Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

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SYED
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by SYED »

Originally, Jason believed the oracle system to be some kind of increadibly advanced predictive computer. So what if he created a biogenic predictive analysis computer, then had a precog capable generation commune with it. A viable precog system that does not harm the oracle.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by Rakshasa claw »

No. Jason beat the shit out of Sha Ra because he despises her, and the way she treated his adopted daughter only amplified his outrage. He utilized the excuse of her stalling the negotiations to pick the fight.

As far as I can tell, the plan IS to keep all of the Dreamers on a single planet. Undoubtedly, they will end up as a protectorate of either House Karinne or the Confederacy akin to Terra herself. I suspect though, that yeah Jason is going to need to make an example of someone like Imperial Intelligence again but this time regarding the Dreamers and not just the generations.

Oh, and the idea of Generations bred with Dreamer traits becoming Oracles... yeah that's scary because that could start having all sorts of weird effects. I mean they already have telekinesis locked into their genetic profile not just standard Faey telepathy, god only knows what might happen if they start breeding with people like the Dreamers.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by expedient »

IIRC the new Dreamer planet in the Milky Way will be weeks of hyperspace travel from the Confederacy worlds and behind interdictors.

Currently only the Kimdori and Karinnes have the ability overcome or bypass the interdictors. The distance, along with hyperspace tracking (that possibly only a couple of other members have) plus Kimdori sensor blocking, make a quick raid impossible.

They could use the small insertion stargates but they are controlled by the Karinnes also.

So they would have to get samples in the next four months during the evacuation and while they are doing that try to get samples of damaged KMS equipment/shrapnel from the invasion. Then sneak it past the Kimdori and Karinnes controlling the Andromeda Stargate. Fun.

Then the Parri might just ask Jason over for some tea and ask him if he has some thoughts about his allies and Jason... :idea: :oops: :evil:
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by SYED »

We assume the dreamers are not naturally occurring, somewhere in their past, their genes were altered. So imagine the potential of the generation augementation meeting the oracle augementation, we have seen unexpected reactions concerning the dormant retrovirus involved.
Say while Jason is setting up the dreamers new home, one of the generations gets frisky with a dreamer. This causing a baby, but also creates a virus that converts potentially dreamers, generations, faey, humans, into the hybrid form. They only detected the virus that altered the Empress family because there were sensors in the house, and the kid felt like a generation to Jason.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by Wolfee »

SYED wrote:We assume the dreamers are not naturally occurring, somewhere in their past, their genes were altered. So imagine the potential of the generation augementation meeting the oracle augementation, we have seen unexpected reactions concerning the dormant retrovirus involved.
Say while Jason is setting up the dreamers new home, one of the generations gets frisky with a dreamer. This causing a baby, but also creates a virus that converts potentially dreamers, generations, faey, humans, into the hybrid form. They only detected the virus that altered the Empress family because there were sensors in the house, and the kid felt like a generation to Jason.
I believe that it is your assumption that the genes of the dreamers have been altered. I personally did not discount the possibility that the dreamers are naturally occurring. I base this on Jason's comment about the adaptability of the Faey, I could be wrong...

There has to be another way for a dreamer to see the future other than being tortured... but remember the source of generation genetic upgrades, or at least the enabler to get the upgrades installed... Kimidori DNA. Question is would the Den Mother be amenable to such experimentation?
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by kyli »

Wolfee wrote:
There has to be another way for a dreamer to see the future other than being tortured... but remember the source of generation genetic upgrades, or at least the enabler to get the upgrades installed... Kimidori DNA. Question is would the Den Mother be amenable to such experimentation?
They dont have to be "tortured". They simply see more effectively if its a nightmare instead of a regular dream.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by SYED »

That might not be true about nightmares being the most effective way, just the way to force visions on demand. The dreamers did hide their prophercised and their own oracles from the Benga. The benga would never have allowed the dreamers oracles, and their own security protocols would be different to account for the coming of the Phoenix. The benga are totally the type to destroy what they can't control. So the ancient dreamers chose to endure slavery, to avoid destruction and the hope for freedom.
I am imagining a combination of jack tech, VR systems and that altered dream state the benga use for hyperspace travel, could allow for an alternative to forced nightmares.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by kyli »

I dont think we want there to be a way for the karinnes to drastically improve on the existing procog ability. At least not at this point. Knowing about the future might be awesome but it would detract too much of the excitement and mystery from the book I think.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by Wolfee »

kyli wrote:I dont think we want there to be a way for the karinnes to drastically improve on the existing procog ability. At least not at this point. Knowing about the future might be awesome but it would detract too much of the excitement and mystery from the book I think.
I agree in both points.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by artreus »

They dont have to be "tortured". They simply see more effectively if its a nightmare instead of a regular dream.
Thats actually the Benga official policy.

maybe torture is necessary for the Benga to telepathically interpret the dreams without ambiguity,
because they cannot trust the dreamers to tell the truth or cannot force the dreamers to make an straightforward prediction on there own ...

I rather doubt the Dreamers needed to be tortured to make their own predictions about their deliberation by the karinnes
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by MartinK »

Rakshasa claw wrote:Pretty sure they don't trust most of their slave races enough to let them fight in battle. I mean we are talking about a species that is even less trusting than humans
The threat of destruction of their homeworld would surely be a very reliable threat to stop wholesale betrayel. And small group betrayel or even individual betrayel seems to be expected even from their own people. If you aren't even using your slaves to fight your wars for you - for what DO you use them? If your tech is good enough to get around your galaxy you surely have automated most anything that doesn't require either years of study or the feelings of a living being as is most often the case in the service industry. And both of those aren't really things you can get unwilling slaves to do for you either. If you don't trust your fellow Benga - at all - then logic says a slave isn't any less trustworthy than another Benga. Rather more, since you can apply brainwashing much better to slaves than to another Benga you just happened to hire for a job.
they would be less combat effective than you'd think.
Quantity is a quality all of its own. I wasn't just thinking 100 semi-AI vs. 1 sentient fighter pilot. Take the mass of those giant moon sized ships and convert one into... how many million fighters it may be and you don't need strategy or tactics. Your sentient piloted fighter doesn't have the canons on it to kill them fast enough.

It's sort of like one of those zombie stories. Zombies are usually brainless idiots who just walk towards loud sounds or bloody smells and thats it. It should be an easy thing to do to build a giant self-reloading rat/zombie trap and voila, zombie apocalypse is solved and the - much reduced - humans can get back to work rebuilding. Yet we get whole books out of the zombie story year after year. And I expect any computer to be better programmed than that.
The additional limitations of needing ways to provide instructions and program updates mean that you may well be able to find a way to hack them or at least isolate them from the main system.
Uhm, that goes for sentiently piloted fighters as well. We have had cases in which cars or even airplanes - both piloted by humans, not computers - got hacked. Heck, we have airplanes that almost crash because some sensor sends back nonsense and the computer doesn't permit the pilot to counter the resulting action. We don't trust our pilots so we implement anti-drunken-pilot-protocols. I'm sure the Benga have lots of remote control functions in their sentient war machines that can lock out the pilot.
As for cloning, yes they probably could clone the Dreamers. However, it is possible that considering how much effort they went to in securing the Dreamers from their enemies they never set aside DNA samples for cloning. I mean they took extreme measures to ensure that the Consortium never even knew that they existed. And on top of that they still had an absurdly massive fleet sitting around in that system as a just in case.
What, those Benga that don't even trust their own parents are suddenly so trusting of keeping their most secret advantage in any war on a single planet? Under the control of a single Admiral? Nah, can't have it both ways. Either they are so naive that they trust each other enough to keep all their eggs in a single basket or they are so suspicious of each other that they establish dozens of fallback plans in case something happens to their secret Oracle planet.

:-D
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by MartinK »

Wolfee wrote:I believe that it is your assumption that the genes of the dreamers have been altered. I personally did not discount the possibility that the dreamers are naturally occurring. I base this on Jason's comment about the adaptability of the Faey, I could be wrong...
I agree with that, I seem to remember implications that the dreamers are the descendants from that captured Karinne scout explorer ship. The Benga notice that they are strong telepaths and isolate them on a random planet. First just to use them to either train their own telepaths that they send there and over time they develop in that direction that makes the occasionally newborn an Oracles.

I'd rather not think about how they found out about that - and about the effect keeping them unconscious and in a nightmare permanently.

As a reminder, the Faey also have precogs every now and then. It's just that they usually go insane pretty quickly and thus are more interested in suppressing that talent than in torturing them into usefullness. Perhaps its not so much a stronger precog talent as a mangled, less effective precog talent that just occurs more often? We do have professional dream interpreters on earth as well, don't we? It's just that nobody sane believes in whatever your dream hints at.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by kyli »

MartinK wrote:
Wolfee wrote:I believe that it is your assumption that the genes of the dreamers have been altered. I personally did not discount the possibility that the dreamers are naturally occurring. I base this on Jason's comment about the adaptability of the Faey, I could be wrong...
I agree with that, I seem to remember implications that the dreamers are the descendants from that captured Karinne scout explorer ship. The Benga notice that they are strong telepaths and isolate them on a random planet. First just to use them to either train their own telepaths that they send there and over time they develop in that direction that makes the occasionally newborn an Oracles.

I'd rather not think about how they found out about that - and about the effect keeping them unconscious and in a nightmare permanently.

As a reminder, the Faey also have precogs every now and then. It's just that they usually go insane pretty quickly and thus are more interested in suppressing that talent than in torturing them into usefullness. Perhaps its not so much a stronger precog talent as a mangled, less effective precog talent that just occurs more often? We do have professional dream interpreters on earth as well, don't we? It's just that nobody sane believes in whatever your dream hints at.
The Dreamers are not descended from the captured Karinnes in the scout ship. Both the Feay and Dreamers were a sub species of homo sapiens on earth forty thousand years ago. The Feay were transplanted by a ancient race known as the Ijira from earth to Draconis and the Dreamers were transplanted to a planet in Andromeda presumably but were transplanted again to their current planet when the Benga discovered them. The speculation the their abilities were engineered comes from the fact that both species are 100% telepathic, yet their cousins back on earth have no telepaths at all. Its also been hinted at that the Feay, Dreamers, and Humans have cousins spread out over the entire universe by the Ijira. It will be interesting to see if they are all 100% telepathic when Jason finds more of them.

And the Benga would have probably discovered the precog ability quickly because I'm sure the ability was common knowledge among the Dreamers. After that, all it took was to study the ability. Also note that the Feay precogs go insane because their ability works when the are conscious. The way the ability works for the two races is fundamentally different.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by SYED »

I don't think they would all be 100% telepaths, but the gift does breed true. So any descendant of a telepath is always a telepath. Or at least has the gift dormant, waiting to be awaken with telepathic contact. If there are human offshoots accross the galaxcy, I want them to be linked together by Oye trees. So earth, draconis and the future dreamer world would get their own saplings. So they would act as antenna linking the worlds of the gifted.
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Re: Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

Post by Wolfee »

SYED wrote:I don't think they would all be 100% telepaths, but the gift does breed true. So any descendant of a telepath is always a telepath. Or at least has the gift dormant, waiting to be awaken with telepathic contact. If there are human offshoots accross the galaxcy, I want them to be linked together by Oye trees. So earth, draconis and the future dreamer world would get their own saplings. So they would act as antenna linking the worlds of the gifted.
Let's do one better, use a retrovirus to upgrade all of humanity to telepaths, it won't activate in adults, but children and future generations would be good to go. That would change things.
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