The fate of the Dawn Star and the Archangels

Continuing a thread from Spoiler!-Merlin's Upcoming Conversation with Thirsk

WeberFan wrote:For my theory to work, there needs to be either a computer personality of Scheuler (or somebody important) in the Temple basement, or possibly a sleeping Archangel. Surviving in cryo that long would be a serious stretch, so I don't expect anyone to appear in person. RFC has emphasized that a personality in a computer like Nahrmahn is at the moment eventually goes insane, so to avoid that it needs to shut down occasionally. That would explain why the CoGA has been allowed to run so far off the rails in the past few centuries - any watchers are literally sleeping.

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Not exactly. Merlin needs to shut down to retain mental focus and clarity. (Whether Nimue does too has not been stated.) The problems faced by VR personalities back in the Federation were of a different order. If you are in a virtual reality, and it can be anything you desire, what keeps you in a simulation of our world and in communication with the organic lifeforms from which you descended? That's arguably insanity, but the guard was placing hard limits on the extent to whch VR personas could modify the parameters of the simulation they were in.

There have been no textual evidence Nahrman needs to shut down occasionally. But since his virtual personality can get drunk, I assume he can also "get tired" and "sleep" like he used to.

At a con in April, David dropped a tantalizing hint. It appears there will be the discovery of something called "the gospel of Schueler" - a document of some sort arguably written by Schueler giving his perspective on things. The initial reaction of the Church of Charis will be careful neutrality, pending verifiable proof it was written by Schueler, sliding over into "There may be something in this..."

Exactly what Schueler was thinking back then is a major question. Consider poor Father Paityr in Tellesburg. It was a tradition of the Wylsynn family that they were descended from Schueler (despite Mother Church's claim if they were told that it was impossible), and now, courtesy of Owl and Nahrman, he knows he is descended from Schueler (along with a possible good chunk of Siddarmark.)* The idea that his ancestor along with Chihiro was one of the real bad guys during the War Against the Fallen is a source of considerable pain to him.

My suspicion is that Schueler chose to support Chihiro because somebody needed to fill the vacuum left by Kau Yung's destruction of Langhorne's administrative center, killing himself and taking Langhorne and Bedard with him. Chihiro has been shown to have been moving to supplant Langhorne from before the Rakurai strike on the Alexandria enclave that produced Armageddon Reef.

I have to wonder if Schueler came to regret that choice but saw trying to pull away from Chihiro as leading to even worse problems.

* And given Schueler having spawned mortal offspring, I have to wonder what other bastard children of Archangels might exist.

One last worry - if the return of the Archangels is managed by the Hamilcar appearing in the skies over Safehold, the good guys need to be in control of the Rakurai so they can blow the mothership to smithereens if they have to. The Hamilcar would provide such an incredible jump start to restoring Terran Federation technology that I really, really, really hope it still exists and that the good guys can get their hands on it!

One of the questions I asked David at the above mentioned con was "Does the Dawn Star still exist?", and his response was "I don't know. Does it?"

I see that sort of response as evidence of Things David Has Not Yet Revealed that will be significant to the plot.

One of the things I wondered about while reading ORR was what happened to Operation Ark's ships. The FAQ here indicated they were discarded when no longer need by dropping them into the local sun.

The last to go would have been Langhorne's command ship, which I infer was Hamilcar, and we've learned that Chihiro and his close associates were already thinking of retaining it before the Rakurai Strike on Armageddon Reef. It's possible that some of the "servitors" used by the Fallen were produced by industrial modules diverted from Hamilcar by someone Chihiro and Schuler trusted.

We haven't seen any definitive statement Hamilcar was discarded, so it might still exist.

Another question I had was "Chihiro and Schueler are reported to have departed after the end of the War Against the Fallen, leaving only some of the lesser Angels to do things like wait for the last of the Adams and Eves to die before editing the Testimonies. Where did they go?" David said we would eventually learn where the Archangels wound up. But meanwhile, absent Something David Hasn't Told Us Yet, the only places to be were Safehold or an Operation Ark vessel, and it appears the only OA vessel that still existed was Hamilcar. I assume it could be programmed to drop itself into the local sun once the last surviving command crew members were gone, but whether it was would be another matter.

There is also the issue that the various surviving Archangels and Angels would still be around for a while. The life extension used by the TF seems to resemble Prolong from the Honorverse, in that it's not "One treatment and you're done." The Adams and Eves got the first stage, giving them a lifespan of about 200 years. The command crew got the booster shots, giving the life spans half again as long or longer. If they couldn't remain on Safehold, but still had possible decades to live, any place they went would need to be a reasonable place to spend the time.

I proposed the notion that since we know know it is possible to create a PICA with no built in activation time limits, since Owl did so for Nimue, Hamilcar could manufacture them. If I were Chihiro, I might just have my personality recorded as I neared the end of my life and uploaded to one, then return to Safehold after the stated thousand years in a potentially immortal body to rule forever. David replied that Chihiro could claim his return was actually a penance for not stopping Shan Wei's rebellion, and he'd really rather be in Heaven with God. But if he could do that, he wouldn't have waited. He'd have done it as soon as he could.

David did flatly state that Merlin and Nimue were the only PICAs on Safehold, and there weren't any tucked away under the Temple.
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Dennis

DMcCunney wrote:Continuing a thread from Spoiler!-Merlin's Upcoming Conversation with Thirsk

..snip..
David did flatly state that Merlin and Nimue were the only PICAs on Safehold, and there weren't any tucked away under the Temple.
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Dennis

So, there are other places than ON Safehold - like in orbit...

Joat42 wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:Continuing a thread from Spoiler!-Merlin's Upcoming Conversation with Thirsk

..snip..
David did flatly state that Merlin and Nimue were the only PICAs on Safehold, and there weren't any tucked away under the Temple.

So, there are other places than ON Safehold - like in orbit...

Which was part of the point of my post.

We can assume it's possible for Hamilcar to manufacture PICAs without the ten day activation limit. Owl could, and we have to assume Hamilcar's manufacturing capability is at least that good. But Owl had an existing PICA to analyze and extrapolate from. Note that plans for building PICAs weren't in the databases in Romulus' computer cores. They likely don't exist on Hamilcar, so even if it can build one, where does it get the plans? It doesn't have a sample to examine.

Whether Hamilcar still exists hasn't been definitively stated, though I strongly suspect it does. And even if it does, and has made additional PICAs, what personalities would inhabit them? Note my quoting David in my post, when I suggested that Chihiro could record his personality, upload it to a PICA, and return to Safehold at the thousand year mark in an immortal body. David said if Chihiro could have done that, he wouldn't have waited. This means that capacity didn't exist, and Chihiro is the one most likely to have done it if he could.

The capacity to make more PICAs exists - Owl could do it is he got replenishment of the critical materials he could not replace from existing resources, Hamilcar's manufacturing capability could likely do it, if plans existed to feed to the units that would do it (and if the requisite raw materials were present.) There's still the question of what personalities would be loaded into them, and whether any of the Angels or Archangels left copies of theirs that could be used.

Whether Hamilcar still exists strikes me as a likely future plot element, but I don't think whether it has PICAs in inventory will be.
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Dennis

DMcCunney wrote:We can assume it's possible for Hamilcar to manufacture PICAs without the ten day activation limit. Owl could, and we have to assume Hamilcar's manufacturing capability is at least that good. But Owl had an existing PICA to analyze and extrapolate from. Note that plans for building PICAs weren't in the databases in Romulus' computer cores. They likely don't exist on Hamilcar, so even if it can build one, where does it get the plans? It doesn't have a sample to examine.

Does it NEED a sample? PICAs after all were built from the same Federation tech base. It's general operating principals have to be known. While having one to examine one to examine would help immensely in designing new PICAs, I can't believe they're absolutely necessary, especially when you have decades or even centuries to work with.

So while Lanhorne's "Loyalists" might not have a PICA to examine, who's to say they can't just reinvent one from first principals given enough time to work on the problem? Heck, they don't even have to be as good as the originals; they just have to be good enough to fool the casual observer into thinking they're a flesh and blood human being and can leave out such features as on-the-fly cosmetic alterations.

evilauthor wrote:

DMcCunney wrote:We can assume it's possible for Hamilcar to manufacture PICAs without the ten day activation limit. Owl could, and we have to assume Hamilcar's manufacturing capability is at least that good. But Owl had an existing PICA to analyze and extrapolate from. Note that plans for building PICAs weren't in the databases in Romulus' computer cores. They likely don't exist on Hamilcar, so even if it can build one, where does it get the plans? It doesn't have a sample to examine.

Does it NEED a sample? PICAs after all were built from the same Federation tech base. It's general operating principals have to be known.

That's a questionable assumption. An awful lot of tech has "general operating principals" known even today, but that doesn't mean you can reproduce it without highly sophisticated facilities, deeply knowledgeable people, and either existing plans or samples to reverse engineer.

While having one to examine one to examine would help immensely in designing new PICAs, I can't believe they're absolutely necessary, especially when you have decades or even centuries to work with.

Yes, it does. Reread the relevant sections about how much fun it was for Owl to create one without actual plans. He could do it because he had a sample to reverse engineer.

So while Lanhorne's "Loyalists" might not have a PICA to examine, who's to say they can't just reinvent one from first principals given enough time to work on the problem? Heck, they don't even have to be as good as the originals; they just have to be good enough to fool the casual observer into thinking they're a flesh and blood human being and can leave out such features as on-the-fly cosmetic alterations.

Tell me why Langhorne's "Loyalists" would need a PICA, or why it would occur to them to create one? And it's clear they didn't have the time to rediscover the needed knowledge. The War Against the Fallen begaan about two years after Kau Yung nuked Langhorne and Bedard, and lasted about six years. Chihiro and company were able to win without PICAs, and even if they had one it likely wouldn't have made an enormous difference. Consider the issue Merlin has of only being able to be in one place at a time. And the Fallen had access to tech that could damage/destroy a PICA. Merlin has the advantage that the opponents he faces don't have weapons that can significantly damage him, even if they do hit him when they shoot at him.
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Dennis

It always seemed to me to be likely that the commend ship still exists.

As to PICAs, I thought that in many respects Owl in fact didn't have an example to reverse engineer. There was a section pre-virtual Nahrman where Owl tells Merlin that there was a high chance that a good enough look at Merlin's innards to be able to learn how to produce additional PICAs had a very high chance of disabling him, too high to make it worth trying, so they did not carry out the exam.
Nahrman wanted a body and spent a very, very long time in subjective R&D with Owl and the basic principles to recreate the knowledge of building PICAs, which Merlin didn't have the time or highspeed interface to do himself. Remember that they managed to spring the possibility of building one more as a surprise to Merlin, so if they carried out any additional scans on Merlin, they didn't tell him and they can't have been very in depth.

Expanding a bit on the underlying issues touched on here, a lot of the tech used by the Federation reminds me of Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (It has been restated as "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.")

Any awful lot of the advanced tech David posits in Safehold makes you say "How does it work?" "It's magic!"

We accept it for the sake of the story, and agree not to look too close.

Owl's manufacturing capability in Nimue's Cave is an example. Things like Merlin's cap and ball revolvers are believable enough. Class 2 VR units capable of hosting a discorporate Prince Nahrman, or a complete PICA take a lot more suspension of disbelief.

To get an idea of why, consider the electronics used in the devices we use to communicate here, and look into how they are actually made. The semiconductor fabs in places like Taiwan that actually make the chips are very large shops costing multiple billions to build and even more to keep current on evolving process technology, and a single piece of equipment used in those fabs may cost half a billion. (There has been steady consolidation in the industry with more and more vendors going "fabless" and producing designs someone else will make because fewer and fewer companies can afford to build and own their own fab. Even some that can are in joint ventures to lower costs.)

Things like the VR unit, let alone a PICA, are a major leap beyond that, yet we are assured Owl can do it using an industrial module in Nimue's Cave. I'll accept it for the sake of the story, but the little voice in my head says "How is this possible, exactly?" You need molecular level replication a la Star Trek, and that's another "It's magic! instance.
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Dennis

Hm, what about the V'Ger scenario? The Hamilcar, set adrift under AI control eventually returned thousand years after - as a planet-size cybercraft, controlled by generations of sentient machines (and capable of shooting several star systes out of existence in mere second, of course... giant robot crafts MUST have badass space-time weaponry)

Of course, it could also ended worse...

"We are Hamilcar. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile"

DMcCunney wrote:Tell me why Langhorne's "Loyalists" would need a PICA, or why it would occur to them to create one?

Because someone with sufficient authority and access to the "Angel's" industrial base (and possibly higher grade than OWL AIs) wanted one. The reasons WHY they would want one are damned near infinite, ranging from the purely selfish ("I want some version of me to live forever!") to vaguely altruistic ("I want to make sure everything goes to Plan... which is not necessarily someone else's Plan."). But as long as the guy who wants one has sufficient connections and enough time, reinventing PICAs should be doable.

Seriously though, given all we've seen of Federation technology what exactly makes duplicating/reinventing PICA tech difficult? It's certainly not copying the human mind to operate inside a computer. Faking human skin? Self repair ability?

I would think these things were old hat long before PICAs were invented; FX companies are always trying to fake human skin TODAY for example. Imagine what they could do with Fedtech nanotechnology.

The two biggest challenges I think would be a) avoiding uncanny valley effect, and b) making the body "feel natural" to the copied mind running it while still giving it all the digital capabilities and features a digital entity would be accustomed to having.

Again, I think the former would be old hat. And the latter could be dispensed with if you're trying to make a PICA for some other purpose than "rich guy's toy".

evilauthor wrote:Because someone with sufficient authority and access to the "Angel's" industrial base (and possibly higher grade than OWL AIs) wanted one. The reasons WHY they would want one are damned near infinite, ranging from the purely selfish ("I want some version of me to live forever!")

I think you're ignoring the Psychology -- i.e. anti-tech bias -- of anyone who would fit that description among "Langhorne's Faithful" (or Chihiro's cronies.)

There's no doubt that Chihiro or one of his cronies could have built a PICA before Hamilcar was disposed of, or even in some hidden tech repository under the Temple, but that would be like the Dalai Lama becoming a jet-set playboy -- possible, but highly improbable.