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If bean ship is constantly in light speed until called home, then wouldn't beans children be alive in the next book after COTM, since ender lived 3000 years and he was constantly spending months at a time out of light speed and working in normal time, and he hardly aged until xenocide. Also, if beans ship was still in light speed, Jane was never threatened to die since bena's ship had a ansible and the earthgov could not be sure that it would be monentarily shut down.

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I don't have Xenocide with me but as I recall the flight Val took was about 3 or 4 weeks and for everyone else, 40 years. A rough estimate of 1 week to ten years means that after 3000 years of pure travel (outside time) is about 5.75 years of perceived time. Bean probably can't still be alive, but yes, his children certainly would be. Though it must also be remembered that in the Speaker books it references "newer" and "faster" ships, so it's quite likely that 3000 years ago a ship this fast didn't exist. It sounds like from the description that the Park Shift has been discovered (in Ender's Game Graff mentions that the ships are "slowing down", which is inconsistent with a technology of Park shift, since it makes apparently an instantaneous shift from near light speed to non-relativistic speeds, and while still making parenthetical comments I'd like to add than the term non-relativistic speed is a misnomer since no, non-zero speed is technically non-relativistic). If it has then about 6 years as a minimum travel time can be assumed since no time is needed to be spent on acceleration (of course the advancement talked about is gravity suspended acceleration but that could just be the early version of the Park shift). If acceleration is counted though Graff mentions just a few weeks I believe so that wouldn't seriously effect it and I'm not sure why I just went into that kind of detail on something that doesn't really matter much (unless he has to write about what happens when they try to enter society I guess).

Anyways, 6 year minimum time, I'm not sure what maximum time would be, around 10 years us a good guess, so I'd say they wouldn't be any older than 11 and any younger than 7 (very approximately).

As for Jane, remember a few things, one is that when they leave Jane hasn't been created yet, and two, she did have some networks that were never shut down, computer labs on various planets, one more ship with technology 3000 years old probably wouldn't have made a dent.

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Who invented the Jane intelligence? We currently have at least two separate explanations in all the books. 1)game program that was bridge to hive queens and modified
2)Bean's suggestion of modification to manage enders money and search for his children

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These aren't two incompatible methods. My theory is that the program was adapted to manage Ender's finances and then, later on, Jane's auia found this and made it the core of her identity, while still keeping the job of taking care of Ender's money. It's also possible that at the time they tried to adapt it (the battle school game) to manage Ender's finances Jane had already taken control of it and that's why it was such an easy transition. I like the second one the most actually. Either way this also explains why Jane always focused on Ender (I know, that was explained already, Jane simply found him to be basically the most intense person in the universe) but I like the subtext this gives it. Kind of an unconscious bias for Ender, she can't help but pay attention to him since he was at the root of her programming.

Now there is one problem which is that it is explained that Jane sought Ender out after going through the mind game files, this makes possibility one less likely, maybe even impossible, option two is still open though since she could've sought him out before they linked the mind game directly to Ender. It works in a time scale too since Jane would have been set free so to speak right when Ender wins his last game, which is plenty of time for her to find the mind game.

A note: the other possible time scale is that Jane is set free once Ender finds the new hive queen, which would make sense since that's when he is no longer separated by large space. But remember, eventually she is set free, long before Ender stops speaking to the cocooned hive queen mentally so she is not necessary for communication, merely for the original communication, and the idea that once the main hive queens died, she was let go makes just as much sense, especially since there's no reason for the hive queen to really care about distance in this kind of communication.

Hobbes

Posts: 10602 | Registered: Oct 1999  |  IP: Logged | 

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I don't have Xenocide with me but as I recall the flight Val took was about 3 or 4 weeks and for everyone else, 40 years. A rough estimate of 1 week to ten years means that after 3000 years of pure travel (outside time) is about 5.75 years of perceived time.

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Think of Jane's origin this way: the IF created her mind at Bean's suggestion, and the Hive Queens gave her a soul. The philotic connection between ansibles became her body. Mind + Body + Soul = Jane.

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[on Eros 'practicing' with Mazer]As he drifted off to sleep each night, it was with thoughts of the simulator playing through his mind. But in the night he thought of other things. Often he remembered the corpse of the Giant, decaying steadily; he did not remember it, though, in the pixels of the picture on his desk. Instead it was real, the faint odor of death still lingering near it. Things were changed in his dreams. The little village that had grown up between the Giant's ribs was composed of buggers now, and they saluted him gravely, like gladiators greeting Caesar before they died for his entertainment. He did not hate the buggers in his dream; and even though he knew that they had hidden their queen from him, he did not try to search for her. He always left the Giant's body quickly, and when he got to the playground. the children were always there, wolven and mocking; they wore faces that he knew... He woke too often in the night. Whether he was waking up to think more about the game or to escape from his dreams, he wasn't sure. It was as if someone rode him in his sleep, forcing him to wander through his worst memories, to live in them again as if they were real. Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him. He began to worry that he would not think clearly enough, that he would be too tired when he played. Always when the game began, the intensity of it awoke him, but if his mental abilities began to slip, he wondered, would he notice it?

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This program [the Fantasy game] was actually more intelligent than Jane was at the moment of her birth, but it was never self-aware until she brought it out of memory and made it part of her inmost self in the philotic bursts between the stars. There she found that the most vivid and important of her ancient memories was an encounter with a brilliant young boy in a contest called the Giant's Drink. It was a scenario that every child encountered eventually. On flat screens in the Battle School, the program drew the picture of a giant, who offered the child's computer analogue a choice of drinks. But the game had no victory conditions-- no matter what the child did, his analogue died a gruesome death. The human psychologists measured a child's persistence at this game of despair to determine his level of suicidal need. Being rational, most children abandoned the Giant's Drink after no more than a dozen visits with the great cheater.
One boy, however, was apparently not rational about defeat at the giant's hands. He tried to get his onscreen analogue to do outrageous things, things not "allowed" by the rules of that portion of the Fantasy Game. As he stretched the limits of the scenario, the program had to restructure itself to respond. It was forced to draw on other aspects of its memory to create new alternatives, to cope with new challenges. And finally, one day, the boy surpassed the program's ability to defeat him. He bored into the giant's eye, a completely irrational and murderous attack, and instead of finding a way to kill the boy, the program managed only to access a simulation of the giant's own death. The giant fell backward, his body sprawled out along the ground; the boy's analogue climbed down from the giant's table and found-- what?

Since no child had ever forced his way past the Giant's Drink, the program was completely unprepared to display what lay beyond. But it was very intelligent, designed to re-create itself when necessary, and so it hurriedly devised new milieux. But they were not general milieux, which every child would eventually discover and visit; they were for one child alone. The program analyzed that child, and created its scenes and challenges specifically for him. The game became intensely personal, painful, almost unbearable for him; and in the process of making it, the program devoted more than half of its available memory to containing Ender Wiggin's fantasy world.

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Nevertheless, a mental image was coming clear for Ender now, one that came from his own mind to explain all the things she was saying. The other hive queens-- not physically present, most of them, but linked philotically to the one queen who had to be there-- they held the pattern of the relationship between hive queen and workers in their minds, until one of these mysterious memoryless creatures was able to contain the pattern in its mind and therefore take possession of it....  "So when you make a hive queen, you already have the biological body, and this new thing-- this philote that you call out of the non-place where philotes are-- it has to be one that's able to comprehend the complex pattern that you have in your minds of what a hive queen is, and when one comes that can do it, it takes on that identity and possesses the body and becomes the self of that body--"

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"But you said that finding me was like making a hive queen."
 
  <We couldn't find the pattern in you. We were trying to make a pattern between you and the other humans, only you kept shifting and changing, we couldn't make sense of it. And you couldn't make sense of us, either, so that reaching of yours couldn't make a pattern, either. So we took the third pattern. You reaching into the machine. You yearning so much for it. Like the life-yearning of the new queen-body. You were binding yourself to the program in the computer. It showed you images. We could find the images in the computer and we could find them in your mind. We could match them while you watched. The computer was very complicated and you were even more complicated but it was a pattern that held still. You were moving together and while you were together you possessed each other, you had the same vision. And when you imagined something and did it, the computer made something out of your imagining and imagined something back. Very primitive imagining from the computer. It wasn't a self. But you were making it a self by the life-yearning. The reaching-out you were doing.> "The Fantasy Game," said Ender. "You made a pattern out of the Fantasy Game."
 
  <We imagined the same thing you were imagining. All of us together. Calling. It was very complicated and strange, but much simpler than anything else we found in you. Since then we know-- very few humans are capable of concentrating the way you concentrated on that game. And we've seen no other computer program that responded to a human the way that game responded to you. It was yearning, too. Cycling over and over, trying to find something to make for you. >
 
  "And when you called ..."
 
  <It came. The bridge we needed. The together-binder for you and the computer program. It held the pattern so that it was alive even when you weren't paying attention to it. It was linked to you, you were part of it, and yet we could also understand it. It was the bridge.>

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