A Visitor to the Future - 4 - Bio-Development

"Two years?!" I said, shocked.

"Yes, you're one of my - sorry, our - most complicated projects. I can't claim all the credit. There are five other Bio-devs who worked on you - only one of them is currently on the ship, the rest helped remotely." Sarkona waved vaguely at the air around themself to emphasise the last word.

"But two years - just working on me? Didn't you get bored?"

"Hah, sometimes my focus did slip, yes. Though I wasn't just working on you - I have other interests too. And on a ship like this we're never without distractions when we need them. I have too many hobbies, really. But I must say it is not like I have been working on you every single day - the truth is you would not notice if I took another day off once in a while."

"Is two years not normal then for... someone like me? A 'cryocontained'?"

Sarkona steepled their hands on the table. "My great-grandfather was a great man but he was far from perfect. Cryocontainment was in very early days back then, and the technique used to freeze you caused a lot of damage to your cells, and meant there was a lot to repair. We know how to automatically reverse a lot of that damage but in your case there was a lot of manual work to be done. Ruptured cell membranes, damaged brain cells - all too delicate for automated tools - but not difficult to deploy a fix for, just time-consuming. Each cell has to be individually repaired."

I supressed a shudder at the thought of someone poking around in my head. But I was here now, talking, moving, well - so everything must have gone well enough, even if it did all feel a little surreal.

"You mentioned Cryocontainment has improved over the years - how so?" I asked.

Sarkona briefly left the table to retrieve a wide-necked bottle of water. They passed one to me too. "Mainly it's down to how quickly the body is frozen. Plus, some more advanced techniques used to remove unnecessary moisture from the body - the less water around, the less damage caused by it freezing and expanding. The most significant changes were made about fifty years after you were frozen - my great-grandfather made sure the process was as good as possible before he used it."

I sputtered and choked on the crystal clear water. "Dr. Grant was frozen too? Is he here now?"

Sarkona shook their head sadly. "Unfortunately not. He was frozen for about five hundred years, and from what I'm told he lived a great life once he awoke. Sadly he was involved in the Dauntless Navigator shuttle accident and was unrecoverable."

"Sorry to have brought it up," I said, weighing up how to ask about the next part, "But if he was unrecoverable... does that mean there are limits to what you can do?"

"Yes," nodded Sarkona, "To use an automobile analogy from your time, enough damage leads to a total loss - a write-off. Too much of the person has been lost to the extent it is no longer possible to recover them. As Bio-Developers we are always pushing that limit, however. But there is a cut-off. Though we can remove and read biological memories, we can't replace them once they're removed or if they're damaged. And even if we could do it safely, then there's bottled mind theory, which is much like - oh, what was it called, the Ship of Thebes?"

"The Ship of Theseus, you mean?"

"That's it! Good to see you're familiar. The bottled mind analogy is much more common these days. Say you have a mind in a bottle, and you open the cap and pour some of it out. If you poured something else in, is it the same person? How empty does the bottle have to be before it's a new person? There's a series of studies that some of the Jovian Orgs are doing on it - fascinating stuff. The ability to quantify the 'bottle' in the analogy - 10% full, 90% full, and so on - is useful. It informed a lot of the definitions we use today."

There was a brief pause as we finished our water, as the enormity of what they had just said sunk in.

"Sarkona, I apologise if this is impolite to ask, but how old are you? If Dr. Grant, your great-grandfather, was unfrozen 500 years ago, and there were three generations afterward..."

"Not at all! You'll find we're a lot more open about that sort of thing. I'm 108 years old, born in 2913. Not that old!"

A jolt ran through my head - apparently there was time for one more paradigm-shattering revelation today.

"You mean to say that - you've solved aging?" My voice became constricted and higher pitch, as I couldn't help the shock that crept into my voice. "You barely look 30!"

Sarkona looked contemplative for a moment. "First, yes, we've technically solved aging. But it's another tricky subject to bring up without causing offence. There are many Orgs out there that do not want to live indefinitely. So saying you've solved it implies there is something wrong with them for wanting to live what they would call a normal existence. And likewise if they were to infer that we were not normal for not wanting to live as they do, that may cause friction. But yes, you can live as long or as short a life as you wish. That's a key part of the right of self-determination. I must stress that your current body will continue to age as it is now, but removing that function is not a challenge for a Bio-dev like myself."

The world spun around me. "I'm sorry, this is all a bit much." I took a moment to consider that everything I had ever planned about my life - from having children to retiring - was no longer under any sort of time pressure. I tried to just let it sweep over me. "I'm going to need time to adjust to all of this - please remember that in my time we still had issues treating the common cold."

"Of course! Just remember that everyone is all warm enough now. Temperature-controlled rooms."

"No, I meant the common cold - you know, the virus?" I clarified.

"Oh. Ohhhh! Viruses. Yes. Mostly not a problem these days. That's the least of what we can solve."


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