Dragaera

Vlad and the Orb

Matthew Klahn mklahn at mac.com
Fri Aug 20 15:23:39 PDT 2004

On Friday, August 20, 2004, at 04:19PM, David Silberstein <davids at Kithrup.COM> wrote: 
[snip] 
>Anyway, this in turn got me thinking about Vlad and his former boss 
>Tagitchan (or whatever his name was).  Vlad admits that he killed 
>T_____ directly and then took over his operation.  So...  Why did 
>he do something so stupidly reckless instead of hiring someone he 
>trusted to do the thing?  And how did he get away with it, even 
>testifying under the Orb, of all things? 

[snip] 

>As we see, there's the strong suggestion that the Orb is not, and 
>never was, infallible at lie detection.  Perhaps Vlad heard how it 
>could be beaten, and took steps to do so. 

[snip] 

>Anyway, that's my pararectal ideation of the day. 

I am AFB right now, but I thought that he talked a little about this in _Phoenix_, and it was more like he was truthful, but skillfully evasive by interpretting and responding to each question in a way that would be evaluted superficially as true, but deeply as evasive. The problem really is that the Orb seems to only do the superficial analysis, as it doesn't have all the requisite context to do the deeper analysis that would show that the answer was evasive. 

In fact, I strongly remember that Zerika and Vlad talk about how he first met her when he had to testify under the orb. Can anyone look up the relevant text and confirm whether I'm right? 

Matthew Klahn