1 I had gotten the impression recently from one of the pilots that brought Florence to the compound that he was, in fact, under guard.  I'd have to go back and trawl the archives to find what it was, though.

2 There was also what the Mayor said about him.

3 Yeah, it certainly looks that way.

I don't see many other explanations for all the security around the compound.


As I see it the options are a) He is confined against his will b) He is working on something very dangerous c) Him being kept isolated from things is a condition of him being able to come to planet.

It makes perfect sense why. Kornada shows some of the crud that can be done by abusing exploits in Bowman architecture brains. What little we know of Bowman's character implies he wouldn't be trusted, if any should be trusted.

The security couple are another clue. Fresh immigrants, and kept isolated from the main population. Clippy may be the first one of these robots that they've seen. That also seems like a security measure that someone sees a compelling need for.

4

I personally wondered what might happen if it turned out Dr. Bowman looked almost exactly like Mr. Koronada, as part of an incredibly complicated Batman Gambit on Bowman's part. If Bowman could pull strings to put Florence on Jean, he could probably do the same to put an incompetent body double in exactly the position he's in and keep him there long enough to screw everything up. Florence, once inserted into the Bowman compound, would eventually see Bowman on one of the security feeds and assume he's Koronada, almost certainly begin stalking him, and only realize he isn't Koronada when she gets close enough to smell him.

But that's all just crazy speculation on my part, really.

5

I don't know about that.

But... I think it likely that Dr. Bowman had put a backdoor in the Bowman Architecture. Once he meets up with Florence, he'll have some noise, or maybe a verbal command (but only in his own voice) which releases all her safeguards, and puts her under his direct control. I keep wondering when that factory override (the smell that cancels all existing orders) is going to come back into the story, and I think that Sam is going to use it eventually to free Florence either from orders given her by Dr. Bowman, or from orders given to her by the guards.

6 It's pretty certain that some sort of failsafe would be installed in Florence's brain, but I'd be surprised if Dr. Bowman actually used it. The thing I like most about Freefall is that the main protagonist is clearly an engineer, and all the ways she thinks like an engineer are relevant to the story. Dr. Bowman is being set up as an engineer that thinks several levels beyond even Florence, and it's hard to think of that being an antagonistic role in the series, much like Mr. Raibert isn't really in an antagonistic role; regardless of how creepy his statements and thoughts are, he has never used any direct orders on Florence, let alone any failsafes, no matter how tired he got.

Still, it's probably an appropriate time, now that we've been fully introduced to the robotic equivalent of General Zod, to be introduced to the first truly evil engineer in the series, and shown just how bad such a person can really be. While that may be the new direction Mr. Stanley's going in, I still hope Bowman turns out to actually just be a brilliant person in a terrible position, trying to explore an unexplored field of AI and hitting every landmine along the way, only able to take basic common sense steps to mitigate the damage he causes.

7 I dunno.

Given how we've seen order priorities work, Bowman might not need a back door. He might have the highest priority. As for the security couple, I think at the moment Flo thinks they have lower authority than the vice mayor.


Tatterdemalian,

Again, I dunno.

We've been given hints that Bowman has character issues. I suspect that he is at least a little uncaring of some of the ramifications of his work. I think that if Bowman were entirely on top of things, entirely sound of judgement, and entirely moral, we would not be in this situation.

We've had a large cast of heroes tackling the Kornada situation. Chief, Max, Bill, Sam, Flo, Blunt, and Edge. Some of them are fairly sketchy in various ways, but they solved the problem by tackling the bits that were a problem for them.

Kornada is scum who wouldn't have gotten near that level of stuff if he were trying to exploit humans instead of robots. Clippy was following orders. He was made vulnerable to and exploited by Kornada because of inherent flaws in EU. EU is a human organization, a busy one, and hence didn't have adequate safeguards on what trusted humans could do with the robots, as Bowman designed them.

I think Bowman may be more of a scientist than an engineer. I don't know that he is "my mother's maiden name was Kihara" evil, but I don't think he is going to fix things on his own once he is made aware of them.

8 Regarding the Mayor's assistant, Arguably she's been operating under his direct order all this time, which means despite her concerns about working around her safeguards, she isn't really. He told her to do whatever she thought she needed to in order to protect the robots, and that's quite a blank check. And, as Pat says, he's right up there in the hierarchy. Only the mayor, and possible Mr. Raibert, rank him.

9 The exact wording was: "Do whatever you think is necessary to save the robots." That covers a lot of territory...

10

PatBuckman,

I've never liked the concept of engineers being in an adversarial role with scientists, but given the various other jokes made about people in various occupations, I suppose that's pretty likely to be where the series is going... "engineers good, scientists bad." The series has seemed pretty realistic about how the most successful people keep turning out to be the ones who use planning and risk mitigation rather than brute force or blind faith, and it would be pretty disappointing to have a huge lead-in to Dr. Bowman's introduction only to reveal that he's some exported clone of a throwaway gag villain from "Girl Genius."

11 Shopping for orders may be seen as working around a safeguard. I think her actions are correct, and in service to the ends of true engineering, among other things.

Tat, mostly an aside
Engineers and scientists are different. Strictly speaking, each practices a problem solving system that is slightly different, each with a history dating back perhaps some thousands of years.

These days, the issue is a little confused by the fact that we can train a person in both fairly easily and cheaply, which is what we tend to do with engineers. Flo here uses both.

What Bowman did involved a lot of engineering work, and science. A pure scientist without enough engineering background can stereotypically make something that works, but fail to anticipate how it will be used enough to disaster proof it to standard.

The thing in Railgun about how that one family is supernaturally predisposed to be evil and use science seems entirely unlike Freefall.