The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Eighty One Up

[Night_stalker]

Probably not, DIMON tracks down the perp and calls in HEA, unknown, and who?

[Simon_Jester]

Would Palin even still be alive? I mean, her public persona, at least, is a religious fanatic with less capacity for intelligent, rational, self-willed action than most baked goods. She's the very model of a Message victim, if you ask me.

[Edward Yee]

I just realized... somewhere on TSW's SIPRNET is probably an E-4's "homemade" video imagining how the scene in Satan's cave went down (as opposed to what we saw actually happened), starring Bruno Ganz...

[Baughn]

So what about people like me then? Where we already know the effects of varying types of weaponry on the human body and your story serves as the ability to watch the plebes get sick over reality?

You're a small minority. In the old days when most people had been through some form of military service, most people knew what it was like. Now, only a small percentage do and all too many think of war as a video game with people dying nice and cleanly. One of the problems inherent in abolishing the draft.

It may be a bit inconvenient in situations like this, but overall I'm very happy most people don't have to know what war is like.

Maybe, if we give it another century or two, we can cut it down close to zero.

[nobody_really]

Probably not, DIMON tracks down the perp and calls in HEA, unknown, and who?

<offtopic>"Birther" is the derogatory term for that segment of the American public that is convinced that Barrack Obama cannot be a legitimate President of the United States because he has not produced sufficient evidence that he was born in the United States.</offtopic>

[bcoogler]

So what about people like me then? Where we already know the effects of varying types of weaponry on the human body and your story serves as the ability to watch the plebes get sick over reality?

Imagine how a Hollywood writer would spin the scene, and take joy in reading something you know about being accurately depicted.

My own area of expertise -- I'm an Oracle database administrator -- is unlikely to make a captivating novel.

"You Idiot! That table column is low cardinality. Drop that b-tree index and replace it with a bitmap index!"

Or.... "Can you help me figure out why my backup aborted?"
"You left out a semicolon in your RMAN script."

Yep, heady stuff.

By necessity, just about anything I read for fun is going to be about something that's not my forte.

[Gil Hamilton]

Would Palin even still be alive? I mean, her public persona, at least, is a religious fanatic with less capacity for intelligent, rational, self-willed action than most baked goods. She's the very model of a Message victim, if you ask me.

George Bush survived the Message while Tony Blair didn't. Alot of this seems to be writer fiat.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, we are informed that there's supposed to be a correlation; I think it's reasonable to ask the question.

[Werrf]

There is a connection, but so far most of the real-world "religious fanatics" mentioned have not followed the message - the Islamic fundamentalist leaders, the Phlopses, the Pope, Bush, etc. Those who have followed it seem to have been the more quietly religious types, who honestly believed in their faith rather than expressing their fanaticism to curry favour with the masses. If Palin followed the pattern, she probably survived and is in hiding somewhere

[Edward Yee]

On the other hand, look how fictional-GWB and fictional-Benedict XVI turned around their post-Message lives.

[Simon_Jester]

There is a connection, but so far most of the real-world "religious fanatics" mentioned have not followed the message - the Islamic fundamentalist leaders, the Phlopses, the Pope, Bush, etc. Those who have followed it seem to have been the more quietly religious types, who honestly believed in their faith rather than expressing their fanaticism to curry favour with the masses. If Palin followed the pattern, she probably survived and is in hiding somewhere

A distinct point.

[Night_stalker]

Wonder how Jack Chick took the Message? Did he die, or did he try and claim that God spared him due to his faith?

[Nematocyst]

He did a nice tract on how Hell isn't what he thought it was (anymore) and he apologizes for all the bullshit in his other tracts by making Fang the main character.

[darksoul]

So what about people like me then? Where we already know the effects of varying types of weaponry on the human body and your story serves as the ability to watch the plebes get sick over reality?

Imagine how a Hollywood writer would spin the scene, and take joy in reading something you know about being accurately depicted.

My own area of expertise -- I'm an Oracle database administrator -- is unlikely to make a captivating novel.

"You Idiot! That table column is low cardinality. Drop that b-tree index and replace it with a bitmap index!"

Or.... "Can you help me figure out why my backup aborted?"
"You left out a semicolon in your RMAN script."

Yep, heady stuff.

By necessity, just about anything I read for fun is going to be about something that's not my forte.

I hear you from software architecture land...

[Crayz9000]

For that matter, they must be less at risk than ordinary humans; a human who lived for thousands of years would be almost guaranteed to get cancer. So there has to be something unusual about radiation exposure that destroys the angelic immune system's normal ability to police up cancer cells without attacking healthy tissue.

Well, I don't think there's much unusual about it. The simple fact is that such a massive burst of hard radiation would pretty much screw up all the tissue, including the parts responsible for the regenerative processes. Any "templates" the regenerative system has would be damaged. Stuart even mentioned that some thirty or so pages ago when everyone was reacting to the initiation.

To make a (poor) car analogy, it would be like cutting the brake lines, the emergency brake cable, the power steering, slashing the radiator hose, draining out all the oil, then giving the engine a 400 shot of nitrous and dropping a brick on the pedals in front of a steep downhill grade. It doesn't matter if the ABS system, the ECM, traction control and every other automatic system are still working, those brakes won't stop worth shit anyway, and the engine's going to rev until it self-destructs.

[GrayAnderson]

From what I gathered, the correlation is not overt religiousness. It's something deeper, but I can't put my finger on it because of Blair. I can go with the quiet, "real" religiousness easily enough.

Also, I'd like to express my preference for "Trantor" over "Coruscant". The latter is a bit too well-known; it comes off cheesy (and I think we could probably agree that some smartass would invariably try and call a desert in Hell Tatooine). Trantor fits, will probably actually become what it is like (a massive city with only some palace areas kept as open space due to the desirability of it over Hell, etc.), and isn't so well-known that it'll have people going "bwuh?".

Finally, as to the bit on the story getting the message across about how messy war can be (and I know that I understate there), you do a very good job of conveying that. Of course, I say this as someone who really isn't reading for the war and "things going boom" (and I very rarely read for that) but for both the general strategy that's being played on both sides (Michael's speed chess and the humans' approaching the various situations being put in front of them) and because I find the world that it is set in to be compelling. You've made a deep, involved, and real world, Stuart, and I'm glad I've been able to both follow you into it (in a sense) and be involved in the discussions about it here.

Edit: Just a thought that I am almost sure has been raised, but I think this is a universe that has a rather decisive answer to the Fermi paradox.

Also, an oddball question, but Yahweh and Satan took gemstones, and presumably easily accessed precious metals from what's shaking out to be at least dozens of worlds (probably including some that never developed any sort of civilization). That would mean, in essence, that they left the useful stuff (i.e. hydrocarbon resources and various relatively rare but not valuable for appearance's sake metals)?

[Ilya Muromets]

So what about people like me then? Where we already know the effects of varying types of weaponry on the human body and your story serves as the ability to watch the plebes get sick over reality?

Imagine how a Hollywood writer would spin the scene, and take joy in reading something you know about being accurately depicted.

My own area of expertise -- I'm an Oracle database administrator -- is unlikely to make a captivating novel.

"You Idiot! That table column is low cardinality. Drop that b-tree index and replace it with a bitmap index!"

Or.... "Can you help me figure out why my backup aborted?"
"You left out a semicolon in your RMAN script."

Yep, heady stuff.

By necessity, just about anything I read for fun is going to be about something that's not my forte.

Naw, even that can be entertaining.

Just play it all dead seriously, with dramatic music and such. Like they do with Spaced.

[Simon_Jester]

He did a nice tract on how Hell isn't what he thought it was (anymore) and he apologizes for all the bullshit in his other tracts by making Fang the main character.

That would be the best Chick tract ever. And some of the others are really hilarious.

Well, I don't think there's much unusual about it. The simple fact is that such a massive burst of hard radiation would pretty much screw up all the tissue, including the parts responsible for the regenerative processes. Any "templates" the regenerative system has would be damaged. Stuart even mentioned that some thirty or so pages ago when everyone was reacting to the initiation.

I don't mean "unusual" in the sense of surprising. I mean "unusual" in the sense of "out of the ordinary for their normal environment." Radiation isn't a hazard they normally have to cope with, so it does things to their physiology that are far out of the ordinary compared to what normally happens to them.

Whoever engineered the angels to be nigh-immortal and regenerative probably could have engineered them to be extremely resistant to radiation a la radiodurans, I suspect. But they didn't, because this wasn't a case of pure genetic engineering wank where you design every imaginable useful feature into the same organism.

From what I gathered, the correlation is not overt religiousness. It's something deeper, but I can't put my finger on it because of Blair. I can go with the quiet, "real" religiousness easily enough.

Well, I'd expect suggestibility to be a strong indicator. People who are likely to lie down and die because a voice in their head tells them to will die during the Message. People who aren't... won't.

So some historical religious leaders (Joan of Arc* comes to mind) would be doomed. They're used to hearing voices, and listening to them. Modern leaders? I figure some of them would obey the Message, especially if they kept getting repetitions of it every time they prayed for guidance. In specific cases like Palin, a lot would depend on whether or not she's really the woman she plays on TV, so to speak. Her public persona wouldn't last five minutes after the Message; the real woman might well just ignore it.

*If Heaven really did close down in 1000 AD, Joan of Arc got a really raw deal, didn't she?

Edit: Just a thought that I am almost sure has been raised, but I think this is a universe that has a rather decisive answer to the Fermi paradox.

"If there are aliens, why haven't they visited us?"

"God killed them all. Then we killed God. Now we can go visit them."

[Ilya Muromets]

Edit: Just a thought that I am almost sure has been raised, but I think this is a universe that has a rather decisive answer to the Fermi paradox.

"If there are aliens, why haven't they visited us?"

"God killed them all. Then we killed God. Now we can go visit them."

Great, now I can't stop imagining someone finding ol' Fermi, pulling him out, and introducing him to a bunch of physicists who start fanboying/fangirling over a now befuddled little him. In the midst of that some idiot in the back feels the need to shout: "Suck it, Fermi!"

[bcoogler]

So what about people like me then? Where we already know the effects of varying types of weaponry on the human body and your story serves as the ability to watch the plebes get sick over reality?

Imagine how a Hollywood writer would spin the scene, and take joy in reading something you know about being accurately depicted.

My own area of expertise -- I'm an Oracle database administrator -- is unlikely to make a captivating novel.

"You Idiot! That table column is low cardinality. Drop that b-tree index and replace it with a bitmap index!"

Or.... "Can you help me figure out why my backup aborted?"
"You left out a semicolon in your RMAN script."

Yep, heady stuff.

By necessity, just about anything I read for fun is going to be about something that's not my forte.

Naw, even that can be entertaining.

Just play it all dead seriously, with dramatic music and such. Like they do with Spaced.

I'll have to admit, after posting that I started to think about Dilbert and Office Space. And I assume by Spaced you mean the British comedy with Simon Pegg? I don't think too many people have heard of it in the US, but I do have the DVD set.

Yes, you're right. Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't be done.

It would be an interesting challenge to write a story involving a Database Administrator, a System Administrator, a Network Administrator, a Programmer/Software Developer, and the real challenge... a Project Manager. Sounds like a comedy.

[Pelranius]

Also, an oddball question, but Yahweh and Satan took gemstones, and presumably easily accessed precious metals from what's shaking out to be at least dozens of worlds (probably including some that never developed any sort of civilization). That would mean, in essence, that they left the useful stuff (i.e. hydrocarbon resources and various relatively rare but not valuable for appearance's sake metals)?

I guess so, since Yahweh and Satan really don't have any means of extracting hydrocarbons in the first place and the angels and demons are both allergic to iron, so the most metals they might get are gold, silver, copper and platinum, and that would probably be gotten by using slaves to dig for it.

[Deebles]

I'd also like to voice my thanks for telling the use of even a "clean" nuclear weapon how it is. I've been very pissed off by having to spell out just what nukes are before to one Irish-American longing for the USA to invade the UK and to an Indian wishing for India to go to war with Pakistan. Because unthinkable devastation is unthinkable, I very much doubt I'll ever see a war between any two countries out of the USA, the UK, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel no matter the provocation. And if such a think did happen, and I got caught up in it... well, I'd hope to be one of the first to go.

[darksoul]

It would be an interesting challenge to write a story involving a Database Administrator, a System Administrator, a Network Administrator, a Programmer/Software Developer, and the real challenge... a Project Manager. Sounds like a comedy.

Been done, actually. check out http://ars.userfriendly.org

[Scorpio]

Yeah, but at one point their resident A.I. builds a Mad Cat Battlemech out of lego mindstorms and uses its guns to send their marketing guy on a suborbital hop. So I think this isn't quite what Bcoogler was talking about.

[bcoogler]

Yeah, but at one point their resident A.I. builds a Mad Cat Battlemech out of lego mindstorms and uses its guns to send their marketing guy on a suborbital hop. So I think this isn't quite what Bcoogler was talking about.

There are a few Project Managers I wouldn't mind sending on a suborbital hop, provided there's a flaming re-entry awaiting them....

Project Manager: Hey, what's the status on project 9743? It's in Red jeopardy, 15 days behind schedule.

Me: You mean the email assignment you sent 30 minutes ago during lunch when you thought I'd be away from my desk?

PM: That's the one.

Me: The project that's behind because the vendor shipped the server with the wrong power pigtail? And other delays, like the freeze on raised floor work demanded by Marketing for a new product release; disk space in the NAS that was supposed to be reserved for this project was allocated to another server; then you bounced the disk work to an SA who was on vacation?

PM: None of that matters; as of now it's in your court. We expect you to help get this project closer to on-schedule by magically completing your work in half the time allocated.

Me: You do realize the original time estimate was based on building 3 databases, and thanks to project creep there are now 7 databases to build?

PM: <click>