bioroids

Trope-a-Day: Belly Buttonless

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(I thought I’d do my trope-a-day to match the Blogging from A to Z letters, too, if you’re wondering. That way everyone gets double the pleasure, double the fun… or at least double the posts.)

Belly Buttonless: Averted. Of course clones have them. How did you think they got their nutrition in the exowomb/cloning vat?

(Bioroids, now, they don’t have them because they’re assembled from the equivalent of 3D-printed organs on a framework, not grown as a single organism. But they’re meat robots, not any kind of natural being.)

Trope-a-Day: Henchmen Race

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Henchmen Race: Not unknown, but highly discouraged in the Accord worlds on rights-of-sophonts ground, where it involves modifying or uplifting an existing species.  Various people’s bioroids, on the other hand, may appear to play the trope straight, but as usually-non-self-replicating biological robots devoid of any threshold autosentience or self-will of their own, they probably don’t count as a race.

Trope-a-Day: Artificial Human

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Artificial Human: Lots of them (well, not humans), historically – for a while in the historical period in which biotech was moving faster than digital sophotech, there was quite the fad for constructing “bioroids” – vat-grown (not generally being equipped to be self-replicating) “meat robots”, without volition/threshold autosentience and therefore without personhood, but sapient enough to be useful.  Which is to say, functionally, they’re golems.

In the modern era, of course, the distinction between a bioroid (which is now more properly a term for a type of bioshell) and a bioshell running a non-sophont AI is purely nominal.

(Clones, uplifts, and other sophont artificial people are mentioned elsewhere, and so will not be here.)

Trope-a-Day: Ambiguous Robots

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Ambiguous Robots: Between one advancement and another, mechanical robots, biological bioroids, cybernetic implants for biological bodies (including nanocytes and nanosomes), biological organ-implants for mechanical bodies (including skin and flesh coverings, with active nerve integration), and biomimetic materials… well, yes, the middle ground is getting rather ambiguous, isn’t it?  Half the time, even the designers aren’t sure.