VR units other than the ones in Nimue's Cave?

We already know VR units exist. After all, Owl created one sufficient to house Narhmann's virtual personality. What Owl produced could provide a reasonable environment for Narhmann and the occasional visitor, but was limited in capacity, and couldn't support all that many virtual personalities.

Hamilcar had far more powerful industrial modules and could produce higher capacity VR units. So an interesting question is what others might exist? Given the possible capacity, there is no reason Archangels couldn't do a personality scan and upload it to a VR as they approached physical death, then bide their time till the right moment to reappear on Safehold.

I asked David at a con "If I'm Chihiro, I might make a personality scan as I approach physical death and upload it to a PICA, then reappear on Safehold in an effectively immortal body and rule it forever." David said "If he had that capability, Chihiro wouldn't have waited! He'd do it as soon as possible. He'd even have a cover story - his new superhuman body that wasn't mortal was God's penance for not stopping Shan Wei before everything blew up, and he was effectively exiled from Heaven and stuck on Safehold instead of being able to return to Heaven and be with God."

But not having a convenient PICA doesn't mean you can't live on in a VR unit. I suspect there's one under Schueler's church in the Episcopate named after him, and that virtual personality was what appeared in the church to present his Testimony to his flock.

If so, is he the only one with a stored personality stashed away? And can VR units communicate with other VR units? David made clear Merlin and Nimue are the only PICAs on Safehold, but they might not be the only stored personalities. It makes you wonder who all might be living virtually under the Temple or elsewhere.
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Dennis

DMcCunney wrote:If so, is he the only one with a stored personality stashed away? And can VR units communicate with other VR units? David made clear Merlin and Nimue are the only PICAs on Safehold, but they might not be the only stored personalities. It makes you wonder who all might be living virtually under the Temple or elsewhere.
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Dennis

The big limitation there is that apparently, most VR personalities will eventually become terminally bored, and/or withdraw completely from the outside world.

However, I do have some theories...

Theory 1: It's possible that a VR Personality "woke up" beneath the Temple on the hundredth anniversary after all, and just didn't bother to reveal it's presence to anyone.

Theory 2: It's also possible that a VR personality may have been beneath the Temple this entire time, but deliberately slow-clocked, so that, say, 50 real years = 1 VR day. That way, they couldn't meddle in routine lives, wouldn't have time to get bored, but WOULD eventually notice any major changes from Safehold's plan.

Theory 3: Maybe LOTS of people got uploaded into a variety of VR personalities, and they spent the first few hundred years waging hacker wars against each other, trying to gain total control of Safehold in death, when they failed to do so in life. It wouldn't take much for them to have all eventually killed each other off, gone insane, or become permanently bored shut-ins.

Krenn wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:If so, is he the only one with a stored personality stashed away? And can VR units communicate with other VR units? David made clear Merlin and Nimue are the only PICAs on Safehold, but they might not be the only stored personalities. It makes you wonder who all might be living virtually under the Temple or elsewhere.

The big limitation there is that apparently, most VR personalities will eventually become terminally bored, and/or withdraw completely from the outside world.

Becoming terminally bored is a problem for immortality, period.

But the don't have to be awake. They can go to sleep that way Narhmann's personality did while he waited for Olivia to decide how she felt about his not really being dead and whether she would want to "see" him again. Owl could wake him up when the time came.

If there are other angelic personalities tucked away in VR units, they might be in sleep state, with whatever controls the VR unit programmed to wake them if there was something interesting they should look at.

However, I do have some theories...

Theory 1: It's possible that a VR Personality "woke up" beneath the Temple on the hundredth anniversary after all, and just didn't bother to reveal it's presence to anyone.

Possible. But it does open the question of why it kept its mouth shut. (As well as whose virtual personality it was.)

Theory 2: It's also possible that a VR personality may have been beneath the Temple this entire time, but deliberately slow-clocked, so that, say, 50 real years = 1 VR day. That way, they couldn't meddle in routine lives, wouldn't have time to get bored, but WOULD eventually notice any major changes from Safehold's plan.

See above about sleeping and being awakened if anything interesting occurred.

Theory 3: Maybe LOTS of people got uploaded into a variety of VR personalities, and they spent the first few hundred years waging hacker wars against each other, trying to gain total control of Safehold in death, when they failed to do so in life. It wouldn't take much for them to have all eventually killed each other off, gone insane, or become permanently bored shut-ins.

Highly unlikely. It's not like the melt-down in North Harchong with all the warlords fighting to be the biggest pig at the trough.

The initial split in the command crew was between those who wanted to follow the original plan and those who supported Langhorne and Bedard's intent to modify it.

A further split may have occurred after Langhorne and Bedard were killed and Chihiro took over, as he apparently had even more radical changes in mind.

But I don't see any who might be tucked away in VRs having a virtual dogfight over the spoils. Most would have no interest in ruling the world. (If they are among those tucked away, I really can't see folks like Hastings, Pasquale, Sondheim or Truscott getting into that sort if pit fight. Who else might?)

And another aspect of my query is that TextEv said the Federation near the end could build VR units capable of housing a number of virtual personalities at once in a suitably realistic virtual world. Those personalities "lived the the same place" and could interact with each other.

I suspect capability to build more capable VR units than Owl could existed on Hamilcar, so there might be "multi-family dwellings" in things like VR units under the Temple. And if communication between VR units existed, all concerned could talk to each other, if not directly interact "in person".

There is also the question of when such VR units might have been built/installed. If after the War Against the Fallen, I would expect Chihiro to control just who got stored, and not house anyone he thought wasn't firmly on his side. Schueler apparently was on his side initially, but might have changed his mind after the fact. If he was recorded and installed in a VR unit later it would be because he carefully didn't tell Chihiro about his change of heart and could bide his time in VR till he felt he could reappear and make a difference.

If so, there was likely a "wake up long enough to catch up on what has transpired, then go back to sleep" loop, so when he reappeared his stored personality would have some grasp of current events. (Or possibly just stored records of what had transpired while he was asleep, like Commodore Pei's downloads to Nimue's PICA. The virtual personality could peruse those in "hyper heuristic" mode to catch up once awakened.
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Dennis

DMcCunney wrote:
....
The initial split in the command crew was between those who wanted to follow the original plan and those who supported Langhorne and Bedard's intent to modify it.

A further split may have occurred after Langhorne and Bedard were killed and Chihiro took over, as he apparently had even more radical changes in mind.

But I don't see any who might be tucked away in VRs having a virtual dogfight over the spoils. Most would have no interest in ruling the world. (If they are among those tucked away, I really can't see folks like Hastings, Pasquale, Sondheim or Truscott getting into that sort if pit fight. Who else might?)

And another aspect of my query is that TextEv said the Federation near the end could build VR units capable of housing a number of virtual personalities at once in a suitably realistic virtual world. Those personalities "lived the the same place" and could interact with each other.

I suspect capability to build more capable VR units than Owl could existed on Hamilcar, so there might be "multi-family dwellings" in things like VR units under the Temple. And if communication between VR units existed, all concerned could talk to each other, if not directly interact "in person".

There is also the question of when such VR units might have been built/installed. If after the War Against the Fallen, I would expect Chihiro to control just who got stored, and not house anyone he thought wasn't firmly on his side. Schueler apparently was on his side initially, but might have changed his mind after the fact. If he was recorded and installed in a VR unit later it would be because he carefully didn't tell Chihiro about his change of heart and could bide his time in VR till he felt he could reappear and make a difference.

If so, there was likely a "wake up long enough to catch up on what has transpired, then go back to sleep" loop, so when he reappeared his stored personality would have some grasp of current events. (Or possibly just stored records of what had transpired while he was asleep, like Commodore Pei's downloads to Nimue's PICA. The virtual personality could peruse those in "hyper heuristic" mode to catch up once awakened.
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Dennis

Well, the scenarios you just described are remarkably similar to what i was thinking of with my three.

If someone DID wake up recently, while taking naps every 50 years...

it's possible that even with hyper-heuristic mode, they didn't think they had enough information readily available to them to make an informed decision. If all they knew about was recorded data about what the Group of Four had been saying to each other, in conference, for the last 30 years...

that would obviously constitute signs of a problem, but the people living INSIDE the temple would have been so cloistered, delusional, biased, or terrified, that it would be REALLY hard to get anything resembling an honest picture of things, based solely on recorded major internal temple conversations.

In that situation... sending out SNARCS to listen to people's outside perspectives would make a lot of sense. and it takes TIME to send out snarcs, more time for them to record conversations, time to send new drones out based on those conversations, with orders to observe new people, and listen to new conversations... It PROBABLY wouldn't take several MONTHS to do all that, but it's not completely impossible...


And regarding hacking wars...
If Schueler and/or Chiriro DID both decide to leave behind VR personalities, and weren't certain whether or not they trusted each other... That could very easily turn into a hacker's war, trying to disable each other AFTER they were each recorded. And the best way to win any hacker's war is physical access, and we know that some junior angels were still alive after Schueler and Chiriro had both died of old age...

If either Archangel had left behind instructions for the a junior angel to unplug the other guy's VR unit, or if one of those junior angels had been a sleeper agent for the fallen, and unplugged BOTH units... or if there had been a hacking war between someone who was dead but in high-speed VR and looking at outside cameras, versus someone who was alive, but logged in with high-speed NEATS... we don't really know if still being legally alive trumps being biologically dead but with higher network credentials...

Problem is that there is at least one infodump from RFC indicating that the problems had been brewing for at least 200 years - and a personality that was waking up every 50 years would have noted the increasing problem in the Temple, long before Clyntyn became a GI.

fallsfromtrees wrote:Problem is that there is at least one infodump from RFC indicating that the problems had been brewing for at least 200 years - and a personality that was waking up every 50 years would have noted the increasing problem in the Temple, long before Clyntyn became a GI.

Indeed. But what would such a stored personality consider a problem? Given the differences of opinion in the command crew that led to what we see now, what constituted a danger to God's Plan for Safehold an Archangel would be concerned about would likely vary by Archangel. Depending on who it was, they might be all in favor of the changes they saw.
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Dennis

fallsfromtrees wrote:Problem is that there is at least one infodump from RFC indicating that the problems had been brewing for at least 200 years - and a personality that was waking up every 50 years would have noted the increasing problem in the Temple, long before Clyntyn became a GI.

DMcCunney wrote:Indeed. But what would such a stored personality consider a problem? Given the differences of opinion in the command crew that led to what we see now, what constituted a danger to God's Plan for Safehold an Archangel would be concerned about would likely vary by Archangel. Depending on who it was, they might be all in favor of the changes they saw.
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Dennis

The increasing corruption of the church leaders is a problem, as it will eventually lead to exactly the situation we ended up with, which could well have resulted in the complete destruction of the COGA.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:Indeed. But what would such a stored personality consider a problem? Given the differences of opinion in the command crew that led to what we see now, what constituted a danger to God's Plan for Safehold an Archangel would be concerned about would likely vary by Archangel. Depending on who it was, they might be all in favor of the changes they saw.
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Dennis

The increasing corruption of the church leaders is a problem, as it will eventually lead to exactly the situation we ended up with, which could well have resulted in the complete destruction of the COGA.

Well, according to something like 1/2 of the original command staff, destruction of the COGA is not a problem...

And according to perhaps 1/4 of the original command staff, corruption, sadism, abuse of power, and maybe even unscientific atheism aren't neccessarily problems.

And frankly, I'm STILL trying to figure out what the OTHER 1/4 of the command staff were thinking.

The only people I'm CERTAIN would object to a grossly corrupt, highly centralized, doomed to schism, COGA, which was accepting bribes to authorize attestations and aprovals, would probably be Langhorne and Bedard...

Who KNOWS what anyone else would think of all that.

DMcCunney wrote:<Snip>
But I don't see any who might be tucked away in VRs having a virtual dogfight over the spoils. Most would have no interest in ruling the world. (If they are among those tucked away, I really can't see folks like Hastings, Pasquale, Sondheim or Truscott getting into that sort if pit fight. Who else might?)
<Snip>
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Dennis

Since we know next to nothing about these 4 'Archangels' except their fields of expertise and that they were willing to go along with Langhorne and the revised Council's corruption of the plan, I just don't see where you get the evidence to say that. Geographers, doctors, agronomists and veterinarians can't possibly be evil megalomaniacs?

Randomiser wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:<Snip>
But I don't see any who might be tucked away in VRs having a virtual dogfight over the spoils. Most would have no interest in ruling the world. (If they are among those tucked away, I really can't see folks like Hastings, Pasquale, Sondheim or Truscott getting into that sort if pit fight. Who else might?)
<Snip>

Since we know next to nothing about these 4 'Archangels' except their fields of expertise and that they were willing to go along with Langhorne and the revised Council's corruption of the plan, I just don't see where you get the evidence to say that. Geographers, doctors, agronomists and veterinarians can't possibly be evil megalomaniacs?

I never said "couldn't possibly be". My view was "highly unlikely to be". What's your evidence they could be?

Being an evil megalomaniac and having the ability to put your nefarious plans into practice are different things. Langhorne and Bedard could decide to rewrite their mission orders, and had the power to impose a permanent ban on technology, and suppress the colonist's memories of who they were and where they came from to help insure technology never got developed. RFC commented in a FAQ that the OBS was intended as a cheap one time usage solution, specifically intended to destroy the Alexandria Enclave and kill off the biggest source of opposition to Langhorne and Bedard's plans.

IIRC, RFC also commented elsewhere here that when the War Against the Fallen broke out, most of the Archangels were taken by surprise and did their best to keep their heads down and out of the lines of fire while they tried to figure out what was going on.

Being willing to go along with Langhorne and Bedard doesn't make them ipso facto evil megalomaniacs. Lots of folks in Earth history have gone along with all sorts of things we look back on in horror because they didn't see that they had any other choice if they wanted to go on living. (And the OBS taking out the Alexandria Enclave was a pretty pointed hint of what could happen to anyone else putting up sufficient objection to Langhorne's plans.)

If other Archangels are tucked away as virtual personalities, you also have the question of what they can do. The are essentially a simulation running on a computer. They can "wake up" (or be awakened) to check on the current status of Safehold. But intervening if they are unhappy requires access to and control of technology tucked away in the real world, like whatever is stored under the Temple. I suspect access to that was rather carefully restricted.
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Dennis