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SPOILER - COG Specialty Lines

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SPOILER - COG Specialty Lines
Post by JohnRoth   » Fri Apr 25, 2014 2:46 pm

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In Cauldron of Ghosts, Lajos Irvine is described as a "specialty line." This is where the penny dropped for me about Albrecht Detweiller's and Aldona Anismovina's bodyguards, as well as possibly the MAlign agent who suicided on Torch. The bodyguards are not, in any sense, genetic slaves. Lajos certainly isn't - genetically and legally he's a seccy.

I think this ties back to the final couple of sentences in the prolog to part III in Torch of Freedom.

Torch of Freedom wrote:Since all that was true, Detweiler further argued, it only made sense to genetically modify colonists for the environments which were going to cause their descendants to mutate anyway. And it was only a small step further to argue that if it made sense to genetically modify human beings for environments in which they would have to live, it also made sense to genetically modify them to better suit them to the environments in which they would have to work.


While this may not imply genetic slavery per se, it looks like the clearest indication of what Leonard Detweiller was actually thinking about.

There's also the comment in CoG about "genetic slavery" having to continue for a few more generations, which suggests that the MAlign, at least, doesn't regard it as a really long term proposition. It's a regrettable necessity in creating their utopian vision.

Comments?
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Re: SPOILER - COG Specialty Lines
Post by Annachie   » Fri Apr 25, 2014 9:33 pm

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From what I remember the whole genetic slavery thing was a cover anyway. I don't think it was implemented on Darius.
What does appear to be implemented is an extreemly rigid cast system which is functionally the same thing.
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Re: SPOILER - COG Specialty Lines
Post by Imaginos1892   » Sat Apr 26, 2014 12:47 am

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Annachie wrote:From what I remember the whole genetic slavery thing was a cover anyway. I don't think it was implemented on Darius.
What does appear to be implemented is an extreemly rigid cast system which is functionally the same thing.

Genetic slaves are Mesa's lab rats. Selling them was the cover for having them.
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Re: SPOILER - COG Specialty Lines
Post by Weird Harold   » Sat Apr 26, 2014 1:40 am

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Annachie wrote:From what I remember the whole genetic slavery thing was a cover anyway. I don't think it was implemented on Darius.


MoH explicitly describes the population of Darius Prime:

Mission of Honor CH 38 wrote:By now, the Darius System's total population was in the very near vicinity of 3.9 billion, of whom just under two billion were representatives of one of the alpha, beta, or gamma genomes the Alignment had worked to improve for so long. The remainder of the system population were genetic slaves, but the conditions of their slavery were very unlike those which obtained elsewhere. For one thing, they were treated far better, without the often savage discipline slaves often received elsewhere. In fact, the Darius System was one of the very few places where the Mesan Constitution's official legal protections theoretically intended to protect slaves from gross mistreatment were actually enforced. For another, they had a much higher standard of living. And for yet another, they formed the backbone of a highly trained, highly skilled labor force which had earned the respect of its supervisors.

Every one of those slaves had been born here in Darius, and not one of them had ever left the system. Their knowledge of what was happening elsewhere in the galaxy, of the history of Mesa, or of their own history had been carefully controlled for generations. They'd been aware for those same generations that they and their parents and grandparents had been laboring to build first the basic industry and then the specialized infrastructure to support a massive navy, but they were convinced it was intended as a defensive fleet.
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Re: SPOILER - COG Specialty Lines
Post by SYED   » Sat Apr 26, 2014 2:02 am

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That means he was designing ways to bioform people to match them to planets, instead of planets to them with terraforming.
This likely expand to altering animals and plants to survive the new ecosystems to act as the food source.
I have to wonder i they have attempted to create genetic changes in people after they are born, possibly with a retrovirus of some type?
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Re: SPOILER - COG Specialty Lines
Post by JohnRoth   » Sat Apr 26, 2014 11:17 am

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SYED wrote:That means he was designing ways to bioform people to match them to planets, instead of planets to them with terraforming.
This likely expand to altering animals and plants to survive the new ecosystems to act as the food source.
I have to wonder i they have attempted to create genetic changes in people after they are born, possibly with a retrovirus of some type?


I've been assuming that the technology to do it is out there and widely deployed. David's vision of what's possible seems incredibly cramped to me, but that's the story he wants to tell.

It won't be a retrovirus, though. Using a retrovirus base as a delivery vehicle has all sorts of down sides, including that the sequences go into random locations, possibly breaking up active genes and regulatory sequences. They've been known to cause cancer, which is what stopped one retro-virus based therapy trial.

The current state of the art is CRISPR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR, which has the advantage that it identifies the specific target sequence and makes the desired change there, not at some random place somewhere else. It's not that well known yet - it was only released at the end of 2012. Initial trials are very promising for treating chronic diseases caused by broken or defective genes.

Major changes are certainly possible. Consider insects, which practically redesign themselves to transform between a caterpillar and a butterfly, or some varieties of fish which change sex if the balance in a particular area gets out of whack. I doubt if that technology exists in the Honorverse, though. That's not the story RFC wants to tell.
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