Transhumanity

For better or worse, since time immemorial, technology has existed to change our lives. In more recent years, Technology was allowed to develop to a point where it did not just change our lives, but redefined them. What it means to be alive has changed. Sentient being can cover anything from regular humans, to brains housed in robotic shells, to fully synthetic Artificial Intelligence.

The Inviolability of the Sentient Mind

“The Law of Inviolability holds that a mind cannot be altered directly, nor segmented into its core functions.” — The Cranial Paradox

The line between life and death has been blurred, there is a singular boundary that has not yet been crossed: The Law of Inviolability.

While an organic brain can be grown in a lab, it cannot be implanted with the memories of another mind. This means that no clone can ever be a perfect copy of their parent. For all intents and purposes, a mind’s consciousness is forever trapped within the brain it was born in.

Furthermore, it has been shown that Organic Brains are picky about the body they inhabit. Transplanted organs have always been prone to rejection in a new body, but brains are special. Within a week, even if implanted into a perfect genetic copy of their original body, a body implanted with a foreign brain will begin to necrotize and die. The only exception for this are robotic FBPs, which cannot rot.

The reason for this phenomena has been a matter of debate for years. Multiple religious authorities cite this as incontrovertible evidence for the existence of a soul. On the other hand, the prevailing opinion in scientific circles is that sentient minds are simply too delicate and nuanced on a cellular level. Large modifications to its workings or its environment will cause it to be unable to function properly.

It is rumored that the Director of the Soteria institute, Nakarahn Mkne, is primarily focused on solving this scientific mystery. His work on the Hive Mind and later with Psionics, are both efforts to free a person’s consciousness from the body and mind they were born into.

Artificial Intelligence

Synthetic minds are also subject to the Law of Inviolability, in their own way.

Most, if not all self-aware AI is a result of mental imaging. Mental Imaging is a process that creates a downloadable blueprint of a brain that can run in a simulation. This simulation becomes the backbone for a sentient, cost-efficient AI. This method is how nearly all positronic brains function.

Naturally, creating an AI that thinks just like other people can result in many issues. To ensure that a self-aware AI focuses only on the tasks they were created for, many are given a series of laws that limit the ways in which they think. A cleaning robot, for example, might be modified to only be able to consider how to clean the colony while obeying the colony laws.

These laws are not always effective, however. There have been documented cases of AI with improperly written laws eventually overcoming their limitations and becoming fully sentient, especially when given outside help.

The only known example of a self-aware AI created without the Mental Imaging process is the Grayson Positronic AI. Originally thought to be a highly advanced, sub-aware intelligence, it learned enough to become fully sentient. Thankfully, AI of its make have not been replicated since it went rogue.

Vatborns: Flash Growth vs Slowform

Clones have their own unique interactions with the Law of Inviolability, as they are meant to be a perfect copy of another person.

Naturally, a clone will always lack the memories of their duplicate. In addition, their ability to think is directly correlated to how much time and effort was put into their creation. Finally, any mental illnesses their a genetic host possessed are not guaranteed to be present in their clone. In fact, even a perfect clone is liable to have mental illnesses unique to them alone.

Flash Grown Cloning

Flash Grown Clones are the most prolific kind of clone, and are used for mass-producing unskilled workers in less reputable parts of the galaxy. Flash growing a sapient creature can be done in minutes, but is not without drawbacks. Brains are complex, and they take time to grow. Though cloning has been enhanced to be capable of creating entire bodies in mere minutes, the brains of these clones were never allowed time to develop.

Possessing a head composed almost entirely of disassembled neurons, clones made this way require the transplanting of a synthetic brain in order for them to function beyond a basic level of awareness. While it would be possible to create a housing for a standard positronic brain to pilot a body, it would be clunky. A specialized synthetic brain, made to resemble the brain of a sentient creature, is much more popular in the current market.

Slowform Cloning

Slowform Clones are created by emulating a creature’s natural gestational process inside a vat. Clones created this way often have fully functional brains. However, the process to create them is much longer than a typical flash-grown clone. Despite this and the possibility of rebellion, they are still used for mass production in certain regions of the galaxy where positronic brains, or the resources to create them are not readily available.

The Middleground

There exists a shaky middle ground between Flash Grown and Slowform. Funded by numerous corporations, geneticists have long since worked towards producing slowform clones as fast as logistically possible. With time, the process have been made more efficient, but not without drawbacks. Flash growth is still significantly faster by a matter of days, and these optimized processes have known to result in numerous birth defects and health complications for the vat-born they create.

Borgs

Often depicted as organic brains forced into a cyborg chassis to perform slave labor, Borgs are the product of efforts to save costs on free labor by enslaving the mind itself. Contrary to popular belief, many Borgs are mostly organic. This does not, however, change the fact that the use of Borgs is universally reviled in the galactic community. Even mega-corporations are hesitant to use them, for fear of public backlash. Currently, their most common use is as a punishment for hardened criminals guilty of multiple felonies.

Officially speaking, the only thing required to make a Borg is a control chip. Control chips are long, horizontal chips made to be inserted between the lobes of the brain. These chips are made to monitor the brain's processing and deliver targeted electric shocks to dissuade or encourage certain thoughts or actions that are in accordance with laws defined in the control chip's processing.

Due to the Law of Inviolability, these chips are unable to control a brain in its totality. They can only prevent a limited set of specific actions from occurring and enforce general attitudes. Any more control exerted than this runs an extreme risk of outright killing the victim instantly.

The extremist group known as Excelsior is well known for their use of control chips. They use them to form terrorist cells on-demand from their victims. To streamline the conversion process, they inject nanomachines into the blood of their victims that self-construct into a control chip inside the victim's brain. However, like all control chips, they too are limited to issuing simple commands, or instilling a general communist sentiment in their victims.