Brigade XO wrote:Leonard Detweiler created Mesa-my moving there and setting up his colony- as a place to advance his philosophy and improvement of humans without the controls and disapproval heaped on he and his co-believers by the Beowulf scientific community.
Mesa was outside and not going to join in the SL because that would have eventually brought it under various pressures and controls of the SL as pushed for by Beowulf. Then it gets interesting.
Not only is Mesa funded by Detweiler and his co-founders of the colony, they create a world that is activly using their research and advances in medical science to provide cloned workers etc.
What ultimately developed is a split structure in which there is the public face of Mesa and a secret body of the Detweiler Plan using the public Mesa as cover and a deflection against interference - primarily by Beowulf it would seem.
Sure, there is what is shown as a Planetary Board that runs Mesa but we keep being told and shown that only some of the members of that board and various visible heads of companies and government offices are significant members -or even have any knowledge of- the Alignment. The Mesa Alignment is the shadow government which actually controls policy just like it is using things like Manpower and genetic slave production base as part of its R&D as well as a source of supplies and facilities. It also runs thing like at least one transtellar (which has a seat on the Planetary Board)
Mesa wasn't bounded by anybody's regulations. Oh, they had to worry and manipulate to sell some of their exports (the genetic slaves) but creating a way to do that was mostly by corruption and greed in places like the SL. Mesa was also manipulated into the position of pariah system (in terms of anybody with any sense of decent morals or those who talked a pious and moral stand but took a lot of money to look the other way) eventually to set up the planet as a scapegoat and decoy for protecting the Alignment from discovery. Very soon after we are introduced to the Alignment we are told about this cover story and the plan to eventually sacrifice Mesa to cover their tracks.
The Alignment really does operate like a criminal gang corporation but it has been better than almost any as it has found an effective way to hide under cover of it's front of operations. And how is it managed internally? By cunning and brute force with swift death to anybody who even looks like they may be going to jeopardize its plans and operations or the elite command structure. They "cull" people all the time....not just failed experiments, but employees who become a potential danger by getting out of the parameters of operation that have been set. Also for knowing too much or even just a dangerous bit of information ( like a stellar coordinate that would be inconvenient) that could possibly expose them. Why do you think they just love the assassin nanite gambit so much? The individual who is compromised or perhaps is out of touch too long is going to "just die". And then there are the Galls - fanatic internal enforcers who WILL carry out their orders including suicide to accomplish their tasks.
You have to wonder if, just sometimes, the Detweiler clones don't have a tiny concern that if they make enough (or one particular) errors, they will either drop dead or some trusted subordinate will casually kill them.
Indeed, there is a long list throughout history of assassinated heads of state. Caesar immediately comes to mind.
Even Hitler was an attempted assassination. But then, the Detweilers are clones that aren't exactly visible. Even their paranoia is paranoid. LOL
But in their case, you'd have to get them all in one fell swoop.
It would be ironic if they fell under compulsion.
"Hmm... now what would we have them do?"
Then again, since everything is so compartmentalized, could it be that only the Detweilers have access to the compulsion and suicide protocols?