Archangel's Return: An Alternative Viewpoint

My First Post

I have read a lot of speculation on the Archangels' Return. There is a fundamental assumption is all the speculation that the Return has been engineered by Team Langhorne.

What if the "Archangel's Return" was actually created by Team Shan-Wei?

Assume for the moment that Team Langhorne actually did a really good job of creating a self reinforcing matrix to contain the Safehold society. In order to break the conditioning you would need to setup a severe enough stress that would over time shatter the conditioning.

Step 1- Cut the head off and take over control
- This was the vest pocket nuke which eliminated major portions of Team Langhorne.
- Install a new command cadre that could insert changes into the society.

Step 2 - Introduce new concepts designed to destroy the conditioning
- Introduce new Angelic books that would slowly corrupt the central moral authority. Book of Schueler. (This would explain why Schueler is such a nice guy but his book is so horrible)
- Create a seat of power (the temple) that would guarantee humans who are corruptible would be attracted to and be corrupted by the new concepts.

Step 3- Leave the pot to build pressure
- Leave things to boil for 1000 years. Humans would naturally take these new concepts and push them to the breaking point.

Step 4 - Introduce a change agent
- Nimue/Merlin would be well placed to push the instabilities over the edge and set the ground work for a technology ready society.
- Maybe Team Shan-wei's use of the older PICA recording was deliberate so that Nimue had absolutely no knowledge of the project or its personnel. Nimue only knows what she has been told which means that Team Shan-wei may have hidden key parts of the larger plan from her.

Step 5 - The Crisis
- The Crisis would need to generate enough pain for large blocks of people to rebel against the conditioning and seek an alternative.
- Once the conditioning has been broken for large groups of people, any number of new societal courses be followed. Given the limited historical information available there needs to be a new source of information that shows alternative paths to follow.

Step 6 - The Return
- This is the safety net to prevent a complete meltdown of society or following an undesirable path. Use the Temple as location give a new path to technology.
- The Return would be pro technology


Other bits and pieces of text evidence seem to fit with something like this model.


Tom

If the team shain-wei won, they simply would return to the original plan. Remember; all "Adams and Eves" have NEAT-comparable implantes. They would just reeducate the population and restart the colony.

And even if they for some reason decided, that the currently model would work good enough for the waiting period (i.e. until Gbaba would give up their search), the Shain-Wei team would not let the situation work uncontrolled. They would undoubtly create some isolated enclaves with the goal of preserving the knowlege about the real history, and mantaining control over the Church to make sure ot would not go out of control.

No, if the system was really sabotaged, it was some fraction of Langhorne team. Personally, i think that the War against the Fallen was won by the moderates, and their millenial return would have as main goal to observe the situation and decide - would the religious matrix really hold, or the whole idea isn't working, and they need to return to original scheme. But this is only my personal belief.

I seriously doubt that whatever hides beneath the Temple is somehow misunderstood or benevolent toward the attitudes and nascent scientific thinking emerging in Charis and around Safehold is general. True, so far RFC has revealed that despite the megalomania and monstrous actions of Langhorne and his cohorts, their actions were in all likelihood spawned as an overreaction to the holocaust that swept humanity as a whole and a determination to ensure the survival of the human race at all costs. It is also clear, thanks to other comments made by RFC and things mentioned in the series, that the church has grossly deviated from the matrix Langhorne and Bedard intended. Much of that is the result of the War Against the Fallen and the subsequent destruction of the original Temple by Kau Yung. Those members of Langhorne's cadre that remained were obviously unequal to Bedard in psychology and too shorthanded and busy to establish the Church as it should have been. They worked with what was available and did a fair job in getting their plan back on track. But it's equally clear that they were not stupid or complacent. They had to know that Shan-Wei's loyalists might be laying low with some carefully guarded bits of remaining technology. They would have to take precautions against that possibility which could explain both the Key's purpose (to call upon the archangels in the church's hour of need) and the Holy Writ's cryptic assurance that demons would be met with an angelic response.

No, whatever is down there is not friendly to Merlin or Charis. The only good thing that's going for them is that I don't think Chihiro and Schueller (or any of the others) ever thought that the opposition would wait 750 Terran years to act directly, nor thought about the more subtle ways of actions that we've seen in the series (I.e. The Brethren of St. Zhearnou and the Sisterhood of St. Khody).

Hi thantos,

While i think you're right. The shan wei theory is plausable. You only need one or two well placed people to manipulate the grand plan on the right track.

the only problem is the tech, so the grand reveal do what you want. But that's not impossibel with the right people on the right place.

it also gives that the couldn't do it out in the open. the didn't have enough people for that.

Hi Cirret,

Welcome to the forums, please enjoy your favorite simulated beverage on the simulated forum.

The idea that Shan Wei secretly succeeded is probably rather miniscule in its likelihood.

RFC has told us in other data dumps that Shan Wei's 'faction' was largely if not almost entirely wiped out before the 'war' began, the survivors kept their heads down like Jeremiah Knowles; the war primarily being between various factions of Langhorne's survivors over the details, although outrage at the mass murder probably [hopefully] also played a part.

We still don't have a playing card listing who fought who or what those details were in the war of the fallen; Seijin Khody's diary may help lift the veil, but RFC has also explained he may never share much of his very carefully worked out details of this critical period in Safehold's development.

L

cirret wrote:Hi thantos,

While i think you're right. The shan wei theory is plausable. You only need one or two well placed people to manipulate the grand plan on the right track.

the only problem is the tech, so the grand reveal do what you want. But that's not impossibel with the right people on the right place.

it also gives that the couldn't do it out in the open. the didn't have enough people for that.

thanatos wrote:I seriously doubt that whatever hides beneath the Temple is somehow misunderstood or benevolent toward the attitudes and nascent scientific thinking emerging in Charis and around Safehold is general. True, so far RFC has revealed that despite the megalomania and monstrous actions of Langhorne and his cohorts, their actions were in all likelihood spawned as an overreaction to the holocaust that swept humanity as a whole and a determination to ensure the survival of the human race at all costs. It is also clear, thanks to other comments made by RFC and things mentioned in the series, that the church has grossly deviated from the matrix Langhorne and Bedard intended. Much of that is the result of the War Against the Fallen and the subsequent destruction of the original Temple by Kau Yung. Those members of Langhorne's cadre that remained were obviously unequal to Bedard in psychology and too shorthanded and busy to establish the Church as it should have been. They worked with what was available and did a fair job in getting their plan back on track. But it's equally clear that they were not stupid or complacent. They had to know that Shan-Wei's loyalists might be laying low with some carefully guarded bits of remaining technology. They would have to take precautions against that possibility which could explain both the Key's purpose (to call upon the archangels in the church's hour of need) and the Holy Writ's cryptic assurance that demons would be met with an angelic response.

No, whatever is down there is not friendly to Merlin or Charis. The only good thing that's going for them is that I don't think Chihiro and Schueller (or any of the others) ever thought that the opposition would wait 750 Terran years to act directly, nor thought about the more subtle ways of actions that we've seen in the series (I.e. The Brethren of St. Zhearnou and the Sisterhood of St. Khody).

I was under the impression that the destruction of the temple occurred before the war against the fallen, and may even be described as a trigger for that war in that the deaths of the leadership of the Langhorne faction lead to disagreements between the remaining members and thence to civil war, the losers being referred to by the winners as 'the fallen'

SPOILERS.....

Keith_w wrote:

thanatos wrote:<SNIP> No, whatever is down there is not friendly to Merlin or Charis. The only good thing that's going for them is that I don't think Chihiro and Schueller (or any of the others) ever thought that the opposition would wait 750 Terran years to act directly, nor thought about the more subtle ways of actions that we've seen in the series (I.e. The Brethren of St. Zhearnou and the Sisterhood of St. Khody).

I was under the impression that the destruction of the temple occurred before the war against the fallen, and may even be described as a trigger for that war in that the deaths of the leadership of the Langhorne faction lead to disagreements between the remaining members and thence to civil war, the losers being referred to by the winners as 'the fallen'

With one caveat, you've got it right - the nuclear destruction of Langhorne and most of his senior cronies occurred before the War of the Fallen, and it also destroyed most of Langhorne's enclave at Zion. We don't know for sure what buildings existed in that enclave, but the current Temple was built by the surviving command team after the war. As a side note, Langhorne established Zion where he did because the climate was so inhospitable that humans couldn't easily survive there without using TF tech. Oops!

The war itself involved lots of fatal squabbling between Langhorne's followers, aided by an unknown number of humans who history now refers to as Seijins. Obviously Seijin Kohdy's sword and Merlin's wakazashi use the same TF tech, since they both have monomolecular edged blades. Many other humans participated in the war and were given "angel weapons" of their own. (Note the verifier the Wylsynn family was given) Many of us suspected that those hadn't all been gathered up after the ambushes and carnage were over, and now we've been proven right.

Yes, the "Fallen" were the surviving members of the command team after Pei Kau-yung introduced Langhorne to his vest pocket nuke. However, they were almost all (if not entirely) Langhorne supporters who merely differed on the details of his plan, not on his intention to dig the deepest hole he could and then bury the human race inside it. Exactly what differences of opinion were intense enough to be worth killing each other over we don't know, but when the blood and dust cleared, the survivors built the Temple on the site of Langhorne's former enclave and heavily edited the Writ, casting Shan-Wei in the role of Satan rather than as the creator of the world. They also vastly expanded the OBS and turned it into the orbiting fortress it is today to provide cataclysmic enforcement of the Proscriptions.

Unfortunately for those who hope that the Return might be a good thing for our heroes, as far as we know Shan-wei and her entire team of "techies" were killed of by the OBS at Armageddon Reef. They weren't around to fight the war, and we don't know of any who escaped, although the conversation that Seijin Kohdy had with the "demon" which caused him to change sides may shed some light on that. I can't wait to hear the parts of his journal that were written in Spanish - heck, I volunteer to translate them myself!

tomu702 wrote:My First Post

Welcome aboard and enjoy the ride. Remember to keep your seat-belt buckled at all times and hands and feet safely inside the ride. OH and scream like mad at the twists and turns. What the heck the rest of us do!

tomu702 wrote:I have read a lot of speculation on the Archangels' Return. There is a fundamental assumption is all the speculation that the Return has been engineered by Team Langhorne.

What if the "Archangel's Return" was actually created by Team Shan-Wei?

SNIP the rest for brevity's sake.

OK I don't think team Shan-wei (as you put it) won or reprogrammed the church in total, although it's an interesting speculation. I could see a scenario though, where a stealth member of the Langhornites who had second thoughts and managed to conceal them, or a hacker member of the pro-technology Shan-wei faction, managed to infiltrate and embed their personality into the matrix buried under the church. Such a personality might be more disposed to undo the plan, now that a viable home grown team exists, especially if the alternative is slagging huge blocks of the population. After all the church itself is now spreading the technology news around about improved metalworking processes and weapons design so how do you put the genie back into the bottle?

One problem I've had with the entire premise of getting Safehold/Humanity back on the road to space is that, without a voice from above (i.e. the return) suddenly giving a divine imprimatur to the technology changes, the church is going to fight on, one way or the other and would frankly be correct, by their lights, to do so.

Another problem is that unless (before the date of the return) either Charis takes and destroys the temple (and sends a shutdown or self destruct command to the Orbital Ballistic System), or the returning visitation blesses the changes (and shuts down or demolishes the Orbital Ballistic System) mankind is stuck on Safehold for a long, long time since OWL can't get through the protection screen around it, even with Federation technology.

Charis may be able to win battles and fight to a draw, but it's impossible to change hearts and minds while the temple entity (whatever it is) is still able to cause havoc and confusion on the planet. And there will always be true believers to spread any message from the temple.

From the standpoint of the OBS, it's impossible for any foreseeable period of advancement to build the requisite technology base to take out the orbiting rock slinger, without electricity. And we all seem to feel electricity is an automatic trigger for an orbital rock flash. So (Q.E.D.) either what's under the temple wakes up and changes it's mind on the viability of Langhorne's ideas, or our intrepid hero's are spitting in the wind in the long term. I just don't see any alternatives.

Therefore from both the theological problem solution and the practical solution of the OBS, the entity under the temple must almost certainly be more benevolent than we think it is. Or else everybody had better start buying battlesteel umbrellas.

Larry

P.S. Unless, of course, you think Merlin or Nimue are going to be able to just talk the temple entity into seeing the light of sweet reason, one stored federation personality to another, as it were.

Larry wrote:

tomu702 wrote:I have read a lot of speculation on the Archangels' Return. There is a fundamental assumption is all the speculation that the Return has been engineered by Team Langhorne.

What if the "Archangel's Return" was actually created by Team Shan-Wei?

SNIP the rest for brevity's sake.

OK I don't think team Shan-wei (as you put it) won or reprogrammed the church in total, although it's an interesting speculation. I could see a scenario though, where a stealth member of the Langhornites who had second thoughts and managed to conceal them, or a hacker member of the pro-technology Shan-wei faction, managed to infiltrate and embed their personality into the matrix buried under the church. Such a personality might be more disposed to undo the plan, now that a viable home grown team exists, especially if the alternative is slagging huge blocks of the population. After all the church itself is now spreading the technology news around about improved metalworking processes and weapons design so how do you put the genie back into the bottle?

One problem I've had with the entire premise of getting Safehold/Humanity back on the road to space is that, without a voice from above (i.e. the return) suddenly giving a divine imprimatur to the technology changes, the church is going to fight on, one way or the other and would frankly be correct, by their lights, to do so.

Another problem is that unless (before the date of the return) either Charis takes and destroys the temple (and sends a shutdown or self destruct command to the Orbital Ballistic System), or the returning visitation blesses the changes (and shuts down or demolishes the Orbital Ballistic System) mankind is stuck on Safehold for a long, long time since OWL can't get through the protection screen around it, even with Federation technology.

Charis may be able to win battles and fight to a draw, but it's impossible to change hearts and minds while the temple entity (whatever it is) is still able to cause havoc and confusion on the planet. And there will always be true believers to spread any message from the temple.

From the standpoint of the OBS, it's impossible for any foreseeable period of advancement to build the requisite technology base to take out the orbiting rock slinger, without electricity. And we all seem to feel electricity is an automatic trigger for an orbital rock flash. So (Q.E.D.) either what's under the temple wakes up and changes it's mind on the viability of Langhorne's ideas, or our intrepid hero's are spitting in the wind in the long term. I just don't see any alternatives.

Therefore from both the theological problem solution and the practical solution of the OBS, the entity under the temple must almost certainly be more benevolent than we think it is. Or else everybody had better start buying battlesteel umbrellas.

Larry

P.S. Unless, of course, you think Merlin or Nimue are going to be able to just talk the temple entity into seeing the light of sweet reason, one stored federation personality to another, as it were.

I'd absolutely love to agree with both of you, really I would. Unfortunately RFC has made it clear that not only did Shan-Wei and her group of techies lose, they were obliterated! The War of the Fallen was fought between the surviving cadre of Langhorne supporters, who somehow found something worth killing each other over, even with the threat removed of someone from the TF actively pursuing the original plan of Operation Ark.

That said, I'm drawing a blank when I wonder what Seijin Kohdy was told by the enemy that caused him to switch sides. The argument among the surviving archangels at that point shouldn't have been "Should we dig a hole and hide humanity in it forever?" but "How deep should we dig?"

There's also the question of why the archangels are returning and why they waited so long, since the church has been off the rails for centuries. They're a bit late if they were supposed to check on whether the societal matrix was holding as planned. If they thought they could pound any areas of technological innovation back into the stone age using the OBS, it's too late, since innovation is now sweeping the planet. So why are they returning at all, in whatever form the Return takes?

Right now, we simply don't know. I hope Seijin Kohdy's journal sheds some light on the subject, but I doubt we'll get any translation of it during the snippets. RFC is an absolute master at setting up all the events of a novel in the first half of it, and only then having all the mayhem break out. It's not often that we get a heads up during the snippets, like we did with the ironclads in MTaT. I'm not optimistic that we will this time. (But hope springs eternal!)

Larry wrote:

tomu702 wrote:My First Post

Welcome aboard and enjoy the ride. Remember to keep your seat-belt buckled at all times and hands and feet safely inside the ride. OH and scream like mad at the twists and turns. What the heck the rest of us do!

tomu702 wrote:I have read a lot of speculation on the Archangels' Return. There is a fundamental assumption is all the speculation that the Return has been engineered by Team Langhorne.

What if the "Archangel's Return" was actually created by Team Shan-Wei?

SNIP the rest for brevity's sake.

OK I don't think team Shan-wei (as you put it) won or reprogrammed the church in total, although it's an interesting speculation. I could see a scenario though, where a stealth member of the Langhornites who had second thoughts and managed to conceal them, or a hacker member of the pro-technology Shan-wei faction, managed to infiltrate and embed their personality into the matrix buried under the church. Such a personality might be more disposed to undo the plan, now that a viable home grown team exists, especially if the alternative is slagging huge blocks of the population. After all the church itself is now spreading the technology news around about improved metalworking processes and weapons design so how do you put the genie back into the bottle?

One problem I've had with the entire premise of getting Safehold/Humanity back on the road to space is that, without a voice from above (i.e. the return) suddenly giving a divine imprimatur to the technology changes, the church is going to fight on, one way or the other and would frankly be correct, by their lights, to do so.

Another problem is that unless (before the date of the return) either Charis takes and destroys the temple (and sends a shutdown or self destruct command to the Orbital Ballistic System), or the returning visitation blesses the changes (and shuts down or demolishes the Orbital Ballistic System) mankind is stuck on Safehold for a long, long time since OWL can't get through the protection screen around it, even with Federation technology.

Charis may be able to win battles and fight to a draw, but it's impossible to change hearts and minds while the temple entity (whatever it is) is still able to cause havoc and confusion on the planet. And there will always be true believers to spread any message from the temple.

From the standpoint of the OBS, it's impossible for any foreseeable period of advancement to build the requisite technology base to take out the orbiting rock slinger, without electricity. And we all seem to feel electricity is an automatic trigger for an orbital rock flash. So (Q.E.D.) either what's under the temple wakes up and changes it's mind on the viability of Langhorne's ideas, or our intrepid hero's are spitting in the wind in the long term. I just don't see any alternatives.

Therefore from both the theological problem solution and the practical solution of the OBS, the entity under the temple must almost certainly be more benevolent than we think it is. Or else everybody had better start buying battlesteel umbrellas.

Larry

P.S. Unless, of course, you think Merlin or Nimue are going to be able to just talk the temple entity into seeing the light of sweet reason, one stored federation personality to another, as it were.

Hopefully, you get into the Temple, seize control of the computer, shut off the OBS and prevent the entity, whatever it is, from waking up...

Don