X-Message-Number: 32296
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 12:43:13 -0800
Subject: Re: uploading and survival
From: Keith Henson <>

For those who don't read anything longer than a short posting,
Suskulan is an AI that runs a nanotech clinic in an African village
(tata), Zaba is a 12 year old girl who was shot through the spine.

****

This time the nanomachines didn't infiltrate her brain just to shut it
down, though they did that and reversed the mild damage from shock and
low blood flow.   The nanomachines mapped out *all* her neural
circuits and cell connections.  Shortly before her parents entered the
clinic the next day they tentatively restored consciousness, partly in
her brain--which was far below the temperature needed to run on its
own--and partly in the haze of nanomachines that were also simulating
input in place of her eyes and ears.

"What happened to me?  Where am I?  Where is my body?" Zaba asked as
she became conscious.  She was calm because the nanomachines were
acting as tranquilizers.  Suskulan was listening to an interface to
her mostly simulated motor cortex.

To give Zaba orientation Suskulan imposed on her visual cortex a wire
frame image of the human form he usually presented then explained:

"You were shot, you are in the clinic Suskulan at the tata, and your
body is under the clinic being repaired.  The clinic recently gained
new powers to speak to spirits while their bodies are being healed.
The healing will take some time, even I do not know exactly how many
days," he added,  "You were badly injured."

snip

Sensing that she wanted to know more, Suskulan generated a wire frame
of her body and fed it to her visual circuits.

"The bullet entered the outer edge of your right nipple between ribs,
passed through your right lung just missing your heart.  It hit the
4th thoracic vertebrae, shattering it and severing your spinal cord."
Since butchering animals was a common (but not common enough!)
practice at the tata Zaba understood the picture she was seeing.

"That takes a lot of fixing.  Your body is being kept very cold so my
healing spirits can work fast without burning up."

"How do they work?"

"Ah.  Such a simple question; such a *hard* answer.   The problem is
you don't have the words; they don't exist in your language.  To
understand how healing spirits work would require that you learn to
read and learn another language."

Zaba, like 99% of the Tamberma, was illiterate.   Not that learning to
read in her language would have been much help.  The only literature
in the language was a translation of the Bible, not terribly useful to
people with traditional religions.

"Can you teach me this language and how to read?"  Zaba asked.

There was a short pause, which was really a very long pause for
Suskulan as he projected what would happen and thought about the
unstated (though obvious) reason he had been given the upgrade.

"Yes" Suskulan said at last inflecting his voice to a sigh.  "But it
will change you and the rest of the people of the tata in ways you
cannot foresee and may not like. You can sleep through the nine or ten
days it will take to finish healing you.  Are you sure you want to do
this?

"Yes," said Zaba firmly, "I want to learn."

And thus was the fate of this particular tata determined,

******

It's not hard to imagine how the rest of the story slides down the
slippery slope.

Keith

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