"Star Lines"

Brigade XO wrote:The Star Lines are the top tiers of the Alignment. The High Casts. The ones in charge.

Almost everything elce is -to the Star Lines- little more than worker drones who happen to be able to repoduce without the aid of artificial wombs and labratories. These are cattle. They are in great part manufactured in industrial scale processes as described when talking about Manpower creating genetic slaves. Property. Tools, at best, which are designed for a range of purposes.

Manpower was created as an industrial scale testing and prodution facility to work on the genetic experiments and proved a manufactured labor force for the Alignment. It had the dual purpose- along with the rest of Mesa- of being a distraction and a misdirection to cloak the Alignment and it's operations such that Mesa and Manpower would ultimatly be sacrificed to permit the Alignment to become the rulers of humanity without having to deal with such unpleasant truths such as the Alignment has been experimenting on humans and modifying them as you would breed dogs for size, color, temperment, particular skills, or (they can't really mention just as sex objects to be sold- can't quite fit that in the Alignment manifesto with a straight face) useful characteristics.
Mere megga billions in credits and billions of human lives first geneticaly manipulated for tools and sold off plus having other hundreds of millions if not hundered of billions slaughtered in how many wars instigated for the sole purpose of wiping away potential opposition of the Alignment installing it self as the absolute ruler (and continued manipulation of what is humanity) over the known universe? The leadership of the Alignment doesn't care about the credits, they care even less about the indivuals or even planitary populations wiped out as long is it advance THE PLAN.

In the eyes of the Alignment Leadership, normals are less than ants, all the non-Star Line Alignment "individuals" are useful tools until no longer needed.

Great system...only if you are on top and have any of those who might be a problem riggged with a nanite based auto-destruct system that has to be reset or the potential problem will JUST DIE.

Charming. But not necessarily true. Many people who are not star line are part of the MAlign. Defining star line itself is almost impossible.

The Harrington line has managed to get along without MAlign supervision for generations.,,a lot of generations. And Honor kicks the daylights out of MAlign.

In theory, MAlign and the star lines should simply be winning. They do have R & D. They have created a lot of interesting tech. But it was Manticore and Haven who created the war tech that beat them. Supposedly they are brilliant but we have never really seen it.

Look at Stirling's Draka. They were really superior. By the end of the series, they were a dominant predator species.

Here we have seen the Detweilers, presumably the top of the star lines and they are just not all that good. Harahap seems sharper than Bardasano or Rufino. And a real lot of the other people that worked with the Dets at the top level come across as rather useless idiots.

Also, the top people in Mesa were reasonably incompetent. The seccies were beating the daylights out of them. Yes, Victor and Thandi were there and neither of them were part of star lines.

Star lines are overrated. And those of MAlign who think they are better are like the poor whites in the South who looked down on blacks. They thought that somehow they were better while being a total mess.

They were willing to kill for their beliefs just like a lot of fanatics...particularly those who are raised to believe.

ldwechsler wrote:Also, the top people in Mesa were reasonably incompetent. The seccies were beating the daylights out of them. Yes, Victor and Thandi were there and neither of them were part of star lines.

It's important to note that the top people in the Mesan government and corporations were NOT star lines. By the time the tower siege started the onion was already abandoning ship and taking most the star line people with them. The people left running the show were baseline nobodies who had been handpicked to be borderline incompetent as part of the onion's strategy.

The vast majority of Mesa's population was baseline human or slave genomes. The only star lines left would have been families of Houdini evacuees who didn't know enough to be evacuated or eliminated, like the remainder of Zach McBride's family.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:Also, the top people in Mesa were reasonably incompetent. The seccies were beating the daylights out of them. Yes, Victor and Thandi were there and neither of them were part of star lines.

It's important to note that the top people in the Mesan government and corporations were NOT star lines. By the time the tower siege started the onion was already abandoning ship and taking most the star line people with them. The people left running the show were baseline nobodies who had been handpicked to be borderline incompetent as part of the onion's strategy.

The vast majority of Mesa's population was baseline human or slave genomes. The only star lines left would have been families of Houdini evacuees who didn't know enough to be evacuated or eliminated, like the remainder of Zach McBride's family.

Not true about the Mesans. Remember the GAULs. This was about genetic uplift. The leadership of Mesa was modified...perhaps not to the level of the top folk but certainly "improved."

The little we did see of discussions about promotions shows that a real lot of the "star lines" were culled one way or another. And generally they were not all that good.

Some elements of genetics are easy to manipulate...like the cosmetic. Improving reaction time and strength for bodyguards. We haven't seem all that much demonstrating brilliance. Yes, they developed certain weapons...but they stole the data for a whole lot more.

Brigade XO wrote:The Star Lines are the top tiers of the Alignment. The High Casts. The ones in charge.

...

Great system...only if you are on top and have any of those who might be a problem riggged with a nanite based auto-destruct system that has to be reset or the potential problem will JUST DIE.

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Reading the other posts and direction of the story line (lines), XO has the best description of this.
Not to get "too political" in this forum, but the Detweiller plan and its implementation is much like the majority of the socialist experiments over the past 150 years (real time). Essentially "all work to a common goal" and as socialist George Orwell noted "some are more equal than others"

Homo Sapiens is very adaptable. As different genetic efforts attempt to "lock in" specific "improvements", some of that adapability is lost or at least reduced.

The "Star Lines" as described in text are seen as the upper eschellon or "First Circle" of the New Galactic Order.

Cachet described the situation correctly noting that imposed society could only survive a couple generations before it became either authoritarian or a slave society, even if the slaves (or drones) were unaware of their status.

"All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others"
-- Animal Farm / George Orwell

-- Stewart

"The New Soviet Man".

kzt wrote:"The New Soviet Man".

Interesting that it's the dictators who want to shape people the most.

But even 2000 years from now, genetics can't really make people superior. There are some improvements but not seemingly in intelligence.

ldwechsler wrote:But even 2000 years from now, genetics can't really make people superior. There are some improvements but not seemingly in intelligence.

Well, for an author to write people who are ostensibly smarter than he is is difficult to say the least!

kzt wrote:"The New Soviet Man".

ldwechsler wrote:Interesting that it's the dictators who want to shape people the most.

But even 2000 years from now, genetics can't really make people superior. There are some improvements but not seemingly in intelligence.

Peregrinator wrote:Well, for an author to write people who are ostensibly smarter than he is is difficult to say the least!

Dictators might believe that they have the tools to do it now: Stalin believed in Lysenko.

Lysenkoism was “politically correct” (a term invented by Lenin) because it was consistent with certain broader Marxist doctrines.

However centuries from now the geneticists might well obtain techniques that shift the "bell curve" to higher intelligence.

The first efforts would be to eliminate any genetic basis for negative impacts on fetal development and to shield the developing baby from environmental disruptions such alcoholism or drug use. Success there could yield a significant improvement in average intelligence.
The next efforts might be much harder; to find ways to make the brain work better; for instance by increasing average number of furrows to increase grey matter.

This does not mean that people will think better; it might mean that the ways of being wrong become more sophisticated (such as the Detweiler Plan).

The Star Lines are in charge of the Alignment. They have a lot of talented people working for them who are not in the Star catagory. You will have noticed that many of the Star leadership tends to think on non-Star Alignment as not much more than tools. Usefull and important in their various capacities but tools never the less.

The Star Lines themselves are in a constant flux as changes are made in pursuit of the Uplift that they revere. There is that constant experimentation and tweaking of new variations. And, the leadership knows that some of the results are flawed- highly flawed-so that while the can be useful it is often nessisary to cull a bunch and produce a new batch with more modifications that hopefully get rid of the problems but retain the efectiveness. Isabel comes to mind.

Remember that the individuls in the Star Lines are not what you would call replicating themselves the old fashioned way. The Long Range Planning Board and other oversight operations decided who their "children" will be. Probably with some large % of the DNA of the parents but always with changes. Those changes include adjusting the existing genetics (baised on their research) AND adding things. All sorts of things that will have not have come from either (or any of) the parents. These are test-tube babies in every sence of the word. The shell (body) is grown from a changing recipe and the minds are molded to be wedded to THE PLAN.
Jack McBride is fairly high up but he ended up with too many conflicts of what was the goal vs what was being done. That would have killed him if he haden't blown the Gamma Center along with corrupting the various databases. His family -excepting Zack- might have been Star Line material but not initiated nor brought inside for the intensive training from birth. Zack is now safely out at Darius...safely for the Alignment because they feel they need him...but if they didn't need him it would quickly become disposal time. Oh, they might even salvage some of his genetics but he is unlikely to ever have "children" even if some major portion of his genetics- suitably cleaned of what may have helped cause his brother's problems- are used in more tubed children.
Also note that all those servants, specificaly bred and tailored bodyguards, etc are essentialy tranind and conditioned to think of themselvs and believe that their purpose for existence is to SERVE the Alignment Leadership or any assigned Principal. They have a duty, a purpose in life and that is to Serve. They have been literaly built that way and then conditioned like exquisitely trained dogs for what they do.d And they are also disposable.

So, yeah, the Alignment Star Lines are working their way to a vision of Godhood and everybody elce is mostly an organic tool to be used and discarded as the Leadership dictates.

The McBrydes are alpha-line Mesans (and hence, belong to a star line). Here is the LRPB explaining to Herlander and Harriet Simoes (Torch of Freedom, p. 62) [emphases mine]:

The most frequent result is a child of about average intelligence for one of our alpha lines, which is to say substantially brighter than the vast majority of normals or even the bulk of our other star lines....

Less often, but more often than we'd like, the result is a child who is actually below the median line for our alpha lines. Many of them would be quite suitable for a gamma line, or for that matter for the general Mesan population, but they're not remotely of the caliber we're looking for.

So I think the assumption that the alpha-, beta-, and gamma-lines are all Mesan star-lines. Clearly from the first paragraph quoted, the alpha lines are star lines, and there are "other" star lines as well (beta, gamma?).

Also, there are alpha-line, etc., Mesans who are not part of the Alignment. For example, Jack and Zachariah McBryde's parents (even if Jack and Zachariah were not born naturally, I doubt the LRPB would have placed them with non-alpha-line parents).