Polity Agent

Watching him go, Azroc wondered if bringing along these ground troops was such a good idea anyway. Yes, they might be needed, but thus far the conflict had remained mainly ship to ship—one of those fast AI battles waged on the line of Polity of which rumours abounded but of which he had never found confirmation. It struck him that such vulnerable troops would serve no purpose other than to add to the casualty figures.

18

It is official: we don’t have to die. There are those amongst us now who are over two hundred years old and who may go on just not dying. However this is not immortality in the old sense of the Greek and Roman gods, for though our lives can be extended to infinity (thus far) we are still subject to death. There’s no medical technology that can save you if you stick your head under a thousand-tonne press (though a prior memcording of you can be saved), and there are some virulent killers, both biologically and nanologically based, that can destroy the human meat machine very quickly and effectively. But, as many have noted, not dying is not quite the same as living. Many would try to make themselves utterly secure against death and as such cease to experience life in its conventional sense. What is the point of immortality if you wrap yourself in layers of cotton wool and armour and bury yourself in peat? Many take that route (well, not literally), but many others seize the opportunity to explore, research, experience, to live a full life. However, there are problems with this, for the human brain, though large in capacity and intricate in function, is a finite thing. Memories are lost during regeneration and repair—that drawback cannot be avoided. Moreover, as a human life grows long, memories are shunted aside by the perpetual absorption of the endless continuing input. The solution, though, is now coming clear: memcording. We can now record our memories and even mental functions and store them separately, reload them should we wish. The technology is now available to actually delete stuff from the organic brain. So, the time has arrived when we can actually edit our own minds. It is speculated that in the future we’ll be able to decide what kind of person we are going to be this year, and cut-and-paste our minds to suit. Maybe we’ll decide to load select portions of our minds to more than one body. Perhaps this is due to become the procreation of the future?

— From ‘How it Is’ by Gordon