Falke: the Commander Who Looked Beyond the Red Gate

Falke is the Replika who commanded the Protektor security force at S-23 Sierpinski, and the last boss Elster faces in Signalis. She is an FKLR unit, the Nation's top bioresonant command model, and before the game began she went through the red gate deep in the mines of Leng. What she brought back with her broke the facility and, in the end, broke her too. Her name is German for falcon. (Signalis)

What is an FKLR unit?#

The FKLR overview is marked for commanders' eyes only. It calls the Falke "a powerful prototype bioresonant Falke unit", head of every AEON facility's Protektor force, "an authority that may never be questioned". She is meant to be seen as nearly god-like, helped by her height and by her resemblance to the Nation's leaders, the Great Revolutionary and her Daughter. Her bioresonance module lets her bend weaker minds, read intentions and emotions, and move objects at a distance. (Signalis, "Replika Overview: FKLR")

She doesn't work alone. The Adler overview describes the administrator as "a direct counterpart to the Falke Unit", handling her paperwork, and the Kolibri overview says every Falke has a cadre of Kolibri adjutants who boost her signals. A propaganda poster in the game shows a Falke trampling the Empire's symbol under the words "Superweapons of our Nation in the battle against the Empire: Falke Units". (Signalis)

What happened to Falke at the red gate?#

Adler tells Elster the story at the gate: "The commander never talked about what she saw out there. I'm sure whatever it was, it was what made her fall sick. Something about her changed when she returned. She was no longer our beloved leader Falke." The Protektor controller Storch Sieben confirms the commander got sick and that everyone else is getting sick too. (Signalis)

Falke's own diary, dated 84-21-A, describes it from the inside. "The red eye beyond the gate showed me, no, touched me, poisoned me," she writes, and her mind feels "contaminated, defiled, by another person's memory". A second note, "A Red Dream", lists what she saw: a crashed ship, a strange gate, a hole in the ground, an island beyond reach, a promise, a search for someone lost. It ends: "Now, I can no longer tell where 'Falke' ends and 'Elster' begins." (Signalis, "Falke's Diary"; Signalis, "A Red Dream")

In one of the game's late scenes, Adler sits beside Falke's bed and tells her she has changed, "like everything was taken apart, and put back together, by someone who doesn't understand how it works". (Signalis)

The Falke boss fight#

Elster finally reaches Falke's quarters in the closing stretch of the game. Falke rises from her bed and floats in the air. "There's nothing for you here," she says. "She'll never dance with us again, no matter what we do. She doesn't even want us anymore." Then: "Both of us are incomplete, let us become whole again." (Signalis)

The fight moves through several distorted rooms. Falke throws spears, summons corrupted units, and shields herself, and Elster finally brings her down with one of her own spears. German text flashes across the screen during her attacks, the same kind of bioresonant noise the Kolibri units use. When she falls, her last vision is of Elster and Ariane holding each other aboard the Penrose. What follows her death depends on the ending; see Signalis endings explained. (Signalis)

Theories about Falke#

The game states that Falke absorbed another person's memories past the gate and came to see herself as Elster. It never says exactly why. The most common reading is that she met the bioresonant influence of the dying Ariane, which the game links to the red eye, and that the sickness that killed S-23 spread out from her. Some players go further and argue that Falke is "the dreamer" described in a note found in Nowhere, the flesh maze under the mines, because it turns up in a ruined copy of her room; the game doesn't confirm this. (Signalis)

Another thread notices that Falke wants the same thing Elster does. She has inherited Elster's love for Ariane without any of Elster's history, and treats Elster as a rival for someone who, in her words, "doesn't even want us anymore". (Signalis)