999 CAST MEETING (TNDG DAY 2)

[keybroad]

[Lotus wakes up in the sci-fi set along with some of the others. She goes off on her own to get dressed in a Star Trek teal jumpsuit. She comes back with two cinnamon rolls. She sits on her bed and claps her hands. The bracelets on her arms jangle and should get a decent amount of attention.]

So. We should all talk as a group, I guess.

[She proceeds to begin eating the cinnamon rolls. Both are apparently for herself.]

Comments

childbirth cw

[keybroad]

Oh, I'll admit that the clone wouldn't be us. However, if you're calling it a person who was just born, it's still a person "related to me". It's like if I'd had an identical twin sister who was excised from my mother and raised in a surrogate, as a stranger. Isn't the instinct of siblings - or parents and children - to protect one another extremely valuable as a species? Assuring a higher probability that our genes will be present in the next generation, even if we're not directly spawning children.

It's also a sort of prisoner's dilemma against myself. I have the option if I escape to try and kill my original so that I can live her life normally. She has the option of making no effort to summon me back into the realm I would find familiar, in the fear that I'd compete against her. But if we both treated each other that way, it would be awkward. So I benefit by being the type of person, before the divergence, who would act the nice way.

While killing anyone who already existed would be bad, I think we aren't obligated to preserve all mechanisms that could produce life in the future. That's like saying Nijisaki shouldn't have died because he theoretically could have gotten it up and given someone a kid.

[exequte]

That's true, but only if you assume immediate generation when someone is created, like people being 3-d printed on a molecular level. Usually any form of cloning requires significantly more time than that - development is effectively the same for a clone as it is for anything else. We know that the people organizing this have done this at least once before, which makes me wonder if we are meant to be the last group - and, if we're not, how far developed the next potential group might be. Maybe they're customization shells that can be changed to match the person who is chosen, a blank slate which can somehow be genetically altered, but even if that's the case then how should they be regarded?

[keybroad]

Uh... uh...

[She's having trouble following that, the clone part being even more new information to her.]

It's really sad and says way too much about the past 72 hours that I don't have a more detailed answer than "probably not murder them".

[exequte]

If there was anything of the kind, I'm not convinced they'd be able to survive without the mechanism that created them, at least not until "finished" - regardless of if one specific person were cloned from the start, or if there were empty shells that were waiting to be finished. Effectively in destroying whatever allowed them to be created, we'd also be sentencing them to death.

[Then just a faint smile.]

All of this is hypothetical, of course. And, on a positive note, if anything about this is true then they're unlikely to be able to quickly create new copies of us specifically if we are able to leave. Even the most cutting edge technology can't do much for how long cells take to develop.

[keybroad]

I guess the fate of an "unfinished" clone is just as doubtful as a premature baby... But we seem to be pretty "finished", we don't have IVs or anything. And we have no proof right now that "unfinished" clones do exist. So, don't worry, you didn't get me down that much.

[exequte]

No, I know. Like I said, this is all theoretical still. But it is still an interesting question.