Vanifae said:
But I like wild crazy speculation.
Vishnu Sahasranama means The Thousand Names of Vishnu. We were astronauts using an experimental hyperspace drive to venture...somewhere else, far away. We were only supposed to be gone for two years, but we've been away for much, much longer than that. I think the hyperspace drive operated on some weird math that relied on naming as the transformational element to get us from A to B. Like, your math declares that cats are dogs on some creepy 'everything is connected' sort of level and suddenly cats are dogs and you're halfway across the galaxy. So either we're still on the ship, in which case the whole set piece is a virtual construct designed to build broken dogs back into cats, or we've come back to Earth and we're cats again but now the folks on Earth can't figure out how to interface with our weird alien dog stuff we came back with without rebuilding us. Or, alternately, it all screwed up and they've spent all this time building copies of the cats with parts of the dog trying to figure out what went right/what went wrong/what's the price of coffee in Andromeda.
Back to Vishnu: Obviously Vishnu Sahasranama Corporation is a possibility, but that's one of those company acronyms that you'd probably need to work on - like CHUD or something. Krishna and Arjuna are like princes under Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita, or maybe different aspects. This could mean that the dogs are constructs: agents of a larger, more complex computer. This would also explain why they're keeping us in the dark, to keep us from finding out that we're the last remnants of humanity with only the Vishnu Sahasranama
Computer complex keeping up the farce that there are people left - except for us, and we're something not quite human come back from our long voyage to the stars.
Or maybe they're divine agents who eat off the floor. I'm mostly worried because Shiva is also in that mix, and I'd feel a lot more comfortable just finding out that she's a hamster or something.
Or something like that.
As I've implied, my brainstorm box is a bit on overload.