Rebuilding Manticore's infrastructure

penny wrote:Grayson's infrastructure needs to be replaced as well doesn't it?

It occurs to me that the MBS is adding a lot of systems to their economy. Each system should have people who are at least familiar with building small ships. That skill could be trained to fill empty positions in the MBS caused by the war. The MBS needs to recruit and train a lot of people. It also occurs to me that this fact intuitively provides an opportunity for the MA to place new operatives.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Grayson's infrastructure needs to be replaced as well doesn't it?

It occurs to me that the MBS is adding a lot of systems to their economy. Each system should have people who are at least familiar with building small ships. That skill could be trained to fill empty positions in the MBS caused by the war. The MBS needs to recruit and train a lot of people. It also occurs to me that this fact intuitively provides an opportunity for the MA to place new operatives.

Blackbird and some ship building structures were destroyed at Grayson.

Manticore can have cats screening anyone working on sensitive projects and there will be intensive screening on anyone sent to Bolthole. But Bolthole may not need additional ship building personnel.

tlb wrote:I do not think that being "asleep" means what you think it means.

tlb wrote: A sleeper agent is just one that is not actively trying to spy; they still know that they are agents and where their loyalty lies.

tlb wrote:Perhaps you are thinking of children of sleeper agents, who would not know about their parents being agents of a foreign power. Have the parents steer them into a position and after the trial period, reveal the parents true allegiance. This is tricky, because it requires the child accept the parent's allegiance as their own; rather than rebelling.

Anyway, if the position is sensitive, then there are regular and unannounced follow up checks. With the child now an active agent, then they are most likely to fail; since they would never have had the necessary training.

Cauldron of Ghosts -- Chapter 16 wrote:That’s all well and good,” Honor said in a much more serious tone. “And, for what it’s worth, I agree with you. But something nobody’s been talking about very much is that for this Alignment to have operated so long without anyone’s spotting it, even on Beowulf, it has to be very, very good at covert operations of its own…including penetration of other people’s security. That ‘sleeper agent’ your people found on Torch is one example of how far they’re prepared to go, and if McBryde was right about their having buried genetic ‘sleepers’ all over the galaxy, how confident can we really be that they haven’t penetrated the BSC itself?”

Much as it pains me to admit it, we can’t be,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou replied, more than a bit sourly. “Obviously, we’ve had to rethink everything we thought we knew about Mesa in light of the information Victor and Anton—and Yana—brought home. I have a few ideas about how we might look for those ‘genetic sleepers’ of yours using gene scans, but nobody’s worried much about that particular form of security screening in the past. On the other hand, we’ve always been pretty fanatical about compartmentalizing information and operating on a ‘need to know’ basis. To be honest, that’s one reason I was so uncomfortable bringing this new genetic sheathing technology into the light of day even under these circumstances. It’s certainly not impossible that the Alignment’s caught a hint of the R&D on it, or even—although I think it’s very unlikely—infiltrated some of its ‘sleepers’ into the R&D program itself. But I guarantee you that anyone who’s involved with it is going to find himself under the most intense scrutiny of his entire life as soon as we get home. And I don’t see how they could have prepared a cover...

penny wrote:But the entire notion of a sleeper has always thrown me for a loop since this passage. I was lucky to find it so quickly on the forum ...

Cauldron of Ghosts -- Chapter 16 wrote:That’s all well and good,” Honor said in a much more serious tone. “And, for what it’s worth, I agree with you. But something nobody’s been talking about very much is that for this Alignment to have operated so long without anyone’s spotting it, even on Beowulf, it has to be very, very good at covert operations of its own…including penetration of other people’s security. That ‘sleeper agent’ your people found on Torch is one example of how far they’re prepared to go, and if McBryde was right about their having buried genetic ‘sleepers’ all over the galaxy, how confident can we really be that they haven’t penetrated the BSC itself?”

Much as it pains me to admit it, we can’t be,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou replied, more than a bit sourly. “Obviously, we’ve had to rethink everything we thought we knew about Mesa in light of the information Victor and Anton—and Yana—brought home. I have a few ideas about how we might look for those ‘genetic sleepers’ of yours using gene scans, but nobody’s worried much about that particular form of security screening in the past. On the other hand, we’ve always been pretty fanatical about compartmentalizing information and operating on a ‘need to know’ basis. To be honest, that’s one reason I was so uncomfortable bringing this new genetic sheathing technology into the light of day even under these circumstances. It’s certainly not impossible that the Alignment’s caught a hint of the R&D on it, or even—although I think it’s very unlikely—infiltrated some of its ‘sleepers’ into the R&D program itself. But I guarantee you that anyone who’s involved with it is going to find himself under the most intense scrutiny of his entire life as soon as we get home. And I don’t see how they could have prepared a cover...

I always thought genetic sleepers were sleepers who were awakened when a certain command was given. Like someone who has been hypnotized.

penny wrote:But the entire notion of a sleeper has always thrown me for a loop since this passage. I was lucky to find it so quickly on the forum ...

Cauldron of Ghosts -- Chapter 16 wrote:That’s all well and good,” Honor said in a much more serious tone. “And, for what it’s worth, I agree with you. But something nobody’s been talking about very much is that for this Alignment to have operated so long without anyone’s spotting it, even on Beowulf, it has to be very, very good at covert operations of its own…including penetration of other people’s security. That ‘sleeper agent’ your people found on Torch is one example of how far they’re prepared to go, and if McBryde was right about their having buried genetic ‘sleepers’ all over the galaxy, how confident can we really be that they haven’t penetrated the BSC itself?”

Much as it pains me to admit it, we can’t be,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou replied, more than a bit sourly. “Obviously, we’ve had to rethink everything we thought we knew about Mesa in light of the information Victor and Anton—and Yana—brought home. I have a few ideas about how we might look for those ‘genetic sleepers’ of yours using gene scans, but nobody’s worried much about that particular form of security screening in the past. On the other hand, we’ve always been pretty fanatical about compartmentalizing information and operating on a ‘need to know’ basis. To be honest, that’s one reason I was so uncomfortable bringing this new genetic sheathing technology into the light of day even under these circumstances. It’s certainly not impossible that the Alignment’s caught a hint of the R&D on it, or even—although I think it’s very unlikely—infiltrated some of its ‘sleepers’ into the R&D program itself. But I guarantee you that anyone who’s involved with it is going to find himself under the most intense scrutiny of his entire life as soon as we get home. And I don’t see how they could have prepared a cover...

I always thought genetic sleepers were sleepers who were awakened when a certain command was given. Like someone who has been hypnotized.

tlb wrote:But that is not what happened with the sleeper agent caught in COG. He arrived at Torch knowing that he had been specially created as an agent and aware of where his loyalty lay. There was no magic word like SHAZAAM to transform him from an innocent visitor into a master agent. That is why he was noticed in the first place, because of his discomfort at the presence of the cat. However they were not directly looking for agents, so they let him through customs. What caught him was having the same slave number as someone else on Torch.

As the final lines say, people in sensitive programs were going to be much more closely scrutinized.

penny wrote:I rationalized it by assuming that he had been awakened and debriefed some time before he arrived.

Because the question of what a "genetic sleeper" is is still unclear.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:I rationalized it by assuming that he had been awakened and debriefed some time before he arrived.

Because the question of what a "genetic sleeper" is is still unclear.

I assume that a genetic sleeper is an individual specially created to have the same genetic characteristics and slave code of someone believed to have died in a way that their slave code would not be recorded. The one in COG had the slave code of someone assumed to have died when a slave ship dumped its cargo in space. The point is to use a pre-existing (but currently unoccupied) slave code, so that the agent cannot be identified as coming from a specific batch. The agent is created and trained as an agent, but is masked in the genetic cloaking of a standard slave; thus is a "genetic" sleeper.

Presumably if such an agent is carefully checked, they will be found to additional attributes that would not have been available to the original slave with that number; such as a prolong treatment.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:I rationalized it by assuming that he had been awakened and debriefed some time before he arrived.

Because the question of what a "genetic sleeper" is is still unclear.

I assume that a genetic sleeper is an individual specially created to have the same genetic characteristics and slave code of someone believed to have died in a way that their slave code would not be recorded. The one in COG had the slave code of someone assumed to have died when a slave ship dumped its cargo in space. The point is to use a pre-existing (but currently unoccupied) slave code, so that the agent cannot be identified as coming from a specific batch. The agent is created and trained as an agent, but is masked in the genetic cloaking of a standard slave; thus is a "genetic" sleeper.

Presumably if such an agent is carefully checked, they will be found to additional attributes that would not have been available to the original slave with that number; such as a prolong treatment.