“The Academician’s private residences shall remain off-limits to the Genetic Inspectors. We possess no retroviral capability, we are not researching retroviral engineering, and we shall not allow this Council to violate faction privileges in the name of this ridiculous witch hunt!”
— Fedor Petrov, Vice Provost for University Affairs
Retroviral Engineering is labeled by the game as a sixth-tier military technology. Its major effect is that it unlocks a new option on the spy team menu when they attempt to infiltrate an enemy base. Instead of stealing energy credits, technology, or attempting to incite insurrection, the probe team can now also choose to unleash a carefully tailored plague upon the inhabitants of the city. If the spy mission is successful, this plague immediately kills half the population of the target base. Additionally, it also cripples all the defending units in the base, reducing them to very low HP levels that make them much easier to clear away.
The game interface helpfully informs you that this is considered an atrocity before you decide to approve the mission. I am not entirely certain how the atrocity penalties are applied under the covers, but it is considered less horrible than unleashing the Planet Busters. I believe that it equates to a use of nerve gas. Which means that brings a ten-year sanction regime into effect, cutting off all trade benefits from treaties of friendship or alliances, while making the target of the atrocity much less likely to ever sign peace again. The AIs have long memories when it comes to these sorts of things.
These handcrafted genetic plagues are created by combining the techniques made possible by Bio-Engineering with the will to power that is implied by Advanced Military Algorithms. Which makes perfect sense. But, as with the Research Hospitals, I feel the need to mention that an analysis of this technology’s dependencies shows that it requires Ethical Calculus. Which implies that the proper, objective Ethical Calculus is 100% OK with unleashing genetic plagues on your opponents! There are at least some circumstances under which that’s true, anyway.
Which brings us around to the hilarious timing of this quote. A functionary for the University loudly proclaims their innocence with regard to the existence of an alleged retroviral engineering program. Which could very well be true, were his angry denial not the technology quote for the Retroviral Engineering technology. So Vice Provost Petrov is certainly lying.
And quite naturally so. The University is dedicated to the belief that all knowledge is good. Restricting lines of inquiry for any foolish ethical concerns is Believer-talk. Even if it turns out one of the only real applications of the technology is to visit humanity with death-plagues as a new weapon of war.
But the other interesting thing that this quote reveals is that there is an official institution, reporting to the U.N. Council, that is known as the Genetic Inspectors. They are completely invisible in-game, though. Unless, possibly, they are the presumed mechanism by which the guilty party in an atrocity-event is identified and punished. Therefore, abolishing the U.N. Charter must also imply shutting down the Genetic Inspectors and all other such pseudo-enforcement/fact-finding arms of the U.N. Council.
Paean to SMAC 
This one is far funnier than I expected from this game.
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One of the weaknesses of my quote-based approach to this project is that you miss out on a lot of the humor, because it’s hiding mostly in the small interface details. Reynolds is a pretty funny guy. So, for instance, whenever you try to leave the game, a little sad voice calls out to you: “Please don’t go. The drones need you. They look up to you.”
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Simpler explanation: ethical calculus is sometimes ignored by the unethical.
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Or the weights assigned to the values involved are such that the needs of the state always win out. If preserving the Human Hive is the greatest of ethical considerations (WE DID THE MATH YOU SEE THE NUMBERS SAY THIS) than obviously it’s totally okay to plant smallpox’s big brother with a prison record in the U.N Department of Destroying the Hive. Not doing so would compromise the Hive’s long-term survival, which would be an unthinkable atrocity. The equations showed this, you understand
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Is it really an UN commission, though? I’ve always read it as a secret research with the university, that was even hidden from the public. And a proof the the provost was digging into Frankenstein like stuff that even his own faction had issues with. Two reasons: a) we’re talking about the provist’s private residences and, more importantly, b) it is a quote by the vice provost for university affairs (sounds like domestic affairs)
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Well, the quote says “will not allow this Council to violate faction privileges” which is an odd turn of phrase to use if it were a council meeting internal to the University.
It is odd, though. The implication of forbidding the Genetic Inspectors from Prokhor Zakharov’s private residences is that they’re allowed to go to other places – research labs and the like. So the University has accepted inspections. But if guilty, as the player is surely supposed to assume from the context, then did the University hide their program by moving all their biological weapons into Zakharov’s en suite? Maybe they did – I’m sure his “private residences” is actually a massive estate of buildings with all sorts of things going on there – including personal labs.
Anyway, what I find striking about this quote is the parallels between the University and the Soviet Union. Alpha Centauri was released in 1999, not terribly long after the Soviet Union collapsed (though I’m not sure, exactly, when the secrets starting coming out). The Soviets had always denied their biological weapons program, even under the reformist Gorbachev, but it turned out they were violating every bioweapons treaty from day 1, with an expansive network of labs. They hid it well, denied everything whenever suspicions emerged, and when they finally agreed to inspections in the 80s, they just moved everything to even more secret facilities (though it still left the american experts with plenty of questions, so suspicions persisted).
I do wonder if the quote is partly based on that. For one thing, the University faction itself seems like it might be aligned not along ideological grounds (as we are often lead to believe) but ethnic grounds, given that both Zakharov and his Vice Provost Petrov have Russian names. If not a Russian faction, then at least a Russian leadership. And for another thing, the Soviets were always denying things to the UN despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (see: Cuban missile crisis), so it’s fitting “they” would be doing this here with the Planetary Council.
Only Brian Reynolds can say for sure.
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Back in 1998, there was a scandal for months in the news about Saddam Hussien (the dictator of Iraq) refusing to allow U.N. weapons inspectors access to this eight “presidential palaces” to search for “weapons of mass destruction”.
Secifically, the inspectors were looking for short-range scud-type ballistic missiles that could potentially be used to launch nuclear, chemical or biological weapons at a city-sized target up to 600km away. What Saddam did to stymie the inspectors was move the scuds back and forth between the different palaces so that the scuds would always be in one of the palaces that the inspectors had most recently checked. Eventually, the inspectors got wise to this and got the manpower together to randomly check several palaces at once. Iraq refused to let the inspectors into the palaces and kicked them out of the country altogether shortly thereafter. In December of 1998, the United States and the United Kingdom bombed Iraq for 70 hours straight in order to destroy as much of Iraq’s missile and chemical weapon production capability as possible and Iraq finally disclosed (and destroyed) the last remnants of its chemical weapons stockpile.
This quote from the Vice Provost was actually hilarious back in 1999.
What Reynolds couldn’t have possibly known in 1999 was that just 4 years later in 2003, the United States and the United Kingdom would invade Iraq based on little more than the mere claim that Iraq was still actively manufacturing “weapons of mass destruction”. As of time of writing in 2021, some 2,500 U.S. military forces are still engaged in combat operations within Iraq.
This quote is A LOT less funny today when you know the original context.
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The Vice Provost is saying this instead of the Provost so the Provost doesn’t look like a liar when the UN Commission finds out the University was 1000% testing on babies to find out which germ variant killed 97% of an enemy population instead of 95%. You don’t have the top guy make the denial when you’re caught red-handed, you have your #2 who was probably halfway out the door for some other reason do that.
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