healing vat

Trope-a-Day: Clone by Conversion

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Clone by Conversion: It’s possible, with the right abominations of technology (basically, start with a healing vat and a cerebral bridge, then add evil) – but since you’re just using the original person as organic raw material, the applications are sharply limited. Basically, if you need reinforcements and have the equipment such that this looks like a reasonable way to go, bear in mind that you can get to exactly the same place in the end by popping along to your friendly local butcher and explaining that you’re buying meat for a family pig roast.

In many cases, this also avoids the ensuring war crimes trial, which is often a point in its favor.

(There is also the technique used by… certain intelligence agencies of covertly implanting sleeper agents with a Trojan device that permits an agent or an intel AI to be remotely downloaded into their brain, overwriting their original mind-state. But decent people shouldn’t think about such things.)

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

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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.)