Detweiler Vision vs Beowulf Code: "Right" and "Wrong"

tlb wrote:But that is difficult to apply here, because the superiors were using Marinescu as their tool - as you say. Still I rank the superiors slightly higher, since they realized that she is not an all purpose tool and disposed of her when done.

tlb wrote:But that is difficult to apply here, because the superiors were using Marinescu as their tool - as you say. Still I rank the superiors slightly higher, since they realized that she is not an all purpose tool and disposed of her when done.

Peregrinator wrote:The thing is, he who wills the ends, wills the means. They might not "like" the fact that they use Marinescu, but use her they do, nevertheless.

Brigade XO wrote:Marinescu was one of those people who had become a liability. She liked the killing. She approched this with that perspective of "tidying it up" by also adding collateral damage. I expect that along with her particularly blood-thirsty approach, she could have been considered a big potential problem on Darius where one of the ongoing difficulties is going to be keeping the Houdini evacuees from learning what was going on back at Mesa to cover their dissapearence, particularly a fairly broad swath of cutting out families of the evacuees either directly or spreading that collateral damage around a bit wider.

Clearly, the Alignment would have enough people willing to kill on command or based on preceived operational necessity at Darius without importing people like Marinescu who get a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of doing it. A cold blooded approach is one one thing, wallowing in satisfaction of the bloodshead is another. But heck, this is the Alignment, if the tool gets bent, scrap it (with extreme prejudice) and grow another from scratch after having made a couple of more tweaks to make it more comliant (to your wishes) and usefull but eliminating that irritating trait that was going to cause a problem in the earlier model

ldwechsler wrote:We are far too casual in damning the whole Alignment. I despise them but they are working towards what they consider a worthy goal. Actually, the improvement of mankind IS a worthy goal. It's basically just their methods that are truly bad.

Remember that the whole galaxy has already accepted a lot of what the original Detweiler wanted. People live a real lot longer. There are few diseases (Simoes daughter, it is stressed, is a real exception). We can see a lot of useful innovations.

Actually, from what I've read, as long as you stay within the human genome you're pretty much legal. Manpower went way to far with manufacturing people but genetically they seem to have stayed human except for a few real exceptions like Dr. Sying-ni.

Things are never simple. Note also that more than a few of the people in the Alignment are very uncomfortable with Manpower, Inc.

Because the truth is that Bardasano's actually right about how quickly we're finally coming up on Prometheus, he thought. I never really expected it to happen in my own lifetime, which was pretty stupid, given how young I am, and how much I knew about what was going on inside the "onion." But we've been working towards that moment for so long that, emotionally, I never really realized I might be one of the ones to see it. Now I know I will be . . . and Herlander's kicked every one of those doubts I didn't really know I had fully awake, hasn't he?
How many more Herlanders is the Board going to create? How many people—and just because they're "normals" doesn't keep them from being people, damn it!—are going to find themselves in his position? Hell, how many billions or trillions of people are we going to end up killing just so that the Long-Range Planning Board can steer the entire human race into the uplands of genetic superiority? And how willing are we really going to be to accept Leonard Detweiler's challenge to improve every single member of the human race to our own pinnacle of achievement? Are we really going to do it? There'll have to be at least some beta lines, of course. And probably at least a few gamma lines. Obviously we won't be able to do without those, now will we? We'll find plenty of reasons for that, and some of them will probably even be valid! But what about Manpower's slaves? What about all those "normals" out there? Are we really going to treat them as our equals . . . aside, of course, from the unfortunate necessity of dictating what children they're allowed to have? Assuming, of course, that their chromosomes offer sufficient promise for them to be allowed to have children at all? And if we don't treat them as our equals—and you really know we damned well won't, Jack—are the children we allow them to have really going to end up our equals? Or will they be sentenced forever to never climb above the gamma level? And who the hell are we to tell an entire galaxy that it has to do things our way? Isn't that the very thing we've been so pissed off over at Beowulf for so long? Because the sanctimonious bastards insisted that we couldn't do things our way? For telling us what to do, because that's what it comes down to in the end, however high the motivations we impute to ourselves.

tlb wrote:This leads to a very interesting question for which I do not believe we have an answer. To what extent is natural reproduction functioning within the Onion versus laboratory creation of children?

Weird Harold wrote:ISTR an off-hand comment that both in-vitro (100% customized) and random chance (natural reproduction, assisted by artificial wombs) figure into the progression of MAlign genomes. It's only a sentence or two, not a full infodump, so it requires a good bit of interpolation.

Bardasano nodded, although her own expression didn't even flicker. Of course, she represented one of Long-Range Planning's in vitro lines, McBryde reminded himself, and one which had been culled more than once, itself. For that matter, at least one of her own immediate clones had been culled, and not until late adolescence, at that, if he remembered correctly. Still, while the culled Bardasano had been the next best thing to a genetic duplicate to Isabel (not quite; there'd been a few experimental differences, of course), it had scarcely been what the word "brother" or "sister" would have implied to a man like Jack McBryde. Like a lot—even the majority—of LRPB's in vitro children, she'd been tube-birthed and crèche-raised, not placed in a regular family environment or encouraged to form sibling bonds with her fellow clones. No one had ever officially told McBryde anything of the sort, but he strongly suspected that lack of encouragement represented a deliberate policy on the Board's part—a way to avoid the creation of potentially conflicting loyalties. So maybe this was simply too far outside her own experience for her to have more than a purely intellectual appreciation for Herlander Simões' anguish.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:This leads to a very interesting question for which I do not believe we have an answer. To what extent is natural reproduction functioning within the Onion versus laboratory creation of children?

Weird Harold wrote:ISTR an off-hand comment that both in-vitro (100% customized) and random chance (natural reproduction, assisted by artificial wombs) figure into the progression of MAlign genomes. It's only a sentence or two, not a full infodump, so it requires a good bit of interpolation.

While scrolling through Torch of Freed, I found the following text that I had forgotten:

Bardasano nodded, although her own expression didn't even flicker. Of course, she represented one of Long-Range Planning's in vitro lines, McBryde reminded himself, and one which had been culled more than once, itself. For that matter, at least one of her own immediate clones had been culled, and not until late adolescence, at that, if he remembered correctly. Still, while the culled Bardasano had been the next best thing to a genetic duplicate to Isabel (not quite; there'd been a few experimental differences, of course), it had scarcely been what the word "brother" or "sister" would have implied to a man like Jack McBryde. Like a lot—even the majority—of LRPB's in vitro children, she'd been tube-birthed and crèche-raised, not placed in a regular family environment or encouraged to form sibling bonds with her fellow clones. No one had ever officially told McBryde anything of the sort, but he strongly suspected that lack of encouragement represented a deliberate policy on the Board's part—a way to avoid the creation of potentially conflicting loyalties. So maybe this was simply too far outside her own experience for her to have more than a purely intellectual appreciation for Herlander Simões' anguish.

ldwechsler wrote:
snip...
Remember that the whole galaxy has already accepted a lot of what the original Detweiler wanted. People live a real lot longer. There are few diseases (Simoes daughter, it is stressed, is a real exception). We can see a lot of useful innovations.
snip...

ldwechsler wrote:snip...
Remember that the whole galaxy has already accepted a lot of what the original Detweiler wanted. People live a real lot longer. There are few diseases (Simoes daughter, it is stressed, is a real exception). We can see a lot of useful innovations.
snip...

George J. Smith wrote:It could be said that Simoes "daughter" was the way she was because of the tinkering the Malign did with her genome.

Bardasano nodded, although her own expression didn't even flicker. Of course, she represented one of Long-Range Planning's in vitro lines, McBryde reminded himself, and one which had been culled more than once, itself. For that matter, at least one of her own immediate clones had been culled, and not until late adolescence, at that, if he remembered correctly. Still, while the culled Bardasano had been the next best thing to a genetic duplicate to Isabel (not quite; there'd been a few experimental differences, of course), it had scarcely been what the word "brother" or "sister" would have implied to a man like Jack McBryde. Like a lot—even the majority—of LRPB's in vitro children, she'd been tube-birthed and crèche-raised, not placed in a regular family environment or encouraged to form sibling bonds with her fellow clones.