(SPOILERS) Langhorne's big mistake ;)

Sharp Claw wrote:Is this a spoiler topic?

DrakBibliophile wrote:Join the club.

I've had my suspicions about Seijin Kody and one of my suspicions is that he was the PICA of one of the Archangels.

The fact that OWL was able to build a PICA without a time limit is "very interesting".

By the way, the description of Seijin Kody in the first official snippet of the next book makes me wonder if I suspected the wrong Archangel.

Bruno Behrends wrote:Could you GUARANTEE that you would stick to your original plan for a thousand and more years? And not have a change of mind - or several - sometime along the way? Or develop totally different interests? See your 'fellow humans' as anything more than pawns? Or stay SANE even?

n7axw wrote:Hi RFC,

There is one thing about all of this that is still bugging me a bit. Owl was capable of building a PICA in Nimue's cave. So no PICA apart from Nimue's came to Safehold, and that one apart from Langhorne's knowledge. Why could not one of the survivors of the War against the Fallen... say maybe Schuler, have had one constructed without the restraints TF law would have imposed. He, after all, would have had access to AIs far more powerful with more resourses than Owl... And the hologram of Schuler is the one who provides the info about the thousand year return.

I would never tell you how to write your story, mind you... Its just that this little niggling question haunts the back of my imagination...

Don

Thrandir wrote:Hi n7axw,

Ask yourself this can you build an iPhone or Android phone by yourself?
I get the very distinct feeling that many of the command crew left did not have the technical know-how to do so. They knew how to utilise the technology they had but not the fundamental under-pinning of that technology and in this case how to circumvent the 10 day limit.

OWL did because a) he has the schematics of Merlin to play with and b) he had some months to work out how to do it. Cannot remember which book it is in but Merlin did ask OWL if he had finished determining how to build another PICA ...

Also I remember DW telling us ages ago that there is only 1 person with a PICA = Nimue

n7axw wrote:Hi RFC,

There is one thing about all of this that is still bugging me a bit. Owl was capable of building a PICA in Nimue's cave. So no PICA apart from Nimue's came to Safehold, and that one apart from Langhorne's knowledge. Why could not one of the survivors of the War against the Fallen... say maybe Schuler, have had one constructed without the restraints TF law would have imposed. He, after all, would have had access to AIs far more powerful with more resourses than Owl... And the hologram of Schuler is the one who provides the info about the thousand year return.

I would never tell you how to write your story, mind you... Its just that this little niggling question haunts the back of my imagination...

Don

runsforcelery wrote:

Not really, but it wouldn't have been all that difficult for him to get his hands on one if he'd wanted to.

I'm pretty sure I've already mentioned this somewhere, but there was a legal difference under Federation law between emancipated electronic intelligences and PICAs owned and used by flesh-and-blood human beings. Federation long recognized the "person" of electronic personalities which had been specifically granted their freedom by the original human being of whom they were copies. When that happened — that is, when the human original granted in emancipation — however, the human original lost all control/ownership/parenthood/whatever over the new personality. That personality became a completely independent individual in the eyes of the law. The personality could be housed in a computer-supported virtual reality (this is where the Federation put its AI R&D types and strategists) or, under certain extraordinary circumstances, housed in a PICA without the 10-day limit. The PICA "brains" involved differed, however. For an autonomous, emancipated personality, the PICA was hardwired to that personality and that personality only, and the inhabiting personality could not be "recorded over" in any way. For a PICA intended to be used as the extension of a flesh-and-blood human — like the "recreational" last-generation PICA Nimue Alban's father bought her — the 10-day limit was imposed because Federation law required an absolute ability to track the individual operating a PICA at any given moment. That is, the flesh-and-blood human who was "driving" the PICA had to be held accountable for any actions of the PICA without legal ambiguity. By the same token, the hardwired (or perhaps the term I want is "hard written") personality in an emancipated PICA couldn't claim in court that it's flesh-and-blood original had really been driving at that moment. AIs fell into a completely different category for several reasons, but it was possible, after jumping through about a bazillion legal hoops, to emancipate even an AI.

The problem that Commodore Pei and Pei Shan-wei and their fellows faced was that emancipated PICAs were very, very few in numbers (I mean as in a minute percentage of a tiny fraction of an itty-bitty part of the human race), and none of them had been included in the planning for the Safehold project. There were a couple of reasons for that, but the biggest one was that the expedition was mounted under conditions of the utmost secrecy and the individuals responsible for planning it wanted to avoid the specific circumstance of some sort of apparently immortal being wandering around on Safehold after all of the colonists had volunteered to have the memory of a technological society deleted from their minds. Mind you, I'm not necessarily saying that this was a logical, carefully reasoned concern on the planners' part. As some of you have suggested up-thread from here, the population of Old Earth wasn't in very good mental shape at the time Operation Ark was mounted. The planners knew that the Gbaba had learned to communicate with humanity at least sufficiently well to interrogate captured humans. They could safely assume that the kebab of were doing their best to Whatever news and data they could pull out of the solar system's datanet, and they had no way to be positive that the Gbaba wouldn't actually physically land upon Old Earth as part of their final attack for the specific purpose of looking for evidence of anything like Operation Ark. Accordingly, recruiting was done very carefully. The planners selected individuals to be solicited as colonists, and there was an exhaustive vetting process, carried out by non-emancipated a PICAs before any individual was initially interviewed by an actual human being. No one found out what they were actually volunteering for until after they'd signed on for the mission, although they were informed during the interview process of most of what would happen to them if they did volunteer. All knowledge of Operation Ark was sequestered in a single, large installation in the as isolated a spot as the Federation could find. The only exception to this was found in the prime minister of the Federation, his cabinet, and the joint chiefs of staff. Not even the chiefs of staff's normal aides and staffs knew about it; a completely separate organization was stood up to handle it, and all of its personnel were located at the Operation Ark basing facility. So were all of the electronic records, all of the AIs, et cetera, and the installation was physically isolated from the system datanet. The reason for this was that when it became evident that the Gbaba had broken through, the entire installation, including every human being and every electronic personality, would be eliminated in a rather large nuclear explosion. If the Gbaba had broken through the sol system's defenses, it would be only a matter of time until everyone on the base was killed anyway, and this provision was designed to eliminate any information/evidence Gbaba investigators (if any) might have discovered. The prime minister, the members of the cabinet, and the joint chiefs were also provided with the means to kill themselves before falling into Gbaba hands.

What I'm saying here is that Operation Ark itself was institutionalized paranoia on a species-level scale, and the planners behind it, while chosen for their sheer brilliance and ability, were no more immune to the paranoia and the desperation of their situation than any other human beings. This is something that needs to be borne in mind when looking at Langhorne's actions farther down the road, although I think perhaps the only Safeholdian who's really grasped that at this point may be Maikel Staynair. Nahrmahn Baytz may be trending at least somewhat in the same direction as the Archbishop, given the amount of time he's had to study on things. Merlin and Nimue Chwaeriau don't need to do any research, but readers should bear in mind that Nimue Alban was also traumatized by what was going to happen to the human race. She dealt with it better than a whole bunch of humanity did, but she was still clearly affected by it, and I think it shows, especially in Merlin.

The mission planners were pretty darned fanatical about what was and what was not to be permitted on the surface of Safehold for the colonists in general. They had made a conscious decision at an early point that PICAs and virtual reality-bound AIs would not be part of that mix. Bear in mind that they never intended the company to be eternally low-tech; that was Langhorne's idea down the road. They did, however, insist on creating a situation in which the colonists would have no clues pointing them towards advanced technology, which was always going to be a difficult line to walk for the command crew.

The command crew (under the original plan) were to be given two options once the colony was fully up and running. Option A would be to have their own memories adjusted to delete any memory of high technology and then to join the rest of the colony population. Option B would be to retain their memories, but in that case they were supposed to live in isolated communities, with little or no contact with the rest of Safehold. This, in fact, is why Zion was located in such a relatively inhospitable surroundings and why the Alexandria Enclave was located on what equated to Antarctica. The youngest of the command crew could be expected to live to a point well past the end of the "complete ban on technology" period by the original mission planners, and if they chose to remain in one of the very small "high-tech" enclaves, they would also have children who would receive the same life-extending technologies. Their power supplies would be buried deep, their use of any sort of radiating technology would be held to an extremely austere (and shielded) level, et cetera, but they were supposed to retain the technological "seed corn" for the descendents of the other colonists once the initial hiding. Was over.

Because of that, there was no need for any PICAs to "protect against barbarism." There were always supposed to be a minimum of two enclaves which would retain that carefully hidden technology and be the librarians/caretakers for humanity's technological past. That's why Langhorne had to rig the membership on his council before he could the verge so radically from the original mission plan. The last thing Langhorne wanted to add to his baggage was an emancipated PICA which might reject his vision for what was needed to preserve humanity from extinction and act upon that rejection after Langhorne was dead or no longer in a position to prevent that from happening. Another possible fear was that a PICA or PICAs might see the opportunity to set up as the immortal, divine rulers of an enslaved humanity. And, trust me, there were all manner of other dark forebodings and imaginings floating around in the tortured psyches of the roughly 0.08% of the human race sent off to Safehold. In fact, in some ways, it's actually rather remarkable that things didn't turn out even worse.

Langhorne probably could have requested that a PICA or PICAs be assigned to the command crew. He didn't want one. None of the original command crew — with the exception of the Peis and their small handful of fellow conspirators — wanted PICAs, to be honest. The fact that Nimue was allowed to bring hers along is an indication that they hadn't been completely, totally, and categorically ruled out by the original mission planners; the extent she and her fellow conspirators went to in order to ensure that her PICA's existence was "lost" from the records is an indication of how thoroughly anti-technology Langhorne truly was. Or, perhaps, I should qualify that by saying that at least initially, it was an indication of how anti-technology the conspirators believed him to be. They were, after all, taking precautions against something which — at the time — they couldn't be certain was going to happen and which they knew was in direct contradiction of the original mission plan. In some ways, it's an indication of just how traumatized Nimue Alban had been — or of how her life experience had shaped her own personality, at any rate — that she was willing to transfer to Admiral Pei's flagship in the full expectation of dying there just in case Langhorne jumped the tracks.

There are reasons beyond those I've listed here why the command crew never contemplated a "permanent PICA presence" to keep Langhorne's master plan on track. Eventually, you guys will find out what those other reasons were. At the moment, you're just going to have to take my word for it that those reasons actually made sense given the command crew's plans, expectations, and fears.

There's no question that leaving a cadre of PICA "Archangels" to control the situation would have been a masterstroke in many ways. As I say, there's a reason it didn't happen, and you're just going to have to trust me when I tell you that "it will all make sense in the end." The original mission planners included no PICAs in their plans for the reasons I've listed above, and the options available to Langhorne and his immediate successors began and proceeded from the technology initially assigned to the colony by those planners.

More than that I am not going to tell you at this time.