29 KiB
[Q][MK][BST] How do you best exploit absolute body control?
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Author: u/mhd-hbd Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake'*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2jnlet/qmkbst_how_do_you_best_exploit_absolute_body/
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Score: 7
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Created: 2014-10-19T01:11:19
Post:
So I have this power I am working with a character having. Virtually absolute body control.
Specifications are:
- It obeys conservation of mass.
- It is literally an unending number of nanoscopic telekinetic tweezers.
- Every change requires conscious concentration. It has a limited capacity for functioning autonomously.
- It includes full, constant awareness of everything inside body.
- It is slow. Healing a cut in the back of the hand takes an hour if left on autopilot, or five minutes of constant attention.
- It is limited by the users knowledge. One has to know the transformation is possible, and have a clear goal in mind before the power starts supplying guidance.
- It is not possible to become grossly inhuman, in any reasonable time-scale. Either mentally or physically.
- Damage done to the brain is generally irreversible. The tissue can be repaired but the information is lost.
- Severed tissue loses control property.
Mental self-editing is go, and it has built in safeguards against messing yourself up. It will readily supply guides for how to do just about anything.
So far I have thought of:
- Perfected physiology: strength, cardio, breathing, bone density, reinforced tendons, myelinated nerves, more connective tissue, no diseases.
- Cerebral maturity, (character is 15 years old,) for improved empathy, etc.
- Little to no sleep required.
- Improved productivity, by editing away how mental fatigue accumulates.
- Improved memory.
- Intelligence enhancements.
What else is there?
Comments:
u/INeedAUsernameToo [+14] (2 hours later)
I can't answer this question unless I know what the character wants. Also, you should look up Sandersons laws of magic. “A character's weaknesses are more interesting than his or her abilities”
I've actually written a full length novel with a main character who has a similar, though much weaker power. He could self edit, but only at natural speeds. So for example he could regrow a limb, but it took a couple months for the flesh to grow.
He did many of the obvious things, of course. Upgrading touch until he could feel the footsteps of opponents, upgrading hearing until he had sonar and could hear heartbeats, upgrading smell to be better than a dog, upgrading taste until he could taste poison, things like that. He could put half his brain to sleep at a time, and so never sleep again, but it caused him to act oddly (Dolphins actually do this).
I explored the way he invaded everyone’s privacy. There was one moment where he started smelling blood everywhere, then he realized it was menstrual blood. He could tell if someone was pregnant with a sniff. He could generally tell if someone was lying. Knew people better than they knew themselves.
I explored his ability to self-edit. He could make himself feel euphoria. He could orgasm with a thought. Could wire head himself at any time, for any reason. Could remove any pain or trauma. Magic in this world was tied to your emotions, where stronger emotions gave you more power, so he would make himself insane with rage or pain for short periods, then wipe the memories.
That said, all the best tricks were for specific opponents. At one point he was fighting vampires, so he changed the circulatory system so that major veins were deeper in the body, and what blood he did have was less useful to them. There was a fortress surrounded by a moat of poisonous gas that he needed to break into, so he made himself able to go for long periods without air. He threatened to become a typhoid Mary. There were people that used mind control, so he created a second brain (He could only use the brain for short periods, as otherwise it would overheat. Brain produces huge amounts of heat).
The entity that he got his power from was even stronger. It had turned all its enemies into giant worms that were immortal and exquisitely sensitive to pain, then turned them loose. The worms felt everything as pain, which caused them to thrash, which caused them to leak poisonous blood, which burned them even more, which caused them to thrash even more. The end result was that an entire ocean was poisoned and full of giant insane monsters constantly trying to kill themselves by attacking anything that they thought could threaten them. The entity also saved the brains of people who were exceptionally skilled or unique in some way, then gave their abilities to itself. It created a giant clone army, star-wars style, made out of half a dozen supremely skilled and loyal fighters.
u/6feetup [+5] (3 days later)
Can we get the name of the novel? It sounds pretty damn interesting :P
u/mhd-hbd [+1] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (5 hours later)
Yeah, this sounds about right.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+5] Utopian Smut Peddler (4 hours later)
How do you best exploit absolute body control?
But seriously.
It includes full, constant awareness of everything inside body.
Awareness does not equate to understanding. Unless you have a body OS already installed, or a masters in medicine or the like...
Actually, that sounds seriously distracting. See brain enhancement notes, below.
Little to no sleep required.
Nope, sleep is not a well understood effect, and might be structural to your huge humaniform brain.
Your...your mind is still running on your brain, right? No way that isn't safetied. So too little sleep == damage. If anything, you'd be less able to intentionally miss sleep, as that might count as damaging and engages safeties.
Improved productivity, by editing away how mental fatigue accumulates.
Right, but again: how exactly does this work? Unless your body control works on magic, or has instinctual or automatic elements, this won't work without a greater understanding of neuroanatomy than the vast majority of people actually have.
Improved memory.
Intelligence enhancements.
Same issue, just more so. This is your brain. Safeties engage the moment you try to make it "better" with some abstract, pop-sci thing you came up with.
What I've got:
Muscle fatigue disappears as recovery times and repair becomes instantaneous. You can run your body forever, any way you want.
Not bruising or bleeding for significant amounts of time.
No more coffee, as you can control attention and focus after reading up on what common drugs do to affect your systems and replicate this (carefully) through trying the drugs, then trial and error to get the same effects.
Unaging, as all decay is stopped.
u/mhd-hbd [+2] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (5 hours later)
Added an information advantage. The power supplies specific hacks for small step changes. Refactoring is up to the user.
Awareness is also understanding, and is non-intrusive. No names for stuff, lots of knowledge.
Brain still runs mind. There are already drugs that improve memory. Neuron density might be a factor too.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+1] Utopian Smut Peddler (5 hours later)
Ah, so it is like a "Blue Beetle" or battlesuit scenario, just without the suit. Your body is hardly even your own, but it runs based on your will not an external force. Works.
What do you see as the biggest disadvantages?
u/mhd-hbd [+2] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (6 hours later)
On a power-analytic level, the speed of change, and the specificity necessary to get the power to supply information on what needs to be changed.
On a pragmatic level, modern weaponry. Explosives, bullets, napalm. Still lethal as ever.
u/krakonfour [+1] (5 days later)
I see two problems: overheating and short-term energy supply. Overheating comes from the increased activity. You can't eliminate heat just by shifting things in your body around.
Short term energy supply: increased activity means increased energy use. ATP is in extremely short supply and hard-limited by how fast you can recycle it chemically. Oxygen supply can be increased by forcing away diaphragm fatigue, but the alveoli already have nearly the maximum possible surface area and haemoglobin already has a near 100% affinity for oxygen. Once you run out of oxygen, you go down anaerobic pathways for energy. They are less efficient and accumulate cell-damaging acid in the muscles and blood. You character can't control chemical reactions, right? Then this is a weakness.
u/mhd-hbd [+1] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (6 days later)
Yeah. This is good stuff. She is working on how to find a better way to make lungs, but hasn't yet found out how Bird's lungs use countercurrent flow for maximum efficiency.
As for heat, humans can throw quite a lot of heat by sweating, and most of her transformations she does long term. But yes, heat might actually be the limiting factor that forces something as simple as healing a wound to take hours.
u/krakonfour [+1] (6 days later)
I was thinking mostly in terms of the character wanting to exert more effort or run faster... Humans produce lots of waste heat, yes, but it is short bursts and released for long after the exercise is over. To exceed your limits would mean to run against your body's capacity to regulate its internal temperature.
You see, the body is mostly a bag of water, and conduction of heat from the muscles to the blood, and from the blood to the skin, and from the skin to the sweat and air, is mostly done through aqueous conduction. Water is a poor heat conductor. There are limits to how much heat you can remove from the muscles over time.
The longer it goes on, the worse things get. The core temperature builds up, meaning the difference in temperature between muscles and the blood lowers.... Thermodynamically, lower heat difference means less joules can be transferred per second. Also, as the muscles heat up, the enzymes move outside of their optimal efficiency temperatures. Each mole of glucose you provide will give you less energy. It goes downhill from there. Your breathing is limited by how many times you can pulse the signal to the diaphragm per minute... Long story short, you won't be evacuating enough CO2. Its much more of a problem than providing O2. Once CO2 starts building up in the blood, there ability to regulate your blood's acid levels decreases. Enzyme efficiency is affected by your blood's pH too.
So while your character can push herself to her limits, she's going to run headlong into chemical barriers.
What I suggest is that she carries drugs and solutions with her. While a regular person would die from a litre of basic solution being pumped into them, she would be able to control her blood vessel pressure and osmotic pressure so that she could make use of that injection to quickly act against acidosis. A human would be greatly damaged from 100g of glucose being released directly into the blood, but she could artificially increase her insulin levels in preparation for the injection.
There are many things she could do like that. A regular human cannot prepare their body for treatment, while she can force her body into a short-term lethal situation in preparation of outside intervention,
u/E-o_o-3 [+3] (2 hours later)
Er...if you're saying that you have total and complete control over a human sized bundle of mass down to the nano-level then there has got to be some better defined limitations in place here (or at the very least, an extreme rigor requirement for the language used to program the mass) because at this point I think it's harder to talk about what can't be done.
As in literally - name almost any random thing which doesn't grossly violate the laws of physics, and we can probably figure out a way to accomplish it..
In other words, if you want to write a hard munchkinproof fiction you've got to start from something more well-defined. You can't start with intuition-driven nano-tweezers or you'll end up with rational! Tetsuo. It sounds like you want the powers to stay body-themed, so we should probably BST a set of premises which remains mostly within those constraints.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (57 minutes later)
You said you can reshape your body more or less freely, right? Can you put a tendril of yourself into someone else? Either to kill them, set a bone, repair an injury, destroy a tumor, kill all the bacteria making them sick, etc?
u/mhd-hbd [+1] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (5 hours later)
No, severed tissue does not retain control.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (6 hours later)
I wasn't thinking of severing it -- grow a tendril off your arm, slide it into someone else. It's still connected to you.
u/mhd-hbd [+1] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (7 hours later)
Direct flesh manipulation is slow. You could grow a tendril, but you'd have to do it in advance. I'm more thinking of mental/neurological/systemic transformations.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (13 hours later)
If you can grow it in advance, there's no reason not to keep it around all the time. Once you have that you can get into other people's bodies and do things (to help or harm) to them as well.
u/zajhein [+3] (2 hours later)
This sounds a lot like the Bene Gesserit or possibly the Tleilaxu from Dune, but without the galaxy wide conspiracies. You might get some ideas from those books or even Dune fanfiction.
If you can control everything in your body down to the molecular scale then breaking down cellulose into base sugars should allow you to eat very little of almost any plant, and you could create useful artificial chemicals, such as tritium, or nearly anything if down to the atomic scale.
Though that might make it completely overpowered.
u/mhd-hbd [+2] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (5 hours later)
Chemistry could in theory be done manually, but it would be slow. Better to engineer a biological process that creates it.
u/Shadawn [+3] (a day later)
Depending on what means "grossly inhuman", Alice (let's call her that) can alter herself pretty efficiently. For example, it may be possible to duplicate her brain (hide it inside the body, so nothing actually gross). She may then tinker with it (always keeping "backup" for safety), for example optimize it for performing rapid calculations and controlling of her ability, thus increasing speed to conscious levels (already x12 or even better if optimization worked). This may also make sleeping redundant (there are papers on sleep being mandatory to cleanse the brain).
Alice should study biology+chemistry, and study HARD. If she finds good scientists (who won't vivisect her on the spot) she can provide them alot of answers about human body. Also, with dedicated team, she should be able to engineer and craft different specialized self-replicating bacteria (and that's what Panacea should be doing instead of inefficiently healing people one-by-one).
Actually, depending on exact mechanism of "gross" limit, it may be possible to craft and eject "parts", designed to combine into "flesh golem" (working completely on regular biology). It may be possible to make this flesh golem Intelligent, Friendly and self-replicating. I don't need to tell what it means, not in this subreddit.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
You can (probably) become a lot stronger/faster if you have complete control. There's something called governor theory which posits that there's something in your brain that stops you from using your body to its full extent. That comes on top of making your muscles stronger/faster/better, which you're presumably already doing.
You can remove pain, obviously. You'd still want feedback of some kind, but there's no real point in making it something that you can't ignore, or which debilitates you (stupid body).
Can you change gender or physical appearance? Or is it basically just at the limits of what a person could plausibly do without any power (badass normal)? Can you alter your DNA? If you have that level of control, you could clone yourself pretty easily. Or just turn into a cloud of spores. Or take over a person's mind. Depending on whether there are any limits, you would get into really crazy stuff.
You could study your micro-expressions and control them in order to become a really good liar. A polygraph would never work on you.
You would never need birth control again (or conversely, could get pregnant pretty much at will).
u/mhd-hbd [+2] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (5 hours later)
Yeah, I added some restraints against crazy stuff.
Mental strength limits could easily be overcome, as could pain. Any damage done by over-strain can be repaired. Nice.
u/autowikibot [+1] (an hour later)
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#### Central governor:
The central governor is a proposed process in the brain that regulates exercise in regard to a neurally calculated safe exertion by the body. In particular, physical activity is controlled so that its intensity cannot threaten the body’s homeostasis by causing [anoxic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia_(medical)) damage to the heart muscle. The central governor limits exercise by reducing the neural recruitment of muscle fibers. This reduced recruitment causes the sensation of fatigue. The existence of a central governor was suggested to explain fatigue after prolonged strenuous exercise in long-distance running and other endurance sports, but its ideas could also apply to other causes of exertion-induced fatigue.
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Image ^(i) - The Norwegian mountain runner Jon Tvedt engaging in a strenuous run: it is suggested that the central governor ensures that such endurance exertion does not threaten the body's homeostasis
^Interesting: ^Central ^Virginia ^Governor's ^School ^for ^Science ^and ^Technology ^| ^Exercise ^physiology ^| ^List ^of ^Governors ^of ^Central ^Province ^| ^List ^of ^Governors ^of ^the ^Central ^Provinces ^and ^Berar
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u/mhd-hbd [+2] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (7 hours later)
Just one for myself: Increase breathing efficiency by roughly 40% by implementing countercurrent-flow lungs like Birds have.
u/rationalidurr [+2] If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight! (8 hours later)
Get fat. Experiment in your fat deposits, preferably on the outer edge near the skin, just in case you need to cut it out on a quick notice.
Friendly reminder, Panacea of Worm had ingrained knowledge of biology, Symbiote Bob from farmerbob1 story had an AI in charge of making upgrades to his body.
Unless the power comes with some understanding of how chemistry works or some complex safety limits on what can be made, then you shouldn't mess around with your body.
Chemistry is complex and so is the human body, building something like nanotubes over your bones can be poisonous, turning your right hand into a bionic claw can strain you the rest of your body with weight.
Ideally you would build parts in your self, and then wear them. But get an engineer to do it for you.
u/mhd-hbd [+1] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (13 hours later)
Good call, yeah there is complex safety mechanisms.
u/Geminii27 [+2] (9 hours later)
It is not possible to become grossly inhuman
This one bugs me. If there's control down to the nanoscopic scale, why on earth couldn't nonhuman forms be pushed for?
Essentially, where's the limit? Could the character reshape themselves into a neanderthal? A gorilla? A bear? Look at the most severe medical deformities and mutations on the books - what could be done with cellular-level control over teratomas, polydactyly, polymelia, dicephaly?
Look at human mutations and medical cases which enhance some aspect. Tetrachromacy, UV and IR sensitivity, magnetoception, polarization sensitivity, and so on. All kinds of enhancements.
u/mhd-hbd [+1] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (13 hours later)
The power comes out of the box with limitations designed to prevent damage to the user. Therefore they are arbitrary, and you cannot handle the true form.
u/TimTravel [+1] (a day later)
The power comes out of the box with limitations designed to prevent damage to the user.
Worm fanfic?
u/mhd-hbd [+2] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (2 days later)
Yup.
u/Nepene [+2] (21 hours later)
Create a super infectious bacterium or virus that can infect people and take control of their brain and make them easy to control for you. Constantly produce this on your skin. Mass mind control. Probably set it to make everyone feel an intense love for you.
Create several bundles of flesh filled with a knock out gas. Throw these at people. Likewise you could weaponize this into a spray.
Create a construct which is obedient to you, and will feed on the flesh of animals and humans to increase in size. Cut this construct out. Army.
u/mhd-hbd [+1] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (a day later)
While a good idea in principle, this is the sort of thing that gets you nuked in my setting.
u/Nepene [+2] (a day later)
No need to broadcast your intentions to the world. People just suddenly like you a lot. A city suddenly has a strange pandemic.
u/Integrated_Delusions [+1] The Flying Kiwi (27 minutes later)
Essentially, the easiest way I see to exploit it is biotech. No diseases implies either control over the bacteria in your body, or the ability to manufacture perfect antibodies. Either is extremely exploitable, bacteria for biotech and antibodies for medicine.
Or the power simply repairs the damage as fast as it's being done, so you're simply asymptomatic as opposed to disease-free...
u/mhd-hbd [+1] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (39 minutes later)
The disease free thing is simply squashing every pathogen manually. With very tiny telekinetic tweezers, very quickly. Actually, let me ETA that in.
But yes, I have considered being able to donate unlimited (limited only by food intake) amounts of universal-donor blood, organ donations, etc. Bone marrow sells very well on the black market, I hear.
u/lsparrish [+1] (an hour later)
Can you synthesize diamond? How about passable gemstones that can be sold to a jeweler?
u/mhd-hbd [+1] Writes 'The World is Your Oyster, The Universe is Your Namesake' (5 hours later)
That would be possible, if slow. More cost-effective selling one's own bone marrow on the black market.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
You can't actually have the character function without sleep without causing brain-damage unless he knows how sleep actually works -- which we don't, in our current state of scientific knowledge. Ditto on improved memory and intelligence enhancements -- DO NOT MESS WITH BRAIN.
On the other hand, strong physiological improvements are going to have positive mental side-effects anyway, so this is very exploitable even with current-day science.
u/fjoekjui [+1] (a day later)
I read a book series (Super Powereds) that features a character with similar powers, albeit faster, it seems. His name is Chad, and he's done stuff like bone sheaths on the outside of his skin, eidetic memory, and some other stuff. It may be worth reading for ideas, but the series is not from his POV
u/ArmokGoB [+1] (2 days later)
Being able to grow new brain tissue (so damaging it isn't a problem, and you have unlimited tries) as well as locally and selectively disable immune response, and maybe small muscle clusters for generating electric current like those eels and such, would make brain machine interfaces trivial. Possibly to the point where it's more like growing an organic USB port.
There are a bunch of ridiculously potent toxins with the exact formula know as well as being easy to make yourself entirely immune to once you know it.
Lots of systems are really only limited to conserve energy, going on full power only in rare emergencies. With a bit of tinkering you could get the thinking speed and strength of split second emergency response, constantly and without most of the downsides, for example.
Take that, and if you beef up your lungs and heart, add a coolant system (wich may very well be partially technological, extremely energy consuming, or at the very least rely on filling up on liters and liters of ice cubes), and disable safeties on damaging things you can repair easily, you can soup things up even more.
Temporarily turning of boredom, warning signals, induce hyper-focus, hunger, etc. means you could work like a machine singlemindedly on a single task for weeks just sitting in the bathroom with a laptop and a glass. Then you eat a lot.
u/palparepa [+1] (8 days later)
Is it limited to cellular control? For example, if she were to eat the eye of an animal that has ultraviolet awareness, could she "understand" the eye, and modify her own to get ultraviolet vision? I doubt it, since eating would destroy the eye before it's considered "hers." But there may be a way to bypass that limitation. Something like skin-grafting, maybe?
Another idea: by consuming small doses of poison, she should be able to get immunity very fast, and maybe even get to synthetise it. A deliver mechanism would be more difficult to develop.
Elsewhere you said that severed tissue does not retain control. Did you consider the case when a severed limb is still alive? Like, rapidly implanted into someone else, or modify some of her cells to become virus-like and "infect" other people, to tag them. Maybe even giving limited control over their physiology (releasing hormones or painkillers to boost allies, for example.) This would easily spiral out of control and become too powerful, so to limit it, it may need a lot of concentration, having to fend-off the host's immune system constantly.
I think many uses would be chemical-oriented. I'd started making the liver bigger, since it's the chemical factory of the body, to have more to work with. Besides liver-things, I wonder if she could control the gas exhaled in respiration. Some kind of killer-kiss made of pure CO2 or pure oxygen?
Also, she has lots of intestinal bacteria to tinker with. But the delivery mechanism is the problem. I guess you don't want her flinging poo.
As far as delivery mechanisms go, we humans are fairly limited. Besides spit, what else do we have? Lots of ideas here, but they would require some major modifications. That's were my "eye" idea at the beginning would be required.
Another way would be to further the perfected physiology to beyond human, while retaining a human shape. For example, pre-programming reflexes. A reflex signal goes from the hand (for example) up the arm, to the brain, then back. If she modifies the nerves on the hand, creating some sort of mini-brain to control it without needing to go up to the main brain, response times would be vastly improved.
Or she can just modify her brain to give herself telepathy and control over bugs ;)