(urth) Violet = Plutonium?

[David Stockhoff]

On 11/13/2011 10:10 PM, James Wynn wrote:much
>
>> Sergei Soloviev wrote:
>> By the way, the technology used to create chem "doubles" of 
>> councillors seems
>> more advanced than to create ordinary chems. Also we know
>> very little about chem officers (but we see that the capacities
>> of Sand are greater than of soldiers)
>
> I don't think so. The councilors and their chems have the technology 
> to convert chems. No one has the technology to create new chems (only 
> repair them--they can build taluses however, but the brown mechanic 
> says he has limits to what he can do to repair chems). Converting them 
> to look like specific people is simple movie magic since their 
> features are created by a plastic type mold (the specific words escape 
> me) overlaying a metal base.

Fair enough, although how do you make a mold without the target knowing 
it? Same with any scanning. I'll admit we now know that there are only 
about 80 facial types, so maybe a good technician could slap a 
convincing face together.
>
> The tricky part for the councilors was connecting the chems 
> consciousness to the the living councilors. This is easier to do than 
> it might appear because (I propose) chems were made to receive the 
> scanned, memory wiped souls of bios just as the Mainframe is received 
> the scanned souls of Typhon's family and inner court. That is why 
> Lemur's chem (soul overwritten when he connected to Lemur) continued 
> to live with Lemur's scan after bio Lemur had died. And why Rose's 
> hands inadvertently absorbed Rose's consciousness (this is the 
> emphatic clue that Rose's prosthetics are chem parts and not 
> "ordinary" prosthetics).
>
> Now, David's Violet-Plutonium explanation is very nice. How was Siyuf 
> fooled? She couldn't have been. She would have to have only been 
> pretending to use Violet's services in order to debrief her and give 
> her instructions.

aha! And then Violet could stay with Siyuf 2 to do the same for her, 
although whatever was planned didn't work to control her.

But I'm still skeptical. It's one of those mysteries where the minimal 
explanation doesn't seem adequate but the maximal one is too much. But 
at least we know why plutonium = violet, and the joke for Wolfe might 
simply be that the nickname works better the other way around for 
humans, but works very well for chems.

The median path might be that Sand's flirty joke is supposed to tell us 
something about Sand. He behaves in a very commanding, deliberate way 
after Auk resurrects him and he appears to be operating on his own with 
his own "knot." Has he changed?