[] 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.
He who fights monsters should take care not to become a monster.
Yeah, but he should also take care to learn what a characteristic monster hunting call sounds like, lest one sneak up behind him and eat him while he is mistaking it for an unusual kind of sparrow.
If we are entirely ignorant of how mind control artifacts work, we have no way of identifying future mind control threats or blocking them.
Doesn't matter if this is reaper tech or not. It subverts people via methods we are incapable of detecting. The methods of securing the item are a guess based on limited, unverified, untrustworthy, data.
There is no SAFE way to study or store the damn thing. We trash the damn thing and study the mind fucked researchers and whatever data is left after wrecking it. Including the spectrograph of the thing burning in the sun.
The Lystheni weren't able to figure out how it does what it does; that doesn't mean we can't. We can always rid ourselves of it
after we establish that our larger and less batshit scientific community can't work out how it does what it does.
Anyway, here is what made me think this isn't the Reapers:
Taking control of someone and then force them to destroy the artifact/ kill themselves sounds much more like the Leviathans than Indoctrination.
It also sounds a LOT like what you'd get from someone who designed an anti-Reaper artifact to make indoctrinated/husked beings go crazy and self-destruct any Reaper equipment they could get their hands on.
Putting aside whether it's Reaper tech or not, we are not currently in a position to be researching this. Maybe later if we ice it and the Rachni war has ended, but for now we're focusing on setting up future integration of a vassal, keeping the war effort strong, exploiting the more relevant research opportunities we have (such as medical research yo), and so on.
This won't necessarily be a large project unless we put
waaay too much effort into it. The Lystheni try-harded this project because their dalatrass wanted mind control tech of her own. We just want to know what the hell the thing does so we can
avoid it.
Incorrect. I have the single greatest defense there is. A proper risk assessment.
That's only a good risk assessment if we have the power to impose our OOC Reaper fear on people who in IC have no idea the Reapers exist. Unlikely.
So what deliberate ignorance really does is, it means that if an enemy
covertly uses indoctrination against us in the future, we will have no way of knowing until it bites us in the butt,
hard. We won't be able to scan for indoctrination (as the Protheans could), we won't be able to block its effects in case someone starts covertly spreading Reaper artifacts around, we won't be able to detect or perceive it or defend against it, except by working out as we see the
dead bodies of our senior military commanders that "gee, I guess that person who just assassinated them was indoctrinated."
An outside reviewed set of reasonable and prudent safety protocols did jack and shit.
They did a great deal- namely, they stopped anyone who wasn't deliberately affected by the device, from being affected by the device.
In the second, Thanoptis killed herself after executing her task rather than going down in a firefight or risking being caught.
Point of order, Thanoptis was in custody for at least a short time after the assassinations; she is reported to have said things that caused people to conclude she was indoctrinated.
Except for the bit where their leadership went totally, insanely, stupid. Hopefully it was due to direct exposure. If not, they went nuts just because of the possibilities of what it offered. Sorry if I don't think such a thing is safe in anybody's hands.
The Lystheni leadership's stupidity can be easily explained by normal, garden variety dictator stupidity and craziness. No mind control required.
We're operating on different viewpoints here. What if mind control itself is so fundamentally toxic to our social structure that its very presence results in the collapse of society.
If by "presence" you mean "even the slightest hint that this technology exists," then I don't buy that; there's no plausible explanation for how
awareness that mind control is a thing or that it uses weird microwaves or something would just insta-collapse civilization.
If by "presence" you mean "people are actually being mind controlled" then sure, but the best antidote to that is to know how to ensure that nobody CAN mind control us. Which requires that we at least have a reasonably good idea of what mind control looks like and the best available means of detecting and avoiding it. We can't protect ourselves against a toxic threat we know literally nothing of.
Again, no they aren't.
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.
Yeah. The Reapers sure TRY to leave nothing behind, or at least no identifiable fragments of tech (I doubt even they can police up every scrap of flesh that comes off of a husk being shot at by military railguns or something). That said, they
do leave things behind, and at least a single digit number of Reaper artifacts turned up in the few decades immediately prior to the invasion of the 2180s alone. It's vanishingly unlikely that no one was finding other Reaper artifacts prior to that time; the statistical odds of Reaper equipment turning up
ONLY right before a harvest is hard to believe.
Just a bit of multiplication suggests that dozens of Reaper artifacts turn up every cycle. This is an
amazingly good record of policing up all their scraps on the Reapers' part... but not perfect. Also, it explains why the Reapers leave someone behind (Sovereign and the Collectors in our cycle) to monitor the galaxy; because otherwise there's a risk of some piece of Reaper tech they leave behind being reverse-engineered and giving the next harvest too much of a technological boost.
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.
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.
Uh, easy explanation for all of that: Sovereign (and Harbinger/whoever) had
reasons to want Saren, Benezia, Thanoptis who was working for them, and the Batarian government to be lucid. Likewise Cerberus. These groups were working on the Reapers' behalf in ways they could not have done if they were mind-controlled empty husks.
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.
There's a
fairly consistent pattern of what indoctrination does to people, though: it causes them to try to indoctrinate more people.
The Lystheni who got hit by this thing didn't try to expose more people to its effect; they became so obviously unstable and aggressive that it drew a hostile response from society, then they got killed, drawing attention to it. It doesn't make sense
either as the huskifying kind of Reaper exposure
OR the 'slow burn' subtle long term exposure they use to create deep cover agents.
It's the only way to be sure.
But sure
of what? I think it's the only way to be sure that when the Reapers actually do start futzing with us at some future time, we're completely prepared to "dismiss that threat" and have no idea how to prevent indoctrinated beings from penetrating our command structure and infiltrating us.
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.
Easy to deal with. Firstly, we put it in Sentry Omega cluster, where to get to it the rachni would have to kill us all
anyway. Secondly, we could easily put it in a remote platform with redundant self-destruct mechanisms that we can trigger if it looks like the rachni would otherwise get to it.
It's not like we would put the research station in cities.