Baseless speculation.

Here goes...we know that Safehold has legends of seijins doing incredible things in the distant past. We know that Merlin latched on to those legends in order to allay surprise regarding his abilities. We also know that many, perhaps all, legends have a kernel of truth to them. We also know that a record of Nimue Alban was kept--a record that could be downloaded into a PICA. Here's where the speculation comes in--what are the chances that the kernel of truth to the seijin legends was a previous instance of Nimue Alban being downloaded into her, or someone's, PICA?

We know that the seijins operated on the side of the light. So suppose after the Rakurai of the Alexandria colony and nuking of the command crew, that the remaining crew fought with each other for religious control of Safehold. Maybe someone put Nimue into her PICA, and had her, in a suitable disguise, participate in the war of the fallen. She might be fighting for the least bad alternative, which ended up putting the current system into power.

Am I completely off my rocker?

~Tonto

Tonto Silerheels wrote:Here goes...we know that Safehold has legends of seijins doing incredible things in the distant past. We know that Merlin latched on to those legends in order to allay surprise regarding his abilities. We also know that many, perhaps all, legends have a kernel of truth to them. We also know that a record of Nimue Alban was kept--a record that could be downloaded into a PICA. Here's where the speculation comes in--what are the chances that the kernel of truth to the seijin legends was a previous instance of Nimue Alban being downloaded into her, or someone's, PICA?

We know that the seijins operated on the side of the light. So suppose after the Rakurai of the Alexandria colony and nuking of the command crew, that the remaining crew fought with each other for religious control of Safehold. Maybe someone put Nimue into her PICA, and had her, in a suitable disguise, participate in the war of the fallen. She might be fighting for the least bad alternative, which ended up putting the current system into power.

Am I completely off my rocker?

~Tonto

We're given the date she woke up in OAR, so why would she have turned her PICA off, then wiped her memories? Turning off for a few centuries to let things settle out isn't something I see Nimue doing, and definitely not wiping her memories. It's far more likely the seijin were normal humans given very limited access to technology from the surviving angels.

keylime314 wrote:
so why would she have turned her PICA off,

That's a very good question, and it's amenable to a number of different answers. Maybe she didn't turn the PICA off. Maybe someone forced her to. Or maybe Pei Kau-yung had a reason for it. Alternatively, we've seen how Merlin's memories are haunting him, and how he was unwilling to inflict them on Nimue Chweriau. Perhaps after a suitable lifetime Nimue decided it was time for her to pass from this world.

then wiped her memories?

It's not so much a matter of her wiping her memories, as the fact that downloading her original personality over-writes everything that was there.

It's far more likely the seijin were normal humans given very limited access to technology from the surviving angels.

That's what Mr. Weber has stated on this forum. His words were something to the effect that maybe technological devices, similar to the verifier, were given to normal humans. However, when I hear that maybe something is one way, my first thought is that maybe it's not that one way, as well.

My favourite author has had his characters define surprise as that thing that happens when something you've seen all along turns out to be something other than what you thought it was.

I'm not sure what irony is.

~Tonto

It seems odd that anyone would have erased the PICAs memories, reloaded the original memories of Nimue from Earth, and set up OWL and the entire based under the mountain, and erased all record of the incarnation of Nimue, deliberately making it look like the PICA had not been awake before on Safehold. I can't imagine it happening.

Now, there has been quite a bit of speculation about whether one or more of the original seijins, Seijin Kody in particular, was a PICA, and even suggestions that it might come back once in a while. We know (or think we know) that many of the original seijins were actually Adams and Eves who had been gifted with high-tech devices to do miraculous feats. But the possibility that there was a PICA in the mix is still bandied about on the forum. But I don't see how it could be an earlier incarnation of Nimue in the same PICA as today's Merlin.

All,
I've always been of the opinion that Seijin Kody and some of the 'legendary' seijins were indeed PICAs. Their time limits, however, had not been hacked by Proctor. (Or, in a more sinister fashion, Proctor did indeed hack them, but put in 'kill' codes to end the personality and shut down/destroy the PICA after a set period of time).

This explains why they 'appeared' for short, mythical periods and then disappeared, never to be seen again. It is also possible that the seijin/PICAs were intended to be 'bootstrapped' between a personality matrix (like Nahrman's) and the PICAs. This PM (the actual computer) was destroyed in the vest-pocket nuke explosion. The PICAs then were activated 'at need' early on, but then lost forever when they automatically dumped their cores ten days later. Thus why the sightings of 'real' seijin dropped off and never re-started.

It should have occurred to Bedard and Langhorne that PICA-based 'visitations' would be the best way to keep the project on track. Thus why they built/encouraged the seijin idea in the first place. Such heroes have no place in a stable society - they only happen when things are going wrong. The fact that they laid this myth along with their religion shows they intended to have a 'divine' oversight.

Such plans died with them in the nuke. Thank goodness. But now you might see why Adm. Pei might have included modern weapons capable of slagging a full-up PICA in combat armor in the Cave, yes?

Just my two tenth-marks for consideration,
Dave

Lazalarlives wrote:All,
I've always been of the opinion that Seijin Kody and some of the 'legendary' seijins were indeed PICAs. Their time limits, however, had not been hacked by Proctor. (Or, in a more sinister fashion, Proctor did indeed hack them, but put in 'kill' codes to end the personality and shut down/destroy the PICA after a set period of time).

This explains why they 'appeared' for short, mythical periods and then disappeared, never to be seen again. It is also possible that the seijin/PICAs were intended to be 'bootstrapped' between a personality matrix (like Nahrman's) and the PICAs. This PM (the actual computer) was destroyed in the vest-pocket nuke explosion. The PICAs then were activated 'at need' early on, but then lost forever when they automatically dumped their cores ten days later. Thus why the sightings of 'real' seijin dropped off and never re-started.

It should have occurred to Bedard and Langhorne that PICA-based 'visitations' would be the best way to keep the project on track. Thus why they built/encouraged the seijin idea in the first place. Such heroes have no place in a stable society - they only happen when things are going wrong. The fact that they laid this myth along with their religion shows they intended to have a 'divine' oversight.

Such plans died with them in the nuke. Thank goodness. But now you might see why Adm. Pei might have included modern weapons capable of slagging a full-up PICA in combat armor in the Cave, yes?

Just my two tenth-marks for consideration,
Dave

Except that those weapons were stocked down there with the PICA before Langhorne even stepped foot on Safehold. So Pei had no way of knowing that Langhorne had a PICA, or what Langhorne's plans were at that time.

SWM wrote:So Pei had no way of knowing that Langhorne had a PICA, ...

Isn't Merlin explicitly told that Nimue was chosen because she was the ONLY member of the Ark project who had a PICA?

Quote from OAR

Unfortunately"—Pei Kau-yung's expression turned sad once again—"the only last-generation PICA belonging to anyone we knew we could trust was yours, and there wasn't time to acquire another.

End Quote

Note, the word "trust".

So in theory, there could have been another last-generation PICA owned by another individual involved with Project Ark.

However, there are IMO unanswered questions about any other PICAs.

First, if there were more PICA, why aren't they still active.

While the "ten day limit" would appear to answer that question, IMO there would be ways around that limit.

While Elias Proctor was one of the best cyberneticist around, it is unlikely that he was the only one involved with Project Ark. What he did working alone, others might have been able to do working as a team.

For that matter, a person could have created a "record" of himself (or herself) in order that it could be reloaded into a PICA.

For that matter, if the high-speed interface still worked, toward the end of the ten-day limit the memories of the PICA personality could have been uploaded to another computer.

Thus when the PICA software erased the personality, there would be a copy to be reloaded to the PICA.

The idea that the recorded personalities were destroyed by Kau-yung's nuke is IMO flawed by the likely fact that the Hamilcar still existed at the time Langhorne was killed. (The Hamilcar would have been very useful when it came to creating the Temple which is why I think it was still around at the time of Kau-yung's nuke.)

If there were recorded personalities besides Nimue's they would IMO be stored in Hamilcar's computers as well as in the Zion computers.

The simplest explanation for the absence of PICAs is that Langhorne had all of them destroyed.

After all, it wasn't like anybody else had a reason to hide a PICA (unlike Kau-yung).

Weird Harold wrote:

SWM wrote:So Pei had no way of knowing that Langhorne had a PICA, ...

Isn't Merlin explicitly told that Nimue was chosen because she was the ONLY member of the Ark project who had a PICA?

Tonto Silerheels wrote:keylime314 wrote:
then wiped her memories?

It's not so much a matter of her wiping her memories, as the fact that downloading her original personality over-writes everything that was there.

But she would have absolutely NO REASON to have even tried to redownload the original. She wouldn't get anything new from doing so, she would already have it PLUS the time she was active. So why?

keylime314 wrote: But she would have absolutely NO REASON to have even tried to redownload the original. She wouldn't get anything new from doing so, she would already have it PLUS the time she was active. So why?

I don't think she did it. I think Pei Kau-yung did it. He did it because the system that had been set up was yielding to corruption and stagnation. He couldn't re-start the original Nimue because over the centuries she had developed a suicide complex due to the unbearable memories she had created during her long and active life. No other personalities would fit into Nimue's PICA. His only viable alternative was to download a "pristine" copy of Nimue into it.

~Tonto