First Exodus theory revised

Gerry Quinn · 11 Feb 2011, 01:25 · from 2011-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 01:25:55 -0000
Subject: (urth) First Exodus theory revised
References: <mailman.117560.1297369011.2737.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>	<SNT136-w1F96C3268ED01D5E75F0C92EC0 at phx.gbl><678A11C1BDEA42949B04B232138C6162@jill>
	<4D548C2C.2030401 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4EB2AEAE9627465A8221A67AA6A8A0BD@jill>

From: "Ant?nio Pedro Marques" <entonio at gmail.com>
> Gerry Quinn wrote:
>>
>>     *From:* Ashley Crill <mailto:ash_crill at hotmail.com>
>>
>>     Were any embryos engineered to have a superior military intellect
>>     that were destined to conquer, Typhon-style?
>>
>> I have said in the past that I think Silkhorn's military accomplishments
>> in Gaon and Blanco were similar to those of Typhon as described by
>> Rigoglio. Like Typhon, he sided with the underdog in conflicts, and won.
>> But I don't think this is necessarily anything to do with genetics. Silk
>> has merged with Pas in Mainframe, and Horn downloads the merged entity
>> into himself (i.e. Silk's old body). So Typhon - as Pas - is present in
>> the resulting, somewhat confused, personage.
>
> I think people grossly overestimate Typhon's powers and urthly technology. 
> I don't find a single example, in all the books, of a power to engineer 
> minds. There's lots of technology around, from a photosynthesizing man to 
> sentient robots, but even the latter seem to have personalities not 
> designed by anyone. I see Typhon being able to produce beings of terrific 
> physical and intellectual abilities, but not to decide their ways of 
> thinking.

There may not be a technology to engineer minds and personalities as such... 
but there is certainly a technology to engineer certain mental abilities. 
Mucor is proof of this.  Her brain does not even resemble a normal human 
brain.

As for Silk, we are told he is a special snowflake, but it's not exactly 
clear where his powers lie. There seems to be general agreement that it is 
something to do with leadership, which makes sense in terms of Tussah 
wanting such an embryo.  Of course, leadership was a characteristic of 
Typhon too, which makes it harder to answer questions about whether Silk is 
genetically related to Typhon.  Really though, it's more the absence of 
something that might show a distinction between Silk and Typhon, rather than 
any sort of positive evidence either way.

- Gerry Quinn

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net