Excusez-moi

penny wrote:As far as I am concerned, you proved the Wintons cannot be a lost line because of the timeline. But it does raise questions for my inquisitive mind.

If there were Wintons left behind then there is an obscure member of the Winton clan that can assume the throne in case of the worse disaster imaginable, like in the 'Eridani Edict of the most dismissive kind’ thread.

In regards to whether any Wintons who were left behind got the gene mod, on the flip side how many who relocated to the MBS had the mod? Weren’t the early gene mods dependent upon age? Or does the age limit only apply to prolong?

penny wrote:If there were Wintons left behind then there is an obscure member of the Winton clan that can assume the throne in case of the worse disaster imaginable, like in the 'Eridani Edict of the most dismissive kind’ thread.

In regards to whether any Wintons who were left behind got the gene mod, on the flip side how many who relocated to the MBS had the mod? Weren’t the early gene mods dependent upon age? Or does the age limit only apply to prolong?

If Honor is a member of a lost line, how could that have happened? Would an MA agent somehow have gotten access to Honor? Possible I suppose. But not necessarily. I would assume that what would at least loosely qualify someone for being a member of a lost line is simply someone who has received a qualifying gene mod. In Honor’s case, Meyerdahl-B. IOW, the MA is taking credit for having developed that mod. And if it is as simple as that, then anyone who receives a gene mod developed by the MA qualifies for being a member of a lost line. As the MA would surely want to study the recipient thus the success of the mod. A lab rat as it were. One for study but not for inclusion at some later date.

And we must consider the possibility that any Wintons who were left behind on Earth could have later migrated to the MBS after receiving an MA certified mod.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Just look at the British royal family succession line as of 2011: http://www.wargs.com/essays/succession/2011.html. There are over 5000 names in that list, descendants of Electress Sophia of Hanover and she lived only 300 years ago from us. Sure, they had much larger families up until the 20th century and Queen Victoria married off all her sons and daughters to other European royalty and nobility (while those existed), but you get my point.

Remember that Mike Henke is still in single-digit from the throne and, as an admiral often in deployment, there's a good chance she wouldn't be around during hostilities.

penny wrote:If there were Wintons left behind then there is an obscure member of the Winton clan that can assume the throne in case of the worse disaster imaginable, like in the 'Eridani Edict of the most dismissive kind’ thread.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:For all we know, one of them is an ancestor of Leonard Detweiler too.

I think your scenario of having to find a long-lost relation if the entire royal family is killed is too unlikely. It's now been 400 T-years since the founding of the kingdom, let alone the colony. There are a lot of descendants of Roger Winton in the kingdom and in other systems. For all of them to die in an Eridani Edict strike of some kind, there would be no kingdom left in the first place for someone to rule over.

The plot of the 1980s movie with John Candy where he became King of England was more likely: the royal family died electrocuted during a photo shoot.

Just look at the British royal family succession line as of 2011: http://www.wargs.com/essays/succession/2011.html. There are over 5000 names in that list, descendants of Electress Sophia of Hanover and she lived only 300 years ago from us. Sure, they had much larger families up until the 20th century and Queen Victoria married off all her sons and daughters to other European royalty and nobility (while those existed), but you get my point.

Remember that Mike Henke is still in single-digit from the throne and, as an admiral often in deployment, there's a good chance she wouldn't be around during hostilities.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:We know that the genetic techniques of the 4th to 7th centuries PD were relatively crude, compared to the 20th century, but we don't know what that means. Moreover, this being before the Final War, more might have been allowed in genetics.

penny wrote:Anyway, in another post I was also allowing for a single member of the Winton line beIng a member of a lost line. Someone else suggested the same thing with the possibility by marriage. But if we consider both avenues of “infection” then we would have to ask how Honor (and Honor alone) became a member of a lost line; or whether there are yet other members of the Harrington clan who are also lost.

Thinksmarkedly wrote: You're reading too much that Honor alone is. This must apply to the majority of the Harrington clan. And, for that matter, to the other descendants of Stephanie Harrington who did not keep the Harrington surname. The fact that Honor grew up in the same house that Stephanie did has to be a coincidence: property inheritance laws only coincidentally match genetic inheritance.

penny wrote:If Honor is a member of a lost line, how could that have happened? Would an MA agent somehow have gotten access to Honor? Possible I suppose. But not necessarily. I would assume that what would at least loosely qualify someone for being a member of a lost line is simply someone who has received a qualifying gene mod. In Honor’s case, Meyerdahl-B. IOW, the MA is taking credit for having developed that mod. And if it is as simple as that, then anyone who receives a gene mod developed by the MA qualifies for being a member of a lost line. As the MA would surely want to study the recipient thus the success of the mod. A lab rat as it were. One for study but not for inclusion at some later date.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:We'll learn more in a month, but I don't think they're taking credit for the Meyerdahl-B. That is a known mod and probably very old. Maybe Leonard Detweiler did contribute some improvements to it while he was a geneticist in good standing, but we don't know that.

Meyerdahl was already a heavy-gravity planet when it was settled, many centuries before Leonard Detweiler.

penny wrote:And we must consider the possibility that any Wintons who were left behind on Earth could have later migrated to the MBS after receiving an MA certified mod.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:Maybe. But 7 centuries ago, one of my ancestors may have been Genghis Khan and one of his other descendants may today be the Emperor of Japan. I'm not feeling kinship to move to Japan today. It's not like the imperial family would be opening any doors for me.

Remember that whoever was left on Earth lived through the Final War and many records may have been lost. There's a good likelihood of fraud here.

It would be far more likely that a cousin of Roger Winton emigrated from Earth to another colony and thus bypassing the Final War, plus also undertaking a couple of centuries of stasis. So if I wanted to look for family relations, Earth might not be the place.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:We'll learn more in a month, but I don't think they're taking credit for the Meyerdahl-B. That is a known mod and probably very old. Maybe Leonard Detweiler did contribute some improvements to it while he was a geneticist in good standing, but we don't know that.

Meyerdahl was already a heavy-gravity planet when it was settled, many centuries before Leonard Detweiler.

penny wrote:I was specifically questioning Meyerdahl-B. The B iteration, instead of just the plain old generic Meyerdahl mod itself. Just a thought.

Chapter 3 wrote:"That's fascinating," White Haven murmured. "You say more than half of Sphinx has the same modification?"

"That's only an estimate, and it's not one modification. The Harringtons are descended from the Meyerdahl First Wave, which was one of the first—in fact, I think it was the first—heavy-grav modification, and folks like us probably make up about twenty or twenty-five percent of the population. But there are several variations on the same theme, and worlds tend to attract colonists who can live there comfortably. When you add the free passages the government offered to recruit fresh colonists after the Plague of Twenty-Two AL, Sphinx wound up attracting an even bigger chunk of us than most, including a lot from the core worlds who wouldn't even have considered emigration otherwise. In many respects, the Meyerdahl genies are the most successful, in my modest opinion, though. Our musculature enhancement is certainly the most efficient, at any rate. But we do have one problem most of the others don't."

"Which is?"

"Most of us don't regenerate," she told him, touching the left side of her face. "Over eighty percent of us have a built-in genetic conflict with the regen therapies, and not even Beowulf has been able to figure out how to get around it yet. I'm pretty sure they will eventually, but for now—"

Chapter 17 wrote:On the basis of my study, I think there's a specific reason so many Harringtons have been adopted over the years."

"You do?" Honor had forgotten the cookie in her hand, and her good eye was very intent as she gazed into her mother's face.
"I do. I started out by looking at precisely what was involved in the Meyerdahl genetic mods. Most people don't realize it, but there were actually four different modification sets within the single project. By this time they've intermingled enough to lose some of their original differentiation, but like a lot of other 'locked' mods, they've managed to stay remarkably stable and dominant over the generations.

"You and your father are direct descendants of the Meyerdahl Beta mod. I won't go into all the specifics, which wouldn't mean a great deal to you, anyway, but most of what it gave you is exactly what all the Meyerdahl recipients got: more efficient muscles, enhanced reaction speed, stronger bones, tougher cardiovascular and respiratory systems, and so on. But the Meyerdahl Betas also got what they used to call an 'IQ enhancer.'

-- skip --

"Then too, a lot of the IQ enhancements, in particular, simply tended to fade into the general background of the unmodified without showing any special advantages," she went on. "As I said, it usually worked out that the designers wound up enhancing one aspect of intelligence at the expense of one or more others, and what happened most often was that those who succeeded simply learned to use their enhanced abilities to compensate for the areas in which they'd taken a loss in ability.

"In the case of the Meyerdahl Betas, however, the effort actually worked, by and large. One thing you should remember, Honor, is that evolution always wins in the end, but it does it by conserving the designs that happen to be able to survive, not by going out and deliberately creating leaps forward. In fact, I've always disliked using the word 'forward' in terms of evolution at all. We assign an arbitrary valuation to the changes we consider positive and call those 'leaps forward,' but nature doesn't care about that, except in the statistical sense that more individuals with Mutation A survive than those with Mutation B or C. In many circumstances, however, the enhanced aggressiveness we see as a destructive side effect could be a positive survival trait. In a high-tech society, with high-tech weaponry, and surrounded by vast numbers of people who didn't share that aggressiveness—and who were seen as inferior by many who did—it had . . . negative implications, let us say. Under other circumstances, like a colony on a world with serious external threats against which it could be focused, it might mean the difference between survival and extinction.

"But even assuming we can all agree on what does constitute a natural 'leap forward,' those sorts of things happen only very occasionally. And we only know about the instances in which it happened and was conserved . . . which is approximately what happened in the case of your ancestors.

"I ran the Harrington intelligence test results against the base norms for their populations, both here and back on Meyerdahl, and the evidence is very clear. So far, I've found only three Harringtons who placed below the ninety-fifth percentile in general intelligence, and well over eighty-five percent of those I've been able to check placed in the ninety-nine-plus percentile. You tend to be very smart people, and if I hadn't wound up in the same select company according to my own test scores, I'd probably come all over inferior feeling or something of the sort."

"Sure you would," Honor said dryly, but her eye was still wide as she considered what her mother had just told her. And especially what she'd said about "undesirable levels of aggressiveness."

"At any rate," Allison went on briskly, "I've come to suspect that an unintended consequence of the IQ enhancer effort, both in the Harrington line and, quite possibly, in the Winton line, was something that makes you more attractive, as a group, to treecats. Given that we know the 'cats are empaths, I'm inclined to think that the confluence of the IQ package as a whole makes you . . . call it 'brighter' or 'tastier' to the 'cats. As if your 'emotional aura' were stronger or more pronounced. Possibly more stable."

Chapter 16 wrote:"You know what Honor's been through in terms of physical injury. Nothing that's happened to her was as severe as what happened to you, but it was more than enough to make her worry about passing her inability to regenerate on to her children. Fortunately for her, her mother happens—if I may be pardoned for blowing my own horn—to be one of the Star Kingdom's leading geneticists. I made identifying the gene group which prevents her from regenerating a personal project, and I found it years ago. The problem child is a dominant, unfortunately, but it's not associated with the locked sequences of the Meyerdahl modifications—if it were, Alfred wouldn't regenerate either, and he does—so it's not automatically selected for at fertilization. Once I'd determined that, I also determined that she carries it only on the chromosome she received from her father, and I've done a scan on her child. As a result of which, I was able to reassure her that she hasn't passed it along to him."

penny wrote:Honor has special “super powers.” She can communicate with a treecat. But if Honor is a member of a lost Alpha line, then maybe that is what enables her to communicate with Nimitz. It was the same with Stephanie. Is it the Harrington's status as Alphas that give them this ability? Perhaps the MA’s Alphas have developed some other forms of latent “psychic” talent.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:Honor has special “super powers.” She can communicate with a treecat. But if Honor is a member of a lost Alpha line, then maybe that is what enables her to communicate with Nimitz. It was the same with Stephanie. Is it the Harrington's status as Alphas that give them this ability? Perhaps the MA’s Alphas have developed some other forms of latent “psychic” talent.

I'd bet no.

Given what tlb posted just above you, it might be that the Harringtons did receive an extra intelligence boost from the MAlign and that has made them more susceptible for adoption. It's a conjecture by Allison Harrington, but possible. That would mean that the MAlign accidentally and unintentionally made the Harringtons more adoptable.

But not phychic talent.

penny wrote:Honor has special “super powers.” She can communicate with a treecat. But if Honor is a member of a lost Alpha line, then maybe that is what enables her to communicate with Nimitz. It was the same with Stephanie. Is it the Harrington's status as Alphas that give them this ability? Perhaps the MA’s Alphas have developed some other forms of latent “psychic” talent.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I'd bet no.

Given what tlb posted just above you, it might be that the Harringtons did receive an extra intelligence boost from the MAlign and that has made them more susceptible for adoption. It's a conjecture by Allison Harrington, but possible. That would mean that the MAlign accidentally and unintentionally made the Harringtons more adoptable.

But not phychic talent.

The Harringtons are descended from the Meyerdahl First Wave, which was one of the first—in fact, I think it was the first—heavy-grav modification,

I started out by looking at precisely what was involved in the Meyerdahl genetic mods. Most people don't realize it, but there were actually four different modification sets within the single project. By this time they've intermingled enough to lose some of their original differentiation, but like a lot of other 'locked' mods, they've managed to stay remarkably stable and dominant over the generations.

tlb wrote:ThinksMarkedly, you were the one that said the Meyerdahl colonization was long before even Leonard Detweiler (colonization was pre-final war and he was somewhat after). So if the Mayerdahl-B version was created at the same time as the others for that colonization's first wave, then the IQ enhancement also predates the Detweiler schism (and so the several generations later creation of the Malign).