capturing Alignment agents

ThinksMarkedly wrote: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.

The more I think about this the more it seems medical tech is way behind what they could do. The stuff we saw in the infiltration of Mesa should make Prolong irrelevant and let anyone regenerate.

Even without that, how about an emergency heart kit--a box of nanos you slap on the chest of a suspected heart attack. If the heart is out of it the nanos go into the chest and either pump the existing heart or form a replacement heart.

The ability to tube a pregnancy implies some tremendous ability to manipulate tissue at the nanotech level--by the time Honor's pregnancy was tubed the placenta would have grown into the uterine wall--yet it was a fairly minor procedure to extract them while maintaining the resource transfer and place them into some sort of synthetic equivalent. (Note that this is far beyond a simple artificial womb.)

We are already to the point of making simple artificial organs with the patient's own DNA code. We are also modifying DNA inside living cells. The current organ-growing approach requires a donor organ to start with (but the organ need not be suitable for transplant) but nanotech should be able to easily replace this. The artificial wombs mean they can make synthetic life support. Put that all together and that means you can regrow any body part (but you'll need some means of hooking up the nerves.)

Patient can't regenerate? They know the DNA involved, change it!

Loren Pechtel wrote: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?

Because that's a major signal "MAlign agent here, trace my handlers back!". The idea is to disguise the disposing of a troublesome or compromised agent and to deny the opposition even the semblance of having captured anyone.

My guess is that if you autopsied the corpses within minutes of the "natural death", you'd find all sorts of unnatural things. You may be right that the nanites attack the brain first and irreparably damage it, but then try to clean up after themselves and set up another causa mortis to be discovered.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:I've been having some more thoughts on the nanite's triggers and I think the person plays a role. I think they're triggering on a "I've been caught" reaction. There doesn't seem to be any specific trigger required but they go off when the agent knows he's been discovered. While it's possible they are all actually suicide-by-nanite I don't think the Alignment would want to trust in that. Some of the assassinations show an ability to evaluate the situation in complex ways that have to be using the host's senses, if they're getting their information from the host why not get the evaluation of the situation from the host, also?

See also Brigade_XO's reply, but we have another counter-example: Gweon. When he was discovered, we were given insight into his mind: he did not realise he was discovered. He was wondering why his fiancée's financial analyst was bring brought up, with no indication he connected that to his fiancée's handler and source of orders. Then he promptly died.

Im wondering what the ghost hunters have in store for Ms Bolton. She's been identified as Gewon's control and with 5 MAlign agents already taken out of play, the ghost hunters can't wait too long or she will slip away. Someone suggested knockout gas in an elevator or some such method to incapacitae her without triggering her self-destruct. She can be interred at a black-ops medical facility, preferably in cryo-sleep (that tech should be available) until they come up with a way to overcome the nanites.

I had a previous suggestion that a mission impossible type senario might work here. "Mr. Phelps" could convince her that she barely escaped from old earth and is finally being debriefed by her handlers. Risky, but what the heck inaction just increases the chance that she gets away clean.

In fact, one of the Honorverse anthologies had story about a Solarian agent, Charles from "no such agency" that stopped a tech transfer from the SL to the Peeps. I always thought that Charles was a character we should hear from again. (Runsforcelery are you listening?)

bert953 wrote:Im wondering what the ghost hunters have in store for Ms Bolton. She's been identified as Gewon's control and with 5 MAlign agents already taken out of play, the ghost hunters can't wait too long or she will slip away. Someone suggested knockout gas in an elevator or some such method to incapacitae her without triggering her self-destruct. She can be interred at a black-ops medical facility, preferably in cryo-sleep (that tech should be available) until they come up with a way to overcome the nanites.

I had a previous suggestion that a mission impossible type senario might work here. "Mr. Phelps" could convince her that she barely escaped from old earth and is finally being debriefed by her handlers. Risky, but what the heck inaction just increases the chance that she gets away clean.

In fact, one of the Honorverse anthologies had story about a Solarian agent, Charles from "no such agency" that stopped a tech transfer from the SL to the Peeps. I always thought that Charles was a character we should hear from again. (Runsforcelery are you listening?)

The time-window for duping Ms Bolton is short, even in your scenario. Even if you could determine who her handler was and convincingly impersonate him/her to Ms Bolton's satisfaction, there's a good chance her nanites wouldn't be fooled and would continue counting down to her forced termination.

As for Charles, there was another story that would seem to imply he's not actually from a Solarian intelligence agency, but from something else. Probably a Solarian member world's intelligence agency (the only one I can think of that would even bother is Beowulf). Since we know from "Recruiting Exercise" that Beowulf was likely helping the Aprilist resistance to the Legislaturalists way back when, his being part of the BSC is a good idea.

There's a recent thread about him in the forums. Something like "Charles in 1922". I'm also waiting to hear more from him. Maybe he infiltrates the GSN Francis Mueller?

bert953 wrote:Im wondering what the ghost hunters have in store for Ms Bolton. She's been identified as Gewon's control and with 5 MAlign agents already taken out of play, the ghost hunters can't wait too long or she will slip away. Someone suggested knockout gas in an elevator or some such method to incapacitae her without triggering her self-destruct. She can be interred at a black-ops medical facility, preferably in cryo-sleep (that tech should be available) until they come up with a way to overcome the nanites.

I guess that depends on how paranoid the nano programmers are and how capable of independent sensory input processing the nano is. Even when the host is unconscious the ears will be feeding auditory nerve impulses to the brain which the nano may be capable of detecting and acting on. Or the nano could detect that the host is unconscious and yet is in physical motion and trigger that way.

The fact is we don't know enough about the nano's capabilities to do more than speculate when we're this far from anything seen in the text, and all of it is also subject to warring levels of paranoia and foresight of the programmers vs. the ability of investigators to predict and bypass those measures. Literally anything could be written off as "the MAlign didn't think of that" or "the MAlign didn't think of that but it was close enough to something they did think of to trigger the nano".

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote: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?

Because that's a major signal "MAlign agent here, trace my handlers back!". The idea is to disguise the disposing of a troublesome or compromised agent and to deny the opposition even the semblance of having captured anyone.

My guess is that if you autopsied the corpses within minutes of the "natural death", you'd find all sorts of unnatural things. You may be right that the nanites attack the brain first and irreparably damage it, but then try to clean up after themselves and set up another causa mortis to be discovered.

I'd just cause a catastrophic bleeding stroke. Nanites should be able to damage it in a fashion that looked like a flaw that picked that instant to burst.

Galactic Sapper wrote:I guess that depends on how paranoid the nano programmers are and how capable of independent sensory input processing the nano is. Even when the host is unconscious the ears will be feeding auditory nerve impulses to the brain which the nano may be capable of detecting and acting on. Or the nano could detect that the host is unconscious and yet is in physical motion and trigger that way.

Unconscious but moving isn't enough to determine capture--you'll get the same thing in any situation where someone is knocked out by a hazardous environment. The first order of business will be to get the victims out of the situation.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:I guess that depends on how paranoid the nano programmers are and how capable of independent sensory input processing the nano is. Even when the host is unconscious the ears will be feeding auditory nerve impulses to the brain which the nano may be capable of detecting and acting on. Or the nano could detect that the host is unconscious and yet is in physical motion and trigger that way.

Unconscious but moving isn't enough to determine capture--you'll get the same thing in any situation where someone is knocked out by a hazardous environment. The first order of business will be to get the victims out of the situation.

So? The MAlignment consistently shows that it's willing to take the "better safe than sorry" approach to security and would almost certainly accept a few false positive trigerings as the cost of doing business.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Unconscious but moving isn't enough to determine capture--you'll get the same thing in any situation where someone is knocked out by a hazardous environment. The first order of business will be to get the victims out of the situation.

So? The MAlignment consistently shows that it's willing to take the "better safe than sorry" approach to security and would almost certainly accept a few false positive trigerings as the cost of doing business.

The problem is every triggering is another chance for the defenders to figure out what's up. It's not the lost agents, it's the information gained.

Loren Pechtel wrote:The problem is every triggering is another chance for the defenders to figure out what's up. It's not the lost agents, it's the information gained.

"People who die if you shake them with a frequency of 1.25 Hz, amplitude of 7.65 cm RMS for a duration of 12.3s" would be a nice and much easier way of finding agents than having treecats armed with pulsers on your shoulders.