What Do You Mean, It Doesn’t Grow On Trees?

What is cryptid-currency? It’s the latest brainstorm to come out of the convergence of bankers, cryptographers, and genetic engineers – a blockchain-based form of cryp designed to use the photosynthetically-powered computing capacity of mesh-networked genetically enhanced trees to provide the validation and storage necessary to operate the cryp’s backing protocol, combining environmental friendliness and stealthy operation in a single package.

All you need to do is find the trees. You’re looking for at least six (the minimum needed to form a functional server-grove with enough combined power to reach distant networks) – and bear in mind that since many varieties have been created, such as the byteoak, the moneple, the wishwillow, the cashelm, and the greenwood, not all trees in the grove are necessarily identical. Indeed, the converse is also true, and identical-appearing trees may be of different protocol varietals.

At this point, you can register an account with the appropriate wallet application for the cryptid-currency in question, running on your more conventional computing device. Since no special peripherals are required on ubiquitous cognitive radio hardware, all the data is stored in the tree’s logs (sic), and cryp applications tend to support steganographically concealed keys, a self-destructing app can effectively hide your use of tree-cryp from any and all nosy chaps out there.

So now let’s take a look at some of the more popular cryptid-currencies out there…”

– excerpted from Profiting on the Woodblock-Chain:
A Guide to Cryptid-Currency

Oops

acc3BE: A gene complex used with artificial chromosomes which causes those chromosomes to lose their centromeres in the process of meiosis, thus reducing the genome present in the resulting germ cells to baseline-equivalency. This permits clades augmented with artificial chromosome-based enhancements to be reproductively compatible with both the baseline and with the majority of other clades also possessing the acc3BE complex.

– Bioaugmentation: A Pocket Reference

* * *

From: Clinic Director
To: All Staff
Subject: Nomenclature and Tact

Gentlesophs,

Please remain aware that here at the Nepenene Somatic Clinic a majority of our clients are from out of town, including many from polities where enhancement is not, as it is in Imperial space, thoroughly pervasive; baselines are not rare to the point of nonexistence; and, indeed, the use of biotechnology is considered with varying degrees of caution, skepticism, and even aversion.

As such, when explaining the function of artificial chromosomes and the fertility-preserving function of the acc3BE complex to our clients, be sure always to refer to its operation by its proper technical name, “baselining excision”, and not, whatever the current chic snark may be at other augmenteries, as “bestiality enable”.

A certain junior attending’s slip of the tongue has already required me to calm down and make contractual concessions to one offended client this month, and I do not care to do so again.

Am I clear?

Doctor AGATTACCATTAGGCG, EFGc, IRCGE, IFNS,
Director of Augmentation,
Nepenene Somatic Clinic

 

Trope-a-Day: You Gotta Have Blue Hair

You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Not all the uses of genetic engineering – or other technologies, including that shampoo that turns regular hair into a fully-functional LCD display surface for a week or two – are for even vaguely utilitarian purposes.  Enough said.

(As a side note, the silvertouched – see Our Dwarves Are All The Same – do this naturally with some metallic colors, due to their symbiotic silverlife accumulating metal within their bodies, which turns into metallic strands in among their hair, among other things.)

Trope-a-Day: We Will Have Perfect Health In The Future

We Will Have Perfect Health In The Future: Seeing as the top level of medical treatment in the advanced civilizations is to replace your body with a brand new one, fresh out of the tanks and still with that new flesh smell… played very straight.

Somewhat subverted inasmuch as regular medical technology (genetic engineering, artificial immune systems, healing vats, nanosurgeons, etc., etc.) makes it rather more efficient just to stay there and fix the current one than move for minor illnesses, but then, being able to spray a nanofluid up your nose and have your respiratory infection vanish in under an hour is close enough to perfect health for most purposes.  (This, of course, only being necessary in the case when you’ve managed to contract something genuinely new, or else failed to keep up with the service packs for your artificial immune system.)

Trope-a-Day: Scale of Scientific Sins

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?

Conception

CHanith Desúmé, Dinéval Eugenesis Pty., to Laurë Minaxianos and Ryal Cerron-ith-Oléron, greetings.

Permit me first to apologize for the delay in proceedings; since both the chloromorph dryad clade and the alaereldrae aquanaut clade represent extensive whole-body modifications, we thought it best to take particular care in stripping clade-template alterations from your parental genomes before attempting recombination.

As is our usual practice, we have sequenced twelve alternative randomized recombinations for you to choose from. All have been upgraded to the latest alpha baseline genetic standard, and equipped with both the rieltelir talentic-world tolerance biomod, and the particular hair color recovered from the archive sample of Citizen Minaxianos’s grandmother, per request. Since no gender preference was indicated, this was left to the randomization process to determine: your current selection includes five female, four male, two herm, one neuter.

Please make an appointment to come in to the office and meet your potential children! If our current designs are suitable, we can begin zygote printing and embryogenesis immediately.

Hanith Desúmé

for and on behalf of

Dinéval Eugenesis Pty.

Trope-a-Day: Mix-and-Match Man

Mix-and-Match Man: Happened a lot more in the early days of genetic engineering – and still sometimes happens when the spouses in a multiple marriage of one schema or another wish to have a child that’s descended from all of them – but these days, if you want your child to have some specific traits, you just order those sequences out of the Colonial Genetics, Biogenesis, FleshTech, etc., catalog.

Trope-a-Day: Human Subspecies

Human Subspecies: Okay, no, since there are no humans.  (Or, at least, none worth speaking of.)  However, once the genetic engineers really got working, there are literally thousands of eldrae subspecies, galari subspecies, myneni subspecies, kaeth subspecies, esseli subspecies – although, with the esseli, it’s proceeded almost to the point that each individual is his very own species – and so on and so forth.  People adapted to space, to alien planets, to some social ideal, to live underwater, to stand up under high gravity, to photosynthesize, to reproduce parthenogenically, to fly with their own set of wings, to breathe different atmospheres, to dwell in solar coronas, to… well, it’s a really long list.

Trope-a-Day: Homosexual Reproduction

Homosexual Reproduction: This is a trivial matter of routine bioengineering.

(Says it all, really.)

…actually, since this is so short and so is the one that linked to it, here, have that one too…

Has Two Mommies: See Homosexual Reproduction.  Obviously, this happens a lot, as does its Spear Counterpart.

…and to add…

And when I say routine, I mean: off-the-shelf exowombs and off-the-shelf gengineering. They let the newly minted journeysophs do it. It’s easy.

Trope-a-Day: Inhumanly Beautiful Race

Inhumanly Beautiful Race: Quite possibly, since the eldrae started out a very pretty people and have been engineering further in this direction for a long damn time; of course, it’s not like they aren’t happy to sell this technology on the open market in the interests of a more beautiful universe.  (And, of course, assuming they don’t fall directly into your Uncanny Valley; the trouble with being a product of postsophont genetic engineering is that you look like a product of postsophont genetic engineering.  This troubles the eldrae not at all, but your awe/unease/horror/fear may vary.)