Everyone In Silico
Book Excerpt
She called up her active in silico experiments - two had been birthed alive. One was a three-headed fluke she had called Cerberus, and the other had a single eye in the middle of its forehead. She focused in on the Cyclops fluke first, noting with satisfaction that it was blinking normally - the last version had been birthed with a messed-up eyelid. She called up the Cerberus fluke. It wasn't doing as well, only one of the three heads breathing normally.
She zoomed in on the organs and got the computer to diagnose. The heart glowed red, 125% the normal rate. The lungs were within normal parameters this time, although still a little off. Nicky sighed. Maybe three heads aren't better than one...
She went back to the Cyclops and introduced different stimuli. The model fluke barked happily when it was introduced to food pellets, sexual partners, and petting. It looked good to Nick
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The ending, described in posts below, is a bit jarring, but, as far as I can tell, is part of an overall shift in the accepted form of the novel withing the science fiction genre (a similar denoument occurs in "Somebody Comes to Town, Somebody Leaves Town," a novel published contemporaneously). It will be interesting to see where it leads.
Um, and why would uploaded bodies be needed for work when you could just create or bake them as you please, is beyond me. Mech robots are the future, anyway.
It doesn't have the most "tidy" ending, but it leaves room for the reader's imagination to "fill in the blanks". A sequel in the works, perhaps?