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post mortem Biomorph repair

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Tiberia Tiberia's picture
post mortem Biomorph repair
Is it possible to put a dead bio-morph in a healing vat, and repair it so that someone else can resleeve into it? for example. You take a bullet to the head while on extropia. Brain is mush. insurance retrieves your stack and you get resleeved somewhere else entrepreneurial extropian picks up your now empty corpse and puts it into a healing vat, and grows a brand new brain. They then sell the refurbished morph on the market. If this is possible then would this be a very common practice as repairing a biomorph is far quicker then growing a new one?
UnitOmega UnitOmega's picture
As I just responded to this
As I just responded to this query in another way, I'd wager that the time to repair brain injury might be a detriment. Given the difference in "grow" time between a Pod and a Biomorph, brains are probably one of the more time-consuming parts of the prospect. But if you want to quick grow and give it a wipe with an Ego Bridge, it'd probably be possible. Though this brings up all kinds of issues with "ownership" of the body after you've vacated it. If you're in a rental that might be a good way for the Body Bank to get their investment back, but what if somebody other than the body bank picks it up?
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
Tiberia Tiberia's picture
salvage rights may come into
salvage rights may come into play, though in anarchist territory it may become an issue as there would be no salvage laws in place. if the brain is the main time consumer you could simply put a cyber brain in the refurbished morph. This would give you an ad-hoc pod. in fact you could put the cyber brain from a mental augmentation morph into a biomorph built to physically superior, and with a bit of tinkering and maybe some psycho surgery make the two work together. then you have a very intelligent bruiser morph. such a thing would likely fall under GM approval though. if the brain is still intact just clinically dead, repair would likely be much shorter, thus profitable.
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
and then there is the
and then there is the possibility you can not perfectly repair a brain. normal nerves are aparently easy enough but when it comes to grey and white matter there is a reason why the healing vat says you need a head at minimum.
Tiberia Tiberia's picture
I could imagine some habs
I could imagine some habs growing nothing but spare brains. they may take awhile to grow, but when all you grow is the brain you need less space so can grow more at once. they could then put the brains in stasis and sell them off for morph refurbishment. the type of brain would likely have to match the morph unless you're ready to fix comparability issues (give mental disorders for partially incompatible brains?).
Scottbert Scottbert's picture
The impression I get is that
The impression I get is that the designers want you to be able to recover your body in about 5 days to 3 1/2 weeks depending on how badly it was damaged, but they also want there to be a shortage of biomorphs for people. It is up to the GM to decide how to justify this in their game -- 'you can't fast-grow brains' is a possible solution, but then it has the result of morphs with headshots being irreparable (although, you could replace the brain with a cyberbrain). I have also heard some say that cloning vats are cheaper and less resource-hungry but also slower than healing vats -- it may be that devoting available healing vats to morph production is infeasible due to the energy required or something. Again, it's up to the GM. Here are some previous threads on the subject (there are two because I wasn't sure which forum it should go in and it later got moved) http://eclipsephase.com/time-needed-grow-morphs-healing-vats http://eclipsephase.com/time-needed-grow-morphs-healing-vats-0
Forseti Forseti's picture
Non gruesome death and re-awakening
I wondered on something similar recently. Namely: assume a biomorph is mortally wounded and bleeds to death, then found only after 6 hours. If we put it into healing vat, would it repair it to pristine quality? If so, what will prevent an ego to restart on restored brain? Well, I mean common, not gruesome wound that will kill body but isn't devastating. Healing vat should be able to repair damage from few hours of decomposition in quite short time, right? Then, should the brain will be returned to health would the ego spontaneusly awaken? Or should neurosurgeon restore brain's structure as saved on cortical stack and then... do what to bring the body to sentient life?
Scottbert Scottbert's picture
Forseti wrote:...If so, what
Forseti wrote:
...If so, what will prevent an ego to restart on restored brain?
Even if healing vats can repair brains, there is a difference between restoring the basic structure, and restoring the specifics. Imagine a hard drive partially melted in a fire. You spray it with repair spray. Maybe the nanites can get you a working hard drive that can store new data, but that original data is gone. Similarly, in this case, that ego is damaged once the brain has had time to rot. If there's enough to run at all, you'll get a vapor, a delta fork. There are probably safeties that wipe the brain or keep the body and brain in stasis or something.
Forseti wrote:
...do what to bring the body to sentient life?
If healing vats restore brains, then your repaired morph is ready to be thrown into an ego bridge and have the backup from the cortical stack downloaded into it. If they don't... then you'll have to replace the brain with a cyberbrain and then download the ego. Of course, either way, a hacker can override the safeties on the vat and a neurosurgeon might be able to fix the brain, and a psychosurgeon might be able to kludge together a repair for the missing parts of the ego... but if you go that route, you're getting a vapor. It's not pretty. Of course, embodied vapors running around is just the sort of horror element you might find in Eclipse Phase, so feel free to use that in a game! But there's no way it's standard procedure for someone who's actually trying to revive the person.
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
unfortunately there is still
unfortunately there is still the problem that despite ep tech you can't reanimate a corpse. the cells must still be living. which despite being able to regrow a body from a severed head there is still a time limit on that head
Nerathul Nerathul's picture
After a quick look, I found
After a quick look, I found this in the healing section of the corebook (On page 208); "Healing vats (p. 327) will heal even the most grievous wounds in a matter of days, and can even restore characters who recently died or have been reduced to just a head." Transhuman (P. 180) also has this about healing Vats: "Healing vats are more expensive and far costlier to operate than industrial-scale morph tanks. They’re only capable of repairing, not completely regrowing, anything above the spinal cord. Given all of this, along with their central importance in medical care and a constant shortage of new units, healing vats have never been a practical option for making new morphs."
In the sea without lees Standeth the bird of Hermes Eating his wings variable And maketh himself yet full stable
Forseti Forseti's picture
Why not?
ORCACommander wrote:
unfortunately there is still the problem that despite ep tech you can't reanimate a corpse. the cells must still be living. which despite being able to regrow a body from a severed head there is still a time limit on that head
But my question boils down to "why not?" Nanos of healing vat restore the cells to perfect structural state (and they can do it atom by atom), they reset cells to state right after death. So what keeps the life from restarting? We are speaking about the setting which uses the "body as biological machine" paradigm so what keeps structurally restored to full health body from spontaneously animating? Slight signal from brain's stem to start heartbeat and breathing, perhaps? I agree that higher functions would most likely be in ruin but stem functions aren't part of Ego (stem is so intimately connected to given's biomorph anatomy that it shouldn't even be touched by egobridge) so healing vat can restore it to full potential. Now, when healing vat finishes with restoring its structure according to morph specifications, shouldn't it restore it functions like it does with functions of any other failing organ like liver? That would mean restoring life to the body, right?
Forseti Forseti's picture
Nerathul wrote:After a quick
Nerathul wrote:
After a quick look, I found this in the healing section of the corebook (On page 208); "Healing vats (p. 327) will heal even the most grievous wounds in a matter of days, and can even restore characters who recently died or have been reduced to just a head."
Yes, I remember that passage from core book. I thought however that there was someting about time limit of 2 hours from death. This is why I wrote about 6 hours from death. I meant dead body that's on the verge of decomposing so "truly dead".
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
I just go with the early
I just go with the early Schlock Mercenary paradigm, the paradigm that was in place pre-retroexocephaladerm. If you can recover and preserve the head, or in a pinch, the bits of the head including the brain and brain stem, then you can rebuild the morph. The key word there is "preserve." Once the body dies, I would say the brain starts to degenerate past the point where repair is possible. Environmental circumstances can impede or exaggerate this process, but even in the best of environmental conditions, an unpreserved brain is not going to survive more than, say, a week or so - and those 'best environmental conditions' are exceedingly unlikely environmental conditions, and include the body being subjected to a normal atmospheric pressure of inert gasses, being chilled to cryonic temperatures and sterilized of any bacteria and other destructive parasites. Under most circumstances, you're looking at a matter of hours, and in some environments you're looking at minutes. This is where medichines come in. Medichines place the subject in medical stasis if they take enough damage. Even if the victim takes enough bodily damage to become clinically dead, the medichines will still preserve the brain. [i]Indefinitely[/i], as long as the brain isn't subjected to hostile environments or parasites beyond the ability of the medichines to fight - like immersed in acid which will eventually eat through the skull, dropped into the crushing depths of a gas giant, subjected to swarming vermin, etcetera. For this reason, I would also rule that medichine nanohives tend to be implanted near to the cortical stack, to ensure the brain continues to receive medichine stasis even if the victim was decapitated. In a pinch, if the victim doesn't actually have implanted medichines (and seriously, why wouldn't you, they're cheap!) you can also store the head in a bag (colloquially referred to as a nannybag,) or a jar containing a similar nanohive, allowing for transport back to the nearest healing tank. If you're really in a bind, a nanobandage applied to the stump of the victim's head might work, though I wouldn't want to trust it for long. Field medicine of the mid-22nd century would look a lot like wanton and pointless corpse desecration to the field medics of the early 21st.
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