Lutra sapiens

Subspace - or, A Stronger Formula This Year

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by Chrontius

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First in pool

Eclipse Phase

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Sci-Fi

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So, I like Eclipse Phase.  It's a great setting, with lots of potential for storytelling, interesting ethical questions, and enough technology to enable wonders, but not enough to eliminate unintended consequences.

Canonically, several kinds birds, octopi, pigs, quite a few cetaceans, and most of the great apes have been uplifted.  Elephants were, too, but there were only one or two at that point, and none of them made it off-planet when humanity geth'd themselves.  Dogs and cats are presumably in progress.  After the low-hanging fruit is finished, what comes next?  Well, my money is on social tool-using, home-building mammals with a sense of play and a pre-existing technical aptitude - otters.  (Seriously, they're infamous for disassembling their exhibit at the Monterrey Bay aquarium)

In a survival situation, what justifies this expense and tying up qualified personnel and AIs?  My answer is that on those few aquatic habitats designed to house uplifted cetaceans, you might want some technical personnel who are comfortable in both the flooded habitat area, and the dry service areas.  There's plenty of bodies available - either robots or clones or uplifts - that will handle either environment with aplomb, but nothing at all that can handle both without breaking its stride.

So, last night I worked on the story and the novel technical process of doing uplift without all the vivisection - also, I sketched someone (probably one of the R&D staff) climbing out of a combination healing vat and ego bridge, having just copied his brainstate into a vat-grown ("pods," short for "pod people," in the jargon of the setting) clone of their work-in-progress otter uplifts, trying to figure out how to think human-like thoughts in a significantly different brain structure, with an unfamiliar hormone balance and endocrine system.  Why would you risk copying your mind into another species, let alone another body?  The latter, because space travel is ruthlessly hard, or perhaps because you just caught an acute case of the dead.  The former?  By dogfooding their own designs, they get to know how the progress towards humanizing their ottery brains, or at least expanding their existing abstract reasoning abilities, without all of the electroshock, brain dissection, and distasteful parts.  Also, the first generation of uplifts get to be raised by their own kind, after a fashion, rather than in what amounts to corporate orphanages.

This also has the happy side effect of satisfying the desire to one-up the inner system corporate overlords, which opportunity outer-system socialists, anarchists, and libertarians would never turn down.

And this researcher?  How are they faring?  I'm not sure whether this is a late-beta or early-beta body they've slipped into, but eventually they'll probably sell their old mostly-human body, for the pod-grown otters will probably be pretty easy to adapt to, pleasant to be, and they'll have probably spent more time as one for the last few years, and might find themselves alienated from the human form by then.  They'll probably volunteer to parent some of the natural-born uplifts, since they clearly find the project worthwhile, helping ensure that Lutra sapiens will be launched into the solar system without the psychological hang-ups of corporate indoctrination, indenture, and and such associated abuses.

And me?  I'm working on building a stat block for playing these guys

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Once our intrepid researcher figured out how to stand up and step out of the ego bridge, the hardware that etched their brainstate onto a fresh clone - not even of their birth species - the Integration test is barely begun … though it's off to a good start.  The next challenge they will face is the Alienation test, where our intrepid researcher encounters a dangerous obstacle that may lay them low:  A mirror.  They don't even know what sex their new body is, at this point; otter uplifts don't have stonking great tits, technicolor plumage, enormous tusks, or anything between the legs that flaps in the breeze (hydrodynamics, naturally!) so there were none of the cues that they were used to looking for when dealing with humans, or with other uplifts.  No, they're busy trying to remember how to form vowels, the software downloaded into their brain while their personality was copied over only enough so they remember where all their new muscle groups are, but not enough to offer any finesse in this part of the process.

I wonder if they'll find they're the same sex they were in their last body?  Only time will tell!

[quote]Trait:  Self-Documenting:  Pod-style cloned otter uplifts include documentation on their original factory condition in machine-readable form.  While their service life is around 20 years, before biological-cybernetic interface components begin to fail, any time a "podder" uses a healing vat, they are restored to peak condition, and begin aging from a completely renewed state.  This repair cycle can be continued indefinitely, making the Lutra project's "podders" some of the best-built, longest-lasting pods available anywhere in the solar system.

Trait:  Advanced Bioprinting:  Combined with a novel production method developed in collaboration with the Mars institute of technology, these pods can be produced with truly remarkable speed, and uplift biomorphs can be produced in a fraction of the time usually required for the production of conventional biomorphs.  A podder can be manufactured in under a week, and a fully biological otter-uplift can be produced in only a few weeks through aggressive nanofabrication.  If you need to be sure you'll be able to get a body you're used to, and you're not fond of splicers or infomorphs, lutrine uplifts are an excellent choice.[/quote]

[quote=The Artist]Not quite the triple self portrait, but not far off, either.  Maybe I'll add a folder propped up against the mirror with a "receipt" or something with a mug-shot on it of their vat-grown body, in order to make it a proper shout-out.

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