Trope-a-Day: Body Backup Drive

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

Body Backup Drive: Standard practice in civilized transsophont space, using cloned replacements grown specially – or, for budget body use, travel, or temporary copies, any one of a large number of premade ‘vatjobs’. These replacements are designed never to be fully sophont on their own, though; their brains are designed to run the Universal Noetic Architecture platform, with a very simple maintenance OS to keep the body healthy when someone’s mind isn’t inhabiting it.

---

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2016/08/03/trope-a-day-body-backup-drive

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

Comments migrated from WordPress:

@joelkreissman <zarpaulus@gmail.com> on 2016-08-03 17:45:58 wrote

So, do the clone bodies have brains that are wholly or partially non-biological? I was wondering how they downloaded into existing bodies.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-08-09 20:09:43 wrote

Yes - not that that really says much, because you could say the same thing about everyone else, even the rare non-vat-born. (Nanocytes and nanosomes can self-replicate just as much as the biocytes and biosomes they live alongside, which includes along the germline - so being a nanocyborg, to use a term that no-one actually uses because it’s the new normal, is heritable.)

So given that, and the Universal Noetic Architecture-compliant 'laced brain that comes along with it, downloading is simple - just do the data transfer and initialize the mind-state vector, and it should take less than a minute.

That said, though, it’s not like downloading into a pure-biological brain is impossible, at least if your mind-state still (a) fits, and (b) is still close enough in fundamental structure to something that could have evolved there. The procedure involves injecting a whole bunch of nanomachines into the brain and having them literally move synapses around, manually reordering the brain’s neural network to match the download, and then “teaching” it to respond appropriately to stimulus until its outputs match those of the recorded mind-state. Which is slow and a spectacular pita to do, which is why UNA-compliant brains became so popular in the first place…