- StealthSlasher2
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- Exalted Mythic Member
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Posted by: OrderedComa
Even though I disagree with him about Glasslands overall, DaeFaron is right about this, the flash clones were for the best. Out of 75 families only one getting suspicious and sounding like a conspiracy nut you'd find saying that George Bush and the US Government did the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks is a large gain compared to the alternative. 75 kids all disappearing on a galactic scale in similar manners and all around the same time-frame is going to raise a lot suspicions from people who normally wouldn't suspect a thing. I mean 75 kids all disappearing is bound to raise suspicions for plenty of people. I mean if my kid just randomly up and disappeared I'd have someone investigate it, and investigators are bound to find out about similar suspicious disappearances of 74 other children, and you'd naturally contact one of the people investigating one of those cases and you'd find a pattern, and so on and so forth, etc. Don't you see that just kidnapping the kids leaves far more questions than them becoming sickly and slowly dying of natural causes? Just kidnapping them is not something easy to shrug off, even if ONI tries to silently suppress or throw off the investigations something linking them at least in some way is bound to be uncovered, and that is not something they would want. With the clones, no one does any investigating, and even if anyone does suspect anything they'll come off sounding like a raving lunatic and conspiracy theorist who thinks he's always being spied on the government puts listening devices in their houseplants.
Now no one is saying that cloning the kids was some sort of morally correct action, but it was a smart one. And honestly, if the clones is all Parangosky is taking issue with (when many of her subordinates have done far, far, far, far worse things *cough* Major Smith *cough*) then the old hag is completely off her nut and is acting beyond ridiculous.
Here's the thing though.
First and foremost, at the end of the day going "what if.." parents launch investigations and somehow link 75 disappearances out of a population of hundreds upon hundreds of billion people spread out across the galaxy ultimately doesn't matter. What's being dealt with is what has happened. While the possibility, slight as it may be, can exist it still did not actually happen which is what the characters are reacting off of.
Despite bending if not outright breaking the rules all the time to suit their needs, ONI still has their own internal policy of what can or can't be done.
The AI BB even states:
She abducts these exceptional children, replaces them with flash-clones that seem to convince the parents, but then they develop terrible cloning-related health problems and die. Isn't that considerate? Anyway, she's breaking every statute on the book by using cloning for those purposes.
Furthermore to add to that. Think about what would happen had Halsey followed Parangosky's directive? Had the project been compromised would Halsey be facing the personal vendetta Parangosky is throwing at her? No. Though of course it wouldn't change ONI's tendency to give the public a scapegoat if need be, and Halsey is already a prime candidate as is despite approval from the top. After all, they had the same contingency plan in place for Cole if he had failed in his task at Harvest.
Second off, which was what the book was addressing in regards to just leaving it a kidnap scenario as originally planned. Children can and do get kidnapped at anytime for any reason throughout the year somewhere someplace.
Naturally when a kid goes missing, parents and local authorities will launch an investigation and go about on a campaign to find a lost child. With said child wiped off the face of the galactic public and undergoing training deep in the heart of a classified UNSC facility there isn't going to be any leads back to ONI, and even if there was it's competing with an infinite amount of reasons for a kid to go missing. The key to track the disappearances to ONI is to find a pattern, except there isn't one save for the children having superior genes in a variety of categories.
As we have seen in various Halo media, the kids are taken in a variety of scenarios from being snatched en route to school, taken from their very own bed, or elsewhere. Keeping the perspective grounded to what people within the universe have to work with there is no discernible pattern. Certainly not when you have to sift through the reports of much more than a billion people over several planets.
That's a lot of white noise to sift through to find a pattern. As individuals, their trails will eventually end up cold because each child was sent directly to and remains in ONI's secret training facilities on Reach which is away from prying eyes.
To quote the book on the particular explanation:
Vaz found himself drowning in questions, like why people hadn't noticed all these kids disappearing for a few weeks and then miraculously being found alive, but the colonies were a long way from Earth, and a long way from one another.
There were only seventy-odd kids involved. Kids went missing all the time. They were spread across so many planets that no cop would ever have spotted a pattern in all that.
And as far as current information goes, no cop has detected a pattern in 75 kids coincidentally dying from genetic illnesses despite no prior family history that would result in such conditions.
As BB states earlier in the book, all the clones died as a result of "cloning-related health problems". The parents were spoon fed a cover story about how their son or daughter contracted an extremely rare genetic disease.
Sure, the parents get their child back and get to watch them die in front of their eyes. But unlike the disappearing in a sea of other disappearances, the parents have a body and a cause of death. An unlikely cause of death. For those that would go on to question it, it would be readily apparent that if foul play was involved the average joe crook wouldn't exactly have the means to infect a child with. If anything, parents whether they know it or not would have a crumb trail to follow if they so much as ask "how did my child get this condition" and follow the family tree to find a cause.
Now in regards to your post Coma, I am not trying to vouch for where the morality scale lies for Halsey's method either.
What I am (and have been) trying to make clear to Faron is that Parangosky's reasoning for reprimanding Halsey is justified. It is not a question of 'what if' Halsey went down the other route, it's a question of 'Halsey did' go down the route she was not ordered to and the consequences of her actions fell in line with what was feared would happen. Saying that it's "retarded", as he puts it, simply because the what if scenario sounds more of a liability is pointless because everything stemming from the confrontation is all about what did happen. There is no way to prove that the alternative is worse off.
As for Parangosky being off her nut and acting beyond ridiculous I do ask...Is it? Now from what I understand you still have not read the book yes? So in that case I'll quote exactly what Parangosky's punishment for Halsey is for breaking ONI's self made regulation:
Yes, another project you were never told about. The fourth-phase Spartans. And you know why nobody told you? Because you sabotage as much as you create, Catherine. You're not a team player. But if you think you're going to spend whatever time remains writing your memoirs, think again. I have work for you, work that doesn't involve manipulating people, and you'll report to someone else and do as you're told. Because if you don't , I can do whatever the hell I want with you, and nobody will lift a finger to help you. How does that sound?
While we still don't know what became of Smith (and thus cannot make a comparison to how he is treated compared to Halsey), we do know that Parangosky has made a reputation of killing people (whether by her hand literally or by ordering someone to carry it out is not made clear) or putting them in positions that will intentionally get them killed (such as transferring them to a planet directly in the path of the Covenant's advance) if it suits her. For Halsey, her punishment is to continue working for ONI, but on a shorter leash. In addition to that, Halsey is reminded that she is no position to negotiate because as far as everyone who could help her is concerned (such as Hood for example) she is officially dead. So I do ask, how is that an incredibly intense punishment?
After reading a lot of the posts concerning Glasslands I find that it's particularly important to read the book for yourself before making judgment calls on a scenario whether it's in favor of or against anyone as there's a lot of exaggeration going about.
Prior to reading the book myself, I actually thought that Halsey was slated to be executed according to one poster in a thread on here, but that turned out to be entirely false. Another claimed that the Spartans of Blue Team went to go see their parents and were rejected by them due to their status as "freaks" according to another poster, but that too turned out to be completely false and based only the a single line that the information was declassified to the Spartans. Of which, none of them chose to look at it by the time the book ended.
So sorting through things with primary source in hand is going to be particularly handy when it comes to the topics springing up from this book.