coil as an analogy for death. Humanity had taken it a step further, though. Technological advances theorized that the mind, the essence, some said the soul, of a person could be digitized and preserved, given that a large enough reservoir of storage space was available. The advent of quantum computing provided the raw storage and processing needed to turn that theory into a reality, taking humanity one giant leap closer to immortality. The rest was easy.
Cloned tissue produced new shells, new coils, in which the mind could be inserted. Genetic engineering ensured that those coils were as perfect and purpose-built as any machine. They had to be slow-grown, as something in the chemistry of the brain required a certain degree of aged stability before accepting a core and by law, no one could be re-coiled into a body younger than sixteen years of age. That created any number of issues, particularly in those tragic instances when children died, but the ramifications of stuffing people with multiple decades of life into, say, a five-year-old body were too much for society to accept. And so, humanity, still unable to break the boundaries of our own solar system, effectively obtained immortality. Of course, it was never that easy, not with people being people. In the early years, with every aspiring biotech company trying to pump out home-grown coils as fast as possible to make a quick credit, the quality control had been nothing short of abysmal. And the issues went beyond the simple cosmetics and capabilities of a given coil. Improperly grown coils suffered from… call them wiring problems. The wetware of the brain, if not grown slowly over years to very specific and demanding standards, caused compatibility issues with the cores. The results weren’t that different from any number of violent psychoses.
That’s when the various polities stepped in. Most of the megacorps had a certain degree of extraterritoriality, but they were at least nominally subject to the will of the governments of Earth, Mars, Luna, and the various habitats and stations scattered throughout the system. When those governments acted in concert, even the corporations had to bow to their will. A set of standards was established and a new corporate entity, a new monopoly, was formed. BioStar was given the sole rights to create coils and held to the exacting standards. There were still errors of course, coils that didn’t quite meet spec, but most were built as solid as the human form could be. Of course, limiting the supply to a single company, coupled with the growth time required for stable coils, meant that there was always a queue for getting put into a new coil and that, unless you had the top-of-the-line insurance policies, you pretty much had to take whatever body they stuffed you into.
Which brought its fair share of problems, but they weren’t really the ones I was concerned about at the moment. Getting a backup of your mind shoved into new flesh had its own drawbacks. It took a while to acclimate, to really feel like the new coil was yours. But, more importantly, you accepted a certain data loss, as some termed it, between the time you had last backed up and the time you were re-coiled. For the ultra-rich who changed coils like the rest of us changed clothes, that might only be a few minutes. Pop into your local coil center, pick a new body, do a quick backup, and be inserted on the spot. For those of us who could only afford the most basic backup insurance, which provided for new coils only in the event of advanced age or death, that lost time normally measured in weeks, and in rare cases, sometimes as long as years.
How long, Sarah?
Agents were backed up in almost the exact same way as people, storing a copy of the AI at the point in time when the person was having their backup done. But AIs didn’t have the shock of adaptation to a new coil, or the emotional baggage of realizing that, somewhere, some-when, a version of them had just been wiped out of existence. The question was vague, but since it was the question asked by most people when waking up in the body shop, AIs were programmed to handle it.
It has been sixty-three days since this instantiation was created.
I was still too new to my coil to register the physiological responses to surprise. My stomach didn’t drop. My heart didn’t race. My mouth didn’t go