Robotic Laws

I wouldn't worry too much about. Since these are schlock writers, I believe that Halima's sect can explain it well.

Let me help in this task.

While clones (defective or not) do not karmically attract the souls of family members and friends over the millennia... they do attract the dis-incarnated souls of yesteryear's whack jobs. Not that whack jobs can't find a home in a natural born baby but that's for another day, related to family karmic patterns, etc. We need a Buddhist theology class for that one.

So for the past 11,000 years, Joseph Stalin was wandering around, looking for a body to incarnate in but found too many average offsprings of stereotypical serial killers and somehow avoided getting stuck in one, to avoid paying back the karmic debt he owes to the millions people he killed during the years 1923 to 1953 (supposedly more than Hitler but a notch below Mao). In effect, those lives would have been others hurting him than vice versa.

In essence, Stalin's soul is that of the Batman villain, the Joker, the entity which cares for nothing and only brings destruction to the universe. And so he sees that opportunity when the Cleons were genetically tampered with and decided that number 13 (Yes, what numerological timing 🙄 ) was the perfect opportunity to arrive on the physical plane.

And there you have it, a setup where Day's trip to the Spiral opened himself to having feelings and then, seeing those feelings get jaded when Dawn was killed and discovering that his genes weren't so identical to Cleon I so that he didn't have to follow royal protocols forever.

That's when ... the Joker consciousness fully awakened and Stalin's complete soul incarnated in Day to now become ... the most notorious Emperor that the galaxy has ever seen.

@RandyO

I'll only buy your Joker-soul premise if Demerzel has a secret cave where she dons a Batwoman costume, complete with red wig, and heads out on her batcycle to protect Tarantor,

@D. Thorn This isn't Asimov and thus, Demerzel is not Daneel Olivaw.

Demerzel was the brain child of Stalin's chief rogue Soviet scientist, Dr Lysenko, before his death in the 1970s.

When Khrushchev de-Stalinized Russia after the evil dictator's passing in the 50s, Lysenko was striped of his powers, granted by Uncle Joe during the reign of terror.

The invention of Demerzel was that of a sleeper cell.

The idea was that one day, Comrade Stalin would return to the physical plane, long after the concept that there were dictators which had absolutely zero regard for any human life, whatsoever. I mean let's face it, even Cleon's got one or two soft spots out there. In contrast, Stalin had none. FYI, even Lenin didn't want Stalin to ascend (upon his passing) to the top of the Soviet hierarchy.

So this is Lysenko's revenge to the galaxy (which at his time was only the earth).

I'm a tech worker as well, having been in both telecom & biopharma.

My point was that the basics of Asimov's three laws (plus zeroth) spanned many books, not just Foundation, so that the legacy of the fictitious US Robotics was that the robots created post-22th century (or some other distant date from now) would not reflect the human ending psychosis of WWII and the Cold War.

So the mere 'pseudo code' was a barb (and nod) toward today's DoD where in effect, killer drones already exist on our world with only a remote controlled pilot around, as a fail-safe, so that a mission could be aborted w/o the higher ups having to account for a mistake to the Joint Chiefs. Yes, that room of operators could be fired if colonels and generals weren't playing CYA.

If you notice a pattern on this forum, only D Thorn, yourself, and I are even responding anymore. And as D Thorn stated elsewhere, you're doing everything you can to set up a scenario (from what appears to be an askance or oblique interpretation) where Demerzel has no choice but to execute Halima.

I simply don't see that. If Halima tells ppl on her home planet that Cleon cheated the test, she'd be labelled a sore loser and then, if she adds to it, saying that Demerzel was a robot, it'll look like the idiots we see on the internet, constantly harping about Michelle Obama being a man, given her upper body strength & muscularity. And I'm not even including the folks who think that JFK Jr faked his death 20 years ago and will be US President come 2030.

Halima lost the match.

Her entire M.O. was that cloning was an abomination towards the idea that human life comes from two parents and thus, only those offsprings have a soul. And only souls evolve. Without that doctrine in place, and given the fact that the leaders of the religion most definitely needed resources (not living on Bhutan's planterary system w/ 800K residents & plenty of rain), she would be the Fox Mulder or Alex Jones of the 12,000th century. Cleon would be better off, assassinating her a year in the future, after her boring lectures on robots running the Imperium only attracted the lunatic fringe of the fringe systems.

And as far as looping this back to the terrorists who tried to replace Brother Dawn, those ppl were against Cleon because they couldn't handle the thought of someone reigning for centuries without some succession to a newer person or newer political party/organization. It was clear that Trantor was not an evenly rich and prosperous society, post-bombing, so they blamed the genetic dynasty. Even they seemed too smart to fall for some fringe world religious conspiracy theory of robots running the Palace.