bioshells

Intellectual Property

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“You don’t need a license for patent S/03218B915. If you’d looked it up, you’d have seen that – it was granted to Cognitech and Biogenesis back in the 2300s. Five-thousand years in the public domain, more or less.”

“So what is it, and why are you killing people over it?”

“‘A Method and System for Artificially Stimulating the Growth of Mature Synaptic Function in the Biosapient Brain While Preventing Logos Iteration’.”

“…which is?”

“How you grow a working brain without a mind in it, and without accidentally getting a mind in it, when the brain requires stimulus and interaction with the world in order to structure itself properly. Very complex, very technical – or it was back in the 2300s – still quite expensive, and ethically critical, of course.”

“I don’t get it.”

“There are two ways to grow a working bioshell. One of them is described in patent number S/03218B915. The other one is to grow yourself a regular kid, let ’em walk and talk and run and jump and play when you aren’t putting them through hard conditioning routines until the crucial brain structures have been laid down. Or grab one off the street, but the customers like their meat fresh.

“Then you hit ’em with enough catacinin or other selective synapse-buggerer to turn their cortex into neuron soup and sell the result as a cheap blank. Usually without a label describing how your low, low prices are the product of murderous industrialized paediculture.”

– an eigeninterview from the Expansion Regions

Trope-a-Day: Wetware Body

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Wetware Body: Bioshells, when inhabited by digisapiences.  No more difficult than the opposite, or indeed putting biosapient minds in them, or digisapiences in cybershells.  Also, not known for any side effects; a digisapience in a bioshell is no more emotional than it would have been anyway, although it may take them some time to get used to bodily sensations.

Trope-a-Day: Remote Body

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Remote Body: The standard operating system (the Minimal Maintenance Architecture) that’s part of just about any cybershell or bioshell on the market lets them be teleoperated as an alternative to actually downloading yourself into them.  It works pretty well, except when absurdly fast reactions are required, or there’s significant light-lag.

Trope-a-Day: Non-Mammal Mammaries

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Non-Mammal Mammaries: Averted, except in the highly specialized case of bioshells (emulating species in which one sex or another has, ah, notable mammary glands) built for infomorphs who prefer their sexual characteristics to match their gender-emulating code.

Assuming you don’t make the point that mammalianism is a trait that goes with the body, whatever the mind that’s in it, anyway, which is probably a more valid way to look at things in the first place.

Trope-a-Day: Gender Bender

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Gender Bender: Fairly trivial to achieve with Empire-level biotech, whether done by growing an opposite-sex bioshell (or, y’know, other sex; it’s not like hermaphrodite and neuter haven’t been invented, and not every species uses the same sexes anyway) and mindcasting into it, or if one is of one of the clades that has the facility built in (hermaphromorphs).

Also, not exactly uncommon. It’s distributed much like the Kinsey scale mentioned in Bi The Way; while there are at one end of the notional scale people who have one preferred sex they use all the time, and at the other end of the scale people who change sex about as often as they change pants, the majority of people are somewhere in the middle and are mostly/but sometimes. Certainly, it would be very unwise to assume that the person one’s talking to had always been the same sex, even if only just to see what it’s like.

(ObControversy: Gender-identity-wise, the processes use involve rewriting the subconscious – but not the conscious – aspects such that one feels comfortable in one’s new body. After all, it would rather suck having to figure out how these new organs work and what they’re telling you, or having to relearn how to walk ’cause your hips don’t work that way any more, etc.

*Here*, some people would undoubtedly suggest using that to “cure” transsexuals, rather than the equally possible “so, change your sex to what you feel it ought to be, already” option.

*There* – well, a people who worship with fluency, fervor and zeal at the altar of self-identity and personal autonomy aren’t, obviously, going to have any truck with that idea. And, if asked for an opinion, would tell people to go with whichever option they felt best represented their own concept of themselves, because who you want to be is your own damn business, other people’s narrow views and naturalistic fallacies be damned. [In practice, I suspect that usually means the latter option.]

And on an authorial note, I find it preferable to depict a society that refrains from being assholes even when the technological option exists rather than ensure that the option doesn’t exist because many-real-Earth-humans would be assholes with it. YMMV, but mine feels no need to project monkey-brain phenomena on the rest of the universe. It has its own.

Here endeth the speechifying.)

Sysadmins Wanted, Infomorphs Preferred

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SYSADMINS WANTED, INFOMORPHS PREFERRED – Site systems administrators wanted to manage long-range extranet relay stations in the Expansion Regions. Infomorphs preferred, cybershells and bioshells accepted but must provide own IMS44 hab module and breathing gases if necessary. Companions accommodated at own expense. Skills required: IIP, extranet interchange routing, cloud servers, auton agent management, local-space mesh, including wireless EM and whisker-laser, metashl scripting, tangle, blacknet protocols, and interchange perimeter security (min. 6 wall-clock years live experience). Psych requirement: no to minimal negative isolation response. 2-year contract, pays 24k over standard for hardship/hazard, full backup cover and personal bandwidth allowance. Contact Litheia Elethandrion, Sophont Contracting, Outer Ring Netweavers, ICC.

Trope-a-Day: Uncanny Valley

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Uncanny Valley: Largely averted where other species are concerned, simply because they’re far enough apart in appearance from each other that it never comes into play.  (Now, eldrae and humans, both being humanoids, are probably close-and-yet-far-away enough to fall right into this where each other are concerned – proportions off, and yet too perfect, too serene, move too smoothly, body language is all wrong – yet another reason why I don’t plan on touching that particular First Contact.)

A recognized phenomenon in robotics design where androids and gynoids are concerned; mostly averted in practice because it is a recognized phenomenon, and so cybershells of this kind tend to be either very, very good indeed, or deliberately robotic enough not to trigger it.  And if you really want something that looks that human species-like, you can always go bioshell.  Of course, much the same thing applies to bioshells with certain types of extreme augmentation, which their designers have to take into account.

This whole thing, of course, is all inconvenient enough that it’s an instinct the bioengineers are working hard on ripping out through their xenophobia elimination program…