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[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.
 
[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.

Won't lie, throwing-it-in-the-star™ would be preferable, Out-of-universe we know that Reapers are nasty (and hellava successful!) subverters I'd prefer we have at least LOOKED at something resembling indoctrination.
In-universe well, in real life even atrocious acts of science after in future did give us some benefits and chance to advance .. same applies in this scenario: • It has useful information, something that MIGHT help in the future. Throwing it away is the same as with Genophage cure: immoral.
Good point. I am going to update my vote.
Adhoc vote count started by Thors_Alumni on Apr 11, 2018 at 3:56 PM, finished with 211 posts and 90 votes.

Adhoc vote count started by Thors_Alumni on Apr 11, 2018 at 4:18 PM, finished with 212 posts and 91 votes.
 
And you'd be wrong.
Diagnoses like antisocial behavior are never made in isolation; you don't pick one symptom and wave it about.
The early symptoms of indoctrination can look like schizophrenia with paranoid ideation, or PTSD, which has a different clinical presentation.

You're missing the gist of my point, which is that the perspective of the people who called it antisocial behavior matters more than the diagnosis itself when we don't actually have the specific symptoms that led to that conclusion or know the methods they used to determine the symptoms.

Obviously different both in medium and effect.
Indoctrination always seems to end in severe, permanent mental damage, with the only thing retarding that process being Reaper intervention.
These guys are mentally intact.

The quoted section is describing, specifically, the results of direct exposure the signal from Sovereign itself rather than from a separate artifact. Rana is exposed indirectly to the indoctrination signal and, almost definitely, for more time than the week required to directly turn someone into a mindless thrall, but she's clearly lucid before the events that led to her death in ME3. Benezia is clearly indoctrinated, and also seems to be lucid, if a complete asshole, before she breaks free of her indoctrination temporarily. There's no indication in either of their conversations, anything after that in ME1, or on the wiki itself that their lucidity is due to a specific choice of Sovereign's. The Batarian government, though also indoctrinated by a Reaper, were almost definitely lucid, or at least seemed externally to be.

However, even if we're looking at a possible Reaper artifact, we're definitely not looking at a Reaper, so Object Rho would potentially be a better indicator. Kenson and her team were all exposed to Object Rho for what was realistically more than a week, and Kenson is also clearly lucid.

The part of the wiki you're quoting is one limited section based on one event that's contradicted by other parts of the wiki. The effects of indoctrination are, frankly, ambiguous. Either it causes people to become mindless thralls, or it doesn't. The effects are heavy and complete after only a week unless it isn't. The voices send people into a mindless rage, or they don't do anything for years. The only consistent metric we can use for determining whether the artifact is Reapertech is whether or not they're hearing voices, and I'm not ready to dismiss Reapertech as a possibility until that's determined convincingly.

I'll give you that the sequence of events could use elaboration.
But I'm going with GM intent here; if they say they were attempting to blow the station and were still lucid, the GM is obviously not trying to call up the classic manifestation of Reaper indoctrination exposure.

I gave two examples. In the first, we know Kenson was still lucid when she tried to blow her station, and, as you said, it was less about suicide than it was an attempt to stop Shepard. This first scenario meshes with the supposition that the researchers attempted to destroy the station after the irregulars attacked to prevent exactly what happened: the researchers were all either killed or imprisoned, the danger the artifact presents is known, and the artifact is contained. That's a reasonable scenario no matter what the artifact's origin is. The second example, you made a decent point about:

As for Rana Thanoptis, we don't actually know the circumstances of her death.
Was she simply suffering from PTSD? How did she fall into custody after killing military officers?

The report with all available information is here. She's pretty clearly suffering from indoctrination, and it seems to be from "providing research assistance on Reaper technology" in exchange from a pardon for her stuff with Saren. I'll grant you that the suicide is "alleged," though, and not knowing the circumstances of her death, we can't use it for evidence of much.

The Reapers fight wars every fifty thousand years or so; the one against the Protheans apparently lasted several hundred years.
And despite that, we are counting Reaper artifacts from canon on the fingers of one hand.
In a volume of space constituting much of the known galaxy, inhabited by hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of spacefaring sapients.

Consider exactly how much identifiable shit an Earthborne army leaves behind.
We are still finding WW2 bombs in Europe.
The Reapers really don't leave anything behind.

I'm not saying they're left lying everywhere, but they pretty clearly do leave things behind, and I don't know why you're trying to say they don't. Do the examples I gave just not count for some reason?

Fake edit: I may have conflated an argument someone else made with one you'd made when I was making the argument you were responding to here, as I didn't see exactly what I was looking for when I was reading back through your statements here since the update, so I may have come across differently than I intended.

Specifically, my stance is that, though rare, the Reapers did leave the occasional piece of Reapertech in unexpected places. They have been around for upward of 37 million years based on just the dead Reaper Cerberus found and nearly a billion based on the Leviathan of Dis, and the Precursor civilization probably falls within the time frame that the Reapers have been operating. So, based on those observations, the object isn't inherently disqualified from being Reapertech on either of those grounds.
 
[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

we're going to see something like this again. in character we have other ruins left by the same race, out of character this seems to be another species take on indoctrination tech. so being ready for that would be super useful.
 
Looks like jettisoning that into sun isn't going to win, might as well study it instead of put it under lock. Hope our scientists aren't too annoyed by this dangerous project.

[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.
 
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Adhoc vote count started by Night_stalker on Apr 11, 2018 at 5:18 PM, finished with 215 posts and 92 votes.
 
[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up
 
The Reapers really don't leave anything behind.
Well they do...but it seems more like the Leviathan of Dis and the Reaper we get the IFF from are left behind more like schmuck bait than anything else.

Worked on the Batarians.

The quoted section is describing, specifically, the results of direct exposure the signal from Sovereign itself rather than from a separate artifact. Rana is exposed indirectly to the indoctrination signal and, almost definitely, for more time than the week required to directly turn someone into a mindless thrall, but she's clearly lucid before the events that led to her death in ME3. Benezia is clearly indoctrinated, and also seems to be lucid, if a complete asshole, before she breaks free of her indoctrination temporarily. There's no indication in either of their conversations, anything after that in ME1, or on the wiki itself that their lucidity is due to a specific choice of Sovereign's. The Batarian government, though also indoctrinated by a Reaper, were almost definitely lucid, or at least seemed externally to be.

However, even if we're looking at a possible Reaper artifact, we're definitely not looking at a Reaper, so Object Rho would potentially be a better indicator. Kenson and her team were all exposed to Object Rho for what was realistically more than a week, and Kenson is also clearly lucid.

The part of the wiki you're quoting is one limited section based on one event that's contradicted by other parts of the wiki. The effects of indoctrination are, frankly, ambiguous. Either it causes people to become mindless thralls, or it doesn't. The effects are heavy and complete after only a week unless it isn't. The voices send people into a mindless rage, or they don't do anything for years. The only consistent metric we can use for determining whether the artifact is Reapertech is whether or not they're hearing voices, and I'm not ready to dismiss Reapertech as a possibility until that's determined convincingly.
Wasn't there a big thing in the wikia about how the Reapers are able to modulate and control the rate of indoctrination in accordance to their needs?

If they think you're useful or potentially useful they'll tone it only to the point that you'll obey, but not enough to lobotomise as with Saren, Benezia and the Batarian government... so basically indoctrination is only as powerful as it needs to be. Just look at the illusive man for instance, who installed masses of reaper tech into himself and was indoctrinated most of his adult life yet wasn't completely controlled. Enough that we can persuade him to throw off the indoctrination anyway.

Going from that Object Rho isn't a good indicator either, as the wikia states it broadcasts similar to a QEC, the same tech that lets Shepard communicate with Hackett on the other side of the galaxy. Only more advanced because ya know...Reapers. There's nothing to suspect that Harbringer or another reaper wasn't directly controlling their rate of indoctrination.

Specifically, my stance is that, though rare, the Reapers did leave the occasional piece of Reapertech in unexpected places. They have been around for upward of 37 million years based on just the dead Reaper Cerberus found and nearly a billion based on the Leviathan of Dis, and the Precursor civilization probably falls within the time frame that the Reapers have been operating. So, based on those observations, the object isn't inherently disqualified from being Reapertech on either of those grounds.
True, they do leave behind schmuck bait, but it seems to be...ya know reapers, or at least their corpses.

Which given what we know/suspect about indoctrination makes sense, they need one to control the rate of indoctrination, no use turning an entire species into brain dead idiots.

I mean if we look at what the dead reapers did, the one we get the IFF seemed to decide that the researchers were of no use so killed them, if I were to guess to honey trap in more useful people (which as it turns out worked).

The Leviathan of Dis hits pay day and manages to carefully subvert an entire galactic government.
 
So, pink version of Happy Fun Ball, that undetectably* manipulates the minds of those within a certain radius... That's some serious hypertech. (Power source, effector field**, ability to figure out how to manipulate brains to produce a (presumably) specific effect without causing major brain damage, sensors to detect said brains at sufficient resolution to allow the above...) How big is that thing?

*As far as the Lystheni could tell - and presumably they're not completely incompetent at science.
**Or similar means of altering matter/energy at a distance without changing things in the intervening space.

So... From what it does, I'd like to toss it into a star, but I think that its capabilities are scary enough that we probably have to research it, just from the "how is it doing that?" perspective.

[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.
 
It seems at the moment pretty clear that keeping a hold on it for limited research is going to win, but I'd like to point out the yet-unmentioned but obvious follow-on - if we do research and find it useless or too dangerous, we can throw it into the sun. If we throw it into the sun... It's gone, opportunity lost forever.
 
Going from that Object Rho isn't a good indicator either, as the wikia states it broadcasts similar to a QEC, the same tech that lets Shepard communicate with Hackett on the other side of the galaxy. Only more advanced because ya know...Reapers. There's nothing to suspect that Harbringer or another reaper wasn't directly controlling their rate of indoctrination.

That's fair. I didn't catch that line while scanning through the wiki pages. However, it just improves my larger point: Reaper indoctrination from known sources can have a range of effects, and aren't limited to specific observable characteristics that would easily refute the proposition that this specific artifact is Reapertech.

I mean if we look at what the dead reapers did, the one we get the IFF seemed to decide that the researchers were of no use so killed them, if I were to guess to honey trap in more useful people (which as it turns out worked).

I don't actually know how aware dead Reapers are, though, or how aware of the surroundings of an artifact like Object Rho they might be. The one from the IFF mission and the Leviathan of Dis both were initially found by science teams, but the Leviathan chose a longer term indoctrination while the other just drove everyone nuts and turned them into husks. How much of that was good planning, and how much of that was luck?
 
[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.

Yeah, what you don't know about WILL eat your face. In canon MEverse there is no defense against indoctrination, no friendly AI's to prevent ewar, the list goes on ...
 
[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.
[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.
 
That's fair. I didn't catch that line while scanning through the wiki pages. However, it just improves my larger point: Reaper indoctrination from known sources can have a range of effects, and aren't limited to specific observable characteristics that would easily refute the proposition that this specific artifact is Reapertech.



I don't actually know how aware dead Reapers are, though, or how aware of the surroundings of an artifact like Object Rho they might be. The one from the IFF mission and the Leviathan of Dis both were initially found by science teams, but the Leviathan chose a longer term indoctrination while the other just drove everyone nuts and turned them into husks. How much of that was good planning, and how much of that was luck?
It can have a range of intensities, but the generalities are the same.

1. Awe/worshipful behaviour for the reapers which can be seen even in the least indoctrinated. TIM for example.
2. A desire to protect their stuff, TIM for example really objects to Shepard destroying the Collector base and the tech within it, the scientists willingly turn themselves into husks to protect the IFF reaper, though by that point they were likely husks sans augments anyway.

Now of course the Reapers could have other settings they can set the indoctrination too rather than just different intensities, but we haven't see them in canon at least.

They could decide to set them to anarchist/removal of evidence mode, but if they have an anarchist mode why do their indoctrinated agents not leave that stuff around more?

As far as I'm aware they're not...kinda. We've got one log by a Cerberus researcher which refers to the reaper corpse as "a dead god who dreams." Obviously a reference to Lovecraft, but it still gives us an indication that while it may not be conscious its still active and able to process stuff. Given some of the other logs by the Cerberus people (talking specifically about the pair who get their memories mixed up and shared between them) I'd not be surprised if the Reaper were experimenting.

If they can still do that then it would be able to make some kind of decision on its indoctrination, the Cerberus team was small and didn't have many people coming and going, their use as long term assets is low since they intend to be here for a while, turn them into guardians and a lure for more valuable agents.

Leviathan of Dis presumably got a lot more traffic by a lot more Batarians, thus indoctrinating a large number of people was more valuable even assuming it couldn't tell that it was getting high profile people.

As for how much they can see with Artefact Roe, well if its similar to a QEC, but more advanced I'd hazard everything around the base. Hackett for example on a comparatively primitive QEC was able to see around Shepard when he shep and Liara are chatting. I don't have a hard time believing the Reaper's have a much more advanced one.
 
[x] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.

You don't even need to go meta for this one, mind control be scary! this shard we have may be nothing more than the business end of an exotic weapon, or the fired shell of a different weapon. Neither of which teaches us more than what a depleted uranium slug from an A-10 would teach us about that fire hose that plane calls a gun. And it's even more dangerous to keep around without context!
 
this shard we have may be nothing more than the business end of an exotic weapon, or the fired shell of a different weapon. Neither of which teaches us more than what a depleted uranium slug from an A-10 would teach us about that fire hose that plane calls a gun.

...what? That analogy makes no sense. The artifact independently has an effect on those exposed to it. Regardless of what its original use was, of course we can use the artifact to study the effect that it observably produces. A better comparison would be an unexploded bomb - it's dangerous, and studying it won't tell us much about the plane that dropped it (or however else it got here), but we can still figure out how it does the thing that it does (in the bomb's case, explode) all the same.
 
[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.
 
[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.
 
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Adhoc vote count started by Miner249er on Apr 11, 2018 at 9:35 PM, finished with 228 posts and 99 votes.
 
[x] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.

It's the only way to be sure.

It's been a while IRL, but do remember that we have a massive war going on. Do we really think that we will have the resources to spare to keep this 100% safe if the Rachni launch a serious assault? Really? Because at anything less than 100% safe I don't think this thing is worth dealing with at all.

ETA: Also, keeping it around in any capacity leaves open the possibility that the Rachni capture and then weaponize the thing.
 
we don't know what stage this artifact makes sense in. maybe these 1mil y.o. precursors used mind control for their empire. maybe it was sophisticated enough to be man-portable. then again, maybe they were killed by another empire that used mind control to destroy their opponents. frankly that hypothesis is supported by the existence of the precursors and the protheans

In the first, like if we were to send people to study a depleted uranium round w/o knowing it's the end result of a firing sequence? We would learn about radiation poisoning. I fail to see how my analogy is IC falsifiable. Except of increased cancer rates we see an increase in subversive elements that exist like lolsec from the mid 2000s irl

in the second, at best we can see the results of that kind of weapon.. not worth the risk while we're at war
 
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you mean like if we were to send people to study a depleted uranium round w/o knowing it's the end result of a firing sequence? We would learn about radiation poisoning. I fail to see how my analogy is IC falsifiable.

except of increased cancer rates we see an increase in subversive elements that exist like lolsec from the mid 2000s irl

I mean...okay, even granting arguendo that the mind-affecting aspects of the device could be entirely orthogonal to its intended purpose, that doesn't make learning about them (and potentially how to counteract them) unhelpful.
 

thought about my reply and changed it, see if my new points change anything for ya?

edit: changing vote
[x] Fire it into the sun. Durrahe has the right of it. Whatever mad idea the Precursors had in mind when they engineered it, you can't think of any value to be had in learning how to implant anarchist ideology. Hell, any ideology. Despite how Lissa occasionally worries about you, you are not an autocrat, and you certainly have no interest in this madness.
[X] Put it on ice. This thing is dangerous to study even with detailed notes on its effects, but its principles show promise. It's likely that you simply don't have the technology to productively study it at this point, but you can release the research notes and wait for them to click for somebody. You can always revisit experiments later if a promising avenue of research crops up.
 
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