why is there a word for that

[alicornucopia]

Finnah's just arrived at work to open the store for the morning shift; she has her apron on but hasn't put her hair up yet. She lets in the customer who always takes half an angle to determine that he wants four buttercreams, again, and then nips into the back to tend to her hair and check the overnight progress of the rock candy.

This isn't the back.

But that -

No, he's too tall to be Mial, if this is a Mial prank it's a stupidly elaborate one.

"Okay, I give up," she says, "what the hell?"

Comments

[thisvorlunatic]

"I'm a covert operative," Miles says brightly. "And a mercenary admiral. And a courier."

"I'm an exile," snorts Stalas.

"I'm a scoot racer," says Mial.

[unmarred]

"I'm unemployed," says Mark.

[greatcomposure]

"And I'm a research wizard," says Koridaar.

[isthisart]

"I've already collected textbooks on one apparently portable form of magic. Anything I can import from you?"

[greatcomposure]

"Elcenian wizardry doesn't work outside of Elcenia. But I'm interested in your apparently portable magic," she says.

[isthisart]

"It involves a lot of complicated drawing and I have no substantial evidence that it can do anything you can't, except be relocated to other universes, but Bar will supply textbooks on it. What about non-wizardry magic?"

[alicornucopia]

"Generally you have to be born with those," says Finnah. "You'd probably know if you had any of the kinds."

[greatcomposure]

"Purely for my own curiosity, I think I'd like a set of textbooks," says Koridaar.

[isthisart]

The bar quotes a price in aaberik.

"I don't mind buying them for you if that would be meaningfully useful," says Linya.

[greatcomposure]

"Meaningfully useful... hm, yes, I think so," says Koridaar, nodding. "Thank you."

[isthisart]

"You're welcome."

"I take it people who can be reasonably summarized as engineers make a lot of money?" says Aurin.

"Well," says Linya, "that depends on a variety of things."

[middlingalong]

"Linyabel invented the holo-pen, hardware and software, and they sell like ice cream in summertime on Zoave Twilight. She has a pet neuroscientist."

[isthisart]

"Dr. Cheung is not my pet."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Someone explain 'neuroscientist' in more detail?" says Mial.

[isthisart]

"Neuroscience is the rather medical study of brains. Dr. Cheung does groundwork in uploading, which would be the instantiation of a person's mind in software; it's at least sixty years away, even optimistically, but if it works it could mean universal immortality, and depending on some other factors possibly resurrection of adequately stored deceased individuals. I pay him a salary, reimburse him for research expenses, and provide software support, and I'll pay his assistant too when he finds one he likes, because that seems very cheap for universal immortality."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah, no kidding," says Mial. "Although I'm not sure 'software' sounds like a nice place to live."

[isthisart]

"Well, obviously that would require some work, in order for the uploaded individuals not to have to spend all their time in a featureless wasteland, but we've already got a lot of preexisting technology for connecting experiences to minds, mostly used for immersive fiction. Delivering experiences to an upload is almost certainly much easier than getting someone uploaded in the first place. Certainly all the tests will be on animals until we're extremely confident that uploaded people will not be better off dead. And if the virtual environment turns out to be very complicated or people simply don't prefer it, it should be likewise fairly straightforward to put them in robot bodies - or even figure out a way to clone blank brains and redownload them, although that's uncomfortably close to the current leading brand of functional immortality, which involves human sacrifice, and I'd want to be very sure no one would be tempted to take shortcuts with the downloading."

[unmarred]

"Thank you," Mark says dryly.

[thisvorlunatic]

Stalas squeezes Mark's hand and says, "I'm missing something here. Human sacrifice...?"

[isthisart]

"If someone wants to be immortal in the current state of technology, first of all they need to avoid sudden death in any situation that isn't amenable to cryopreservation and subsequent revival, and second of all, when they get very old or develop other intractable health problems, they commission clones of themselves, who grow at an accelerated rate to adulthood and are then murdered and receive brain transplants. This is not very popular and it's only legal on one planet, but it happens on a routine if not overwhelmingly frequent basis. Mark is a clone, just not for that purpose."

[thisvorlunatic]

"...Your world sounds kind of terrible," says Mial. "I mean, I'm sure there are nice parts too."

"Plenty of 'em," says Miles. "But, yes, also that."

[isthisart]

"Mark's half-alt Lalita - who was married to my alt Isabella - was genetically engineered, differently enough from me to have ceased to age and such that his blood, transfused, can heal an amazing variety of conditions very quickly, albeit not as instantly as it sounds like your lights can. So I may be able to make non-software-based inroads on the galactic lifespan with what he left for me to look at."

[greatcomposure]

"That's interesting," says Koridaar. "Does his blood make people cease to age too? Or have you not had the opportunity to test it?"

[isthisart]

"Isabella's received transfusions and hasn't noticed any effect over about seven years," says Linya. "But it's possible she simply wouldn't have noticed; I'm younger than she is and I can expect to look younger than a non-engineered person of the same age for my entire life, and our alt didn't share our face and was also shy of four years old. Perhaps she's aging much slower than she otherwise would. We don't have any better data. Bar can tell whether substances are safe for possible recipients that she has available to look at, and we have one full dose left - I don't need it to try to duplicate the effect at home; I have his genome sequenced."

[greatcomposure]

"...hmm," says Koridaar. "Is that a suggestion?"