cryostasis

Defrosting

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A question I did not answer at the time, regarding this:

One wonders, when she was revived, did she reinherit back any of her titles or property?

Well, now.

Titles are the easiest one to answer, *there*, and the short answer is “some of them, according to their nature”.

To answer in a rather longer manner: if we for the moment discount titles of privilege (i.e., those titles which exist simply to be purchased by/to recognize the contribution of personal resources to the public good) and assume that private titles more or less follow the same rules as public ones (an essentially accurate assumption), it looks something like this:

In Imperial praxis, as defined by the Imperial Charter, there are three classes of titles: runér, praetorate, and exultant. The former two are both functional – by definition, the holder of a runér title has the Imperial Mandate over some demesne somewhere, physical, virtual, or abstract, and explicitly executes all the duties attached thereto. Likewise, a praetor holds some office somewhere in the Imperial Service, and the title comes with the job, to provide the precedence and dignities appropriate to the job.

Exultant titles, contrariwise, are not-implying-you’re-done-but-still-post hoc rewards for merit, accomplishment, and excellence, and as such are not explicitly tied to executing any particular duties except for the rather generalized one of continuing to be the awesome soph you were formally recognized as being.

So, the rules for these were set a long time before it ever came up in this particular case. Exultant titles, you keep and can reclaim; they have no dependencies on anything unless you go so far outside the pale that the people authorized to initiate such a case can persuade the Curia to impeach you. Runér and praetorate titles, on the other hand, are strongly linked to doing the job, and as such the condition there is and has always been incapacity. Suffering from “not-dead-in-the-most-technical-sense, long-term, whole-body frostbite” adequately qualifies as incapacity, so those titles do pass – but, then, unlike most Earth cases, they would also pass if you were merely comatose, or suffering from other lengthy medical conditions that meant that you couldn’t perform the duties of the office, because none of those titles are ornamental and someone’s got to.

You do, however, automatically receive the corresponding courtesy exultant title for ex-runér/ex-praetors, because that’s part of normal succession procedure. Which is to say you keep the honors of the position, after all, you earned them; it’s just that you aren’t the person people should be taking their petitions and paperwork to any more.

(As for the possibility of reclaiming those titles: in most cases, that wouldn’t be automatic, although your successor may choose to hand it right back to you. There are a few exceptions due to their own special rules: most House charters reserve the position of “genarch”, for example, to the oldest living family member with descendants, and if the person fitting that description happens to do so because they just came back from the dead, well – ain’t no rule against that, and they’re still the oldest living family member with descendants, so.)

Property-wise: That’s somewhat more complicated, and I don’t want to go into too much detail because that time period is exactly the time at which the legal rules on that sort of thing were in flux, and I have not yet nailed down the exact dates of what fluxed when.

In the modern era, of course, it’s not even a question. You aten’t dead until there’s no information-theoretically recoverable mind-state recognizable as you available anywhere, or alternatively, have personally merged with the Transcendent god-mind, so no-one’d even think about running probate just because you happen to be chillin’ right now.

Back in the day, of course, this was more complicated when you could be dead without being dead-dead, but Imperial law has always been much more generous than ours when it comes to ensuring that the dead can still get their will done, not like mere animacy should be able to impair the sacred obligation of contracts, after all. So it would not be at all hard for her, or anyone else trying this, to set up the appropriate instruments to hold her stuff in trust and then give it back to herself. (That would be necessary because it’s not like they could unprobate, as that would inevitably be ex post facto.)

(And she probably didn’t do that for all of it, either – this being, after all, still very experimental. And, well, one can always get more money.)

Trope-a-Day: Scale of Scientific Sins

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Scale of Scientific Sins: All of them.  Absolutely all of them.

Automation: Of just about everything, as exemplified by the sheer number of cornucopia machines, AI managers and scurrying utility spiders.  Unlike most of the people who got this one very badly wrong, however, in this Galaxy, almost no-one is stupid or malicious enough to make the automation sophont or volitional.

Potential Applications: Feh.  Anything worth doing is worth doing FOR SCIENCE!  (Also, with respect to 2.2 in particular, Mundane Utility is often at least half of that point.)

GE and Transhumanism: Transsophontism Is Compulsory; those who fall behind, get left behind.  Or so say all we – carefully engineered – impossibly beautiful genius-level nanocyborg demigods.  (Needless to say, Cybernetics Do Not Eat Your Soul.)

Immortality: Possibly cheating, since the basic immortality of the eldrae and galari is innate – well, now it is, anyway – rather than engineered.  Probably played straight with their idealistic crusade to bring the benefits of Avoiding That Stupid Habit You Have Of Dying to the rest of the Galaxy, though.

Creating Life: Digital sapience, neogens (creatures genetically engineered from scratch, rather than modified from an original), and heck, even arguably uplifts, too.

Cheating Death: The routine use of vector stacks and reinstantiation is exactly this.  Previously, cryostasis, and the entire vaults full of generations of frozen people awaiting reinstantiation such that death would bloody well be not proud.  And no, people don’t Come Back Wrong; they come back pretty much exactly the same way they left.

Usurping God: This one is a little debatable, inasmuch as the Eldraeverse does not include supernatural deities in the first place.  On the other hand, if building your own complete pantheon of machine gods out of a seed AI and your own collective consciousness doesn’t count towards this, what the heck does?

Trope-a-Day: Human Mail

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Human Mail: This is what “steerage-class” transportation is.  In the old days they’d freeze you down (Human Popsicle–style), and in the new days they put you into nanostasis, but either way, at the sophont shipping center they pack you into a body pod, stack them three by three by two into a powered (“reefer”) shipping container, and send the result off as freight to the sophont receiving center on your planet of destination, where they revive you. (Unless something goes wrong and you end up at the lost sophont office, but that hardly ever happens.)

In addition to being the favored transportation method of the poor and near-poor (because it’s obviously much cheaper to ship a corpsicle than something that needs life support), it’s also widely used for bulk personnel movements, like prisoner transfers, colonization ships, and troop transports.

Trope-a-Day: Human Popsicle

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Human Popsicle: Cryostasis used to be a standard way of storing people, and was taken advantage of for a variety of purposes, specifically including the Deep Star projects (subluminal interstellar colonization of the Thirteen Colonies, with ships full of frozen people), and, in the time after the prospect of fixing the dead was mooted but before the technology to do so was available, freezing something very close to everybody who died accidentally “for later”, in the Vaults of the Dead Awaiting.  Hates the permadeath, they does.  Some people, chrononauts, even used it electively for, to be closest to the spirit of the trope, deliberate one-way time travel into the future.  See history while skipping the boring parts!

In the modern era, cryostasis is an archaic technology, mostly replaced with digital archiving for minds and the rather more high-tech and less damaging/risky nanostasis for organic bodies, but the effects and the purposes for doing it remain much the same.

Trope-a-Day: Cryonics Failure

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Cryonics Failure: While not nearly as bad as some of the examples given under the trope – for example, with the exception of the ill-fated Valiár (Thirteen Colonies) mission, whose failure was the result of engine defects rather than cryonics problems, virtually all of the cryostatic colonists were revived safely on their arrival at their destination – cryostatis always posed some problems (due to cracking and ice crystallization damaging cells), resulting in difficult and medically intensive revival processes and often-severe “revivication sickness”.

Which is why, once it was invented, it was very quickly replaced by the more advanced nanostasis process, which replaces freezing by the emplacement of a “vitrification scaffold” which preserves the body over long durations, does not require extreme cold for maintenance, and is optimized for the stop and restart parts of the process.  Much more effective, especially when you can store the mind outside the body just in case.

Trope-a-Day: Cold Sleep Cold Future

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Cold Sleep Cold Future: Averted.  The thing about widespread immortality is that even the first-generation cryonauts, the people frozen en masse after fatal accidents from about, oh, a week or two after someone figured out this whole thing might be possible, walked out of the revival vat and into the embrace of old friends.  Future-shocked as hell, I grant you, but not exactly “cold future”.