Royce Bracket, the terminal opponent of the game Transistor, the final boss after your run-ins with Grant and Asher Kendrell take a swerve left turn, is a swerve in a different direction himself. Sure, you fight him, in a scene that seems almost reminiscent of the final fight in Knights of the Old Republic, and it's astonishing to fight someone who has the same "pause time while you plan out your Turn()" that you do; there's nothing like it in the game. He's hard to beat, requiring a dedication to optimizing your functions or anticipating what he will do when he has the same anticipation that you do. It's a fitting end to a weird game, especially one where the third act has you at your most empowered, making it one of the easiest sections of the game up to this point.
It's also interesting how, like every member of the Camerata, he has a sympathetic outlook towards Red, who was at the same time counted among their prey. Sybil wanted her, Grant wanted what was best for the city, Asher was distinctly apologetic, and Royce... needs you, right now. You have the Transistor; the Process, who represent all of the game's enemies up to this point, turn out to be malleable to its influence. He describes it as a "conductor's baton", and you start to understand why the transistor was so important to them, and why things have gotten out of hand so very very badly as soon as the Transistor was out of their hands... and into ours. So Royce calls a truce, and we go to Fairview — the country that is juxtaposed by the city of Cloudbank — where with an awful lot of math he first found the Transistor, to return it to its cradle and end the threat of the unchecked, unguided, all-consuming Process. Which we do successfully! And then, for existential reasons, only one of us can go back, and whoever wins gets to go back to reality, and whoever loses... gets to see what it's like, inside the Transistor. So he'll fight to the end, but he's also equally optimistic about the alternative because he's always wondered what it was like inside, a scientist's approach to the world, the ever-ready spirit of inquiry, the plague of that queer thing genius.
As Sybil represents the vice of interest, Asher the vice of care, Grant the vice of pragmatism, Royce embodies the vice of genius, of being so desperate for whatever's out there, of going down the rabbit hole of theory until it becomes art and then the art becomes practical and suddenly, well, now it's political; of being a human, and stuck with trusting someone with the tools you have made and finding them destroying everything that's ever been known and then going "well, that's new, at the very least" and no one can quite tell how dry you're being because there's no one left alive, which is a much less relatable vice than the other ones! and perhaps particularly, less instructive. But anything we make can be used to hurt people we have never met if we are not careful; our production doesn't need to be reality-defining to be co-opted by someone with designs bigger than our selves. Art, ideas, lines of poetry, lines of code, a life's work, a formula, a moment of clarity, good luck: all we have is the trust that what we bring into the world is good and that the people we trust to see it can be better.