Anyway, it's plenty ordinary… among those rich enough to have biomorphs and spare biomorphs.

Getting a clone of your favorite original body might be a common desire of people. Sure, you can get biosculpting, get a mesh-order facial restructuring nanomachine injection or spend a short while in a healing vat to remodel yourself. But some people do not think this is "real". So there is a market for clones. The cost of the clone body is presumably due to 1) the service of taking a sample cell (or, extracting DNA from something, inserting it into a host cell and getting it to start dividing), 2) culturing it into a body of the right age (requiring some force growth if you want it soon), and 3) installing the bioware, enhancements and other infrastructure that turn it into a morph. I would guess that with EP tech all these are fairly routine. 1 likely takes an hour (minor favour), 3 at most a day (moderate favour). I would assume the total effort spent during 2 is somewhere just above moderate (a few days of tending the process, finetuning development and testing things). As I see it, healing vats can do radical force growth that builds a clone in about a week: I think the max speed of the cell cycle is about 5 divisions per hour at *really* high growth factor concentrations, while normally for fast growing human cells it is around 24 hours. To get 10^14 cells, you need 46 generations, which can be done in 9.3 hours to 46 days. Many cells also need to extend branches (axons normally grow about a millimetre per day). So a week is probably around the limit - at this point the body is more like a pod that is assembled cultured cell by cultured cell. At this extreme all the individual characteristics are due to cells being placed where they ought to be rather than having grown. Slower growth actually produces a body that is an organic unity.

Yerameyahu wrote:

Whatever the science, we know the RAW is 1.5-2 years for a biomorph, 0.5-1 years for a pod, accelerated.

I think this makes sense if you actually want to have nerves work. Consider that the nerves from the spinal cord to the toes are about a meter long in an adult: at normal axon growth speed that would take about 2.7 years to happen. Pods might fix things by replacing the slowest-growing parts with artificial parts (electronics for long peripheral nerves, artificial bones etc).

Scads. Biomorphs suck, which is why there's so much tension in the setting on *forcing* them to be preferred. Which is interesting, but still annoying that the synthetics (by the numbers) are often inferior.

I'm not sure that's justified by the setting rules, but I'm sure people in-setting *believe* that. People with believe anything, however irrational. :) People think wine that's more expensive tastes better, even if it's the same bottle. For my money, XP data is XP data, and all egos are equivalent (AGI, uplift, whatever). This is a transhuman world, so even the biomorphs are already interpreting sensory data at a beyond-human level, incorporating all kinds of sensors and senses.

I doubt experiences had in a synthmorph is merely "data" (shouldn't thinking by an infomorph then be mere symbolic rearrangement of meaningless bits?), but it might very well lack qualities people cherish. Some of that lack is just imaginary or emotional, like the wine example. Cultural expectations based on earlier synthmorphs, prejudices and ideas that the more "natural" biomorphs are better will make people think that their experiences in biomorph are better. That is already a lack of quality, despite it not being based on anything objective. But making a body feel "right" is also very hard. The brain can adapt surprisingly easily to rather odd body models, but it might be that when used to live in they do give an experience that is different from a person's original body. This is not just due to external appearance or shape, but also the internals. A lot of how it feels to be ourselves is due to quirks of our biochemistry, gut flora, physiological states and their interactions with the mechanics of the body and signals in the brain. So the synthmorph might simply make you feel like "someone else". Biomorphs might of course have exactly the same problem, but it is more common complaint for synths. The different synth internals mean that some systems are seriously changed. Normally breathing is natural and necessary, and it affects our mood a lot (try breathing in deeply and slooooowly, or panting quickly). A synth doesn't breathe at all. Worse, it cannot breathe in - most doesn't have any lungs! If you feel the need to breathe, you can't. Feelings of asphyxiation are very hard to avoid except by directly modifying the brainstem counterpart in the cyberbrain. Hardly a nice situation. In the long run, I think synths will become so capable that it would be absurd to remain biomorph. But that will take a long while, since what people want to *be* is just as much a matter of culture as technology.

While synthmorphs have many advantages I've seen way too many get their brains hacked in game to ever want to use one unless I'm running in autistic mode.

Also, if you were smart enough then you would rout your mesh traffic through an ecto first.

No, if they broke into your ecto you can disable wireless access to your mesh inserts because you have the warning of 'hey, someone is in your ecto!' And then you can break the ecto so they can't get anything out of it. Or did I misunderstand something?

And this is all under the assumption that you will actually see the hack coming. If the hacker is worth the cred/rep he's getting paid he will most likely have a team of AIs assisting him as well which basically evens the playing field unless the hacker is actually good (skill 50+) which then most likely gives him the edge. Our GM realized too late how easily this could be done when (while unnoticed) I hacked the enemies two Reaper body guards while they were chasing the parts of the team they did notice. Taking that -60 to rush the job is barely an issue when you have moxie, a specialization, high end exploits (+20), and AI assistance (+30). Hmm, good times.

3 minutes of in game time and the team was running from them. Keeping stuff between you and the enemy while free running isn't that hard actually. Especially if your on full defense the entire time. In the 3 minutes they ran I hacked in without being noticed, locked both egos, and then loaded a couple of rapid response combat forks. Quick explanation, in our game rapid response forks are forks designed to be loaded and used quickly (away from book but it's the quality that boosts tests for sleeving. Level determined by cost) and then further specialized with a specific skill set. In this case combat. To be fair we were rolling pretty well that night. EDIT: I should say in those 3 minutes everything was done but the loading of forks. That had to be done by hand but was done by another players character. Mine was tracking the guy and making sure he thought his Reapers were still operating.