capturing Alignment agents

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Could it be that his concentration was him triggering the nanites consciously?

And could all the agents have as much self-discipline to do it?

Could be. Could also be him trying frantically to think of a way to talk his way out before the nanites triggered - he was almost certain to know about them and what was about to happen, after all.

And we have at least one agent where we know darn well he didn't trigger the nanites himself. Lajos was in the middle of describing it as an onion when the nanites triggered. Seems pretty unbelievable he'd be spilling his guts and pulling the plug at the same time.

Galactic Sapper wrote:And we have at least one agent where we know darn well he didn't trigger the nanites himself. Lajos was in the middle of describing it as an onion when the nanites triggered. Seems pretty unbelievable he'd be spilling his guts and pulling the plug at the same time.

Lajos must have been like Firebrand: he knew he had nanites but not that they'd kill him. He must have been told it was to enhance his health and stamina.

I think Audrey O'Hanarhan is aware that she's a MAlign mole (and that she has a secret agent decoder ring and everything); but of course, we dont know what layer of the onion she's at. Anisimovna Aldona knew about the MAlign in Shadow of Saganami too, but we later learned that she didnt know their real motives until Bardasano brought her into the core of the onion AFTER the Monica mission had failed!

O'Hanarhan as an Alpha, is very far from stupid. Her role was always to be a high quality, high profile investigative reporter. Remember that when we (the readers) first met her, she had a conversation with another reporter who gave her some info on a story (cant remember the details or even which book it was in) but he knew she was an Alpha, whereas he was only a Beta. Up until she was sent to Mesa she was the voice of reason in the Solly newsmedia and (apparently) gave the Manties "the benefit of the doubt."

While on Mesa, as part of her reporting, she reamed out a govt spokesman who was blowing smoke, reiterating her balanced approach. She was however, specifically warned not go near a specific area; then lo and behold that same area suffers a mischief (in the words of Marvin the martian.. "where's the kaboom, there's supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom").

All this occurs before Admiral Gold Peak arrives, but then she's in position to have a change of heart, based on the evidence, and cast doubt on the Manties for setting off all those nukes. Once again, she's not stupido.... the Manties have already won, why blow things up? In fact how would they know what to blow up since they had just arrived? (The timeframe is unclear about how long they were there before the nukes went off, but shuttles of marines had been going back & forth to Mesa when they went off.)

My question is how committed is O'Hanahran? Gweon was, at least, perturbed after finding out about Beowulf's civilian casualties through a MAlign conduit before he received his orders to downplay silver bullet's role in the attack. After seeing for herself the bodies of the victims (collateral damage), on Mesa , just how willing they are to cause mass-casualty events, both civilian & navy across the galaxy; how ok is she with their (sociopath) core values? "If all u have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." She's smart enough to figure out that the MAlign, has and will continue to be more than willing to terminate all oposition with extreme prejudice. After all it SEEMS to be working for them so if it aint broke, why fix it? (Unless of course she's sociopath ruthless like the geome of the Alpha line operative that facilitated the final culling of non-essential Alignment personnel on Mesa <in UA or Shadow of Victory>, but I doubt it because she'd have to hide those sociopath tendancies from too many people & like Jack McBride she'd need a high level of empathy to be a great reporter.)

Daryl wrote:Not sure why this matters. We know that these agents exist, so just continue interviewing with a tree cat present and a stock of body bags.

It would really help if the GA could get somebodyto squeal like a pig. Im sure no one on earth or Masa knows about Darius or that the MAlign's objective is to be a hostile star nation, with super humans who are trying to take over the universe (sorry I had a Pinky & the brain cartoon flashback). However, they might know something that could help identify the evil overlord masters.

Even better, as in other posts in this thread, get info on the DNA coded nannite assassins.

bert953 wrote:I think Audrey O'Hanarhan is aware that she's a MAlign mole (and that she has a secret agent decoder ring and everything); but of course, we dont know what layer of the onion she's at. Anisimovna Aldona knew about the MAlign in Shadow of Saganami too, but we later learned that she didnt know their real motives until Bardasano brought her into the core of the onion AFTER the Monica mission had failed!

Yes, but she's a reporter, not a spy. She may have enhancements as part of her Alpha lineage against interrogation, but she's not likely to be trained on it and on counter-surveillance (aside of what to do when contacting her handler).

My question is how committed is O'Hanahran? Gweon was, at least, perturbed after finding out about Beowulf's civilian casualties through a MAlign conduit before he received his orders to downplay silver bullet's role in the attack. After seeing for herself the bodies of the victims (collateral damage), on Mesa , just how willing they are to cause mass-casualty events, both civilian & navy across the galaxy; how ok is she with their (sociopath) core values? "If all u have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." She's smart enough to figure out that the MAlign, has and will continue to be more than willing to terminate all oposition with extreme prejudice. After all it SEEMS to be working for them so if it aint broke, why fix it? (Unless of course she's sociopath ruthless like the geome of the Alpha line operative that facilitated the final culling of non-essential Alignment personnel on Mesa <in UA or Shadow of Victory>, but I doubt it because she'd have to hide those sociopath tendancies from too many people & like Jack McBride she'd need a high level of empathy to be a great reporter.)

She's indeed pretty intelligent and she knows for a fact that the organisation that handles her is the one responsible for the attacks. How does she know? Because, like you said, her handler told her where not to go. Her handler knew where the explosions would be before they occurred. And she knows she's not working for the Ballroom, so the only other party had to be "The Other Guys" (to use the Ghost Hunters' name for the MAlign).

And now she's seen the atrocities on both Mesa and Beowulf.

Another aspect which may make her change her mind, which I voiced in one of these threads, is that she's been left behind. I'm predicting that the MAlign has cut off most ties to its agents as it retracted behind the wormhole to Darius. Its access to the agents becomes curtailed. She may continue to do their bidding by inertia for some time, but as time goes on and her handler doesn't give you more directions, the simple attempt to maintain her cover will have her find unpleasant stuff out.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:And we have at least one agent where we know darn well he didn't trigger the nanites himself. Lajos was in the middle of describing it as an onion when the nanites triggered. Seems pretty unbelievable he'd be spilling his guts and pulling the plug at the same time.

Lajos must have been like Firebrand: he knew he had nanites but not that they'd kill him. He must have been told it was to enhance his health and stamina.

It doesn't seem reasonable that agents even further inside the onion would have the self-punching ticket removed from their nanite set - assuming it even CAN be removed, even by the people who made it. They might have adjusted the parameters on which it triggers some, but removing it entirely seems like bad planning.

It also makes me wonder how close Jack McBryde was to triggering himself when he was talking to Anton and Victor. He never did spill any agenda related secrets, did he? Technical and operational details, but nothing about the goals and structure as far as I remember.

It could be that even if Jack had gotten out of the Gamma center, he wouldn't have gotten very far.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:As for the how, it's likely the nanites just directly cause the issue. A brain aneurysm is just blood vessels rupturing in the brain. A heart attack can be achieved by electrical jolts (and the closer to the heart, the smaller the energy required).

Disagree on the heart attack. Shocking the heart is hazardous but by no means a guaranteed kill. Hollywood gets it totally wrong, always showing the doctors shocking a patient that has flatlined. That is actually the opposite of reality--the purpose of the defibrillator is to stop the heart! It is only used when the heart is going crazy, beating but doing nothing useful. Shock it, it stops, it's normal rhythm hopefully takes over.

The suicide nanites must be using a brain bleed.

It also occurs to me that when it comes to capturing agents, if it was messing with the heart wouldn't be enough to keep them from being taken alive. If you know the guy is going to have a heart attack when you arrest him you do it with a full OR next door--you'll have to be pretty brutal but you can get in there fast enough to take over from the failed heart.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:As for the how, it's likely the nanites just directly cause the issue. A brain aneurysm is just blood vessels rupturing in the brain. A heart attack can be achieved by electrical jolts (and the closer to the heart, the smaller the energy required).

Disagree on the heart attack. Shocking the heart is hazardous but by no means a guaranteed kill. Hollywood gets it totally wrong, always showing the doctors shocking a patient that has flatlined. That is actually the opposite of reality--the purpose of the defibrillator is to stop the heart! It is only used when the heart is going crazy, beating but doing nothing useful. Shock it, it stops, it's normal rhythm hopefully takes over.

The suicide nanites must be using a brain bleed.

It also occurs to me that when it comes to capturing agents, if it was messing with the heart wouldn't be enough to keep them from being taken alive. If you know the guy is going to have a heart attack when you arrest him you do it with a full OR next door--you'll have to be pretty brutal but you can get in there fast enough to take over from the failed heart.

The nano could easily be destroying all of the nerves in or going to the heart, to the point where a full transplant would be necessary to keep the prisoner/patient alive. And basically as soon as you put the transplant in, it's infected with the nano and can be ruined just as easily as the first.

There's all sorts of ways to kill a person if you can affect their body at the molecular level, and if you don't know exactly what method the nano used you'd never be able to reverse it in time.

Galactic Sapper wrote:The nano could easily be destroying all of the nerves in or going to the heart, to the point where a full transplant would be necessary to keep the prisoner/patient alive. And basically as soon as you put the transplant in, it's infected with the nano and can be ruined just as easily as the first.

There's all sorts of ways to kill a person if you can affect their body at the molecular level, and if you don't know exactly what method the nano used you'd never be able to reverse it in time.

That is true and you're probably right, except that it's counter to the MAlign's secondary goal of having it look like a natural death. I suppose that's useful if no one is around when the death happens so reviving is also not an option.

But both ours and Loren's message expose a huge problem with the attempt to make it look natural. The more natural it looks like, the more likely regular revival techniques will work. One can only expect that the medical science will have advanced considerably in the next 2 millennia, thanks in no small part to both Beowulf and Mesa. You have a heart attack or another serious condition? There's probably a revival kit in the hallway. If it's serious, they probably have means of securing the tissue that begins decaying immediately so emergency responders have time to act.

Conclusion is that the suicide nanites must cause far more damage than the apparent natural cause of death would have in the first few minutes. So even if you didn't witness it, you can tell it was nanite-caused if you get to the corpse in the first hour.

Galactic Sapper wrote:The nano could easily be destroying all of the nerves in or going to the heart, to the point where a full transplant would be necessary to keep the prisoner/patient alive. And basically as soon as you put the transplant in, it's infected with the nano and can be ruined just as easily as the first.

There's all sorts of ways to kill a person if you can affect their body at the molecular level, and if you don't know exactly what method the nano used you'd never be able to reverse it in time.

The nerves going to the heart don't matter--when a heart transplant is done there's no way to hook up the nerves, yet transplants work. (They don't respond as quickly to changes in demand, though.) I do agree destroying the nerves in it would kill-but if you can do that much there are a gazillion ways to kill. The nanites are in the brain, why not just destroy brain tissue?