I believe I have a solution. From what I remember, humans sleeved in Flats tend to like certain kinds of pheromones and dislike ultrasound. You should have just enough time to implement a course of classic Pavlovian conditioning. By having your friend associate negative feelings with activities related to moving to Jovian space and associate positive feelings with the idea of staying put I believe you can achieve your objective without inflicting permanent harm. This course of action should even pass ethical examination since you would not be compelling her to do anything - it's only what she would have done anyway, given optimal circumstances. In the longer run you may even be able to cure her bioconservatism, thus solving your problem once and for all.

You know, the best thing might be letting her go, then having a contingency plan to get her out once she realizes the error of her decision. If you want to strategize about such things, give me a buzz on a less public channel.

Yeah, but low level citizens rarely get clearance to live in [b]those[/b] areas.

Which suits my plan just fine. After a stay in the "triplemax" resort, our immigrant is going to be less than impressed with the Jovian system. But that will be when she is transferred to some ghetto. We darkcast to a nearby area. then physically insert (I may have to go in cold) By the time we get to her, she will be thoroughly disillusioned with the Jovian system. Now we have time to set this up. Clones don't grow overnight after all. We could put together the resources to have a second clone ready to go when we get her back. As to her getting used to Autonomist life, imagine the rep gains her being able to tell her story on Titan would be. A classic tale of Fall and redemption. She could champion the cause of some of the biocon brinker habs in the AA, and show how they are a real alternative to the Jovians.

If she plans on going to Europa while awaiting residence, I say let her go. Europa is the closest thing to neutral ground that you're going to find around Jupiter. Since it is independent from the Jovian Republic, it's a good place to hang out and get a feel for the Jovian culture. It's also one of the easiest places for Jovian citizens to get a travel visa for, which will give her a chance to meet and talk to people living in the Republic. Keep in mind that just because the Jovian lifestyle sounds like hell to you doesn't mean that it hasn't got an appeal to others. I generally liked my life as a citizen, though I'm not sure how open-minded about Jovian society I'd be if I had to live as an adult civilian, which she would be. Even if she could keep the fact that she's been egocast and lived as a synthmorph, civilians who are adults are seen as one of two things cowards or criminals. The accepted belief is you either did something to get your citizenship stripped from you or you were too much of a chickenshit to do your voluntary service. So without citizenship, her life probably isn't going to be a comfortable one.

[memberid="A. Moira Delaware", locstamp="Aarhus, Titan"] I'm not much good with biocons; quite frankly, I tend to be either outspoken in my opinions or completely reserved with them. But I may be able to help.

Libertad wrote:

I helped her egocast to the Outer System around the time I fled Mars. She was grateful to be released from a life of slavery, but she never got used to her new morph. She missed her old body, feeling trapped in a foreign form which felt "wrong" to her.

Did the habitat just slap her in the first morph available and kick her out of the resleeving clinic? This should never happen. No, let me rephrase: that should [b][u]never[/u][/b] happen. It's a sign that something has either gone horribly wrong in the resleeving process (skipped steps and one-size-fits-all neuro-patches being the two most likely culprits,) or that the ego is suffering severe psychological issues. Even the worst resleeving alienation [i]should[/i] fade with time... But may not always, especially if the circumstances leading to the resleeving were traumatic, which seems to be the case. That said, there are steps that can be taken; if your friend is, as you say, from an impoverished Earth nation, I would surmise that her original body was born either somewhere in Africa, the hindmost parts of Latin America, or southeast Asia. If she were, say, sleeved into a tall Scandanavian Hazer or something, she might be having entirely-understandable issues. What [i]is[/i] she sleeved into, anyway? Regardless of what it is, however, time in a healing tank with a good body-sculpter should be able to alleviate the problem. It's not exactly preferable, in my opinion, to treat the symptom of alienation by sculpting the new body to resemble the old, rather than to encourage and coach the ego to accept morphological freedom, but if your friend finds her new body outright traumatic to live in, it may be a necessary step on the road to recovery. And trust me, with a good body-sculpter, you can do [i]anything[/i]. I recently left about twenty Titanian bodybank sculpters speechless by turning an off-the-rack Hazer - tall, blonde, Scandanavian to the core - into a petite SE Asian with curly red head and emerald green eyes. At the most it should take three days, and that's assuming you're doing a radical change to height and weight, like turning a Hazer into an African Pygmy. If what she's currently got is anything even close to what she was born with, it's more like half a day, or an hour you don't need any real changes to height or weight. As necessary, certain augmentations might need to be reversed; for instance, if you put her in a bouncer and she can't get used to the prehensile feet (I never could, and I was born in space; go figure,) you'll have to fix that, but again, that shouldn't take too long, about half a day. The best part about work done in a healing tank is that it can be done concurrently, so speak with a good body-sculpter, speak with your friend, work up a game-plan relating to altering her current morph, and get her into the tank! She shouldn't even object to this, since she's having such trouble with her current morph. Of course, that's assuming that whatever she's in is a human-derived biomorph. If it was something significantly different; say, an uplift morph, one of those Novacrab things (one tried to take my head off recently and entirely no-sold my stunner, so I'm even less charitably inclined towards the things than usual,) any kind of pod, or a synthmorph, you've got a harder road ahead of you. A pod can be made, with enough work and tweaking, to feel just like an original body, but it would require hiding away most of the cyberbrain interfaces. Tweaks and a good muse can help with this; again, it's mostly healing tank work, though there's a lot of extra programming involved. Talk to some specialists, get their help. If you have a critical dearth of good body-sculpters on your hab, I or one of my sisters may be interested to fork off a new sister to come and help out, we'd need details on where you live, though.

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She did not adjust well to Autonomist life: she missed the relative privacy brought to her back in her Mesh-less home, and felt constantly hounded and judged by the @-Rep system when she got negative hits for her apprehension around AGI and Uplift citizens, as well as her bio-conservative views.

You have to be kind of an outspoken asshole to get enough pings that your @-Rep actually suffers. Does she make a habit of telling AGIs and Uplifts that they're abominations or non-people or monsters? I hate to say it, but in this regard, your friend may need a cold hard dose of reality. Being an asshole leads you to be ill-liked by them, and when you're living in Autonomist space, that means your rep suffers. Sneering at, deriding, or, yes, fearing or hating, people because their origins aren't the same as yours has been a classic hallmark of assholery since the days when having been born in the next valley over was sufficiently "other" to be sneered/derided/feared/hated. Quite simply, she needs to look at the facts here. She was born in what I'm going to take the liberty of assuming was an absolute shithole of a dictatorship, junta, or oligarchy, if it was the kind of place without regular mesh access eleven years ago, where people were forcibly implanted with cortical stacks not for their safety but for easy of control, and which was, as you said, impoverished. That almost certainly sucked, but not nearly as much as the Fall. I can't really comment on it, as I wasn't there, thankfully. What is certain is that your friend was one of the lucky ones, who managed to egocast off Earth. Given that she did so, I can only assume she was either monumentally lucky, or possessed of heroic attributes, if she was a citizen of an impoverished nation who only got a stack implanted by force. Then suckage was heaped upon suckage. Congratulations, you managed to escape Earth as a member of the most desperate and destitute class of refugee ever to have existed in all of transhuman history. Now sign on the dotted line and sell away the next decade for the right not to be thrown back into cold storage and forgotten about. But you got her out of that, and judging by your wording, I'm going to assume you did so forcefully, by liberating her ego from Cognite rather than buying her out or waiting out her indenture period. So, where is she now? She's in autonomist space. She's managed to tank her @-Rep by sneering at uplifts and AGIs, and someone dropped the ball so hard it fell back to Earth with regards to her sleeve. (Seriously, she needs professional help, either a bodysculpter, psychosurgeon, or both.) But I'm also willing to dare to assume that, frankly, she's never had it so good. Even with a tanked @-Rep, unless you're in one of the rare absolute shitholes of @-space, you're in no danger of having your morph summarily taken from you. Nobody's going to let you go hungry or thirsty. She'll probably lack an ability to call on favors - since, I'm assuming that since she's probably in the >20 @-Rep range, she has pretty much failed entirely to learn how to network and socialize with autonomists - but even then, every habitat that's worth fleeing [i]to[/i] instead of [i]from[/i] should have fair waiting lists so that literally everyone gets their fair share of the resources, even if nobody likes them much. So, where does this leave her? In addition to some corrective measure or other needing to be taken for the body dysmorphia, she's either going to need to learn to get along much better in her home habitat, or leave. As often once social bridges have been burnt rebuilding them is impossible, the wiser - and certainly easier - course of action might be to go to a new habitat and start over. Sometimes you find people you just can't mesh with, and need to extricate yourself from that situation. Unfortunately, this brings me to your next point.

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She has discussed to me, in private conversations, of increasing sympathy towards the Jovian Republic. She has spent much time and effort in getting something close to her original body, even if it's a genetic clone (a task with which I helped her). Once she becomes "natural," she says, she plans on moving to Europa and apply for citizenship. She wants to go back to a simpler way of living, something closer to her Old Earth years.

[b]Nothing[/b] you find in Jovian orbit is going to be remotely closer to the Old Earth years except in all the ways that were worst. Even in the hell that is the Consortium, you can get by with a good rep and good social skills, but in Jovian territory it's all money. Since she extricated herself from the impoverishment of her first life, she hasn't had to worry about that, so a reminder might, at least, help to degrade her interest in the Junta. If, as I'm suspecting, she was from somewhere in Africa or SE Asia, you might also remind her that the Junta is, by and large, colored and influenced by the United States commander who took over during the Seventeen Minute War and the high-ranking officials who fled there. It's a bit of an underhanded tactic in changing her mind, but if your friend's outlook is as appallingly backward as you intimate, you might remind her that the people she's considering fleeing to are those whose good lives on Earth were built upon the basis of rank exploitation of her own people. That might harden her firmly against them. As for your other point of getting something closer to her original body, for the love of whatever gods you or she or both of you believe in, don't just clone a flat! There's no reason for it; frankly it's an [i]appalling[/i] waste of resources, at the very least you should genefix it up to Splicer standards; or hell, go straight for Exalt spec. It takes literally just as many resources to grow a Flat as a Fury (Exalt, Alpiner, Hazer, etc,) the only difference is the genetics going into it. As regards your friend's plan to move to the Junta... Has she actually done any research on the topic? Like... At all? She does have mesh inserts and a muse, right? Europa is a parliamentary democracy, independent of the Jovian so-called Republic. (I wonder how long until they start tacking on additional verbs like "People's" or "Democratic".) Europa is a crushing ice-ball whose surface is absolutely inimical to any morph without extensive anti-radiation modifications; triple-encoded DNA with active cell replacement via medichines. (Frankly, everybody should have medichines, but that's neither here nor there, since I imagine it's the kind of thing your friend would abhor.) Going under the surface of the ice, into the subcrustal oceans where you can let the ice absorb all those nasty rads, is the only safe bet. Europa's subcrusal seas are appealing habitable space for cetecean and octopus uplifts. I'm not saying you [i]can't[/i] make a living there in a humanoid biomorph, but it's going to be a harsh environment for one to live in, and for a biocon? It'd be pretty rough. For someone who was, I'm guessing, deprived of educational opportunity, with no real connection to oceanography, with a notable dislike and disdain for uplifts and AGIs... Well, it probably isn't a good place for her, despite the fact that even though they use money there, it would still be a better place for her than the Junta proper, what with the Europan belief in the freedom of higher learning (I just checked - even T.A.U. highly regards the Europan socialized educational systems, so that's a big check in their favor) and that everybody should at least be able to live without being in wageslavery or outright slavery. Even so I wouldn't recommend Europa to her. Quite simply, though, what she's yearning for just can't be found these days. It's gone. The TITANs took it away, and it can't be returned to her unless she fancies the idea of programming a simulspace recreation of her home and abandoning her biomorph to live in it full-time. Simple can be found, if simple is her overriding desire; she can just 'cast out to the Sendero Luminoso Benevolent Dictatorship, sleeve into a Freeman and let someone else manage your life. Of course, that's tantamount to signing herself back into slavery. Then again, so is casting to the Junta; other commenters here have, I think, made it quite plain in numerous ways, that going to live in the Junta is a death sentence, signing herself into an abyssal hell of being a permanently untrusted undercitizen, granted only a tiny stipend of money (insufficient to really live on) in exchange for entirely unnessessary backbreaking labor (we invented robots almost [i]two hundred years ago![/i]) and an inevitable death due to a septic habitat suffering entirely unnecessary and [i]easily[/i] curable medical problems like cancer. Hell, checking T.A.U's mesh, word is that diseases we thought were down-and-out are making a comeback in the Junta's habs, owing to the appallingly septic conditions and the lack of basic medical care and in many cases, even basic biomods.

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My friend is at a crisis point in her life, and she needs support and help. As much as it pains me to say, I cannot prevent her from joining the Jovians, for it would be against everything I stand for. I do not mind her being bioconservative, but I don't want her to join a regime I despise. However, some part of me says "if she will be happy and content there, is it right for me to prevent her from leaving?" Such thoughts are quickly quenched when I realize that she might live in misery as an "Outer System foreigner" in a society which will forever fear her. Any help you can give me is appreciated! Whatever her decision, I hope that everything works out for the best.

I would suggest digging up a Jovian expat or three. The kind of person who clawed their way [i]out[/i] of that Hell, who can sit her down and give her a brutal, no-holds-barred briefing on exactly what kind of shit, both figurative and literal, she'll be up to her shoulders in. Then I'd suggest thinking about other autonomist habitats you could go to. She's probably already soured relations in your home hab to the point where making a comeback there is going to be long and arduous, especially if she still can't get along with AGIs and Uplifts. Honestly? I'd suggest the Titanian Commonwealth. I know what you're thinking, "she's posting from Aarhus, probably at T.A.U. itself (yes, I am,) of course she'd suggest Titan." I'm not exactly a loyal daughter of the Commonwealth, though, I'm late from a hab called New Humanity, where we went circle-@ in a big way during the Fall. I vote hard anarchist at every vote, so... But yeah. She may be yearning for some hierarchy, and if you have to have a hierarchy in your life, the Commonwealth is the only one I'd recommend. You said 'simple,' which I'm guessing means 'has an idea of what to do.' Life in the Commonwealth is more regimented than in most Autonomist habitats, and if you don't know what to do and want someone to tell you what you should be doing, it's easy to find out what you're supposed to be doing, just a quick mesh search or consultation away. You can find biocons - of a sort - here, if you want, but those New Quebecois kind of skeeve me out. Also, your friend's experiential age may be an issue, as the age of majority here is 25. On the other hand, if she wants someone to take her by the hand or lay a friendly hand on her shoulder and lead/point out the way, there are worse ways to do so than to snag a bit of a second childhood by being considered a legal minor. (Or sleeve into a neotenic and do that full-time, heh.) @-Rep isn't everything on Titan. Even if you've tanked your @-Rep, you have the law to fall back on, and Titanian law enforcement and bureaucracy is pretty much incorruptible. Seriously, people wind up doing hard time (well, as hard as time gets under Titanian law enforcement, which is pretty much the softest-touch in the system,) if it comes out they were abusing their positions to spurn or spite low-reppers or people whose views differ from their own. Now, I know, I paint a good picture, and if I do... Well, it's because the Titanians work very hard to build a great place to live. It's not perfect; the janteloven thing does exist, even if it does tend to be exaggerated in the retelling to those who don't live here. Some autonomists chafe hard at the notion that you owe the Commonwealth three years of service, but as a fairly hard-line autonomist having lived through it - and gone straight into the deep end by signing up for militia duty, rather than, say, wiling away my three years in a bodybank - it's not terrible. (I doubt this will be a problem for your friend.) There's opportunities to be found here, if you're ambitious, and there's comforting anonymity to be found if you want a quiet life. You can find a lot of that anonymity in a crowd, in my experience, but if she's seriously having issues with crowds and dense habitat populations, she could be in luck here, as Titan is not just cities, but also various small settlements dotted across the map. I spent a fortnight in Stykkishólmur (yes, I know, I fell to the tourist trap,) and just about found the low population to be terrifying, so it - or, if recreational violence isn't her thing, an alternative place where their idea of a good time does not include sailing a wooden longboat up a methane lake to go and raid another refinery with axes and longbows - may be just what she's looking for. And hey, Titan is a great place to repair your @-rep, get your head shrunk by some serious professionals (seriously, one of the top-thousand psychosurgeons on the @-List is cohabbing in my head courtesy of a ghostrider module. She's an AGI so your friend probably would not go for that, but you can find specialists in biomorphs here, too,) and see a specialist about getting your body attuned to you (and if she comes here, while I'm still living here, I'll do it [i]personally[/i], even if I have to pull favors myself to get her the tank time needed; it sounds like whatever hacks you have running the body bank where you are really fucked her over; and if I'm not here, I can recommend some names.) It's not where she came from, wherever that is. But the only place that is home, is, well, home. And unfortunately for her, her home is currently ass-deep in TITAN refuse. But going to the Junta will only make things insurmountably worse. You need to convince her of that, above all else, because of all the places you can get stuck in the system, the Junta's the stickiest and the suckiest.

Kremlin K.O.A. wrote:

With a diagnosis like that, Ms Delaware, I really hope you don't end up coming into contact with this woman. Now I may be willing to let someone see the inside of a Jovian hellhole if nothing else will convince them, but your suggestions? Wow, just wow.

The problem with that is that once you've seen the inside of said Jovian hellhole, getting out is pretty much impossible.

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First let's look at your racial assumptions, She was poor therefore she was Asian, African or South American? Why did you ignore eastern Europe near the Caucauses? Or Ireland? Italy maybe? Or even Australia? All places that had areas of severe poverty just before the fall. Mostly due to climate issues. Looking at the racial makeup of the places you suggested, and the ones missed, is telling.

Most of those places you've cited, although suffering from severe economic downturn during the time of the fall, were neither so dictatorial nor quite so impoverished that they instituted forced stack implantation for the purposes of keeping track of their citizens, to the best of my knowledge. Out of respect for the original poster's desire to preserve his friend's anonymity, I've made some broad, sweeping generalizations and hypothesized from them, rather than looking up exactly which hierarchies were involved in that level of overt control. That said, it wouldn't really matter if she came from, oh, I don't know, downtown Paris or the heartland of the United States. I was simply hypothesizing for possible reasons body disphoria might be striking her so strongly.

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Secondly: Probably spot on with the body disphoria. But a suggested treatment of 'just get over it.'? Really? Considering how much of resleeving technology was originally used to treat body disphoria in those born with the condition....

Did I [i]ever[/i] suggest a treatment of "just get over it?" No, I did not. I said that most alienation issues fade with time, (especially for those who have resleeved more than once,) but in cases where it doesn't, correction issues can and should be taken. I advocated a multidisciplinary approach, both psychotherapy (augmented with psychosurgery, if she will allow it,) and biomorph sculpting to alter the morph she's in - whatever it is - to match what she feels her body should be.

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Thirdly: Her rep issues = she is an asshole? Given you already noted she is suffering from severe body disphoria? How much of her psyche do you think is being affected by that condition? Not much, if your 'asshole' diagnosis is to be taken seriously. Problem is, the psychological effects of body disphoria are well documented, and, in a situation like the lady in question, would easily lead to the kind of fears and shut in situation we see.

Short of an organized smear campaign, someone's reputation is, well, their reputation. There are certainly explanations for crabby behavior, everyone has bad days, or weeks, or sometimes months where they just want to tell everyone and their virtual dog to get stuffed, and suffering from severe body disphoria is certainly an understandable reason to be constantly in a foul mood, but at the end of the day, people are responsible for their actions towards others. If she's so consistently irritated those around her that her @-Rep is tanked, I can only imagine that interacting with her is either a thoroughly unpleasant experience, or she makes a point of looking down upon AGIs and uplifts and telling them so, or both. In my experience, it takes either consistent refusal to do your share of habitat work, major or repeated serious fuck-ups while doing same, or massive, outrageous assholery to piss off enough people for your @-Rep to tank. I'm imagining that the OP's friend is neither lazy nor monumentally incompetent, and from what he said, it was social issues, which brought her @-Rep down.

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Fourthly: Having your personal views on your Meshbook page is not, and should never be considered, pushing it into other people's face.

I'm confused about this point, as I don't believe I mentioned anyone's meshbook page. That said, if you make a meshbook page and on it you go to lengths to expose your belief that AGIs and uplifts aren't real people, you shouldn't really be surprised if AGIs and Uplifts (or their muses) who read your profile decide that's worth a reputation ping. You know, kind of like how if you made your meshbook page gush at length about how good it was to be born stinking rich and how it was nice to be waited on hand and foot by genuine humans with genuine egos, and how you regret being chased out of PC space for political reasons. That's going to kind of irritate a lot of folks in the AA, and they'd make their displeasure known.

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I will say this now, as an AGI, someone being a little scared of me due to the TITANs? Annoying, but perfectly reasonable. Someone mass dinging a person who shows a bit of apprehension of me? That will earn some serious dings from me. How fucking dare you harm someone for not instantly losing all their fear? How dare you speak for me, or for other AGIs? If I want someone dinged for their attitude to me, I will bloody well ding them myself.

That's amazingly high-and-mighty and presumptuous of someone who's outraged by the mightily high presumption of others. I don't know where you got the idea that I was dinging or mass-dinging others for their views as regards AGI and uplifts. However, on the point that only the aggrieved party has the right to object to the grievance, I have to say: what? Are you saying that someone who's never been subject to an indenture contract has no moral right to object to the practice of indenture, or that someone who's never lived under a hierarchy has no right to vocally oppose hierarchy? That someone who's never been forknapped or ego hunted has no right to object to ego hunting or forknapping? That seems, quite frankly, absurd. It also sounds like an invitation for the largest bloc of all to take over piecemeal, by chipping away and restricting their malevolance towards one small bloc at a time, until nobody but them is left.