I sort of wondered about this when reading Morgan's stuff, and its just as curious an idea (if not more so) in EP. what the heck is a child?
traditionally, its a combination of the parent's DNA. it starts with a partially functional brain that grows organically and develops into something marginally inteligent over the course of several years.
do parents both sleeve parents they want to concieve with, and then pop out a baby 9 months later? or are baby morphs grown from whole cloth after the parent chooses what DNA and features it will have?
or does it have nothing to do with that? I imagine that the actuall brains in morphs are largely disconnected, dont write or read memory or process complex or creative thought, but just read sensory input and provide motor control (and theyre probably better at it since the whole brain can be dedicated to it). memory and thought would be provided by the 'stack. and since most people in the post-exodus era are just infomorphs anyway, they may want to procreate in VR while no sleeves are available.
so maybe children arent "born" and it isnt a question of organic brains growing and learning. maybe its like merging code from parent's egos or creating some blank ego that is mentored and trained.
i can imagine lots of ways this could occur. is there anything official about how it works in the fluff?
traditionally, its a combination of the parent's DNA. it starts with a partially functional brain that grows organically and develops into something marginally inteligent over the course of several years.
do parents both sleeve parents they want to concieve with, and then pop out a baby 9 months later? or are baby morphs grown from whole cloth after the parent chooses what DNA and features it will have?
or does it have nothing to do with that? I imagine that the actuall brains in morphs are largely disconnected, dont write or read memory or process complex or creative thought, but just read sensory input and provide motor control (and theyre probably better at it since the whole brain can be dedicated to it). memory and thought would be provided by the 'stack. and since most people in the post-exodus era are just infomorphs anyway, they may want to procreate in VR while no sleeves are available.
so maybe children arent "born" and it isnt a question of organic brains growing and learning. maybe its like merging code from parent's egos or creating some blank ego that is mentored and trained.
i can imagine lots of ways this could occur. is there anything official about how it works in the fluff?
so having read the resleeving, morph, and augmentation sections i can now answer some of my own questions.
the consiousness does actually run on the wet brain of each morph, which is nanomechanically rebuilt in its entirety each time somone new is sleeved into it. cyberbrains dont run egos in any sort of pure code form, but rather emulate neural networks, making them functionally equivilant to a meat brain.
I would still expect that there is a SOTA race for thought power that is on par with modern computer evolution, so in AF20 we might be seeing the average ego being run on equipment that offers +20 COG or something, but thats a different discussion.
its mentioned offhand that most children are sleeved into splicers, and also that the accelerated growth experiments of the "lost generation" were failures. from this we can infer that adults arent created from relatively whole cloth by forking and merging two egos.
but this still leaves the question of what is a child in EP?
say a splicer is grown from zygote to its 9month form, and then it begins being raised as an infant. did its parent egos pick sleeves and fertilize it the old fashioned way? did they pick from a list of models they could have grown? select each of its significant genes individually? how does the child represent THEM in any meaninfull way, beyond what they impart to it from nurture? its effectively an adopted creature.
or does the family unit still exist? do individuals (or trios) decide to grown and raise children on their own? do some Habs raise children in creches by specialists? or communially like Kibbutz communities? all of the above?
Brian Cross
Posthuman Studios
Rob Boyle :: Posthuman Studios