There have been a good few Veil theory posts recently, which is great! This post has been planned and mostly ready since the time of this post, which relates to this Aztecross lore video. TL;DW of the video is that the Veil is OXA. I didn't draw quite that strong a connection, but I've had a hunch there is one and I'll analyze this here.

What is OXA?

Umun'arath gave us the full name: Odyle Xenotaph Anarchive, sometimes abbreviated as OXTA, immediately raising some eyebrows. We'll get to that later. Having seen the full acronym initially when the LF CE lore was first disseminated, I instantly picked up the meaning of xenotaph contextually (it's also a Greek-origin word which made it easier) so I didn't put much though on what the name tells us, but I'll go over it here.

Odyle is a reference to the Odic force, a pseudoscientific vitalist concept of life force produced by bioelectricity related to hypnosis, so in Destiny terms we can say that it is an alternative word for psychic. Xenotaph has been easily identified as related to cenotaph, lit. empty grave (essentially a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), but using xeno instead, so it can be interpreted as "alien grave" or more simply grave(s) of species lost. "Anarchive" is a nuanced concept, but from what I'm reading, it is interpretation of archival data for feeding future processes. So in conclusion, OXA is a psychic machine that archives data from doomed civilizations and in interpreting it, can see the future.

#History of OXA and related systems

Otzot rebuilt the OXA after the Cabal destroyed it, at which point the machine and its use was sanctioned by Calus. This seems to be a pattern of cosmic history, the Psion Match suggested this happens "eternally". If that is the case, OXA cannot be the Veil, not unless we are missing much more of its history than we think. Furthermore, the Veil is paracausal, if the Witness did not want to destroy it, then what would, and what could even be capable of it? Doesn't seem likely that the Cabal could, at least.

That doesn't mean the two concepts are necessarily unrelated though.

Additionally on OXA:

• The definition, history and known capabilities of the OXA means it isn't a singular "thing", but a pattern. It's a "xenotaph": a species creates or writes in the OXA, dies, and is in turn "entombed" in it.

Here's an example of what in my opinion is a bootleg OXA: the World's Grave!

He called Savathûn to meet in the material world. She told him that the Vex worked tirelessly to understand everything, so that they could build a victory condition for every possible end state of the universe.

“Then I must be a better king,” Oryx said. “If they want to build an emperor for all outcomes, then I will be the king of only one. I will follow the Deep wherever it goes, and document its power. Let us create a catalog of the grave of worlds, which will be our map to victory.”

The World's Grave is a singularity supercomputer that is a library of the worlds the Hive have conquered in their crusade. I'm fairly sure it's not the just the single installation on Luna, but instead something they generally build, I suspect the Dreadnaught also has one. But doesn't the name and purpose of the World's Grave give it a a vibe similar to the OXA? At the same time, the literally monumental volume of data in the OXA may also suggest it functions with a black hole computer, as these keep cropping up in lore again and again (see TTP/Hidden Dossier). Their archival data certainly is all but identical as the memories of extinguished species, and Oryx intended for it to be their "map to victory", the map to the Final Shape, and as such a portent of the inevitable future.

• As OXTA, the immediate conjecture on many of our minds was that it has something to do with Taox. Regardless of if you think Taox lives or not -- it doesn't matter here -- the OXTA can absolutely connect to Taox in a simple manner: through the Ecumene. They received intelligence about the Hive directly from her, some of which we know exists in the OXA. This information however, an unknown amount of time later, was perused by none other than Quria thanks to an "Ecumene gate". How did that come to pass? Well, a "black box for galactic civilizations" sounds like a good guess.

• Odyle is what relates the acronym to psionics in the context of Destiny, but it has its roots as a concept in bioelectricity/magnetism and more. Reading u/lettucedifferent5104 's post on Strand as it relates to magnetic phenomena makes me think that the OXA could be, like the CloudArk, another, technological application of Strand or a mimesis. Perhaps all psionics in the Destiny universe (which Strand is a part of to a degree) are Odic in nature.

• Lastly, the OXA is traditionally associated with Psions. For a variety of reasons, including it simply not existing or being unavailable otherwise, Psions often seem drawn to Vex installations: Kargen, the Technocrat through who we see a connection between a Sundaresh branch and OXA; Ixel, the Far Reaching; even the Flayer sisters that sought to use the Sundial. They're trying to replicate what they could do with the OXA. Having mentioned Sundaresh, note how similar in format Ixel's predictions are to those of the FWC Device. The Device and OXA both seem to be maddening to use as well.

So now let's look at the CloudArk, what the Veil does for it and how it all ties together.

What is the Veil and what does it have to do with all this?

We'll get there in time.

The Veil is stated in the Strand lore book to be an artifact of Darkness. The Veil produces Strand as a "paracausal byproduct", corroborated also by Osiris in the campaign.

Through parts of Neomuna there are turbines of various sizes, including a titanic one built around the Veil itself: the Veil Containment building we see in the Irkalla Complex. Per Chioma Esi's recommendation on studying the fluid dynamics of Strand -- perhaps magnetohydrodynamics -- the Neomuni harnessed it; the result was the CloudArk.

The CloudArk was not always its current incarnation as a virtual reality simspace, but a "civic data architecture", a data repository. Conrad Jain, later known as the Cloud Strider Blueyjay, was sentenced to community service for illegal CloudArk activities, his work being to do simulation research. My assumption is that Sundaresh and Esi had made high-end simulations illegal due to Venus shenanigans. Bluejay eventually made the CloudArk into what we know today. Importantly, Bluejay had said this about the Veil:

It... it is the shadow of every story and memory and hope we brought with us!

The stars are off-limits, but the Veil knits an entire universe for us. All we had to do was embrace it!

If the CloudArk is a meshing of paracausal and Vex technology, and can simulate, then it can be used to perform the same functions as say, the FWC Device (both connected to Maya Sundaresh) but to a greater degree. In essence, it's also analogous to OXA in its own way.

Dima Goryainov's comment on the Veil echoes Conrad Jain:

"physical manifestation of incomprehensible cosmic energy. Window into the mind and memory of the universe".

I propose, not that the Veil is OX(T)A, but that it is what inspired it. The Veil is linked to the Traveler. They may have an opposite alignment paracausally, but plainly there's a close connection. I posit that the Veil as a cosmic entity is an Akashic Record, a thought I've seen expressed by u/Lokan: an imprint of every "story and memory and hope", of every thought, pattern, archetype. Dima Goryainov said it's a "window". Eyes are the windows to the soul. The Veil's shape, while hourglass-esque, is also quite like an eyeball.

It seems to me as if the Veil is to those "imitations", what the Form is to the Shadow.

We have no direct knowledge of the Veil that far back, but we can conjecture somewhat on its history based on the assumption that it's been with the Traveler through the long chase. The chronologically earliest civilization uplifted by the Traveler that we know of were the Ammonites, who were Ecumene clients. It's fairly reasonable to assume that the Veil was there with the Traveler all along. We can suppose that the Ecumene made the, or an, OXA. Perhaps the original data entry was the intelligence gleaned from Taox? Certainly the Ammonites and even the Krill are valid candidates for a "xenotaph", the first extinct and the later transformed. Later they would've been with the Harmony for a time, perhaps the Nicha-Thought Ship was their "OXA"? The reason why Quria was in there was always unclear. The Veil would have continued its travels with the Traveler, running from the Black Fleet and uplifting civilizations, finally reaching us.

Where does the Witness fit with all this?

Now I draw your mind back to the World's Grave:

If they want to build an emperor for all outcomes, then I will be the king of only one. I will follow the Deep wherever it goes, and document its power. Let us create a catalog of the grave of worlds, which will be our map to victory.”

Oryx meant to use the cosmic history of civilizational annihilation at his own hands as well as those of the Witness to map a path to the Final Shape. But Oryx was... misguided. He did not have a full picture. The Witness does. A "window into the mind and memory of the universe" is a far, far better map to the Final Shape than a catalog of burned worlds that can be censored like the World's Grave or destroyed and rebuilt like the OXA.

A brief look at Truth to Power:

Life arises. Life spreads, contests itself, and changes. Great things are built and destroyed, but from your vantage point, you see that the victor of each struggle contains—in its negative, in the marks left upon it by the loser and the shapes it assumed to win—the master record of all that it has beaten. Information may not be erased. Whatsoever survives until the end of the cosmos will possess and remember all which came before it.

This is true even of the devouring black hole, which remembers all the secrets it eats.

Listen to Savathun talk of the Final Shape.

The Darkness will eat everything, and its shape will be the Witness’ teeth.

The Witness looked into the eye of the universe, an object or being upon which the threads of all consciousness converge. Listen to what the Witness says as it approaches the Veil: "Finality takes shape." This is a being of pure-thought in itself, a literal egregore, linking into the universal repository of shapes, no... Shapes. Thoughts, patterns. It is closing in on becoming a singularity of mind. From there, communion with the Traveler and "drinking" its Light, to collapse the universe into a final, eternal shape.

Conclusion/TL;DR & acknowledgements

OXA is a pattern of predictive machine that has proliferated throughout the universe in various forms and may ultimately have origins in the Veil. The Veil itself is the Platonic idea of this pattern, an entity/object as a window into cosmic memory. The Witness sought the Veil as a map to the Final Shape.

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Big thanks to u/lettucedifferent5104 for helping me with this (and actually giving me the confidence to post it too) and also must acknowledge that, while this theory has gone in a somewhat different direction, it was influenced by this beauty from u/Rorshark.

I'm very dumb and certainly not one of the eggheads of this subreddit and I'm sure many of you can poke holes at this all day long, please do! Discuss and let me know what you think.