David Blyth wrote:I'm new to this forum so pardon me if this has already been addressed. At any rate, I'm curious as to why the 'data anomalies' OWL noted in BSRA haven't been pursued by TFT.
To quote the pertinent section of BSRA....
"There are additional anomalies, Lieutenant Commander," he [OWL] informed Merlin.
"Well," Merlin said twenty seconds later, what sort of additional anomalies did you discover? And how many of them are there?"
"All of the anomalies discovered fall into the same category as those already know, Lieutenant Commander. They consist of colonists who appear to have been assigned to multiple enclaves. In all cases, the enclave listed in Dr. Pei's roster is Alexandria. In Administrator Langhorne's roster, they are assigned to several different enclaves. I have detected a total of two hundred and twelve such anomalies."
Note that when Merlin ran into Nimue Athrawes, the sisters of Seijin Khody merged their resources in with those of the Inner Circle (Merlin, Cayleb, Staynair, & Sharleyan, at a min). And Khody was not one of the data anomalies as he switched sides after the Rakuri strike.
Assume the Jeremiah Knowles' family counts as four anomalies. But those four people left enough evidence to boot strap Saint Zherneau's. What did the other 208 people leave as Dr. Pei's additional insurance policy?
More importantly, why hasn't Merlin attempted to track them down by the end of TFT? Seems like they could have useful info (like how to get into the key) or at the least they could provide further assistance to Merlin, et all.
Or has something happened and Weber simply doesn't want us to know what it is yet?
RFC also commented in the past that Knowles and his family were an exception in their success. Remember that Saint Zherneau left orders to unseal his diary and the other documents from the vault 400 years after his death. Either he knew or expected that literacy would become rarer, which would impart a certain sanctity upon the text that the future abbot would have no choice but to accept - but he could not know for certain, so it was still a crap shoot. The abbot who finally opened the vault was shocked by its content and was tempted to simply hand it over to the Church for condemnation and destruction (in the end he didn't of course).
From what Merlin could learn and guess, Pei Shan-wei had intended to train thousands more such agents, so that they would become a movement among the colonists that would undermine the Church in the future. Yet she was stopped far short of her target (indeed, its entirely possible her retention of the NEATs was what pushed Langhorne or Chihiro to launch the kinetic strike on Alexandria). So they were grossly outnumbered when the WATF broke out. It's possible many of them died during that conflict while others went deeper undercover and did not pass on their knowledge to their children.
And remember that at the beginning of HFQ, Staynair comments that the perspective of the SSK is radically different. Their opposition to the Church stems from the example of the Saint Kohdy, their suspicions regarding the circumstances of his death, the way the Church purged the very memory of him after all the Adams and Eves who knew him died and the destruction of their original monastery by a rakurai strike. Ultimately, not all of the Sisters were prepared for the truth that they knew (and suffered unfortunate "accidents") and not all of those who were prepared for it could accept the truth the Inner Circle knew about. Their ultimate goal was to try and influence the Church towards reform really and perhaps to expose the truth about Saint Kohdy's death and the erasure of his memory. They weren't contemplating the toppling of the Church at all.
