Expert snuggler wrote:TBird50 wrote:OK, I'd forgotten that [cryo time cap]. But then my question becomes where are the Archangels and how are they staying alive for 1000 years (or whatever) so that they can return?
It's a darned good question. Merlin couldn't figure out the answer.
An artificial intelligence combined with holograms and assorted remotes could expect to do the trick, without necessarily being any more out of its mind than the rest of the command crew and War Against the Fallen survivors, and within the resources of those survivors. Holograms had already been used for mimicking command crew personnel who'd been killed between Langhorne's (?) Rakurai strike, Kau-yung's reply, and the WAtF.
The only hurdle is getting the AI personality from "now" to "later", and simply not being active or even just processing at an unnaturally slow speed would do that.
That the WAtF survivors may have re-created a good-enough PICA with resources on hand - like Owl and Nahrmahn did, after all - may not be something we can rule out yet, but I'm not sure what it'd even add to the AI plus holograms plus remotes story in practice.
The AI could, as far as this goes, also be preserved by coming in two parts: the hardware to run it, and a recorded personality to get written onto that hardware. (Which may among the files in the Stone of Schueler.) Can't go crazy in time you're not running and conscious.