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Emancipated PICAs?

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Emancipated PICAs?
Post by Aethor   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 11:04 am

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In a number of posts, such as in the Langhorne's big mistake thread, RFC said that in the original TF, there were some PICAs that were "emancipated", personalities legally on their own, without the ten-day limit. A small number of them, but there were some. Some in VRs, others in special PICAs hardwired to that personality.

Words of the author should be the final authority on that.

But in OAR, it's said "After all, no one had ever contemplated maintaining a PICA in autonomous mode indefinitely, which meant no one had any experience in doing that for more than ten days at a time."

This seems to me to be rather conclusive... as in, shows that there weren't any such PICAs. It says that no one even >>contemplated<< that.

So, how can both of these facts be true at the same time?
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Re: Emancipated PICAs?
Post by ChaChaCharms   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 11:40 am

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I think that what the textev is saying in OAR is that no living person would constantly sit in a vegitative state (not sure if the operator would be in that state or not).

I think the overall thought was that no one would have contemplated it because the personality they developed while inside the PICA was not their own personality... Merlin is a perfect example.

If Nimue would have been operating Merlin, and still have her own body, she would not do half the things Merlin did and does; but since Merlin has to, his personality changes. You can see the different personalities between Nimue and Merlin (PICAs), Merlin has had so many experiences that he couldn't become the Nimue Alban of the TF again even if he wanted..(technically I suppose he could wipe his brain and have Nimue's personality uploaded again, but that would be very sad and a story wrecker for me :oops: )

Since the personality is not their own anymore, perhaps the few who worked with PICAs for such long periods would feel guilty to not allow them the freedom they have, so the TF allowed on specific occasions, to grant the PICA personality its freedom, whether in a VR or in a PICA with strict governors enabled.

However, I am but a lowly poster, I would love to hear the thoughts of others who have been on here for much longer than myself :geek:
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Re: Emancipated PICAs?
Post by Aethor   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 11:50 am

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ChaChaCharms wrote:I think the overall thought was that no one would have contemplated it because the personality they developed while inside the PICA was not their own personality... Merlin is a perfect example.


Well, there's still the part which says that "no one had any experience in doing that for more than ten days at a time".

If there was even one single emancipated PICA, this would have been false... or am I missing something?
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Re: Emancipated PICAs?
Post by ChaChaCharms   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 12:13 pm

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Aethor wrote:
Well, there's still the part which says that "no one had any experience in doing that for more than ten days at a time".

If there was even one single emancipated PICA, this would have been false... or am I missing something?


The way I am inferring the statement is that no one had ever gone past the 10 day limit before. I think it would be interesting to see if any of the emancipated PICAs were from TF citizens that routinely worked in them, up to the 10 day limit.

Side note: Why didn't the TF just build thousands of PICAs with ultra-super human strength and speed, and launch them at the Gbaba... it'd be like creating Cybermen (and we all know how that turned out) but just image a few of those going off inside the Gbaba line of battle..
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Re: Emancipated PICAs?
Post by Aethor   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 12:33 pm

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ChaChaCharms wrote:Side note: Why didn't the TF just build thousands of PICAs with ultra-super human strength and speed, and launch them at the Gbaba... it'd be like creating Cybermen (and we all know how that turned out) but just image a few of those going off inside the Gbaba line of battle..


I believe that RFC explained earlier (not in these exact words) that the Gbaba had the advantage in the number of spaceships; building them, in sizes and quantities that would be enough to fight Gbaba, was the issue, not the number of available crews or ground troops.

Additionally, according to textev from the first couple books, Gbaba initially had technological advantage. By the end of the war, humans managed to get to the same tech level (since Gbaba did not improve) but by then, humans lost most of the planets/systems except Sol, so even at the same tech level, the Gbaba advantage in sheer numbers of ships was insurmountable.

It comes to the old truth from the HH universe... if the enemy has the high orbitals, what you have on the ground doesn't matter that much, since they can simply bomb you into submission (or extinction).
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Re: Emancipated PICAs?
Post by ChaChaCharms   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 1:29 pm

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I guess if the PICAs were launched toward Gbaba ships they'd simply blow them up on their way in.
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Re: Emancipated PICAs?
Post by SWM   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 1:37 pm

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ChaChaCharms wrote:
Aethor wrote:
Well, there's still the part which says that "no one had any experience in doing that for more than ten days at a time".

If there was even one single emancipated PICA, this would have been false... or am I missing something?


The way I am inferring the statement is that no one had ever gone past the 10 day limit before. I think it would be interesting to see if any of the emancipated PICAs were from TF citizens that routinely worked in them, up to the 10 day limit.

Side note: Why didn't the TF just build thousands of PICAs with ultra-super human strength and speed, and launch them at the Gbaba... it'd be like creating Cybermen (and we all know how that turned out) but just image a few of those going off inside the Gbaba line of battle..

The point about emancipated personalities is that they are not identical to the original human they came from. These are not PICAs from TF citizens who routinely worked in them--they were independent personalities who never go back to a flesh-and-blood body.

As for your Side Note, humans generally didn't go hand-to-hand against the Gbaba. It was ship-to-ship combat. And the Federation did not have a shortage of ship crews. Creating armies of PICAs would not have helped the Federation. David specifically responded to a question about that.
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Re: Emancipated PICAs?
Post by SWM   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 1:41 pm

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As for the question in the Original Post, I am confident that the answer is that OAR was published before David decided that a handful of emancipated PICAs existed.

If you wish, you could re-interpret the OAR text to mean (bolded text inserted by me): "which meant no one in Operation Breakaway had any experience".
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Re: Emancipated PICAs?
Post by n7axw   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 1:43 pm

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There is an article in Pearls of Weber addressing some, but not all of these issues...

Don
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Re: Emancipated PICAs?
Post by Randomiser   » Thu Aug 27, 2015 6:53 pm

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I suggest a PICA in autonomous mode is a PICA like Nimue's designed to allow someone to have 'out of body experiences' for a limited time with a personality uploaded, instead of being operated through a neural link, say. None of those were ever operated like that for more than 10 days. It was illegal to do so. Possibly because of problems involved in reintegrating the personalities after more than that, but who knows. (RFC has actually been very quiet about how that all worked. Did the owner keep awake and active in her own body too so that she eventually had two sets of memories from that period, or was she sedated in her organic body?) Emancipated PICAs, on the other hand, were a rather different version of the device, designed to be an enduring 'body' for a personality previously recorded. Thus RFCs statements are both true because they refer to two different types of PICA.
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