Eyal wrote:drinksmuchcoffee wrote:I understand that the Mesan Alignment is a centuries old-conspiracy, with sleeper agents embedded all over the human-explored galaxy.
Obviously their agents, who are members of the Alignment and at least partway into the Onion, have been genetically enhanced and are no longer "normals." Those genetic enhancements would very likely be detectable by modern medical technology -- they'd probably be detectable by our current medical technology.
My question is "why hasn't somebody noticed?" Presumably over the centuries more than one Alignment agent has been in an accident and I'd assume that the "regen" and "quick heal" technologies at least require a DNA sample to work their magic.
In Beowulf or Manticore you might make the argument that privacy rights might preclude the authorities for getting their hands on a DNA sample. But that certainly wouldn't apply, say, in the People's Republic of Haven or possibly in Silesia. On the other hand if a mysterious stranger dies in an air car accident the authorities might resort to DNA testing to locate the next of kin.
At the very least, now that they have a living member of the Alignment, why aren't they taking a DNA sample? That might help them start looking for sleeper agents. It might not, too, but it is a starting point.
What we've seen of genetic engineering in the Honorverse, at least so far, is largely quantitative rather than qualitative. We see humans engineered to be stronger, hardier, etc, but we don't see things like (taking Vorkosiganverse examples) the quaddies or Guppy. So it's not unlikely that any Alpha agent undergoing a gene scan would be dismissed as someone who just got genetically lucky (or more likely has some genies on the family tree somewhere this would be more likely in the older worlds, settled before genetic engineering got it's bad reputation, which are also where genetic scans would be more common). You'd need a bunch of them for someone to notice a pattern to raise suspicions.
The series tech base was designed in the early 90s. People were just beginning to talk about sequencing the human genome, at a cost of about 3 billion dollars. The background assumption seems to be that genetics is hard, and it's not something that people routinely do.
Now, Eric Flint has violated that bit of background in a number of places, but it's still built into the Honorverse at a very deep level, and attempting to retcon a modern understanding of genetics into the storyline at this point would cause all kinds of plot havoc throughout the series.
I think David's decision to wrap this up in two more books, and not come back to it for another series, is very wise.