Criminal Reincarnation

Criminal Reincarnation

 

 

I read an article about life extension, and I came up with a difficulty. One speculated route to rejuvenation is to upload one’s mind into a computer, keep it there awhile, then download it into a fresh, young body. I leave aside the unsolved problems of uploading minds, or of maintaining them in a digital platform, or of downloading them. What I wonder is:

 

Where do those fresh young bodies come from?

 

In Zelazny’s “Lord of Light”, people routinely reincarnated into young bodies. Zelazny never mentioned where they got those young bodies.

 

Just grow them? Fast, like mushrooms? Doing that is an unsolved problem, and it’s never witnessed in nature. I suspect that a human body needs a human mind to direct its development. Maybe bodies grown fast like mushrooms would misdevelop into nonviable monsters.

 

How about the old-fashioned way? Take 20 years to grow a 20-year-old body. That’s a while. Well, maybe Rejuvenation, Inc. has a stockpile. But that body will have a mind of its own, one that would not wish to be over-written, i.e. killed.

 

Which brings me to this speculation: that reincarnation would be possible, but a crime.

 

I think there are story possibilities here. What would the 20-year-olds, awaiting mind-wipe, think of this? When the cops shut down Reincarnation, Inc., then what do they do with the previous customers? Mind-wipe them and put the original minds back in? What if those minds were lost?

 

Imagine the courtroom dramas. For instance, the DA proposes putting the invading mind back into the computer, but that person pleads to be erased entirely, for the innards of a digital machine is no place for an analog human mind.