More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
At the other end of the scale were Copies: elaborate refinements of whole-body medical simulations, originally designed to help train surgeons with virtual operations, and to take the place of animals in drug tests. A Copy was like a high-resolution CAT scan come to life, linked to a medical encyclopedia to spell out how its every tissue and organ should behave … walking around inside a state-of-the-art architectural simulation. A Copy possessed no individual atoms or molecules; every organ in its virtual body came in the guise of specialized sub-programs which knew (in encyclopedic, but not
...more
equation for so much as a single protein molecule. All physiology, no physics.
the first Copy’s first words were: “This is like being buried alive. I’ve changed my mind. Get me out of here.”
Hayden, with a thin smile of blatantly insincere approval, let Maria plug her notepad into the socket of her Police Department badge. The notepad beeped cheerfully; the badge knew the private code which matched the current public key being broadcast by the Department.
Radioisotope power sources could run for thousands of years; multiply redundant hardware of the highest standard could last almost as long, in theory. All these Copies would have, to remember reality by, would be the information they’d brought in with them at the start. If it turned into a one-way trip, they’d be like interstellar colonists, carrying a snapshot of Earth culture off into the void.
