mhicks wrote:What if the hand print reader is so that the person who activates the exe. file in the key is scanning the hand print so that instead of having to carry the key and stone around they can just use their hand to activate the rest of the tech that they will be receiving, or can use their hand to over ride the rest of the temple electronics. They knew that some one would need to activate the exe. but they had no idea what the finger print of that individual would be. Here the exe, file tells the temple computer "This hand print is the new official, follow their orders"
RFC has done this before in the mutineers moon series. This is the highest ranking person... therefore they are emperor...
I think Weird Harold's point is closer to my original thought. Like OWL, the system in the Temple might require human authorization, since the TF was leery of handing so much power over to computers and AI (and we can all thank Mary Shelly for introducing the concept of the Frankenstein Complex to humanity). So it is indeed possible that Schueler and Chihiro's contingency plans still required a human to be part of the scheme - Injecting the hapless Wylsynn with nanites and base materials to build the needed implants in them and then forcefully erasing their memory and personality, replacing it with a new personality (that of Schueler or Chihiro probably) and giving them the necessary technological tricks needed to appear angelic (the "aura" of the Kyousei Hai). You get a living archangel in their lifetime with the religious authority and complete control of the Temple to get anything they need done. I think that if Schueler and Chihiro were willing to stage a coup, hunt down the Fallen without mercy and write so many atrocities into the seminal religious book of the colony, they would not shy away from wiping away the personality of one person and replacing it with their own.
But mhicks reminded me of another observation I had a while ago. The Safehold series is what the Dahak series was supposed to be. It was simply that Dahak was far more fantastical and unbound with our reality that RFC decided to rewrite the basic concept into a more coherent and better anchored series. But the two series have much in common and the one element that has been absent from it is the whole "body snatching" element of Anu's mutineers. So it's not too far away to think that that element exists in the Safehold universe. And we still aren't clear as to why the Key can only be used once. In my thinking, there are only two possibilities: 1) The limited technological resources at the command crew's disposal only allowed them a single shot at stopping a true treat to the Temple; or 2) That any "return of the archangels" would allow the "archangels" to reset the Key and the Temple's systems along with any updates to their anti-technology plans, "remaking the key" to serve its purpose anew. The injunction that it could only be used once might just be there to prevent the key's frivolous use, if the Church encountered a threat it could not deal with via conventional means (such any return of the "demons" or the "fallen archangels").
but I suspect he might have been a better person than Chihiro.