Typhon's nature

Jeff Wilson · 11 Oct 2011, 03:12 · from 2011-October.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: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:12:48 -0500
Subject: (urth) Typhon's nature
In-Reply-To: <4E933279.4000305 at verizon.net>
References: <CAM3O41JN3D5Fv4JaHHq1Ewg6VvHYY8NzVBF2VqL9OCHhBzU=eQ at mail.gmail.com>
	<CAMBsQ=J+K_YSPe0hPne5-VZoUeYOZbTS9xhVFh8BS3WDgK1C3Q at mail.gmail.com>
	<4E923EA3.1080003 at verizon.net>
	<CAFjGSadywASrXg3zGQKQBZYKFjUQVg6vy92vPLpjm5VQrF--Kw at mail.gmail.com>
	<4E92407C.1070308 at verizon.net>
	<CAMBsQ=JEkBUmhgeW=Lidx+uV00=+EQNFW+Ms4zw5pDGvRme=sA at mail.gmail.com>
	<4E929F13.8060704 at clueland.com> <4E92E879.1040103 at verizon.net>
	<4E932B84.8000201 at clueland.com> <4E933279.4000305 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <4E93B430.7080505 at clueland.com>

On 10/10/2011 12:59 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> On 10/10/2011 1:29 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> The talking machines could intercept intelligence from the Asciians'
>> transmissions and preserve it for their master's review. Jonas, for
>> example, is a machine that knows about the great beasts without being
>> currently at the south pole or under the sea. He probably lost his
>> antennas for far communication, though.
> It's possible. It's just a lot to expect the reader to guess. And
> Typhon, by his own account, is not one to speak indirectly.

But neither is he given to elaborate for the benefit of others.

It's not so much to guess; Mt Typhon itself is such an outpost and 
Typhon is master of its numerous machines by word.  Since he allows 
Severian to transcend distance and "see" distant parts of the Urth as if 
present above them, it's not such a stretch to think that he can do that 
for himself and more besides when he's not busy putting on a show to 
secure his hold on the unsuspecting Conciliator.



On 10/10/2011 4:56 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
 > Unless there is scanning of the older clone and uploading into the 
younger.
 >
 > If Typhon has superpowers that are genetic in origin, he'd lose them if
 > he transferred to another brain, unless that brain also has that
 > genetically-derived infrastructure. Might this explain his reluctance to
 > lose his "face"?

The nature of his mental powers might include the ability to impress his 
brain's pattern upon another.  He does this a bit, when Sev feels his 
mind gripped by a vise when Typhon tries to make him submit to an oath.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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