Reminds me of one of the more disturbing flashbacks of the protagonist in Charles Stross' "Glasshouse" (definitely recommended EP material!). Spoiler: during the Censorship Wars he fought against the Curious Yellow worm, a piece of software that infected and edited people passing through assembler gates, forming a distributed botnet (the worm might be a great *human* counterpart to the Exurgent virus). During one operation they had to debug the population of a habitat. To do that properly would require moving them through an uninfected disassembler gate that would store their mindstate for later embodiment. Unfortunately there is not much time, so they start chopping off heads and throwing them into the gate. The situation turns ever more gory and dark, and eventually the protagonist realizes the gate has crashed - they have been decapitating people for nothing...

I was picturing a server core with tons of seats positioned around it, and people laid back in the seat and their cortical stack was force downloaded into the server core (frying the brain in the process), a technician/doctor removed the body (probably dumping it into a furnace) and the next person stepped up. When the server core was full, it was put on a ship and a new core was put in its place (rinse and repeat till the ship is full and can take off). I don't think the bloody massacre detailed above would be possible unless the doctors where not human. I find it hard for the human psyche to survive the intentional killing and harvesting of thousands of humans an hour without breaking down. I personally would rather shoot myself in the head and not be resleeved. If harvesting of cortical stacks was done, I would think gas chambers (like the ones used by the Nazis) would be used instead. It is more humane and easier on the psyche to harvest cortical stacks from people that didn't die violently. Even still you would have more room for a server core then crates of cortical stacks and the server cores have the advantage that they can server as long term storage till all the infomorphs are given new morphs. The longest part of egocasting is transmitting the ego, if you cut that step out, you can reduce the download process to a few minutes (less time to massacring and harvesting cortical stacks).

I do have to admit, harvesting a lot of people's stacks sounds like a gruesome affair. I'd think it'd be a bit more traumatic than chopping off some legs. Not to mention the longer you stick around, the longer you risk being caught and harvested TITANly yourself. If I were the doctor in question, I'd probably just fork off a Delta and have it harvest me for transport.

Thantrax wrote:

I do have to admit, harvesting a lot of people's stacks sounds like a gruesome affair. I'd think it'd be a bit more traumatic than chopping off some legs. Not to mention the longer you stick around, the longer you risk being caught and harvested TITANly yourself. If I were the doctor in question, I'd probably just fork off a Delta and have it harvest me for transport.

That sounds more reasonable as a fork can lack some of the emotional and mental barriers that would prevent the original from massacring millions of people.

By the way, I was wondering... ...how long did the Fall take, from start to finish? and how long until all Scum Barges left, leaving egocasting as sole "official" escape route? Look at Battlestar Galactica: Razor and The Plan, and even the very pilot. It took hours in there, and that was a surprise attack (at least a surprise to the humans!) in EP, this happened:

"THE FALL" wrote:

• The TITANs evolve from a high-level distributed netwar experiment into self-improving seed AIs. For the first few days, their existence is unsuspected. They advance their awareness, knowledge, and power exponentially, infiltrating the mesh both on Earth and around the system. • Large-scale netwar incursions break out between rival states on Earth, sparking numerous conflicts. These attacks are later blamed on the TITANs. • Simmering tensions on Earth escalate into outright hostilities and warfare. • Massive netwar breaks out and major systems crash as TITANs begin open attacks, also using autonomous war machines. • Conflict quickly spirals out of control. The use of nuclear, biological, chemical, digital, and nanotech weapons reported by all sides. • TITANs engage in mass forced uploading of human minds. • TITAN attacks expand to other parts of solar system, heaviest on the Moon and Mars. Numerous habitats also fall. • TITANs suddenly disappear from system, taking millions of uploaded minds with them. • The Earth is left a devastated wasteland, a patchwork of radiation hotspots, sterile zones, nanoswarm clouds, roaming war machines, and other unknown and hidden things among the ruins.

It could have taken months, maybe even a year between the first point and the last. at the time of the evacuation, the death toll must have been enormous already. Between the nuclear strikes, the viral attacks (I can't help but remember what Kovacs said about Inennin in Altered Carbon, and the Rowling 4851 virus that sounds A LOT like a short-term tactical Exsurgent Virus strike), the world population must already have been down by 75-80% at the time the evacuation started

*Nods* I've always pictured humanists as blind optimists. Anyway, to the general public it started as World War 3 or 4, I gather. How long do you think it took the threat of the TITANs to become public knowledge? it's almost a given that world wide governments tried to keep their rising a secret even when it was blatantly evident to the street man of what was going on, before the nukes start to fall and flash epidemia making H1N1 and H5N1 look like a sneeze killing millions broke out. There are novels material there!