Wednesday, March 16, 2011

undersulfurous jazz

After twenty or so years walking the highlands, past Theor Grunland and Theor Yusphealius, the Pleurg creatures who had been carrying the consciousnesses and muscular stress patterns of the princess regent and the cadre of royal advisors had reached the Yoveal caves, deep in the Thrunlands. Some Vlyssanghai engineers had set up a small laboratory outpost, and they still were using some Vlurfked composite quantum foam technology, and the Pleurg would discharge their charges into machines that would weave and sculpt new bodies for their charges. The process is two staged: the first stage involved the casting of the muscular stress patterns into blank quantum composite foam bodies, and was a fairly violent procedure involving immense energies: it was implosive and involved the careful arrangement of various attennules and other hyperfine projections into a sphere of unformed quantum foam composite. The sphere then shrinks into the shape of the body, which is still mindless, but carries the right muscular stress spectra to accommodate the mind that it is about to recieve. The second stage is much less violent and slower: while the original transcerebrrephrenization is fast because the tertiary brains of the Pleurg are made out of exotic matter, the process of writing a mind from a Pleurg tertiary brain to Vlurfked composite quantum foam takes about two days. 

After the mind is written (the technical term is 'milked') from the Pleurg tertiary brain, the booting occurs, this is the activation of the mind in the new substrate, and is effected through mental continuity: the experiential portion of the consciousness in the new body is linked to the the Pleurg tertiary brain, and in so doing, the consciousness moves. The Royal Anthropographer described it as "the mental equivalent of changing houses". 

After eight minutes or so, the composite quantum body, which doesn't have any of the original dna of the  person, settles into its appropriate shape. The composite quantum foam is able to determine, using the muscular stress data and the phreny, the exact appearance of the person. It takes about eight weeks for the person to settle into the new body without the added features of the composite quantum foam. At which point, if they so choose, and they usually do, to turn on the added features: dodecachromacy, increased memory and processing power, chromatophores in the skin, buckytube-tensioning of bone-equivalents. But the architecture of the mind is preserved, which is most important. In the case of the earliest attempts at this technology, minds were moved without care for the muscular stress patterns, and the most maladjusted minds would result, feeling naked, and they often lost it.

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