I definitely spent too much time thinking about skele-rat-bots yesterday. Had a dream. Jotted down as much as I can remember, cleaning it up just a tad to fit into reasonably narrative form.

---

I woke up - not in a hospital bed with no memory of how I got there... but in what looked like a courtroom. With no memory of how I got there. After a quick appraisal of certain immediate matters, I asked the people around me the most pertinent question that came to mind: "Why am I waking up as a tiny skeleton made of blue metal with a long tail?"

The human sitting at the table I was sitting on, wearing a plaid button-up shirt, said, "For the skeletal rat part, between what I had handy, and what I could afford, it was the best I could get in the time I had, with full senses and a decent mind-motor interface. For the you part, my computer said you'd be able to adapt fastest. For the waking part, well, you died, got vitrified, and I'm in some ratings trouble because of some differences between the obligations I've got to revive people frozen the way you were, and certain other debts I owe. I had to do a fast dice-and-read of all your brains before the storage facility got repossessed, and we're here to deal with some issues based around you, well, existing."

"I suppose," I said, spending only a half-second trying to figure out how I was speaking without a tongue before rolling with it and concentrating on more significant matters, "there are worse ways to wake up. What are the stakes here?"

"You want to prove you're a person, first, that you've got rights. Then-"

"All rise," interrupted a Bull Shannon bald-a-like. "BosWash Metro Court is now in session, the Honorable Judge Fatima Ma presiding." As I figured out how to balance my oddly-weighted quadrupedal body on my hind-limbs, a very dark-skinned woman, wearing a black t-shirt and jean-shorts, sat at the judge's bench. "Be seated."

"You," she pointed at the guy I'd been talking to. "You the cryo-nut?"

"Yes, ma'am." He seemed to be taking the informality in stride.

"You," she pointed at me. "You the formerly dead cryo-nut?"

"So I'm told, ma'am," I said, trying to be as accurate as I could and following along with whatever social conventions were in play.

"I like the bony look. Very memento mori."

"Thank you, I think; I wish I'd had a choice in it, though. Ma'am."

"Waitwaitwait." The guy near me facepalmed for some reason as the judge continued. "You didn't /want/ to be a robo-rat?"

"It... wouldn't have been my first choice, ma'am."

She glared at the guy, who withered under her gaze. "Explain," she demanded.

"Well, ma'am, a better body was /supposed/ to have been delivered here, before you got here, but I needed at least one of them awake before you started, so..."

"So you took one of your dead guys and - wait," she turned back to me. "How long've you been awake?"

"About two minutes, ma'am, not counting the years I was a regular human."

"Well, fuck," said Judge Ma, shaking her head. "You," she pointed at the guy. "Jail. Thirty days, for the obvious. You've got that long to work up a better defense for the real trial. You," she pointed at me. "Halfway house. Get an immigration caseworker and get yourself sorted. Welcome to the future, blah blah blah, good luck, you'll need it."

As she started to stand, apparantly finishing off whatever had just been going on, I decided it probably wouldn't hurt to ask, "Um, ma'am - one quick question. How soon do you think I can get a proper body?"

She leaned against the side of the judicial bench. "Got some bad news for you. And some non-binding legal commentary. While you were pushing daisy icicles, the rest of us had all sorts of problems, and had to work out some compromises to keep living. You get yourself a different body, or even change what you've got too much, and you're a different person. You wouldn't believe the forms I had to fill out just to get my piercings. My advice? Stick with what you've got - you've got a loophole, having been dead during the paper-wars, which you'll be able to squeeze for a lot. You go for anything else, and among other troubles, law says you'll have to wear diapers the first few years, whether you need 'em or not, so folk know you're re-born."

"Seriously? Embarrassing sumptuary laws are worse than being... /this/?"

"Go ahead, ignore the woman who's spent decades learning the ins and outs of these things giving you a hint about what's in your best interests. Anyway, these laws are fucking stupid and it sucks getting caught in them, but at this point, changing it would mean changing the constitution, and opening /that/ can of worms risks a whole lot of other barely-functioning things stopping functioning altogether, and there's damned few willing to risk that for the sake of a couple of old dead dudes. Now go on, I've gotta do my entrance schtick for the next case. Or stay and watch, as long as you clear the table for the next defendant."

"Er, go on where? I can't even see any doors from here."

"Bailiff, man needs some help finding a door. Be a dear?"

I tried not to flinch as his hand, which was larger than all of me save my tail, picked me up, carried me between some half-filled pews, out the courtroom's back door, and carefully set me on the floor.

Whereupon a fairly literal cloud of journalists - or at least flying cameras - descended upon me.

Ah, civilization.

---

My apparent thought processes:

Something something "Weirdtopia" ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/ ), or at least "Transmetropolitan taken one or two steps closer to the Twilight Zone"; immigrating from a first-world country to a zeroth-world or so one ( eg, in https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/force-chart-of-niceness-part-tres.202548/page-8#post-8064081 , going from around G to F, maybe to low E); deliberately inverting the usual assumption of morphological freedom; clothes have made at least one more step of informal outfits being used more formally... probably a few other things.

Trying to do some world building based on a few minutes of dreaming... I'd guess after a few more Panama Papers style scandals, most social liberal democracies really tightened the extent to which rich individuals could profit at the expense of the public as a whole; and when ems came along, a lot of the shenanigans they'd otherwise have gotten up to were similarly constrained. Aka, Elua fighting back against Moloch ( http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ ), supported by non-first-past-the-post voting systems reducing present-day American style polarization. Imagine if 90% of our current economic system turned out to be for the benefit of the rich at the expense of the 99%... And the 99% got enough proof of that to start voting based on it. Anything resembling a loophole would likely get "fixed", even at the expense of the few non-rich such loopholes were supposedly for.

Remember, if a weirdtopia isn't deeply disturbing, it's not weird enough. :) "Good news: religious based laws against nudity and sex have been thrown out. Bad news: there's no quality control on the aesthetic level of the people having sex in public."