Life and Death

If you've been reading my space opera serial Chronicles of the Deep Patrol (available at a website near you for the low low price of £0.00) you'll be aware that someone died and then got better. What's that about? I confuse the issue with this piece that talks briefly about the changes that have occurred after the passing of the Wavefront to the concepts of...

Life and Death

In the wake of the Wavefront questions of life and death became more complex, tying into concepts of identity and personal history. Cloning, already in its infancy before the Event, is now fairly commonplace. A standard clone, with no continuity of experience, is simply another individual, genetically an identical twin but in memory and personality their own person.

A Doppelganger goes further down the route; as well as having the identical physical template as the original a Doppelganger will have the same memories. A clone with implanted memories will not have the accidental physical characteristics of the progenitor of course. However more exact copies can be made; a strong AI with bio-fabbers can effectively create a human copy that is indistinguishable.

Post-scarcity civilisations may allow what is essentially a branching of a personal timeline as the splitting of resources between the two or more individuals does not place a strain on the original. Deep Patrol policy is not to encourage such duplication, and in the event that it occurs privately or accidentally, to assign doppelgangers to separate posts, relativistic distances apart.

In the event that a Deep Patrol member has backed up their memories then in the event of death or loss, an adult clone is revived or forcegrown, and the memories implanted to create a new version of the individual. This crude doppelgangering is often flawed. Memories may be hazy, personalities changed by the experience. Although grown from the same genetic template, a forcegrown clone is subtly different to the original body, leading to the feeling of being a stranger in their own skin. Although legally the same person there are often changes in temperament.

If a non-identical body has some continuity of memory and identity, then what of the recorded memories in other substrates? Simulated humans in computer simulations, and in robot bodies exist, functionally immortal until the machinery holding the data degrades. Other minds, human and otherwise, can be transferred from human bodies to simulations, machine bodies, or non-human bodies. Without the guidance of a Strong AI there is often loss or damage, and as a Strong AI can recreate the mind independently, it can also alter it invisibly.

A final complication is time. Faster than light travel already takes objects and people outside their natural light cones, breaking relativistic cause and effect. The actions of the Wavefront have apparently embedded people and worlds further back in time than when they were swept away; thousand year empires are not unknown on planets that were uninhabited a century ago and deep time structures have been observed. Occasionally the historical record unearths people known to have been alive later on Earth or in charted space, displaced in time and space and duplicated. Are they truly split by the timeline, or simply another type of doppelganger with a more complex, though spurious, provenance?

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