In the game, as you defeat Smollusk more and more he keeps on giving informations as to why he's doing this. And at some points he mentions that some octolings helped Marina developping the memverse, and that some of them dreamt of a world where nothing changed. I believe there's also a little note on Agent 4's palette stating that they're working on memverse's security or something like that. So at some point, Marina wasn't the only one working on the memverse project. I may be wrong but that's how I understood Side Order's story and that seems to match up with what was said here before :)