## Fantasy writing prompt; looking for rationalist responses * Author: u/Torvacht * * URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2u9dk9/fantasy_writing_prompt_looking_for_rationalist/ * Score: 6 * Created: 2015-01-31T01:13:24 ### Post: "He achieved immortality, the greatest of sins. For his hubris, we have sealed him away in glass, so that he may meditate on his crimes for eternity." ### Comments: > **u/eaglejarl** [+6] (20 hours later) > > Methods of immortality or near-immortality have been known for a long time...there's the "cryohoppers" who wake up for a month or three every century to watch the world changing in freeze-frame; there's the Virts, who create copies of themselves in silicon and trade in a world of atoms for one of electrons; there's the Planters, who periodically buy a new body into which they can transplant their brain. (It's a method that is hard on the teenager who is purchased, but grants an excellent standard of living for their family.) > > All of those methods have one thing in common: the law has a clear understanding of under what circumstances the person is alive or dead. The definition of life matters on every level of society: inheritance, voting rights, eligibility for office, competence hearings, and on and on. > > Last week, Dr. Huron came forward to announce that he had perfected the process of nano-replacing a body in vivo -- the nanomachines replace one cell at a time until, after a few hours, your brain and body are composed entirely of self-repairing, infinitely regenerating nanotech instead of mortal flesh. There's no continuity flaw, no point at which the person ceases and the copy begins. Suddenly, all the legal structures have collapsed; are the new Nanos alive or dead? As one urgent example, the Chief Justices of the American State serve for life with no provision for removal, and one of them wants to be Nano'd; afterwards, would she still be eligible for office? > > Huron has been summoned before the World Court to provide expert testimony on the life and death states of the Nano-folk. Given his long and respected career in both practical technology and medical ethics, Huron's views will have a great deal of influence in shaping the law going forward...the law that affects two trillion sophonts throughout the System. > > Angry at what they expect his answer will be, a group of Conserves captured Huron and Virted him into an isolated system running an emulation of Hell. Every thousand subjective years, a warden will come to the Huron-Virt and say: "Explain your crime." If Huron can give an answer that satisfies them, and if he truly believes that answer, then they will put him back in his body and send him to his appointment before the World Court. > > Such is the punishment of Dr. Huron, the man who gave us eternity. >> **u/Torvacht** [+3] (a day later) >> >> Oh man, this is really good. > **u/The_Mad_Duke** [+5] *House Tremontaine* (22 hours later) > > A futuristic retelling/version of *The Count of Monte Cristo* in which the protagonist has plenty of time for self-improvement and planning. Either a hopeful one were the protagonist attempts to show his captors/guards (or maybe their descendants?) the error of their ways, or a more old-fashioned revenge tale in which the immortal hunts down his narrow-minded enemies. > **u/E-o_o-3** [+4] (an hour later) > > First thing that came to mind was an advanced society who had suspended the dead in some sort of plastic equivalent of cryo. > > Society collapses, immortality goes out of reach, humanity forgets the spark of enlightenment, and gradually from scraps of truth a mythology builds around the catacomb containing thousands men and women staring blankly from their plastiglass tombs... > > (If we're getting technical though, we would probably avoid letting photons in, but you can hand wave around that for the cool factor) > **u/OffColorCommentary** [+4] (18 hours later) > > Separate responses: > > * It's a simple tragedy; just because the authorities are wrong doesn't mean they can't do it. > * The elite take immortality for granted, but the serfs are banned from it. This is supposedly due to resource constraints, but it's just people being assholes like usual. > * A transhumanist figured out how to achieve immortality, but since she knows there's a punishment, she abstains from becoming immortal herself and is going around making other people immortal until the system breaks down. > * Heaven is real, it's actually wonderful, and becoming immortal prevents your future self from ever going there, so it's actually worse than murder. > **u/xamueljones** [+3] *My arch-enemy is entropy* (4 hours later) > > The sin isn't the immortality itself. > > The price born of his arrogance led to the sin of sacrificing an untold number of lives to extend his lifespan unto the final end of all as the stolen life force exponentially multiplied in his body. > > The ritual cannot be done without sacrificing what makes us human, for it twists the caster into a monster. Only a mind born without empathy would be left unchanged by the ritual. Even with willing sacrifices, the ritual is useless to us and is forbidden for this reason. > > To fit the punishment to the crime, we entombed him in glass in a desolate location where he still lies to this very day. It is a pitiful existence as he suffers the same unchanging Oblivion he sentenced his victims to as well as the light of the outside showing him what his victims lost. > > Listen child and understand that while immortality for all is a noble goal, to hoard it to oneself at the cost of others, already pitifully short, lifespan, is the greatest sin one can commit. > **u/notmy2ndopinion** [+2] *Concent of Saunt Edhar* (3 hours later) > > I finally uploaded my consciousness to a virtual cloud of data... but they cut the cables to the sky, so now I'm trapped in one small box. Forever. > **u/Empiricist_or_not** [+1] *Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm* (an hour later) > > Are we going for a tragedy, comedy or romance? I.e., for those not conversant in lit-crit patterns, does the past force the future, does the future pull the present, or does stuff just happen? ---