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Monday, February 29, 2016

Week 7 YC118, "Thoughts on Thoughts"

#Recording initiated#

#Erun is lounging on the couch in his quarters, datapad in hand - The sounds of heavy industrial machinery can be heard echoing from the doorway behind him#

#I take it this means your Thanatos is done then sir?#

"Yup, should be about a week while final assembly and systems checks are completed. I'm working on building some crew dossiers for it at the moment. I may be able to control most of the ship systems from my pod, but periodic maintenance and repair still require the work of several hundred human hands."

#You speak as though you no longer count yourself among that number sir#

“Can I really, truthfully call myself human still Pali? Some capsuleers have a term for the normal folks, 'baseliner', as if we have somehow been elevated above them, mere mortals that they are. #Erun shakes his head# Such an attitude has always seemed, well, elitist. Only certain genetic, physical, and psychological traits in combination separate me from the hardworking folks behind me who build my ships and keep them spaceworthy. Of the trillions, trillions, of people living in this galaxy there are less than a million active capsuleers. As much as we like to hold ourselves apart from the masses, we are still beholden to the people who maintain our clones, ships, and the basic necessities of a space faring society."

#Been holding that in for a while sir?#

"Yeah, sorry. It's one if the things that just drives me crazy about a lot of my kind. We're often so oblivious to the multitudes that we take for granted every day. It's why I try to take a personal hand in the building of everything I have out here. I want the people who work for me to know that I'm still, you know, a person, and not some aloof demigod as many would style themselves."

#Isn't that dangerous though sir?#

"Oh sure, there's always the chance that some mishap or willful act of aggression will destroy my current body. I made quite a few enemies in the Amarr Empire in my time working for the Sisters. My stance against slavery stems both from my upbringing in the core of Federation, as well as my disgust that an entire people would use religion of all things to justify it. I freed slaves or bought contracts to do the same a lot while I was out there, and that tends to make one unpopular with the more conservative Holders. I don't worry as much as I used to though, I've created backup copies of my consciousness after each of my latest poddings. I'm already in a facility that I trust to handle my mind, I just have them record the pattern used to make my current clone and have it sent to secure offsite storage."

#Sir! That is-#

"Not technically illegal so long as no two copies of my mind ever exist simultaneously. Recent advances in battlefield cloning have made this very appealing to capsuleers like myself who aren't content to spend every waking moment ensconced within the relative safety of a pod. In the event that my current body is somehow terminated, the backup of my mind would be used to instantiate a new clone. Sure there would be some loss of continuity, but every clone soldier goes through the same process, repeatedly, of simply not being, for a period of time."

#You seem to have put a lot of thought into this sir#

"Sure I did! The universe has seemingly gifted me with functional immortality, who am I to waste such a thing! There are still so many mysteries to be observed in the reality we find ourselves in. Places to explore, sciences to discover, I mean we've yet to even encounter an intelligence of non-human origins. I want to be there when that happens! I want to keep learning, and experiencing, and growing as a conscientious being, would could possibly be more human than that!"

#I believe you've successfully disproved your initial argument sir#

"Huh, I suppose I have, sorry for the rambling Pali. I'd actually intended for today's post to just be a quick update on my progress."

#These recordings are for your benefit, not mine sir. If you intend to do as you say, these may be the only way for you to remember your formative years. Your admittedly large head is only capable of storing a few petabytes of material naturally, and cybernetic enhancements will only take you so much further#

"That's true Pali, I figure I'll need to store a certain amount of my memories every century or so. I think what I'd like to do is store entire libraries of knowledge and only access them when I need them. Like my knowledge of Talocan and Yan Jung technologies, how often do I use those on a day to day basis? I'd have those stored externally and only call them up when I needed them. So, I would know I still knew those things, I just wouldn't know what those things are, if that makes sense?"

#Sure thing sir. Did you want to end this soon? I'm reasonably certain that a few of your readers have gone glassy eyed at this point#

"Bah, streams of consciousness are always fun! But yeah, this went on for way longer than I intended, thanks Pali."

#Sure thing sir#

#Recording ended - Archiving#