Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1)

by E. William Brown

  With better materials, integrated electronics and arbitrarily small feature sizes, most types of equipment can also make use of extreme redundancy to be absurdly reliable. The climate control in your house uses thousands of tiny heat exchangers instead of one big one, and they’ll never all break down at once. The same goes for everything from electrical wiring to your car’s engine - with sufficient ingenuity most devices can be made highly parallel, and centuries of effort have long since found solutions for every common need.

  This does imply that technology needs constant low-level maintenance to repair failed subsystems, but that job can largely be handled by self-repair systems and maintenance. The benefit is that the familiar modern experience of having a machine fail to work simply never happens. Instead most people can live out their whole lives without ever having their technology fail them.

  Now that’s advanced technology.

  Appendix V – Medicine

  Futurists have invested a lot of effort in trying to predict the future of medicine, especially in light of expected developments in fields like tissue engineering and nanotechnology. While some of their more ambitious ideas seem unlikely in a universe that doesn’t have superhuman AIs, four and a half centuries of research implies a lot of progress. The human body may be incredibly complex, but nanotechnology is an equally incredible tool for unraveling that complexity and making repairs where they’re needed.

  Or enhancements.

  Indeed, as we shall see below, medicine in the 25th century is more about changing how the body works than simply fixing it. By this point in history infectious diseases are long since extinct, and cures for virtually any natural malady have been known for centuries. But the possibilities for enhancement and modification of the body are limitless, and in the long run people aren’t going to simply ignore that.

  So what will people do with the technology to shape biology at the atomic level? Let’s take a look at the different applications.

  Tissue Engineering

  With a complete understanding of biology, doctors can easily clone organs or other tissues based on a patient’s DNA. Originally this process was developed to create replacements for lost body parts and failing organs, and in a modern lab it can produce anything up to and including a complete body.

  This means that as long as your brain makes it to the hospital intact, any injury is survivable with no long-term consequences. In the worst case a doctor can simply put your brain in a life support pod for a week while he builds a replacement body, and then transplant you into it. Less drastic injuries can be treated by replacing lost body parts, or by applying various combinations of cultured cells and nanites to quickly rebuild damaged tissue.

  Similar techniques can be used for cosmetic surgery, making it possible to alter a patient’s appearance in pretty much any desired fashion. Such cosmetic changes aren’t limited to a human appearance, either. If you want to look like a kitsune, or have horns growing out of your head, or anything else that’s biologically realistic, a little judicious cosmetic surgery can probably make it happen.

  Genetic Engineering

  Early genetic engineering focused on curing diseases, but over the course of centuries many societies have gone far beyond that. Since beneficial changes tend to spread, and deleterious alleles have a high chance of being removed via genetic engineering in any given generation, the human gene pool has changed markedly since the 21st century.

  In the modern era all humans are considerably healthier, more athletic, smarter and better looking than in the past. Minor health problems like acne and poor eyesight are unusual, and easily fixed. Insanity and idiocy are likewise much less common, because the genetic factors that often contribute to such problems have long since been eliminated.

  Many populations have gone beyond simple elimination of defects, seeking substantial improvements like universal genius or superhuman physical abilities. Such efforts usually succeed to some degree, but as a result the human genome has also become far more varied than in the past. Artificial manipulations from different sources often don’t mix well, so heavily modified humans may need to seek professional advice if they mate outside their own group.

  Cybernetics

  While organic modifications are generally more popular than mechanical devices, there are a lot of applications where they just don’t get the job done. The archetypal example of this is the implant communicator, a tiny brain implant that contains a radio and a computer controlled by a neural interface. Implant coms are virtually universal in most colonies, serving as a combination smart phone and ID card.

  A second near-universal cybernetic device is the standard medical implant, which monitors its user’s health and deploys defensive nanotech devices to protect against hostile microorganisms. Given the lethality of artificial plagues this is considered an essential public health measure by most governments, much like vaccinations in the 20th century.

  But cybernetics can go far beyond simple single-purpose implants. More ambitious designs can include subdermal armor, life support systems, sensory enhancements, and even wholesale replacement of large parts of the customer’s body. In the most extreme case the brain can be transplanted into a completely synthetic body. While few people are willing to go that far, full body replacements aren’t unknown in military forces or dangerous professions.

  One of the biggest advances of the last century is the development of nanotech systems that can be inherited from mother to child, and will build a specified set of cybernetic devices as the child develops. As a result many children are now born with com and medical implants, sensory enhancements and other special abilities.

  Low-powered cybernetics are usually designed to run off the same chemical energy sources as normal tissue. More energy-hungry devices are often connected to an implanted power cell, or even a nuclear power source such as a radioactive decay battery (i.e. ‘nuke pack’) or micro-fission plant.

  Immortality

  Like any other medical problem, the biological causes of aging were unraveled way back in the 21st century. At this point medical technology has been capable of repairing old age for almost four centuries, and immortality has long since become a routine part of life for practically every human society. Contrary to pessimistic early assumptions this is not some rare privilege reserved to the upper classes, and it doesn’t require some terrible Faustian bargain. In the 25th century people just stop aging when they reach maturity, and continue to live in a completely healthy body indefinitely.

  Some people aren’t satisfied with this, since having your brain destroyed will still kill you. Many people have taken to living inside heavily armored structures (either giant space stations or underground colonies) with extensive security measures to minimize their chance of a fatal accident. Others have themselves upgraded with survivability mods like an armored skull, or even transfer their brains to heavily armored fixed installations and operate their body via remote control. The last option is popular with VR addicts, who don’t expect to spend much time in the real world anyway, but other people tend to think it’s a little paranoid.

  Uploading is another option that’s technically feasible, but not especially popular. While scanning a human brain and converting it into a software emulation can potentially make the subject immortal, many people worry that the upload is ‘just a copy’ and that this doesn’t help the original. There is also considerable concern over the fact that an upload can easily be modified by whoever controls the hardware they run on, raising the specter of easy mass mind control.

  Newer technology makes it possible to install a brain implant that streams all of a person’s experiences to a backup server in real time, so that if they die a doctor can simply construct a new copy of them complete with all their memories. Unfortunately it’s also trivial for anyone who has the backup data to edit it, and create as many altered copies of the original as they want. As a result fears of abuse have made the adoption of this technology fairly slow.

 
In the final analysis, the real limit on longevity in the 25th century is usually not individual lifespan. In a typical colony peaceful citizens can easily expect to live for thousands of years before falling prey to some rare accident, but the colonies themselves have a much shorter lifespan. War, terrorism and genocide are by far the leading causes of death, and further lifespan improvements are more a matter of politics than medicine.

  Sex Mods

  Yes, we’re going to go there. For some reason SF authors have generally been very reluctant to touch this issue, but the more immediate applications of easy personal modification tech seem fairly obvious.

  First, by the 25th century practically all women have a set of mods that give them conscious control of their own fertility while completely eliminating the need to have periods. Another set of tweaks that makes it easy to achieve orgasm through intercourse is also nearly universal, because practically everyone wants that to be easy. Generations of hereditary cosmetic tweaks ensure that even average women are as beautiful as the supermodels of the 21st century, while those who work at it can achieve a level of exotic perfection that would be impossible in nature.

  Meanwhile men generally have more stamina, and are able to perform several times in the course of an evening. Larger sex organs are fairly common, as are various minor design tweaks reputed to increase a partner’s pleasure. Gender dimorphism in height and weight is also significantly increased - the average male is a couple of inches taller and carries an extra twenty or thirty pounds of muscle, while the average female size hasn’t changed.

  Second-order effects are less obvious, because they depend on the evolution of the surrounding society. Some colonies have fallen into a cycle of adopting more and more potent sex mods, creating a population that grows ever more obsessed with increasingly intense and exotic sex until finally nothing else ever gets done. Other societies become obsessed with specific fetishes, with most of the population adopting a common set of extreme mods (i.e. everyone becomes a cat person), but remain otherwise functional. Many societies see human relationships come to a virtual end with the widespread introduction of companion androids, and population growth either stops entirely or continues via artificial means.

  But the one constant is that the future belongs to those who show up. As humanity expands ever further from the Sol system most of the colonists inevitably hail from societies that maintained a high birth rate for one reason or another. In the Outer Sphere virtually every colony has a high fertility rate, although the mechanisms vary widely. One colony might manufacture new citizens under the guidance of a Department of Population Growth, while another might simply have three women for every man and a culture encouraging large families. One way or another, though, the societies that produce strong population growth are steadily outcompeting those that don’t.

  Mind Control

  Unfortunately, one of the unanticipated consequences of the mastery of biology is that it makes a wide variety of mind control technologies feasible. While such techniques take time to apply and aren’t perfectly reliable, they can be far more insidious than traditional methods.

  One branch of this technology combines VR systems with AI and direct neural stimulation to create a sort of perfect brainwashing environment. The AI can monitor the victim’s thoughts, applying positive and negative reinforcement in real time as it subjects them to various virtual experiences. Ruthless application of this approach is very effective at inducing compliance in most subjects, with a few days of training having an effect comparable to several years of more normal indoctrination.

  The other approach is to directly modify the victim’s brain using implants or nanotechnology. Medical implants provide some protection against this sort of thing, but if you can capture someone it’s relatively easy to either remove their implant or overwhelm its supply of defensive nanites. At that point the victim’s memories, emotions and beliefs can simply be edited to match whatever is desired. A careless editing job can easily drive the victim insane or reduce them to a virtual zombie, but careful professional editing can be almost seamless.

  Naturally oppressive governments tend to make liberal use of these technologies, both to ensure the loyalty of their subjects and to force them to believe whatever ideology has been declared official truth. This approach tends to be very successful at first, but once the brainwashing starts it tends to get used more and more until there’s no one left who has any contact with reality. This is one of three common failure modes of dysfunctional colonies (the other two being VR addiction and mass wireheading), although it’s gradually becoming less common as dictators learn to avoid the trap.