Trope-a-Day: Living Relic

Living Relic: Quite a few, including some cryonauts and other last-survivor types, but the most common form of these is still-readable archives left behind by dead civilizations.  Many of which archives include suspended mind-states – sometimes biological but more often AI – or recipes to create AIs, as part of their contents.

While some of these are, indeed, lights flung into the future or bearers of the ancient wisdom of forgotten civilizations, enough of a minority of them are examples of the kinds of dangers I’ve mentioned under Gone Horribly Right or will later mention under Sealed Evil in a Can that blithely cooking up recipes you dug out of ancient archives is something you should approach with approximately the same caution as poking Cthulhu with a stick.

(Nonetheless, there are major commercial entities – say, Probable Technologies, ICC – who make a living doing it.  So it goes.  They also make a living selling spin-off technologies with names like “meme-gap archive recovery systems” and “broad-spectrum gigaton-range autodestruct protocols”.  So that goes, too.)