You're forgetting that there were over a million "emancipated electronic personalities" who resided in PICAs in the Terran Federation, and they were were considered full citizens. It was a grey area, but with the final war in full swing, the TF didn't have time to worry about it.OrlandoNative wrote:Also, I suspect the manufacturing modules required templates and programming. *If* a PICA template existed in any of the computers originally on Safehold, it would have been for a "limited duration" PICA, since those were the only ones allowed by Federation law. Someone would have needed to modify the programming, and the person who had that kind of expertise was on the opposing side.
So it would appear the possibility of a basically unlimited duration PICA with one of the "evil" archangel's personalities is, in essence, vanishingly small.
From HFQ: "Under Federation law, it had been legal to emancipate electronic personalities. Indeed, quite a few of them—only a tiny number, perhaps, compared to the size of the Federation’s total population, but almost a million overall—had been housed in PICAs free of the hardwired time limit of Nimue’s PICA. The ten-day limit in her case had been required because PICAs like hers weren’t independent entities. They were extensions of an existing biological intelligence, and the limit was intended to do two things: first, prevent the cybernetic version of that intelligence from “going rogue,” and, second, to establish legal responsibility for any of the PICA’s actions.
The PICAs built for emancipated personalities lacked that limitation. Instead, they were hardwired to prevent any other personality from ever being loaded to them in the first place, and the question of whether those copies of flesh-and-blood humans were actually human—like the question of whether or not they had “souls”—had remained hotly debated. There’d been so few of them, and the ability to create last-generation PICAs had been so comparatively recent—and the threat of the Gbaba had provided such an enormous distraction from such concerns—that any sort of definitive philosophical consensus had been impossible to achieve. Merlin Athrawes found it rather bitterly ironic that Nimue Alban had never thought too much about either of those questions. Or perhaps she had when she volunteered to die so that a PICA with her memories could awaken here on Safehold. If she had, however, neither he nor Nimue Chwaeriau would ever know a thing about it.Legally, however, the Federation had concluded that—like the virtual personalities created for its military R&D—the electronic people living in those PICAs had the same legal rights as any biological entity. Many of them, in fact, had been members of the military, and a handful had even served as elected members of the Federation Assembly."
So clearly TF law did allow a person to live permanently in his/her PICA. (Which I'd guess would be a huge blessing for the severely handicapped, for example. I'd certainly love to have one!)
