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Life and Death in Weirdtopia by DataPacRat

"I want to set a few things straight, so I'm going to describe the whole series of events as I experienced them.

"I'd gone to the office building to meet with someone who could help me through some of the more Byzantine paperwork you've put together, here in The Future. Specifically, I was looking into upgrading my current robotic body in one or more ways, depending on which alterations I'd be able to get approval for. Hm? Oh, replacing my tail-tip vertebrae with one that was more useful for self-defense, such as a shot of pepper-spray or whatever else is allowable; or upgrading various parts of my surfacing with this electrically-controllable gecko stuff, so that I could walk up a wall to get to a door handle instead of relying on Lexx, my helper-robot, for every single human-scale task; or putting some plating around my ribcage and filling the space with a more usefully-sized battery.

"So I'd parked Lexx in a chair and was on my contact's desk, and we were talking about, what was it, the difference between the rules that are written down and human judgement about such rules, when the window shattered, and /something/ swooped in. Bird- or bat-sized, black, hovering instead of flapping - some kind of drone, I guessed.

"Then it said, or more screamed, 'Death to the immortals! Kill yourself or I'll kill everyone here! Five, four, three...'

"No, I was unaware of the drone's actual owners. Nor about the real-world trolls you seem to be unable to squash. I'm still teaching myself how to use the full set of augmented-reality overlays that are available to me. As far as I knew, the threats were entirely legitimate.

"So I galloped to the broken window and jumped out.

"As much as I'm flattered by the obvious interpretation, this wasn't a choice to kill myself to save everyone else. I'd read up on the specifications of my robotic body. Specifically, that due to my relatively light weight and large surface area, then as long as I could maintain a parachutist-style spread-eagle, my terminal velocity was only two hundred ten kilometres per hour - and as long as I landed on a reasonably flat surface, even if it was concrete, the wunder-materials of my structural framework would be good enough that I could stand right up without damage. Even if I got into some sort of spin, so that some part of my hit the ground much faster, then the chassis includes a selection of carefully-designed break-points, allowing some parts to snap off in order to preserve the remainder from such acceleration. Depending on how much damage was involved, they could even be snapped right back on.

"Hm? Oh, no, I was assuming that with all the invisible infrastructure you've got going, anyone I might land on would get a warning to duck.

"Anyway, I've never gone skydiving before, and didn't know how to aim my fall... plus I was suddenly distracted by all sorts of high-priority instant-messages warning me about other revived cryonicists being attacked... so I landed partly on the armrest of a bench, all the break-points snapped, and a couple of seconds later, I was coherent enough to say, 'Okay, now I'm a robotic rat's /skull/. Anyone around who can sweep me back together?'.

"Which is when I got a reply with a different plan. 'Am close. Can hide you, and muffle your EM, if you want.' This whole situation was, as far as I was concerned, pretty well spiralled out of control - my best guess was that the bird-drone thing would be following me down as soon as it could, and would blow itself up to make doubly sure I was dead. And there was the matter that almost all of my battery cells were in my body, from the neck down, and I had very little time before I was going to run out of juice. So sure, this offer might be part of some multi-stage plan to kidnap me, but I didn't have much to lose, so I sent a response of a thumbs-up emoji.

"In two seconds, an ostrich-taur lady, a body-plan I had vague memories of seeing more than once since I was revived, stepped over to the bench, sat next to me, and brought out something like an egg-shaped Kinder egg from her purse, pulled the two halves open, scooped my head into it, and snapped it shut.

"My gyros registered some movement, a lot of the radio-signals dropped precipitiously in strength, and then my temperature gauges registered an increase in ambient temperature with the curve consistent with being surrounded by body-temperature flesh. I choose to believe that she swallowed me and later coughed me up, and I have no interest in looking at video records or analyzing acceleration data. But I was nearly out of juice, so I set a couple of quick script commands, then paused my brain-emulation software.

"The next thing I was conscious of, the plastic eggshell was being cracked open, and there weren't any radio signals at all. The ostrich-taur-lady plugged a cable into the regular socket on the bottom of my skull, and I mentally flinched, expecting a bunch of data-signals containing viruses - but it was just power.

"She rubbed the back of her head. 'Okay, this is kind of embarrassing,' she said. 'But I want to get it into the open first, so you can make informed decisions. I've kind of had a thing for you since I found out you were revived, and while I've been careful not to cross the line into stalking, I've tried to be in the same areas you are, when I can, to try to meet you. I wasn't expecting anything like actual /violence/. We're in a real-private room I'm renting from one of my groups, Faraday cage and crowd-shuffling and everything, so you can hide here and be safe as long as you want. Or say the word and I'll take you anywhere you want to go. Oh, and I swept up most of your body, maybe all of it, I don't know if any of it still works.'

"At my request, she reattached my spine to my head, and as that still worked, I started reassembling my remaining parts onto my initially snake-like form. On my request, Peggy - yes, that's the ostrich-lady - left me to it, exited the Faraday cage, and posted a particular alphanumeric sequence to a particular public board, waited a few moments for a reply, and came back. The response was one that I had anticipated, but wasn't expecting.

"It seems that a certain cryonic revivee, who I've been working with and had trusted with some of my power-of-attorney, had also been victim of this massive trolling, and had gotten notice of my autodefenestration and that I had gone offline moments after impact; and as my directions on such matters allowed for a certain amount of leeway, he initiated one of my 'in case of my death' plans...

"... and activated my backup copy.

"Given the legal system you've developed, I would thus like to introduce you all to the individual who is, legally, my son. You can see that he has chosen to wear a plush-style suit over his skeletal-shaped body, and the mandated diapers over that to indicate that, according to the legal fiction that he and I are entirely separate individuals with nothing in common, he is roughly one day old. According to the naming conventions I chose in case of just such an occurrance, then as long as it's just the two of us, you may refer to me as Dan, Dan Senior, or Dan One, and him as Dan, Dan Junior, or Dan Two. No, neither of us have any intention to reproduce further. No, Peggy is not his mother - we aren't even dating, let alone married. That wasn't a date, she was just helping me shop for some electronic parts. Look, if there aren't going to be any /relevant/ questions then I'm just going to go back to living my life, okay? ... Well, I certainly /hope/ that they can catch the trolls, but my understanding is that they used sufficient anonymization that it may be some time before any particular individuals are suspected..."

Life and Death in Weirdtopia

DataPacRat

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