shayvaan wrote:As for implants being placed in adults- I don't recall this being ever even discussed. The closest thing was when someone (Cayleb, I believe) asked about using a NEAT to educate the inner circle, to which Merlin replied that one had to have implants to use the machine, but never explains why the inner circle couldn't receive implants.
Make of it what you will
P.S. If I had to guess, I would suspect that the surgery needed to do it SAFELY, would be beyond Owl's capability.
I'm guessing that a neural interface would take years to truly master. Implanting an adult should be possible. Most of them would probably never achieve the comfortable instinctive proficiency of children implanted shortly after birth but they would be able to use them ... eventually.
I wonder if Princess Alahnah was given the implants? Will the children of Sharleyan and Caleb, Irys and Hektor, and others in the Inner Circle, wind up being educated with the NEAT before the next series begins? That would be incredibly handy. They could even have a School of the Inner Circle where a select group of kids could absorb the knowledge of the Terran Federation. They might very well be facing a high tech onslaught more formidable than the church ever was, depending on what actually happens when the thousand years are up. The more people they can get who know everything, the better. And you don't really have to worry about someone rejecting the truth if they're exposed to it from an early age.
One thing you definitely want to do before any "Archangels" show up is make sure the truth is distributed too widely for them to squash without wiping out the whole population. That means you go public at least a year or two beforehand, preferably with a mass printed and distributed series of books detailing the whole of human history. There will be controversy yes. Some Safeholdians will accept the new revelations while others will condemn it as heresy and decide the old Grand Inquisitor was right all along! But you want to have skeptics everywhere who will notice when the Archangels screw up, or suffer setbacks, and see them for the frauds they are. The genie needs to be brought too far out of the bottle to be stuffed back inside - no matter what extremes they go to in the attempt.