Retribution, chapter 5, (spoilers)

[SYED]

They not only need to have the genes for telepathy, but they need telepathic contact to awAken it. Either constistant long term exposure, or powerful in depth contact. The faey population on earth has boomed, there are likely vast regions when people feel no telepathy.

[kyli]

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.

Even if they dont take that shortcut, give it a few generations, and a huge portion of humans will be telepathic from cross breeding. Give it another few generations, and people wont even consider humans and feay as a different species. That's long past the series is over of course, but still.....

[Wolfee]

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.

Even if they dont take that shortcut, give it a few generations, and a huge portion of humans will be telepathic from cross breeding. Give it another few generations, and people wont even consider humans and feay as a different species. That's long past the series is over of course, but still.....

I can agree with that. I would like Fel to write a scene with Jason talking to the head of the UN and being told the state if how many half-fey have been born on earth etc.

[GotToGo]

Has anyone heard from Fel since chapter 5 was posted or any news on chapter 6? I haven't seen anything in the forums from him since posting 5.

Wondering if he is writing on 6, getting a gaming fix, or has REL gotten a hold of him?

[SYED]

Since it is possible that humans transformed by a retrovirus that their telepathy would be dormant, would anyone notice such a change. They might simply pass it off a common cold. It does seem that humans are highly compatable with telepathy, so the change might not be do drastic for humanity.

[Wolfee]

Has anyone heard from Fel since chapter 5 was posted or any news on chapter 6? I haven't seen anything in the forums from him since posting 5.

Wondering if he is writing on 6, getting a gaming fix, or has REL gotten a hold of him?

Last post Jan 8th - hasn't said anything about his writing since Dec 25th, prior to the posting of Chapter 5. Hopefully a update soonish?

[Fel]

Been sick.

Will start on it when I feel better.

[GotToGo]

Sorry to hear, hoping your feeling better soon! Your health and family is way more important than your writing.

[SoronelHaetir]

Given what we know (even if those in-universe don't) about the Feay originally having come from Earth and that human-Feay crosses still breed true (at least they did a few hundred years ago, and there is no reason to believe that has changed in the short intervening time), I would say they are still the same species.

The question I find more perplexing is that unless all of Draconis was re-made for the Feay it should have been plenty apparent to the Feay that they aren't native to the planet, that there were significant genetic differences between themselves and every other living thing on Draconis. Do they chock this up to the work ofDemir? And even so suddenly stumbling across a planet where they are genetically a much closer match than their home planet must have been something of a shock.

[Wolfee]

Been sick.

Will start on it when I feel better.

Hope you feel better soon!

[SYED]

There was a mass extinction event on draconis, that they could blame a lack of bio diversity on the planet. And biological samples could have been bio formed to better be suited to the draconis Eco system.

[Rakshasa claw]

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.

I misstated that slightly. It's not that they don't trust them to do assigned tasks, it's the fact that they are utterly contemptuous of the "little" races. Just re-read the section where Jason fights Sha Ra. She might be a more extreme example of bigotry... but the it comes across pretty clearly that they don't actually think the "little" races are dangerous to them. So they only use them for specific tasks, ones where being small doesn't impair their ability to be a threat. That's of course not true, but I'm pretty sure that's the general opinion of the Benga.

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.

People say that, but it's not as true as you think. Yes, a million semi sentient AI versus 1 fighter pilot would be effective. But the more you deploy a purely AI army the more likely someone will find a simple way to nullify your entire force. Why? Because the larger your army the simpler your overall security measures are going to be. Why? Because you need to be able to provide command and control. That is the problem with Droid armies that aren't entirely sentient. Yes, you can hack a modern plane. But unless it's poorly designed you won't be able to gain full access to the plane. The fact that the Benga don't trust their pilots enough to not have lockout measures they can employ against them is a mark against them... but that doesn't necessarily help them against most people. Pretty sure Jason doesn't build his Crusader Armor with lockout measures to prevent his soldiers from doing things so you can't hack that. As for the accidents, yes sometimes people get locked out of their planes by controls inside but those generally aren't accessible by hacking.

Ultimately though, you can if necessary design craft for manned flight/fighting that aren't hack-able because they don't up-link without certain settings being enabled or disabled. You can't, literally can't do that for non sentient AI because they need Command and control links to update their mission/orders. So they are always vulnerable to hacking. THAT is the problem. The zombie argument is not valid either. The reason zombies become dangerous is that it disrupts society during the attack so you can't find effective countermeasures and you just salvage what already exists. Hence Zombie Apocalypse? If you can't disrupt the society you are attacking with your drones, then they can develop effective countermeasures. Simple. Or at least doable. Also, that authors keep creating stories about zombies... even less valid as I'm sure you know. You can always generate a scenario that starts an apocalypse. Be it from AI, zombies, or gun control.

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.

Actually, you have it backwards. They are so UN-trusting of each other that they won't allow the possibility of the others having even the slightest advantage. If even one of them had access to Oracles without the knowledge of the others they would undermine each other. So they can't risk having them not under communal control. They could have an alternate site to keep them, but it would still be under communal control and thus when the Kimdori learned about the moon where they keep the Dreamers they would almost certainly have learned of their alternate site. This isn't a case of only trusting some people. It's a case of trusting nobody. So the same group of "trusted" (and probably spied upon) small number of people that were on the "in" about the moon, would likely be the same ones trusted with knowledge of the alternate site. Even if they didn't know where, they'd know about it. The fewer people that know a secret the easier it is to keep, but that only works if Kimdori can't get access... which they can.

But, having an alternate site would require more people to know about them... so more likely the Consortium might learn... thus it's not likely they have an alternate site. Maybe, but low likelihood.

[SoronelHaetir]

I say 'no' to an alternate site based on the fact of how insanely far they chose to place the Dreamers from the Consortium. An alternate would need to be far enough away from the original site that whoever is in charge of that main site would have no influence over the alternate yet the alternate would also have to be just as far from the Consortium as the main site.

As for the Benga using the little races in battle I see to recall some statement about them doing so (that the Consortium was the unusual one in having _all_ their fighting done by the insectiods).

[MartinK]

The question I find more perplexing is that unless all of Draconis was re-made for the Feay it should have been plenty apparent to the Feay that they aren't native to the planet, that there were significant genetic differences between themselves and every other living thing on Draconis. Do they chock this up to the work ofDemir? And even so suddenly stumbling across a planet where they are genetically a much closer match than their home planet must have been something of a shock.

The only reasonable answer would be that not only the people but the entire biosphere of earth were displaced on a world that had gone on to develop just enough that they could put a few important species on it step after step but not enough to be able to really compete with the new arrivals. Thus, only a few microbial species might show that the world wasn't the original home to the Faey - and those became very rare in the time the Faey took to develop biological sciences enough to find out. And if just a very small group of simple lifeforms hint at the secret, it is easy enough to dismiss the conclusion as either nonsense or assume that those ones were spread to the planet by asteroids from outer space and not the other way around.

On the other hand, it might be that all life in a galaxy ultimately shares common origins and there is no way to detect the originating world.

There was a mass extinction event on draconis, that they could blame a lack of bio diversity on the planet. And biological samples could have been bio formed to better be suited to the draconis Eco system.

Nonsense, as long as anything survives and repopulates the world it doesn't have an impact on SoronelHaetirs concerns.

[MartinK]

[...]Yes, a million semi sentient AI versus 1 fighter pilot would be effective. But the more you deploy a purely AI army the more likely someone will find a simple way to nullify your entire force. Why? Because the larger your army the simpler your overall security measures are going to be. Why? Because you need to be able to provide command and control. That is the problem with Droid armies that aren't entirely sentient. Yes, you can hack a modern plane. But unless it's poorly designed you won't be able to gain full access to the plane. The fact that the Benga don't trust their pilots enough to not have lockout measures they can employ against them is a mark against them... but that doesn't necessarily help them against most people. Pretty sure Jason doesn't build his Crusader Armor with lockout measures to prevent his soldiers from doing things so you can't hack that. As for the accidents, yes sometimes people get locked out of their planes by controls inside but those generally aren't accessible by hacking.

Ultimately though, you can if necessary design craft for manned flight/fighting that aren't hack-able because they don't up-link without certain settings being enabled or disabled. You can't, literally can't do that for non sentient AI because they need Command and control links to update their mission/orders. So they are always vulnerable to hacking. THAT is the problem.

I think you see it too much in black and white. Many of the disadvantages of AI drones can be turned into advantages if you get the enemy to expect drones to fight a certain way only to be surprised if they don't. There are tons of ways you can turn those around. I'm assuming that there are hordes of programmers coming up with new and unexpected variances in drone programming. I would also seed real pilots among the drones, looking no different to the enemies than the drones themselves but able to turn predictable reactions of their enemies against them.

It also isn't correct that you have to design the communications differently in drones than in real fighters. Anything, literally anything you can predict might happen you can put into the programming. And since the Benga have countless battle footage from previous fights that is a lot indeed. You can hack a drone no easier than you can make a fighter pilot believe the same. You talk to a pilot to change mission orders. Why shouldn't you be able to do the same to drones? A primitive backwards world like Earth already has voice recognition systems like Amazon Echos Alexa or Googles Home. I would expect any spacefaring species to have much more sophisticated technology.

The only thing any AI will lack is the ability to be creative and come up with entirely new methods to act. But they are able to use part of all manouvers already programmed into them and combine them. If their programming tells them that they are dead anyway, they sure are free to be unpredictable in trying to randomly use nonsense manouvers. Oh, and they do have an advantage as well - a real fighter pilot will always feel a need to preserve his or her live. They really don't want to die. A drone on the other hand can decide to turn itself into a sophisticated missile in the blink of an eye. The japanese Kamikaze manouver is still remembered well to this day because no other power ever had fighter pilots willing to die quite so easily to archive their goal.

Stop thinking in terms of stupid movie AI. Any movie AI drone army I have ever seen pretty much looks like the programmers went insane and put most if not all their effort into making them look entertaining, cute or silly to an audience and forgot to put in more than the essentials of point and shoot for their main job.

In the end, AI programming isn't limited to AI being stupid but AI being limited by their programming. And considering the fact that most computer games are still entertaining if played against an AI opponent even years after multiplayer became an easily archievable alternative I have to assume that we can come up with something better than Star Wars EP2 drone armies, if not on the level of a Terminator AI.