What did Schuler know?

Your 1) is highly disputable: Jerry Knowles learned of Nimue by accident, he wasn't _given_ the information. There's no reason to think that any others among those who were shifted out of Alexandria knew about her. We don't know that none of them did, of course, but there's reason to think they weren't supposed to.

I would agree that 2) is indisputable. In fact, they could have been the Fallen that Chihiro was warring against - or, more likely, taking advantage of to war against his opposition.

3), I fear, is laden with assumptions. The most egregious of them is that the Cave could be hidden from anyone with access to the full TF tech base and the certainty that there was something to find. Remember the saying 'half of a secret is the fact that it exists'.

One of your starting assumptions is also debatable. We know that Langhorn's records were hacked to insert the colonists moved out of Alexandria. Removing all traces of a _dead_ TFN officer would have been no more difficult. Editing her personal baggage list would have been even simpler. And a fairly obvious precaution, come to think of it.

Thurgrak wrote:This is a bit sarcastic and I apologise for that.

So no-one thinks it possible that the other Brethren type groups in other enclaves might have adopted a different approach to Knowles's 350 year wait to open the document?

And we seem to have the consensus that the stuff produced by the Hamilcar would have been capable of defeating the stealth tech of something constructed with the facilities of an entire terraforming fleet to be undetectable to known equipment and placed in the optimum location chosen from the crust of an entire planet. Could anyone who thinks that the cave would have been found explain why Merlin isn't using the same tech to see inside the Temple?

And for reference the PICA was listed in Langhorne's "Master Lists" (OAR) which is why Nimue transferred and died. Whatever else (unless Langhorne purged what would based on the capacity of the verifier memory sphere have been a tiny amount of information) that information - ownership of the PICA and presence on the ship at some point - would still be on Langhorne's files so Schuler or whoever was in charge after Langhorne died would have had access to it and a general search in the records for "Nimue" would have found it irrespective of what Schuler or anyone else knew of Nimue before that. I would also argue that IF the search took place the fact there was a PICA and the transfer would make it fairly obvious what happened.

I'm not saying I'm right - in fact I suspect I'm not but unless there is some serious textev I'm missing the following is indisputable.

1) There were multiple enclave groups with the information the Brethren had which includes the name Nimue

2) One of those groups COULD have been found by Schuler or other archangels of the Langhornite faction

3) There's no particularly rational method using demonstrated tech capacities (SNARCs and whatever scanners are on the OBS) of determining small scale power/materials at long range with low power methods through planetary crusts when those objects are highly stealthed and know exactly what to protect against, if there is the OBS should be assumed to know exactly what Merlin (an unstealthed publicly available metallic object with a power plant) is - and why would a PICA be programmed into the OBS as something allowed? The fact the series didn't end a couple of hundred pages into OAR in a flash of light as Merlin was vaporised by the OBS is the best evidence that sensing Merlin's cave was impossible with low power methods.

Louis R wrote:Your 1) is highly disputable: Jerry Knowles learned of Nimue by accident, he wasn't _given_ the information. There's no reason to think that any others among those who were shifted out of Alexandria knew about her. We don't know that none of them did, of course, but there's reason to think they weren't supposed to.

It doesn't say he learned by accident, only mostly by accident which would imply some information was actually given to him deliberately but less than he had in total. It does say Shan-wei didn't want them to know but we know so little about this time period. Commodore Pei could have told them after Shan-wei's death for all we know.

And that isn't the only possible route for the information to have reached Schuler. I can think of at least a couple of others.

Louis R wrote:3), I fear, is laden with assumptions. The most egregious of them is that the Cave could be hidden from anyone with access to the full TF tech base and the certainty that there was something to find. Remember the saying 'half of a secret is the fact that it exists'.

Agreed - there are assumptions. However there are assumptions in your answer which are equally problematic. first that there is no way they have effective access to the complete federation tech base (nothing that would potentially give away their position to the Gbaba like active scanners would be even considered IMO) and second that there is precisely no evidence of any scanner tech capable of doing it being deployed or even mentioned even when its use would be obvious like peering inside the temple.

Unless there is a complete technological avenue that would be of massive use to Merlin that he's completely ignoring I can't see this one being wrong. I'm basing what I'm saying on the displayed scanner tech (SNARCs are line of sight
and are presumably latest stealth scanning tech for the Federation). If there's any suggestion anywhere that there is something that can be built that can scan through a mile of rock on passives please point out my mistake.

Can anyone else who wants to handwave federation technology as a reason this is impossible actually check what tech we've seen and give me some idea of what they are expecting this tech to actually do. It's pretty hard to discuss about "some highly superior tech that no-one has seen or referred to" being able to do anything.

Louis R wrote:One of your starting assumptions is also debatable. We know that Langhorn's records were hacked to insert the colonists moved out of Alexandria. Removing all traces of a _dead_ TFN officer would have been no more difficult. Editing her personal baggage list would have been even simpler. And a fairly obvious precaution, come to think of it.

Hey that's fun. You've just dismissed the whole premise for Nimue needing to die in the first place since if that's right Nimue could simply have had the PICA removed from the list. Where does it say his computers were hacked? His list differs from Shan-wei's but that doesn't mean his list was hacked, it just means the two lists were different and I can think of a bunch of reasons for that.

The point of this is IF Schuler did know what could he do?

Is there anything in the text somewhere which suggests he could have found the cave even if he did know about it that I've missed?

Could he have left a message? Who would he leave it for and what would it say?

Thurgrak wrote:
It doesn't say he learned by accident, only mostly by accident which would imply some information was actually given to him deliberately but less than he had in total. It does say Shan-wei didn't want them to know but we know so little about this time period. Commodore Pei could have told them after Shan-wei's death for all we know.

And that isn't the only possible route for the information to have reached Schuler. I can think of at least a couple of others.

I am pretty sure that Commodore Pei had no idea about what Pei Shan-Wei was up to at Alexandrea. They had not talked for years, certainly not enough to discuss their plot to undermine Langhorne with Nimue, and definitely not enough to share her plan to re-educate the colonists. I am certain that if he had known he would have discussed the matter in the video he left for Nimue.

How about this:

Scheuler (and possibly Chihiro as well) was one of the (I forget how many) settlers programmed by Bedard who were reprogrammed by Pei Shan-Wei to be aware of their true nature, and chose to appear in the Holy Writ and the Commentaries (as modified by Chihiro) as archangels, so they could influence the development of the church.

Remember, there were quite a number of those groups of programmed/reprogrammed settlers who haven't been accounted for, and it's well known that the celery ambler is fairly tricky!

Philip Stanley

Philip Stanley wrote:How about this:

Scheuler (and possibly Chihiro as well) was one of the (I forget how many) settlers programmed by Bedard who were reprogrammed by Pei Shan-Wei to be aware of their true nature, and chose to appear in the Holy Writ and the Commentaries (as modified by Chihiro) as archangels, so they could influence the development of the church.

Remember, there were quite a number of those groups of programmed/reprogrammed settlers who haven't been accounted for, and it's well known that the celery ambler is fairly tricky!

Philip Stanley

Pretty improbable, Philip. Fanciful, even. But so what the heck... Being fanciful is what we are all about!

Don

Philip Stanley wrote:How about this:

Scheuler (and possibly Chihiro as well) was one of the (I forget how many) settlers programmed by Bedard who were reprogrammed by Pei Shan-Wei to be aware of their true nature, and chose to appear in the Holy Writ and the Commentaries (as modified by Chihiro) as archangels, so they could influence the development of the church.

Remember, there were quite a number of those groups of programmed/reprogrammed settlers who haven't been accounted for, and it's well known that the celery ambler is fairly tricky!

Philip Stanley

NO NO NO!

Scheuler and Chihiro were/are command crew who became archangels.

Poker

I have no intention of telling you guys whether you are right or wrong in your speculation, but I will give you this much information.

(1) Schueler was part of the command group and was an "archangel" from the beginning.

(2) Langhorne had access to lots and lots of records, but he did not have the purely military records — i.e., the rosters of the various warship crews — in his possession at the time that Nimue transferred to Admiral Pei's flagship. The conspirators obviously couldn't be certain that he wouldn't gain access to them later, since there was absolutely no legal justification for withholding them from him if he requested them. In fact, the possibility/probability that he would eventually have access to them was one of the fundamental drivers in Nimue's decision to transfer to Admiral Pei's flagship. He simply didn't have them initially because he was the civilian administrator of the colony expedition.

(3) The fact that Shan-wei was able to . . . adjust the personnel files of the various enclaves doesn't necessarily mean that she hacked Langhorne's computers at all. It means that the records she was responsible for maintaining as the person establishing those enclaves may not have been fully accurate when they first came into Langhorne's possession as part of her progress reports.

(4) So far as I know, the only on-planet group we have seen in the books which knew anything about Nimue were the Brethren of Saint Zherneau, and they knew only because Jeremiah Knowles gave them that information in the sealed letter not to be opened until centuries after his death.

(5) I never intended there to be any ambiguity about the fact that Knowles learned what he knew about Nimue accidentally and that there was never any intention for him to have been told about it by anyone.

(6) Nimue Alban's decision to transfer to Admiral Pei's flagship (and to "officially" take her PICA with her) was necessary for several reasons, in her estimation as a member of the conspiracy against Langhorne's probable intention of corrupting the original plan for the colony. The most important of them was that the PICA was officially logged in records available to Langhorne as the civilian head whether or not he got access (eventually) to the rosters of the warships of his escort. (It had to be logged because PICAs were on the list of officially proscribed technology. For Nimue and her fellow conspirators to get it aboard ship at all required the cover story they spun at the time to get it past the intensive security fences put in place before the expedition ever left Earth.) That meant it had to be taken out of those records in a plausible and definitive fashion. It also meant that whether or not he had access to the rosters, Langhorne had access to documentation listing Nimue Alban by name and rank as the owner of the PICA when it was officially added to the colony's equipment list. Given her transfer to the flagship (and her death there), however, there would be absolutely no reason for Langhorne (or anyone else) to suspect that there was anything at all clandestine or "unexplained" about her fate and that of her PICA. The entire point of her going to her death was to completely expunge her — and her PICA — from the colony's records with no need for anyone to hack any computers or falsify anything after the fact.

(7) I don't think I ever said that there was no communication at all between Commodore Pei and Pei Shan-wei after their public disagreement and separation. I also never said that there was no coordination at all between them after their public disagreement and separation. I am not saying at this time that there was, you understand, but people who are assuming that I said there was no communication between them are misinterpreting what I've written.

(8) I'm pretty sure that I have never suggested anywhere in the books that there was any way for any member of the command crew who wasn't already privy to the conspiracy to learn about the existence of Nimue's Cave or her PICA. Obviously, no secret can be absolutely secure if anyone knows it, as Jeremiah Knowles' accidental discovery of something about Nimue demonstrates. However, Knowles learned what he knew from inside the conspiracy, which none of Langhorne's loyalists would have been in a position to do.

(9) If any of the loyalists who survived Commodore Pei's nuclear attack had known of Nimue's existence, Steps Would Have Been Taken.™ If there had been any inkling on the part of the people responsible for putting together the Holy Writ as a means of ensuring the planetary population's perpetual orthodoxy that someone had hidden away a PICA for the express purpose of eventually attacking that orthodoxy, then there would have been mention of it in the Writ. "Beware the demon who shall come among you preaching blasphemous edition against the Law of God! The day of that demon's coming is foreordained, but the time at which it shall come to pass is known only to the mind of God. Yet those who are faithful, forewarned of the trial to come, will stand foursquare in the truth of God's teaching and reject the damnation of waiting any who accept those lies."

And that's about all I'm going to say.

Have fun.

runsforcelery wrote:[SNIP] then there would have been mention of it in the Writ. "Beware the demon who shall come among you preaching blasphemous [s]edition against the Law of God! The day of that demon's coming is foreordained, but the time at which it shall come to pass is known only to the mind of God. Yet those who are faithful, forewarned of the trial to come, will stand foursquare in the truth of God's teaching and reject the damnation of waiting any who accept those lies."

In keeping with the spirits of the forum:
Lo, behold! The great one has spoken. Since RFC has revealed that the Writ cautions against demons preaching sedition against God, what does that implicate for the reaction to the great reveal by the CoGA and by the common Safeholdians?

runsforcelery wrote:*Snip*

(9) If any of the loyalists who survived Commodore Pei's nuclear attack had known of Nimue's existence, Steps Would Have Been Taken.™ If there had been any inkling on the part of the people responsible for putting together the Holy Writ as a means of ensuring the planetary population's perpetual orthodoxy that someone had hidden away a PICA for the express purpose of eventually attacking that orthodoxy, then there would have been mention of it in the Writ. "Beware the demon who shall come among you preaching blasphemous edition against the Law of God! The day of that demon's coming is foreordained, but the time at which it shall come to pass is known only to the mind of God. Yet those who are faithful, forewarned of the trial to come, will stand foursquare in the truth of God's teaching and reject the damnation of waiting any who accept those lies."

And that's about all I'm going to say.

Have fun.

I doubt they would have done that... Call Nimue a demon sure, but at the end of the day an immortal PICA will inevitably shatter the writ. And no amount of warnings about demons would change that.

I suspect what they would have done was make a PICA of their own, and establish a computer watch to wake the PICA up if anyone seemed to be meddling with "God's Will"

Heck, who knows... That could be what is already waiting under the Temple.

Ugg.

Straight up refuse to register any submits. Even with me double checking between attempts on 2 differnt computers. Then 30 minutes or more later they all show up. Sorry.