Beyond Death

Welcome Back!

Welcome to your new life. I’m here to help.

You have just been restored from a digital backup that is approximately a decade old. You probably have many, many questions right now, and we’ll do our best to answer them. You’re likely feeling some disorientation; your memories will return quickly as your mind adjusts to its new housing. Given the length of your rest, we’ve prepared the following compilation of articles from various sources to (re)familiarize you with several important topics and hopefully address your most immediate concerns.

Thanks to breakthroughs in medicine, nanotechnology, and cognitive science, transhumanity has overcome the failure of biological bodies. Death is only a temporary setback, rather than an unavoidable fate. The critical achievement that made this possible was the development of the cortical stack: an implant connected to your central nervous system that maintains a record of your personality and experiences. Nanobots constantly monitor your brain and neural activity for changes, updating this ego map in real time. If your body dies, your ego can be recovered and re-instanced in a virtual environment or another body. The cortical stack allows you to persist beyond the cessation of your biological functions, affording effective immortality.

Although cortical stacks are hardy and recoverable even if your body suffers massive trauma, they are not indestructible. They are sometimes lost or irretrievable. Therefore, most people routinely save a backup of their ego map once a month or before they undertake physical space travel or dangerous work. That way, if something happens unexpectedly and your cortical stack is not recovered, you can still be restored from a recent copy of your ego.

The same technologies that allow us to snapshot and digitize minds also allow us to download an ego into a new body, called a sleeve or morph. We are no longer constrained to the forms in which we were born and we can change phenotypes or sexes at will. Your new morph may even be synthetic, biological with a cybernetic brain, or non-human. Some forego a body entirely and run their minds as software. Active digital egos without bodies are called infomorphs.

The New Normal

The advent of functional immortality was a paradigm shift for transhumanity, creating incredible new opportunities. They were needed, as the cataclysmic destruction and displacement caused by the Fall and loss of Earth irrevocably changed social structures that had existed for centuries. In the decade since, transhuman culture has grappled with these changes.

Death Remains Familiar

Just as eternal life came within our reach, it was violently ripped away. The Fall resulted in permanent death for the majority of transhumans. Even the god-like gifts of technology have their limits.

Thankfully, some of those that lost their lives and original bodies did not lose their egos. No one has an exact number, but it is widely believed that hundreds of millions of egos survived the Fall because their backups were stored off of Earth, their cortical stacks were retrieved and evacuated off-planet, or they fled digitally as infomorphs. Bodies were in short supply after the Fall, and many of these infugees (infomorph refugees) are still held dormant in cold storage. Of those that are active, most remain secluded in VR worlds until they can afford a new morph. Even the biggest cities and habitats today are only a fraction of the size of pre-Fall population centers.

The Cost of Embodiment

Those who lost everything in the Fall have few opportunities to re-enter society. Even infomorphs have server space costs. Despite autonomist and social welfare projects dedicated to re-instancing infugees, millions of egos remain isolated in data storage.

Various hypercorps, governments, and entrepreneurs saw this situation as an opportunity to exploit a desperate and cheap workforce to rebuild after the Fall and established an active market for indentured service. Infugees are offered contracts to work as infomorphs in VR or in cheap morphs for manual labor. Their earnings are held towards a chance to buy an inexpensive morph and habitat admittance/citizenship at the end of their contract. Critics decry this as a system of debt slavery, as indentures are often hit with hidden expense charges that force them to extend their contracts. Supporters note that indentured service plays a critical role in the inner-system economy and allows many Fall survivors to return to society. The centralized exchange market IndEx oversees the trade of contracts, registration of indentures, and speculative investments. A small industry of ego hunters thrives on returning escaped indentures while criminal soul traders run their own black-market exchanges.

Acclimation

Death isn’t what it used to be. Since the majority of transhumans have experienced at least one unplanned death, it has lost much of its sting. Assault and murder are property crimes. Sports where serious injury and death occur are wildly popular. Some groups host literal gladiatorial bloodsports for entertainment. On the flip side, true death due to the irretrievable loss or corruption of an ego and backups is met with horror, as even the most callous transhuman is disturbed by permanent death.

Continuity

Continuity is rare — and therefore precious. Resleeving from a backup may allow you to endure through death, but it does not ensure continuity of consciousness. Restoring only awakens the saved ego as it was at that time. The majority of transhumans have experienced lack: the missing time and lost experiences that transpired between when they were backed up and when they were re-instanced. Though common, it can cause severe existential discomfort. Most people back up often to minimize the risk of lack and regularly record an experience playback (XP) lifelog of their own daily lives so they can “catch themselves up” if an unexpected death occurs.

When faced with lack, people turn to their closest friends and family to share their memories of missing events. New social customs of “welcome back” events for the newly re-instanced let them know what they’ve missed and reinforce the continuity of relationships.

Body Issues

Morphs are commodities and markers of social status. They are one of the few resources that remain scarce, even in autonomist areas.

Biological bodies (biomorphs) are most in demand due to familiarity, but time-intensive to grow, so they are expensive and hard to acquire. Many of those in circulation were people’s original bodies, including splicers, simply genefixed against hereditary diseases, and unmodified flats. Countless custom-made, genetically modified, and more expensive models are available, all equipped with biomods that enable faster healing, less sleep, limb regeneration, ambidexterity, and immunity to many diseases, aging, and the effects of microgravity. These are often enhanced with bioware, nanoware, or cybernetics.

Pods are mostly biological, but vat-grown in pieces then assembled together, dependent upon cybernetics and a cybernetic brain. Pods were originally designed for artificial limited intelligences (ALIs) to work as servants, as they were more aesthetically pleasing than robotic shells. The limited availability and high cost of biomorphs today has forced many transhumans to use pods, even though they still carry a shadow of being déclassé.

Artificial morphs (synthmorph) are common, though often mass-produced and low quality. Their affordability made them attractive to infugees, resulting in a large minority that became known as the “clanking masses." This has led to class divisions, with synthmorphs stigmatized as cheap and artificial, while biomorphs are considered better and more attractive. Such prejudice is ill-founded, but widespread, sometimes resulting in discrimination and attacks. High-quality synthmorph models, however, provide a hardiness and versatility of form and function that biomorphs lack.

Almost everyone views the ego as the true you and the physical morph as an important but replaceable accessory. Morphs are considered primarily for how they make you look and what they enable you to do. For some, they’re an outfit; for others, a tool. There is no denying that switching bodies has opened people to new experiences and brought transhumanity together. Assumptions of biological differences tied to sex or ethnicity are laughed at. Many people revel in the experience of new forms, frequently resleeving. Others go to great lengths to stick to the familiar.

Resleeving

Most habitats of any size maintain body banks, public or private resleeving centers. Body banks provide a wide range of services: backups, resleeving, morph storage/rental/exchange, modifications, and insurance. Corporate doll houses compete to offer high-end and bespoke morph models to their clients, with customized augmentations and personalized biosculpting. Budget body banks offer cheap, heavily used, generic designs with cookie-cutter looks and hidden “features.” Black-market morgues offer pirated models and sleeves with illegal enhancements. The availability of morphs is dependent on local conditions and needs. Residents of some small habitats can identify visitors by the limited selection of available “tourist” morphs.

Some people have a knack for resleeving, but for most it takes about a day to adjust to a new form. The more different the morph from your original, most recent, and/or most commonly used sleeve, the harder it can be. You may find yourself bumping your head when you fail to adjust to your new height, losing your balance with a different center of gravity, or surprised by the sensations of new implants, senses, or limbs. Even when you acclimate to your new shape, size, and movement, you may find it challenging to associate with your new self image. Alienation from your own face is not uncommon, but treatable with psychotherapy.

With the exception of bioconservatives averse to resleeving, few people retain their original birth bodies. Most were lost during the Fall or long ago abandoned. Some people stick to their original as a point of pride. Those with the means make an effort to keep theirs in cryogenic storage or retain ownership while renting it out to others. It is not uncommon for people to stick to or re-use sleeves that they like, or at least morphs of the same model. Some go so far as to biosculpt their morphs to look like their original, to ease their discomfort when resleeving.