EVE Fiction

How Recent? Maybe they are Using the Dust Clone tech?

Wow thanks for the explanation, i was looking for this myself.

Wait, so this means that it's CANON that you're biomassing your old body every time you switch between jump clones? I guess that I'd gotten the impression that it was more a matter of taking time to upload memories and transfer a complete scan of the client's mind, and that since there was no pod-death to rush the process, this was actually less destructive than pod-cloning, and would allow the jump clone bodies to be re-used.
If the idea that you kill your old body on every jump is what ccp is going with I'm not going to argue I suppose, I just didn't realize that I had misunderstood the process so completely.

Jump clones just switch consciousness between themselves when activated and allow you to jump around a bit with the 24 hour penalty wait between jumps. The medical clone is the one you wake up in that the pod transfers you to when the pod is breached. Soft cloning is still somewhat wishy washy and involves having your consciousness at that point backed up into a data form and then used later to activate a clone. The basic idea behind it is that since the capsuleer implants do not themselves cannot quantum transmit, then a capsuleer could be killed station side permanently. So backup no damage brain scan ala' 7th Day movie style is done and then held on file. The same idea will work with baseliners since there are no implants needed for it. Just the clone or clones, the equipment to do the scan and the storage device to download to and upload from.

I'm not sure if that's true, Henry, since I know CCP has said before that they haven't confirmed or denied soft cloning in PF (although this post by Falcon seems to imply soft cloning does exist). I personally assume that you simply can't write to the brain once it's already been "developed". Afterall, prior to activation, all potential clones only have a blank gel structure in the skull. That gel structure only has its neural patterns shaped once activated, at which point it is no longer a blank, malleable structure. Therefore, soft cloning for Jump Clones would be pointless, because you would not be able to 'transfer' the memories acquired in the Jump Clone back to the original body. Thus they just go with the burning scan, biomass the body after removing the implants, and prepare a new clone with its malleable brain in preparation for when the capsuleer transfers back.

I could be wrong, but I don't think the fact that the burning scan is used on the original body during Jump Cloning automatically means that soft cloning isn't possible. More likely it simply points to the idea that clone brains are like CD-Rs, not CD-RWs (rewriteable). Once imprinted, they can't be 're-imprinted'.


*Edit* Although this is dependent on how skill books work...

... I wasn't saying you should refrain from engaging in debates about cloning? I apologize if you felt I was.

And there's nothing physically stopping someone from doing that I don't think. (IIRC, in TEA the Broker was using an army of clones). I believe there's simply strict CONCORD regulations about having multiple clones of the same individual at the same time. Though yes, it would be nice to get definitive answers on this stuff.

The corporations that run the clone vats and the medical facilities. They're pretty much stuck following CONCORD and empire laws. The Broker got away with it because he was Jovian and had his own facilties, and was not connected with the Directorate or CONCORD in any way. So they really couldn't have gone after him since finding his facilities would have been very difficult. Also jump clones when made are pre-imprinted to accept only that persons mind pattern. Soft Clones would be the same way, but would only be able to take the back up copy.

Jump clones: In one of the old chronicles, there's a character who jump clones back and forth very rapidly and ends up wetgraved, which is assumed as part of the justification for the 24 hour timer. In theory with Infomorph Pyschology trained to a high degree, you could do it, just not without breaking many many CONCORD laws. Since the cloning bays in 90% of the Empire factions are regulated by CONCORD, this becomes a mechanical/practical impossibility though there are still some people that RP it.

Soft Clones: currently the only reference to soft clones is in the canon is the Jita 4-4 chronicle which includes a bit about a capsuleer being used as a disposable assassin and "laughing all the way to the clone bay" there for a time was a PF article that included softcloning, but it has since been removed. Most people don't want to say softclones don't exist, because doing so puts their RP in a little box where if anything happens to their character out of the pod they end up dead permanently. Most long term RPers would be permadead by now if not for handwaving things with softclones. It largely comes down to RP convenience.

Mass Cloning: Previously some of the cloning articles mentioned cloning non-capsuleers, and rich CEOs and businessmen being cloned. I believe this has since been removed but it might still be around somewhere. according to the old PF, anyone could be cloned except for the price, but only a capsuleer could operate the capsule, because of the mental strain involved in that activity. With that in mind, if you accept that as canon, the only thing preventing a capsuleer from backing up their crews is money. I ran the numbers a while back to find out roughly how much it would cost. Backing up a whole cruiser crew would run about 8 million, backing up an entire battleship crew, something on the order of 250 million. Of course if you have your own clone vat bay, you could do this without the cost, but then you're looking at the initial cost of a Rorqual or Titan. It seems like fairly common practise to back up chief engineers and department heads, as for only a few people, the cloning cost is fairly negligible.

I'd like to note that capsuleers are by definition unique by the sheer awesomeness of being one. Then in comes the fact that the ratio of capsuleers and non-capsuleers is (i believe) a few hunder thousand-to-one, because there are much less capsuleers around than there are of common folk.
And finally, of those only the ones that have some unique stories to tell come forth and do so, hence why all RP capsuleers seem to be unique.

because noone wants to RP a common non-unique character, do they?

The PF of the setting is riddled with references to cloning that doesn't require either the pod or the DUST implant. I can think of at least one Caldari security mission arc where a prominent researcher is killed when a rogue drone blasts its way out of the lab for instance. They are later cloned, in a scenario where the only possible means of cloning would be to "restore from backup".

One of the more contrived bits of the fiction is that Otro Gariushi apparently stupidly kept all his clones on one station, and this was raised as being an issue even though he didn't have time to get to his pod, which again suggests that there's a means of cloning somebody even from complete body destruction without the use of the capsule.

Tibus Heth is not a capsuleer, but it is still explicitly said that he cannot clone due to a syndrome known as Derj's Disease.

Putting those together, it's plain to me that there's a means of creating a neural map template for cloning that doesn't require the patient to be in a capsule, and that "soft" backup-based cloning is a thing.

This can still involve euthanizing the body, if "soft" still means using a Trans-Neural Burning Scanner, but maybe it's sufficiently "gentle" to not damage or destroy any neural cybernetic implants, which can be salvaged and re-installed when the brain is regenerated inside the host body.

As far as the patient's experience goes, they're sedated for surgery, fall asleep, and wake up some time later with their head shaved and maybe some residual itching from where the medical nanites are busy repairing the surgical scars and regrowing their hair. In that time, they have been euthanized, their neural map harvested and stored in backup (with all previous copies deleted only after the current map has been saved to multiple redundant storage devices), their implants salvaged, their body prepped to receive their mind-state, their neural map restored into the body, which was kept sedated while the implants were re-installed, then they're taken to post-surgical recovery and allowed to wake up.

The result being that if, at some future point, they are killed by illness or misadventure, then a clone body can be cosmetically resculpted to their physical specifications, infected with a genetic engineering retrovirus to restore their own unique DNA, and the backed-up neural map is squirted into its head. They'll experience amnesia and quite probably PTSD and a sense of dissociation, but that's better than being dead and they can receive counselling and medication if necessary.

The data can technically be cached and used to have multiple simultaneous active clones (see The Broker), but this is highly illegal under the Yulai Convention. Many pirate factions don't give a stuff about the YC, but tend to agree with it on this one point out of sheer practicality. There are some very good reasons not to allow this scenario to happen.

1: If you've got the potential for one person to be wandering around in multiple bodies, then you've got the potential for somebody to be wandering around in an identical-looking body who isn't who they claim to be. If your security guards are used to the idea that their boss can be in two places at once, then that makes their job way harder to do and significantly increases the risk of security breach.

2: Encountering your own brain-state in an identical copy of your own body is highly confusing. Imagine if you were to look in a mirror and wave cheerily, and your reflection waved back with the wrong hand, or flipped you the bird or blew you a kiss instead. Individuals repeatedly exposed to this stimulus have a sharply elevated tendency to develop mental health issues, most commonly paranoid delusional complexes ("One of my clones is out to get me!"), schizophrenia, and dissociation disorders where they stop seeing the world as real or significant.

3: One capsuleer is a barely-contained menace. They're unpredictable, mercurial, powerful and tend not to notice the ants unless they have a magnifying glass in their hands. The last thing you want to go and do is actively decrease the effectiveness of the security around these individuals and make them more crazy at the same time.

So the pirate factions, being largely pragmatic and intelligent, don't allow it to happen. They're criminal, not crazy (well, all except the Blood Raiders, and they mostly view clones as a snack, EoM don't have the resources [and in any case are death cultists who probably view resurrection through cloning as a horrifying abomination], and Sansha's Nation probably reserve the privilege of multi-bodying for The Master).

There is no issue with pod death in wormhole space. The pod's communications systems work via quantum entanglement and therefore have a theoretically unlimited range. So long as you're still in the same space-time, it'll work.

I see no reason why a capsuleer couldn't have a cloning program for their crews provided they're okay with a crew that was slowly going crazy from regular bouts of cheap cloning, with all the amnesia, post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative identity disorder and all the other stuff that entails. It'd be vastly cheaper and more convenient for the pilot not to bother, and to just hire replacements but if there are some bleeding hearts among them who prefer to be more humane than that, then sure they can have crew cloning programs... provided they don't mind the ship slowly devolving into an insane asylum and efficiency suffering as a result.