There are actually quite a few things that would have shown things were going off the rails hundreds of years ago. For example, the drastic changes which ended up consolidating the power of three different branches of the church (essentially judge, prosecutor, and jury) into the Order of Schueler was a major disruption to the plan. No single Order was supposed to have that much power. They were supposed to provide checks and balance against each other. With that much power in the hands of a single Order, it is inevitable that corruption would follow. And corruption would inevitably lead to deviation from the Plan. If anyone had been checking up on the Church in the hundreds of years since then, they would have immediately stepped in to fix this.
bkwormlisa wrote:Everyone including Merlin is assuming that if there was anything intermittently active under the Temple, it would have realized that things were going wrong centuries ago. I question that, because it depends on how they're gathering information.
Merlin apparently sent SNARCs out and collected information, probably for months, before he acted. I presume Owl did a lot of the sorting for relevant information which is pretty impressive from so much data. And it got him a really good picture of the current world.
But what if the APs or PICAs or cryo-suspended angels or whatever under the Temple didn't do that? Say they left instructions for the Temple historians to write up a history every, pick some number of years. Say once every fifty years, they write up a few (or a lot) of pages indicating anything major that had happened since the last time, wars and maybe innovations and whatever else they thought relevant. Heck, maybe there are already periodic histories published. And the whatever wakes up, snitches the history, and stays up to date that way. On the surface, that's a much more efficient way of getting the information than what Merlin did.
But it would be subject to severe bias. Aside from the invention of gunpowder (probably called blasting powder or mining powder or something similar, since that's why it was invented) and later guns (which also go by a completely different name), what would be in the official histories that would indicate that things were going off the rails? Even if they're looking at histories written by the Inquisition or other specialized group, would the histories really reveal the internal Church corruption and the loss of faith it caused? I'm sure there would be at least some talk about increasing heresy and uppity islanders, but I doubt anything published by the Temple (which is the main official source on the planet, and I doubt any government would ever call itself corrupted) would indicate the real, serious problems.
To me, relying on some sort of official history seems like an easy, obvious solution for whatever is under the Temple to believe it's keeping up to date with how everything is going, and that would have done a lot to conceal the problems.
As I recall, gunpowder is a century and a half old, but does anyone know how old guns are? Those two things are the only worrisome pre-Merlin details I really think would have made it into such a history.
So it's possible that with those major exceptions (which might be recent enough the whatever won't know yet, especially if it's in cryo for 150 years at a time), there could actually be something or someone that thinks it's checking up on things and yet has no clue how screwed up it's all become.