Undercover Fat Kid wrote:Whoever activates it will almost certainly not be in control of anything, beyond possibly describing the situation to whatever personality or AI gets activated.
My thought for a long time has been that, if a victorious EOC, having decisively thrown the temple down, has an envoy activate the system, the controlling personality will have no real choice but to aid and abet them. My reasoning is that, by that point, the beginnings of innovation and industry will have progressed to the point where it simply isn't an option to scour it away the way it was in the beginning, because trying to do so will require either too many casualties, or too much damage to the planet, or more resources than are available. That being true, it's only a matter of time before scientific progression will lead humanity back into space, even if that progression has to wait until the AI or whatever is rendered impotent. It follows then, in light of the failure of the Langhorne plan, which was shuddering toward collapse due to corruption long before the intervention of Merlin et al, that the next most logical course is to ensure that when the fated rematch commences, it does so with a forewarned, prepared humanity ready chew bubble gum and kick butt. By the way, the bubble gum recipe didn't work out well in the Safeholdian biome....
At the end of the day, everybody in Project Arc wanted the same thing; peace and continued survival for humanity. Since crawling into a hole and pulling the hole in after themselves isn't working out, it may simply be necessary to utter the old adage, "Si vis pacem, para bellum"
For rational beings? That makes sense. But we're not very rational even in the best of circumstances. RFC has repeatedly pointed out how living under the threat of the Gbaba warped humanity. Whatever canned personality gets awakened was shaped by that reality. And then they went from that traumatic nightmare of an existence and went to Safehold where they chose to become part of a twisted system that set themselves up as a gods--excuse me, "Archangels"--amongst men. They spent centuries living that life where they were worshipped as divine beings. Even for a normal person, untainted by the knowledge that they and the entire human race was going to be exterminated, living that sort of life would twist them to the point where they readily believed in the image of themselves that was worshipped. If I recall correctly, I think Pei's message for Nimue touched on the idea that they started to believe their own tripe.
Langhorne and his ilk thought that humanity and its pursuit of technological growth was to blame for how things worked out with the Gbaba. That's a pretty perverse sort of victim blaming, and it does'n't lend well to just accepting a revision in the plan for Safehold that'd open the door to the same thing. We don't know just how much whatever virtual personality is under the table agrees with that line of thought, but it's safe to assume that some sort of overlap is likely.
So no, they aren't going to see it as a plan to avoid the Gbaba falling apart. They're going to see it as their divine will and their life's work being thwarted by some bastards living on an island.
