The original "me" clone created by my father from scavenged cells of his birth daughter would have started as an embryo and grown naturally through those first 16 years. I would have grown up basically as a normal girl.
Despite
intellectually knowing I was a clone, it probably wouldn't have had much day to day effect on my worldview, and it probably never even occurred to me to do this clone & swap routine until after my father died. Let's say he died when I was 40. So, two years of grief go by during which I dwell on mortality and the inevitability of death, before I decide to clone a body and switch to it. Assuming no sped-up growth, that first body cloned by me would have had to grow naturally from an embryo. So, let's say I wait until it's age 10 to swap to it. It's now been 52 years and I'm in a body 10 years old.
Fast forward 6 years...it's been 58 years and I'm in a 16 year old body. At this point I decide this is something I'm going to want to do again so I create a
Rei Ayanami style clone bank, so that at any time I have a dozen bodies on hand to swap to in case of emergencies. If they need to grow naturally, then I'd put a new one in a vat every few years, and I probably have a a set of bodies aged variously from 1 to 40 each growing in vats, each available to be swapped to at any time, as suits my mood for the age I'd like to be. And since I only need one at a time, most would never be used so I'd end up destroying the majority of them. Unless we have age control technology in our cloning in which case most of this particular paragraph becomes irrelevant. 3-4 clones at a time for backups, quickly age them to 16-20 or so then put them in stasis. Lots of options.
So...58 years have gone by and I'm in a 16 year old body having only body swapped once. That means six more swaps over 142 years. That averages to only 23 years per body, so on average each body after the first swap is worn from ages 16 to 39. Probably some longer, some less. But age 52 is when I terminated my original body and did my first swap, so presumably I'd be reasonably comfortable wearing a body to about that age. Figure mid-40s is when I generally terminate, but one or two bodies had some sort of combat-related accident that made it convenient to swap early, bringing the overall average down. No point wearing a body with a missing arm when I can easily swap to a new one.
Finally, keep in mind that the 200 years figure is probably an estimate. After the first couple swaps I probably stopped keeping track of how old I am. Do I count from my original birth? Do I wear a 16 year old body and go around telling people I'm hundreds of years old? Or do I use my current clone body age in day to day conversations? If so, do I count from the day a clone was conceived in a vat, or from the day I inhabited the body? I think keeping track of years would get messy after a while. The 200 years figure is probably rounded off and counting calendar centuries. Like somebody who says they were a "90s kid." That basically just means they were a teenager in the 90s. It's an imprecise measure of age. Azalyn "was a teenager" in the 1800s. Does that mean starting in 1850, so she's 162 years old, or starting in 1800 so she's 212 year old? Again, it's an imprecise measure.
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Topic: The Planeskippers — Turn .5 (10/8) (Read 26839 times)