CodeBreaker wrote:

Otherwise, you are probably looking at a Moderate cost purchase to get someone resleeved. That is how much a month of insurance costs, so its a decent cost to use.

You've brought up a question I've pondered for a while: How much do extended service plans cost on backup insurance? How much for the basic package to back-up once every six months? How much to have mercs hunt for your cortical stack if you die gatecrashing? How much for them to create/store clones of your top of the line morph, with all the bells and whistles? To purchase you an equally expensive morph, or simply pay out a certain amount equal to the price of your old one? Backup insurance seems so ubiquitous, after all, I figure there's a diverse range of options and price guides.

Quincey Forder wrote:

Something I've been wondering almost from day one (aka the day I got EP), is how big the Egobridge really is? And how does it look?

I don't think there is any mention in the books, so here is my guess: An egobridge needs to be able to scan and "reformat" all neurons in a living brain in a reasonable time (let's say an hour). That suggests that it needs to be able to connect to nearly everything with an enormous bandwidth. I would hence imagine that the bridge looks a bit like a current brain scanner: the morph lies with its head fixed inside a cylindrical space, where massive amounts of nanofibers penetrate the cranium to interface directly. It is likely a bit like a mini healing-vat. The fiber bundles are built by nanites and branch into the brain, where actuator nanites take the local commands and reconnect the neurons that need to be reconnected (this would be *messy* in a natural brain, but morph brains have no doubt been somehow optimized to allow this to be easy). When everything is finished, the fibers disassemble themselves and medichines remove the signs of their presence. The healing-vat gel is withdrawn and the morph can wake up. I think this requires at least a bed-sized device, likely not normally mobile. Note that there are likely simpler brain scanners for just uploading a brain without a stack. During the Fall they were mass produced: little more than a box where a sheet of disassemblers descended on a head, the scan data processed by massive nanocomputer blocks in the walls and turned into an ego file. These scanners are rare these days because of the prevalence of cortical stacks, because of the risks of such nanocomputer blocks, commonly occurring bugs (a part of the disassembler sheet is damaged, and a long column of brain tissue will be improperly scanned) - and because many people have horrific memories of the scanning.

Quincey Forder wrote:

I just rewatched the pilot of Dollhouse, and thought that the chair they use in the show would make a nice version of the Egobridge.

Good idea! Yes, that is how I imagine an egobridge. Although not as nicely wireless: How many bits of information does an egobridge need to transmit into a brain? We have ~10^11 neurons with ~8000 synapses each. To tell the systems in the brain what goes where, it needs to specify 8*10^14 pairs of numbers, each specifying two synapses. It takes about 50 bits to specify a synapse, so we need 8*10^14 * 100 = 8*10^16 bits for the full specification (you can simplify things a bit using compression and assumptions about spatial homogeneity, but you also need to tell the brain what strength each connection needs to have, so I think this evens out). Now, if you want to send this over one hour you need a bandwidth of 22 terabits per second. (Facebook reputedly right now has a total data rate of 4 Tbit per second) I don't know if you could use radio to do it; I suspect there is not enough bandwidth in the radio spectrum. Maybe you could go down to t-rays or even optical laser communications, but then it would be tough getting the information into the tissue. So I think physical connectors are the way: we are already approaching photonic ethernets that are approaching terabit speeds, and with EP tech I think this is pretty standard. Robert Freitas has calculated (can't find the reference right now, I think it is somewhere in volume IIA) that an optic cabling network with one connector per neuron could fit into the brain and not block too much of circulation (I have quibbled with his figures a bit, but EP tech is mature enough to have solved this problem). Yes, resleeving is an *amazing* operation. I can definitely see a mobile egobridge existing: rare, expensive but useful on remote missions. I think most fabbers will not be able to make a normal egobridge since it has to be certified to an amazing degree - you DON'T want to be resleeved by a crappy or hacked egobridge, so most ego transfer software is built to simply refuse downloading egos into uncertified bridges.

Quote:

When in walker mode, the "Egobridge morph/bot" looks like big flat spider with two to three feet long legs.

"IIIIH! A headhunter! Shoot to kill! I won't let the TITANs get me!!!"

Actually I did refer to it in the text:

Quote:

Then a spare synthbot could link with it, when a spare morph is found and be transfered in it.

it is said that the egobridge itself is the size of a breadbox, but quid of the need interface for the scan? I think that the egobridge is just the stockage/recorder unit. The version I submitted is a complete kit, most likely (way) more expensive and restricted than the baseline egobridge mentioned in your quote. would likely take a level 4 if not 5 favor to have access to it, and that's not counting the cost to actually acquire it! people most likely to use this version of the 'bridge could Cognite, DA, Medusa Shield, Stellar Intelligence, Oversight and Firewall.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

I think, given that a cortical stack has the ability to read an ego from a brain scan, it's evident that the technology to scan and record an ego is quite small. Meanwhile, a ghostrider module, which is likely not much larger, can run an ego. These are both clearly rather miniaturized tech.

Reading and recording are not the same thing as *writing*. As a neuroscientist/futurist actually working on the issues of uploading, I can somewhat swallow the abilities of a cortical stack - there will be *a lot* of nanowires in a brain with a stack (and the storage size is entirely plausible with nanotech). But actually *modifying* the neural network, now we are talking something far harder. Remember that neurons are branched structures that can be many centimetres long, yet connect with a precision less than a micron. OK, since this biobrain rewriting is far out in handwavy sf land where magic nanotechnology can solve any problem, maybe you can completely ignore this and allow stacks or similar-scale tech to write back (which opens fun issues of brain hacking - in this case there is no real difference between biobrains and cyberbrains). But if you want to keep a smidgeon of hard sf you should probably require some pretty extensive nanotech to reformat a brain.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

However, as someone perhaps too ignorant to speak fully on this topic, I'm curious as to why the nano-machine/equipment storage for affecting something the size of a human head would be particularly big. The software might require extensive storage capacity, and the nano-equipment might require extras I'm not thinking of, but the equipment is affecting a rather small object and, being chiefly nano-machines, doesn't seem to me like it would need to be particularly large.

My intuition is that the "writing a brain" part is very, very tough. You literally need to rearrange a hundred billion neurons and their individual thousands of synapses across macroscopic distances. This is not just something a local nanite can do, you actually need to build a whole infrastructure for moving the neurons and their branches around. Think of the machinery you would need to rearrange all plants in a jungle completely, without breaking a single branch or root. Maybe this can be achieved by injecting a small volume of nanomachines that builds an infrastructure (of what? most likely you anyway need on the order of 1.4 litres of building feedstock unless you want to scavenge tissue), but it seems that it would almost be easier if the brain was just disassembled and then reassembled. In fact, I think the idea of having biological brains in morphs in EP is a mistake. Reprogramming a cyberbrain is just a matter of changing the contents of a few hundred billion memory circuits, you don't even need to change the circuit topology. I can kind of see why the writers wanted to have "real" people rather than everybody but the flats to be cyborgs with artificial brains, but the result is some rather intense handwaving and slightly soft science. However, I don't have much problems with the idea of an egobridge being breadbox-sized when not in use. It is just that when it is in use it will unfold to embrace the head of the morph and then do heavy duty nano magic. But since the morph is clearly not going anywhere during this procedure and should be kept really still (remember, massively parallel surgery on the nanometer scale is occuring) it makes a lot of sense to combine it with a bed or a healing vat.

I would recommand reading Old Man's War, by John Scalzi. There is a VERY detailed upload and sleeving procedure...and also one hell of a Morph that would give the Olympians and the Furies models a run for their money that's a reason why I went for the helmet idea. it's scans externally the brain, injects and direct nanobes simultaneously in different points of the brain. Networked macrospoctic management of nanoscopic operations. What the stack do is saving thousands times a second the differences appearing in a pre-recorded synaptic mapping

(ROTFL) and to think that back in late 20th century, early 21st, the young TITANs were very liked by the humans. There were comic books, even a (silly) TV show! and now look! they're firing at us over the slightest mistake! People, really! I know the theme song was possibly the earliest example of an aural basilisk hack, but come on! Mommy Zoe! the humans are mean to me! would you smack them with your U-87 detached arm, please? like you did with that STO looser? that was so funny!