[ but to explain the situation with bancroft means starting from the beginning. taking another swig, he tilts the bottle over to her so she can have another turn. ]
Where I come from, a long time ago, people discovered a way to download the human consciousness into these disks called stacks, which stores everything that makes a person's mind and soul what it is — thoughts, memories, personalities. As soon as we hit the age of one, every person in the settled worlds gets implanted with a stack in the base of their skull.
[ raising a hand, he gestures to it by rubbing at his nape where a thin, horizontal line forms a scar, possibly easily lost amongst the many others on his body, something she may or may not have noticed the night her fingers touched various corners of his skin. ]
So even if the body dies, if the stack's undamaged, it can be stored into a different body, which we call sleeves. Technically, too much body jumping can cause personality frag on the consciousness data, but there's ways around that. [ methods probably a bit too complicated and irrelevant to get into right now. ] But essentially needlecasting can be done to get a person's data transferred from body to body in seconds, even across to different planets, different star systems.
Long story short, a bit of trouble got me arrested so they put my stack on ice indefinitely. Kept me in the dark for two hundred and fifty years when I woke up in this ... borrowed body because some rich asshole wanted me to solve his own murder. And now here I am.
[ very long story short, considering all the details he's leaving out, but that should round up the sum of it. ]
no subject
[ but to explain the situation with bancroft means starting from the beginning. taking another swig, he tilts the bottle over to her so she can have another turn. ]
Where I come from, a long time ago, people discovered a way to download the human consciousness into these disks called stacks, which stores everything that makes a person's mind and soul what it is — thoughts, memories, personalities. As soon as we hit the age of one, every person in the settled worlds gets implanted with a stack in the base of their skull.
[ raising a hand, he gestures to it by rubbing at his nape where a thin, horizontal line forms a scar, possibly easily lost amongst the many others on his body, something she may or may not have noticed the night her fingers touched various corners of his skin. ]
So even if the body dies, if the stack's undamaged, it can be stored into a different body, which we call sleeves. Technically, too much body jumping can cause personality frag on the consciousness data, but there's ways around that. [ methods probably a bit too complicated and irrelevant to get into right now. ] But essentially needlecasting can be done to get a person's data transferred from body to body in seconds, even across to different planets, different star systems.
Long story short, a bit of trouble got me arrested so they put my stack on ice indefinitely. Kept me in the dark for two hundred and fifty years when I woke up in this ... borrowed body because some rich asshole wanted me to solve his own murder. And now here I am.
[ very long story short, considering all the details he's leaving out, but that should round up the sum of it. ]