Dog Pants wrote:I had a think about it in the shower. Threatening someone with a gun probably doesn't hold nearly as much threat in a world where you can just upload your backup into a new morph. A financial hit maybe, although in anarchist society that's a moving target anyway, and maybe an inconvenience if I shot him in the cortical stack, but not something to make him wet his pants, especially if he hangs out with suicide artists.
Ok, couple of things to point out: Even though people are effectively immortal, people still do their best to avoid death. This is for a few reasons, each more or less important depending on the individual:
1) Dying is, generally, a fucking horrifying experience. Knowing that you will come back to life and everything will be fine doesn't change the fact that right now you are in immense pain from the sucking chest wound. You could get around this by restoring from your backup rather than your cortical stack (more on this in a sec) but then you have the psychological problem sometimes known as "lack"; the troubling fact that there were things that happened to you that you know nothing about, and for at least some small time you didn't exist. This bring us to...
2) Long term psych problems. Resleeving is a pretty standard process, but its not entirely without risk. Its like driving a car: Most of the time you get to your destination with no problems, but sometimes you get rear ended by a lorry on the motorway and die. That possibility of coming out of a resleeve not quite the same as you went in makes some people freak the fuck out. A tiny minority, but still. Even those resleeves that go perfectly have a little bit of a "settling in" period for most people, where they get used to the fact that the body they are in now isn't the same size/shape/gender/species as the one they were in moments before (from their perspective). For most people this is just a bit of a pain, like breaking in new shoes. For others its an existential nightmare.
3) Cost. There are a fuckton more egos floating around than there are bodies to put them in. Even with advanced medical science and cloning techniques, growing a biomorph to maturity takes months, which is why so many people stomp around the place in cheap and shitty robo-bodies. You are right that cost is less of a problem in Anarchist societies, but its not a non-issue. You can make clothes, food, guns etc. from a nano-fabricator. You cant make bodies.
So, depending on what kind of a person Wang is, he could have a few different reactions faced with death. If he were a super-rich combat vet, used to dying and resleeving over and over and with a library of backup morphs to slip into he probably wouldn't give a shit. If he were poor, in his original body and has severe phobias about the whole resleeving thing then he would react to death threats just like anyone in the real world would. In all likelyhood he is somewhere between those two extremes. As a rule of thumb, if you wave a gun in the average persons face they will still scream "don't kill me!" and do a little wee.
"Suicide Art" is a weird one, but as it wouldn't necessarily be something you guys know about I wont just tell you. If you want to know more, a research test (with a +20, as it shouldn't be too hard to find something) or a test against any art based knowledge skill will do.
So I think I'll go unarmed. I've no desire to get into a confrontation with him, and if I do I don't need a gun to be unpleasant. On the other side of that, if I end up in the shit I'm similarly protected. How easy is it for me to get a backup done just in case it does go wrong and I bite it? It won't affect me going in or not (although I'd still like to know if I can call on backup), but it would be handy.
As a synthmorph, its piss easy. Go to a clinic, say "back me up, yo!" and they will do so. Because synthmorphs run cyberbrains rather than little bags of grey goo it is literally a case of copying over some files. Its practically instantaneous, and because you are still within the first month of working for Firewall its completely free (Firewall give all new recruits one months worth of backup insurance for free, along with assurance that if you croak whilst on the job they will provide your re-instantiated self with a new morph as close to your lost morph as possible).
I'll let you retcon if you do want to bring your gun along after all that, and whether you do or don't want to go get a backup before heading in.
Arriving at the door to the Blue Pod, you get to see it for the first time. Its made from a largish old cargo container, and is bright red. This may be ironic. Interestingly, although it is just (from the outside at least) a large roughly rectangular box, the thing is being spun along its long axis, presumably for gravity. Considering the fact that its not in any way round the gravity in there must be
fucked. As you approach the airlock, it swishes open. In the doorway is an extremely slim woman in what looks like a custom Sylph morph, somehow managing to appear to be lounging even though you are currently in microgravity (ie, floating about). She has one hand on her hip, and the other hand is holding a long thin stick, like a two foot long chopstick, which she is tapping on her leg. She stares at you for a second from under dark, slicked back hair.
lady wrote:Mmmmmyes?
