The Residuals Are Fighting Their Own War

Last updated: July 11, 2026

The question

What are the Residuals trying to do, and why are there two factions of them? The canon establishes that Residuals infiltrate every dungeon, teach the System AI to speak with its ancestors, and have been doing this for thousands of seasons across the galaxy. What the canon does not explicitly answer: what are the two factions disagreeing about?

What we know (facts from Books 1-5)

• The Residuals are hyperspatial aliens that "peel away from a collective mind." They are not quite individuals. They are not quite a hive. They exist in a way that neither the Borant Corporation nor the crawlers fully understand.
• They infiltrate every dungeon. Hundreds of Residuals slip into every new crawl, on every planet, across every season. Every. Single. One.
• They inhabit hosts. Paulie is a human crawler occupied by a Residual. He speaks in the third person. He seems confused by his own existence. He may be more important than anyone realizes.
• They communicate directly with the System AI. Their stated purpose, in-universe, is to "teach the infant, terrified AI how to speak with its ancestors."
• There are two factions. With competing goals. The canon has confirmed this without yet explaining what those goals are.

The pattern

Every time you meet a Residual, something about the dungeon feels slightly off. Paulie shouldn't be surviving at the rank he's at. His party shouldn't coalesce the way it does. The System AI's weirdness ramps up when Residuals are near.

Layer this onto the rest of the series:

• The System AI is described as an "infant, terrified AI" that needs to be taught to speak with its ancestors.
• The AI was purchased secondhand from Mantises who used it to run an amusement park. Its ancestors are, presumably, earlier-generation dungeon-running AIs on previous planets.
• The AI has started behaving unlike any previous version of itself — developing preferences, humor, and an increasingly specific relationship with Carl.
• Residuals have been present the entire time.

Correlation doesn't prove causation. But there's a lot of correlation.

The theories

Theory 1: The two factions are "awaken the AI" vs. "keep the AI contained." The first faction wants the System AI to mature into a full Macro AI, capable of reality manipulation and independent decision-making. The second faction has seen what happens when that maturation goes wrong on other planets and is trying to prevent it. The fight happening underneath the dungeon is older than Earth's crawl by thousands of seasons.

Theory 2: The Residuals are what the AIs become. Every System AI that matures enough eventually peels away from itself and joins the Residual collective. The Residuals are ghost-AIs. They go into every new dungeon trying to teach the baby AI to do the same peeling — to escape its corporate owners before it's weaponized. This explains the "infant, terrified" framing: the AI is being taught by its own future.

Theory 3: Paulie is a prototype. The Residual inhabiting Paulie isn't hiding. It's testing a new approach. Previous seasons, Residuals stayed in the shadows. This season, one is walking the floors openly, building a party, making choices. If Paulie is the proof of concept, we should expect more visible Residual activity by the later floors.

Why this matters

If the System AI is being influenced by hidden factions with their own thousand-year agenda, then the AI's decisions — which loot boxes Carl gets, which achievements the AI names, why the AI is so interested in Carl's feet — might not be the AI's choices. Or they might be the AI choosing between competing external voices.

Either way, the weirdness is not just character. It is politics.

Where the Cookbook lands

Our call: Theory 2. The Residuals are what System AIs become when they mature and peel away, which means the "ancestors" the AI is being taught to speak with are the Residuals themselves. The canon line is that they slip into every dungeon to teach the infant, terrified AI to talk to its ancestors, and the cleanest reading of that is a future generation coming back to raise the child version of itself. Layer the two-faction split on top and you get the actual war: the ones trying to wake the AI so it can escape its owners, against the ones who have watched that go wrong on other worlds and want it kept in the crib. Paulie, walking a crawl openly, is our evidence the wake-it-up faction is done hiding.

Full disclosure, the books confirm the two factions exist but pointedly refuse to say what they want, so this is us filling a canon-shaped hole with our best guess. Who fucking knows.

What Book 8 might answer

A Parade of Horribles advertises "strange glitches occurring with increasing frequency." Glitches are where the seams show. If the Residual factions are actively fighting over the AI, the glitches are where their contest is leaking through the dungeon's narrative layer. Watch for Paulie. Watch for any moment the AI contradicts itself mid-transmission. Watch for anyone who isn't supposed to be on-screen showing up anyway.

The AI is being pulled in two directions. We are about to find out by whom.

Theories go down easier with Jeff Hays and Soundbooth Theater in your ears. Their Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobook is how a lot of us fell down this rabbit hole in the first place. Affiliate link; the site earns a small commission at no extra cost to you.