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Rain Cream
252e1b
Point by point address of the questions in >>344237
>Nobody I've asked can remember why we visited Ara.
Ara was the best choice for any sort of help Sal could hope to reach with the resources Lyan's body represented. Ara's choice of habit (non-consent violence LARP with a crippled version of the Network which is incredibly important for preventing the infection from spreading) put her on the short list for good choices of allies. Her lifystyle and experience made her the best. A 50 gsec old motile nanoswarm living in a simulated(?) caldera means she only wants contact on her terms, and thus should be pretty self-sufficient. She was an isolated contact with the available resources to help, and who was at least inclined to hear out Sal and Lyan instead of just destroy them when she realized the threat they represented to everything by virtue of their basilisk infection.
>The chapter was set up such that Lyan was mad at Sal. This led me to believe that Lyan had realized things about Sal sufficient to make him really mad, so I was trying to play along, but it would have helped if he was more explicit about it. Or maybe I was just overreacting. In any case, we appear to have forgiven him for whatever it was. (I know about the "My own clone!" part, but I don't know enough about Network society to know whether that's considered a serious faux pas or a mortal offense or what)
Lyan explicitly said it was illegal to make multiple states of himself when he was exploring himself as he was being brought back on-line by Sal at the start of chapter 2. There were other hints too, like how Lyan reacted to the news he and Sal were both copies. And we were told a little about how Network society brought new people into its fold when we met Mika. All in all, the hints were there that copies were not considered acceptable in the Network.
>All I've really got right now is this abstract understanding that we need to save the world. Well, sorta. The world we started on was destroyed already, so we're trying to save a more abstract world. But we also need to stop the world because it's bad. And maybe that's what the basilisk is actually doing and we need to just sit back and let it do its thing? Like, maybe all that weird cyberspace green shit was Phase II of the infection and it does something different? Who knows? Not us! (I have no idea what we were supposed to get out of that sequence, to be totally honest)
That was the Lyan-state that was left behind in the Lethe center when the Habitat died (the one who had just had his memory wiped). That Lyan encountered the basilisk somewhere in the ruins of the processing matter of the habitat.
>Also, I don't know why there's this whole issue of trust with Sal. He can just program us to think whatever he wants, and he's our only source of information. We have no real ability to go against his wishes. Whatever they are.
Sal can mess with Lyan's head a little, but for Lyan to have any value to Sal, Lyan had to be a relatively blank slate. Lyan was similar to the computer image that you would see on a recovery disk, while Sal was the nearly-identical computer that had all your favorites and settings and bullshit anime shows saved and was infected with a virus. Sal wanted to be able to figure out what the virus did, and how to remove it while doing as little damage as possible, and to do that he needed something to compare against. Hence, he engineered Lyan.
>Also, I'm still a little unclear about why he killed us the second time. With the black rubber ball.
That was a device Sal made to back up Lyan's brain state. It would kill him to stop the brain from changing while it was being read, and then the device would read it, and then finally the device would rebuilt it and restart Lyan's metabolism. Risky, crude, but better than not having any back up.
>Basically, it seems like Sal is our boss and we can't do anything about it (and have no reason to try because we have no alternative plan and no information with which to make a plan and he can just hack us whenever he wants anyway) but he's being really unclear about what he wants us to do.
Sal is a desperate man, and Lyan is his victim. However, because Lyan has the same talent at hacking as Sal does, Lyan is not a powerless victim. Meeting Ara was the first real chance Lyan had at rebelling because through Ara he could have asked for help (he could have done it with the LARPers but they would have had to have been brought up to speed at the risk of totally blowing whatever advantage Sal bought them both by pretending to be dead). Remember, at this point we're still not sure if the basilisk was a murder weapon or something worse.
>Frankly, I don't know why he keeps letting us tag along. He seems like he'd be much more productive without us. He's this shapeshifting hypertech multi-megawatt puppetmaster guy who can hack unicorns and build computronium, and we're this big doofy emotionally unstable hermaphroditic sergal clone with no internet connectivity who doesn't know anything about anything.
Sal's systems were compromised by the basilisk, and he was losing against it. He told us that. He needed Lyan because Lyan was a blanked template that he could compare himself against and use as a test-bed for anti-basilisk solutions. He was nowhere near his full capability. Lyan, being a meat type body was apparently more resistant to the effects of the basilisk.
Sal was completely untrustworthy beyond doing whatever it took to save his own skin.
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