Has someone fiddled with the temple AI?

mhicks wrote:It could be that the PICA tech was in the private sector and it seemed it was for the wealthy as a "toy" or in manufacturing areas that were again well to do financially and could afford to build them vs a military budget getting things done by the cheapest bidder. So if there was a data base out there with all the knowledge of the Terran Federation and all the patens ever made... the military would not have access to it. Yes Operation Arc was humanities final "Hail Marry" but they may have forgotten to add all their eggs into this basket. Like I said earlier PICAs were for the very rich and so the company that made them wanted the money for the hard work that went into them. They would not have given the instructions up just for the sake of humanity. Even with total oblivion facing them, they were holding out for their pound of flesh.

I would say they probably downloaded all the internet information and so they would have access to limitless porn , but not things with exclusive rights by rich corporations with politicians in their pockets.

No. There is considerable textev that PICA were actually integrated into society - there were even independent PICAs that were members of the government - - a more likely explanation is that Langhorne had the information purged since he did not want any technology to survive (after the planting of the colony) - and didn't have the Tech expertise to create a PICA of himself - one that would be independent, and NOT reset after 10 days,

Sounds great, but unfortunately is flat-out wrong.
From the FAQ Why was Kau-yung surprised by the orbital bombardment system? (Asked Wed Dec 04, 2013):

"The Commodore never saw the original OBS [orbital bombardment system] coming for a very good reason, which I didn't really intend to share with you at this point, but . . . .

By the time the OBS was deployed, all but one of the colony's ships had been disposed of (as per the original operations plan) by dropping them into the local sun once they were no longer needed. The ship which remained had been Langhorne's flagship all along and he'd been very careful about vetting and reassigning shipboard personnel while Kau-Yung and Shan-Wei were off prepping the planet. By the time he came to join them, he'd had several years to weed out any potential weak spots in the crew.

Now, these were big honking ships, and his flagship had been chosen (and hung onto until last) in part because it was one of the main fabrication vessels --- that is, it represented a very impressive industrial base. Officially, it was retained till last in case something unexpected came up on Safehold which would require industrial support to rectify. There were no "system defenses" as such any longer, since they were now committed to staying on Safehold no matter what might happen and the small number of relatively light warships Kau-Yung had retained had been destroyed (for the same reasons as the rest of the colony fleet), since they would have been totally inadequate to defend the planet anyway. The military forces which remained under Kau-Yung's command essentially consisted by that time of a handful of passive sensor platforms (which were looking out of the system and not inward) and the ex-Navy personnel who were now part of the command crew and served more as police than any sort of serious military force. Don't forget that the entire command crew (less those in the Alexandria Enclave) were in on Langhorne's basic plan, which came to . . . lots of people. Exactly how many "lots of people" is something I don't intend to tell you just now. There were enough of them to require policing, and Kau-Yung's people would also have been in charge of disaster relief or any other emergency that came along."

fallsfromtrees wrote:Hamilcar only becomes Langhorne's flag ship after he arrives witht he colonists - He was with the main fleet hiding out in deep space until the terraforming was done - reprogramming the colonists among other things - Shan Wei had 75 years to set things up on Hamilcar the way she wanted before Langhorne arrives, and remember - she had Proctor - the computer genius who wa sable to hack Merlin's software, available to clean up any traces. Given that Langhorne and the others of his party were not computer heavies, the chances are pretty good that they could get away with it.

isaac_newton wrote:
Looks as if RFC has been changing his mind a bit somewhere.

I just came across a rather definitive para in p322 of ATSoT on the subject of PICAs/archangels
[sadly I only have dead tree version so maybe someone could post it in full]

“We don’t know for certain that the ‘Archangels’ are actually going to return at all,” Merlin said. “And if they do, we don’t know how they’ll return. One possibility would be for PICA ‘Archangels’ to suddenly emerge from vaults under the Temple. Frankly, I don’t think that’s likely, because if they’d prepared a stack of PICAs in the first place, they’d probably also have continued to interact with the flesh-and-blood population of Safehold. We had the capability to build a single PICA out of the resources in my cave, once Owl and Nahrmahn figured out how to do it. It’s for damn sure Chihiro and Schueler had that capability after Langhorne’s death. Oh, they might’ve needed to do the same research Owl did, although I think it’s more likely they would’ve already had the necessary information. But they certainly could’ve done it before or during the War Against the Fallen if they’d wanted to, and if they had, they could have had clearly superhuman ‘Archangels’ and ‘angels’ leading their armies in the field instead of relying on mortal seijins, like Kohdy. Think how that would have cemented the Church’s authority—especially if the same ‘Archangels’ or their ‘angelic’ successors were still available to be the Church’s public face.” He shook his head. “No, if they’d been willing to go the PICA route, then when Nimue Alban woke up in a PICA here on Safehold, her entire mission would have been flat out impossible instead of simply damned near impossible.”

Weber, David. At the Sign of Triumph: A Novel in the Safehold Series (p. 322). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition.

It's still reasonable for Merlin to be concerned about a possible PICA under the Temple, because he knows it was possible to smuggle a PICA to Safehold. It wouldn't take Proctor-level hacking skills to fiddle with an inventory, especially if one of the mission leads is waiting impatiently to sign off on it. (And, of course, Merlin does not have access to Q&As with David Weber.)

It would take a Proctor-level hacker to make a stock PICA usable under any conditions that precluded it disappearing every 10 days with the regularity of a clock, however. And Merlin did put his finger on the main argument: if Chihiro & Schueler _could_ have used them, they _would_ have - and would be still.

Julia Minor wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:
Looks as if RFC has been changing his mind a bit somewhere.

I just came across a rather definitive para in p322 of ATSoT on the subject of PICAs/archangels
[sadly I only have dead tree version so maybe someone could post it in full]

“We don’t know for certain that the ‘Archangels’ are actually going to return at all,” Merlin said. “And if they do, we don’t know how they’ll return. One possibility would be for PICA ‘Archangels’ to suddenly emerge from vaults under the Temple. Frankly, I don’t think that’s likely, because if they’d prepared a stack of PICAs in the first place, they’d probably also have continued to interact with the flesh-and-blood population of Safehold. We had the capability to build a single PICA out of the resources in my cave, once Owl and Nahrmahn figured out how to do it. It’s for damn sure Chihiro and Schueler had that capability after Langhorne’s death. Oh, they might’ve needed to do the same research Owl did, although I think it’s more likely they would’ve already had the necessary information. But they certainly could’ve done it before or during the War Against the Fallen if they’d wanted to, and if they had, they could have had clearly superhuman ‘Archangels’ and ‘angels’ leading their armies in the field instead of relying on mortal seijins, like Kohdy. Think how that would have cemented the Church’s authority—especially if the same ‘Archangels’ or their ‘angelic’ successors were still available to be the Church’s public face.” He shook his head. “No, if they’d been willing to go the PICA route, then when Nimue Alban woke up in a PICA here on Safehold, her entire mission would have been flat out impossible instead of simply damned near impossible.”

Weber, David. At the Sign of Triumph: A Novel in the Safehold Series (p. 322). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition.

It's still reasonable for Merlin to be concerned about a possible PICA under the Temple, because he knows it was possible to smuggle a PICA to Safehold. It wouldn't take Proctor-level hacking skills to fiddle with an inventory, especially if one of the mission leads is waiting impatiently to sign off on it. (And, of course, Merlin does not have access to Q&As with David Weber.)

Just a thought.

I think that they where entirely capable of building PICA's, but considering Langhorne's stance on technology (well, stance isn't quite the right word, more like completely bonkers) he could have essentially told the remaining AI's that they where forbidden to access or research PICA's and locked that command in with no way to reverse it after the council was blown up.

This makes sense from the standpoint that they had access to vastly superior AI's compared to OWL and they still didn't create PICA's.

It may also explain the key, which contains a personality and the means to unlock the AI in the temple so it can manufacture a PICA and load the personality into it.

The reasoning is consistent with all we know as far as I can see.