reading about Red Sands i found this bit of information that reminded me of something...
: Wouldn't you want to make sure that there was no way they could trace
: you back to Earth or learn any information about Earth? Wouldn't you want
: to delete any pre-launch data?
I have noticed that Durandal's records from this early
pre-launch period are missing, but that their deletion
occurred externally, and before Durandal became Rampant.
-- Ingue Ferroque (Terminal 3)
...as if it were from an old dream, or from a novel, or from a series of novels in which a colony ship's AI finds all its memories from Earth purged by invaders, to make sure that the enslaved colonists can't find their mother planet. in the Fleet of Worlds series by Larry Niven (which has been cited as influence for Marathon and especially for Halo) this 'slaver' race are the hyper-cautious Pierson's Puppeteers. very intelligent and more technically advanced than humans, they fear what could happen if the bellicose humans found out about the planet full of unwitting slaves that they've been carrying with them for the last couple of centuries.
by now we're pretty certain that the purging of Durandal's memories was something Strauss did in order to keep the semi-stable rampant AI quiet while he was in stasis (that was the latest theory, right?). but some things in the Ringworld/Fleet series certainly ring a bell, even if Jeeves and Durandal would never be friends ;)
best,
yaco\
ps: doesn't "Gw'oth" sound like something we would read in any S'pht term?
