Well, I said this elsewhere, but since CitJoe is porting over his 'that's a human response, not an AI response' bit, I guess I should port over my responses, etc.
Why would an AI flake out and go rogue in the first place. I've heard the party line that it felt betrayed by the kill switch, but that's a human reaction, not an AI response.
CitJoe, once again, we OOCly as-players-and-GameMasters
know - definitively - why Deus did what it did. Period. Please continue to preface all such 'well, fifteen years of Shadowrun history and out-of-character information is wrong' with what you started to do over on the other forums - 'I think', and 'In my game', and similar such things. Deus felt betrayed to his electronic core -
period. End of explanation. Opinion otherwise, but please keep prefacing all your conspiracy theories with such things that aren't going to lead the poor newbies astray. When we're talking canon, acknowledge the party line.
So why would Pax salvage and rebuild Deus if she was betrayed by him and she's so anti-AI?
My guess is that she loved having turned the table on him and keeping him in a "bottle" where she could lord over him was a vengeful thing.
To me there is a big question about how much of Deus she has? Given the way that things played out, it seems to me more likely that she had a bunch of fragments of his programming ... (clipped for space)
Beta essentially has the key, here - it is unlikely, <i>very</i> unlikely in my opinion, that Pax has any significant portion of Deus's actual code. Considering her competency with coding, I find it far more likely that, being embedded in Project Vulcan as she was, she was able to examine up-front the level of code that is required <i>at this time</i> for an ElInt. It's canon that she has, in the past, done some serious up-close work on AIs to screw them up and pervert them into Dissonance carriers. I think that, given her unique position of independence and playing both sides against each other so that neither of them get to look over her shoulder, she snagged a well-torn-up AI, wrenched its code around until the thing resembled (in a mental state) the 'I must get free / crush my enemies' psychology of the AI Formerly Known As Deus, and created its own 'print run' of CFD nanites, to be mixed with that of Cerebus / Eliohann just before or during the massive onslaught being used to 're-implant' him back into his brain-dead body.
As for why - consider the likelihood of anti-AI responses if it's 'made known' that the worst AI in the universe, Deus, was a part of this whole thing. Makes perfect sense to me.
Considering the fact of Deus's (apparently partial) return, though, and some of the info in the Lockdown book, would there be any chance that those rare head cases where the Deus personality wins out decide to start finishing the rebuild? Maybe dumping a bunch of Deus-infected nanites into the Harbor Guide system and booting up all 25 servers?
I would personally say not - simply because it ain't the real Deus. Current AI are at least one, and possibly several, degrees of magnitute less code-intensive than the Big Three, and there's a reason for that.