Originally posted by Aramis:
Re: Virus as described, it had abilities well beyond what many considered plausible. I don't like it as a plot hook, nor can I see it as anything other than electro-psionic in nature. And I don't buy electro-psionics. I never liked the "Setting restart" either.
Aramis,
I'm hijacking 2-4601's thread here, so this will be my last Virus-specific post.
I agree with you up to a point. I did not and do not like the
Setting Restart idea behind
TNE. As 2-4601 points out it produced a mileau as 'static' and 'uniform' as
CT supposedly was, only with the horrific, charnal house Wilds replacing a living Imperium. Many have written about how
TNE deals with 'rebirth' or is 'full of hope'. In the Regency perhaps, elsewhere it is little more than an endless slog through an abattoir.
That being said, I can understand why GDW decided on a
Setting Restart. The Rebellion and DGP had painted the OTU into a very tight corner.
Every faction was either morally tainted, had it's back to the wall, or wasn't big enough to make a difference. What seem's as a no-brainer to us in 2006, aA 'hard' landing and a longer Long Night produced by the drawn out a
Hard Times and
Black War era, wasn't seen as an option. Why it wasn't I haven't a clue.
Back to Virus...
I can just swallow some of the claims regarding Virus' abilities
IF those abilities are limited to certain times and places. Can Virus cut new circuits? Because Virus remote Cymbeline ancestor could cut new circuits the answer is "Yes"
BUT NOT in
EVERY computer it infects. The same proviso can be made for all of Virus' other abilities.
We tend to forget that the Virus that was released was 'built' or 'geneered' with a specific infection path in mind; the Cymbeline chip inhabited transponders aboard nearly every starship in the Third Imperium. The Imperial scientists had ran a long term
eugenics project on the natural Cymbeline chips. The first useable (and only) result of that 'geneering' effort had been the new transponders.
Simply put, the Imperium took the sophont Cymbeline chips and geneered an
idiot savant version to
enslave within millions of transponders. This idiot savant chips was able to do little more than evolve at a known rate and recognise other idiot savant chips. The chips' evolvution was controlled because their environment was controlled; they lived inside transponders and were given just enough energy and/or other materials to stay 'alive'. An important part of the natural chips' reproductive process; the ability to transmit or pass along its operating 'code', had been removed or suppressed in some fashion in order to keep the idiot savant transponder chips in their 'box'.
In Virus, that same function was
emphasized and
refined. Virus was also designed to be
suicidal.
The transponder chips and Virus were parts of the same whole. When Virus was inadvertantly released, it found refuge where it had been
bred and
trained to find refuge; the transponders of the warships fighting across the system. Within those transponders, Virus found the missing pieces of itself
just as the Imperial scientists who had created Virus intended it should.
Virus and idiot savant 'merged' and, being in an environment created for them, made physical changes to the chips they were operating on. Could Virus do that everywhere else? No. It could only do it in systems that allowed such activities.
We're already experimenting with computers that physically rearrange themselves in order to perform certain tasks more effectively. Is it such a great stretch to believe that, upon finding itself in such a system, Virus wouldn't reconfigure the computer in order that it may run more effectively too?
A lot is made of Virus sentience. As with Virus' circuit cutting abilities, I believe Viral sentience is greatly limited to certain times and places. The trouble in our understanding arises when we fail to distinguish between 'potentially' sentient and actually sentient. Every Viral infection is potentially sentient, but only a very few are actually sentient.
Virus in your toaster is an infection, not a 'being'. Move that infection to a processor 'large' enough to allow sentience and it becomes a being. Move it back to the toaster and it is an infection again. That's hard to understand as we have no biological comparisons to draw from.
Because of this sentience threshold, Virus kills mainly by
ommission and not
commission. A Viral infection in your toaster will 'grow' or 'expand' in it's attempts to 'mature' or 'achieve' sentience until it encompasses the entire amount of 'cyberspace' within that toaster. With all the toaster functions overwritten or erased by Virus, the toaster no longers works and the coded safety interlocks are gone. The toaster could possibly short out and cause a fire but little else(1).
Now, a possible toaster fire won't kill you, but imagine what would happen to an infected grav-car. All monitoring and controls shut off as the Viral infection takes over more and more of the grav-car's computer. The infection spreads as fast as your CPU's clock rate too. In mere seconds of human time, your grav-car goes from a Virus-free flying toy to a plummeting coffin.
And the infection
never intended for that to happen! It never reached sentience. All it did was crowd out all the other functions on your car's CPU in it's attempts to grow. The crash was a side effect and not a conscious act. The difference is not important to those about to die and those who live through the
Day All The Grav-Cars Fell can't be blamed for believing that an
evil intelligence was behind it all even though conscious volition never entered into the picture.
Virus was deliberately geneered to infect and disable ship via their transponder systems. The transponders themselves were a 'focii of infection' containing a Viral 'cousin' of sorts. When the two met it was like when the Old World strain of syphilis and the New World strain of syphilis met; a new and far more deadly strain was created.
Virus then was able to infect other systems via others 'infection' vectors because it
evolved. Imagine how fast evolution can occur when a lifeform's idea of time is set by a 57th Century CPU's clock rate. Imagine how fast evolution can occur when a lifeform can geneer itself by writing or removing a few lines of code. When epidemiologists discuss new diseases like ebola or avian flu, they refer to the potential host populations as 'fresh meat'. The whole of Chartered Space's cybernetic systems were fresh meat for Virus. It was all a virgin field with vast amounts of room to 'eat' and 'grow'.
Viral infections released evolved/geneered copies of themselves in the same manner trees release
pollen. Very few spores took 'root', even fewer grew or survived, fewer still reached sentience but that virgin field beckoned ever onward. Each new system, each new set of protocols, each new model of computer, all of it were simply different environments for Virus to adapt to much like how biological life adapted to deep sea volcanic vent rifts, polar ice, mountain sides, and grassy plains.
When you (carefully) apply biology and epidemiology to Virus it becomes a bit less suspender snapping. If you write off much of what is claimed about Virus to hyperbole or hysterics or misunderstanding or a layman's level of knowledge, Virus becomes much less suspender snapping. I also don't think psionics needs to enter the picture at all.
The real threat of Virus lays in ths fact that the infection in that discarded toaster can, if transplanted into a battleship, result in another
Rape of Trin. Viral spores are everywhere and each and every one of them can achieve sentience if given enough 'room' to 'grow'. And, even if they don't achieve sentience, each and every one of them can reproduce.
For Virus,
tens of millions of generations have passed between Release in 1132 and
TNE's 1202. Evolution and geneering have been working the entire time. There are stable species of Virus now, some less dangerous than others and some actually benign. Judging Sandman for the actions of the threshing machine that swallowed Dulinor would be judging one of us for the actions of
Homo habilis. It just make no sense as the two are completely different.
Well, that was quite a thread-jacking. 2-4601, you have my apologies.
Have fun,
Bill
1 - Unless your toaster, coffee maker, vacuum, duster, fridge, pantry, clothes washer, comm system, and every other function your 57th Cnetury flat handles for you are all seamlessly interconnected into a single system. I've brought this up before in the many
Where Are All The Robots? threads. People in the 57th Century
live inside what wewould consider a robot. It's a self-cleaning, self-repairing, self-monitoring entity that cleans up after it occupants, orders what goods and services they need, and does everything else up to balancing their virtual checkbooks. A Viral infection in a 57th Century flat may find enough processing power to either achieve a malevolent sentience or a lesser level of 'animal' cunning. Either way, given all the functions and tools Virus will control within the flat, the occupant is in for a hard time.
