherent being.