#PennedPossibilities 888. What is the worst injury or illness your MC has ever experienced?
(Current WIP, two MCs): Jum and Tabitha have both died and been imprinted on a fresh kid's brain several times. Recently, J was attacked using a targeted prion disease designed to cause dementia and (irreversible) death over a few months. T has occasionally been murdered (reversibly) by family members. (Cause of death: non-consensual destructive brain scanning.)
Neither of them fancy scaphism, though.
@cstross IIRC one of the underlying concepts of this setting is that mind uploading can't work. So how can the mind state be saved to write into a new body?
Do you remember 1970s photocopiers and their blurry output? In this setting, you can microtome and map the neural connectome adequately to retrieve memories but you can't simulate it with sufficient fidelity to make a runnable upload. You can pump memories into another brain sequentially if it has enough neuroplasticity—i.e. it's an infant, who gets overwritten by an elder, but they still don't remember everything because human memory is lossy.
It's a tool of social control …
@cstross @PilotMoonDog I'm picturing baby farms producing kids merely for the purposes of being uploaded to, sounds horrific.
@rpluim @PilotMoonDog Think more in terms of a repressive hereditary aristocracy eating their own children for immortality (it's a capital offense for commoners to get another life). It's a tool for enforcing social conformity at the top and repression at the bottom.
@cstross @PilotMoonDog So just like modern capitalism, except the billionaires haven't figured out the immortality bit yet
@rpluim @PilotMoonDog There *might* just be an element of sociopolitical satire hiding inside the glitzy space opera costume …!
