The posthuman society

The ability to record a Selfmark and transfer it into a new Soma has produced consequences far deeper than the mere extension of life. For most of human history birth, identity, age, illness and death were bound to the same organism; with the arrival of the Soma and of consciousness transfer, that conviction has been broken: a person can pass through several bodies in the course of their existence, lose years of memory without being considered dead, hold a recorded age very different from their biological one, and retain their legal continuity after the destruction of their original Soma.

Many contemporary sociologists, philosophers and anthropologists describe this transformation as the entry into a posthuman condition, in which personal identity can retain continuity across several biological bodies and the Soma becomes a replaceable component of individual existence.

This achievement has altered some of the principal foundations of human society: family, work, property, medicine, religion and the distribution of wealth.

The new inequality

Soma technology is frequently described as a victory over biological mortality: on closer inspection, however, it is one only for those who can afford it. Survival after the loss of a body requires at least three elements: a recently made Selfmark, a compatible Soma and the infrastructure needed for the transfer.

The wealthiest individuals can update their Selfmark frequently, keep redundant copies of it and maintain customized Soma ready for use; for them the destruction of a “Shell” may mean the loss of a few hours or a few days of experience.

For an ordinary worker, however well off, continuity is less certain: Selfmarks are taken at longer intervals, often of months or years, and the transfer depends on the availability of a compatible Soma, on insurance cover and on the infrastructure present in the place where death occurs. Recovery remains possible, but it may entail a significant loss of memory, long waiting times or the assignment of a body of lower quality.

For those without sufficient resources, on the other hand, the distinction between biological death and final death is purely theoretical: Selfmark, Soma and consciousness transfer remain economically inaccessible technologies, or else available only through public programmes with restricted access, limited and intermittent forms of assistance, or heavily binding employment contracts in which backup, transfer and the availability of a new body are conditional on accepting onerous, invasive and barely negotiable terms.

The possibility of perpetuating oneself beyond biological death has thus ended up becoming a new form of economic inequality.

Age and longevity

Age has lost part of the meaning it once had: a person born eighty years earlier may occupy a biologically far younger Soma, while a much younger individual may be forced to use an old or debilitated body. To manage this situation, identity documents have been adapted to distinguish between chronological age, referring to the legal continuity of the individual, and biological age, referring to the Soma occupied.

Among the wealthiest classes, the periodic replacement of the body makes it possible to avoid most of the effects of ageing: executives, owners and officials can thus personally retain control of the same institutions for periods that, in the past, would have required the turnover of several generations.

The result is a concentration of power that is particularly hard to counter: estates, corporate holdings, political networks and expertise can remain in the hands of the same individuals for decades, drastically reducing turnover at the top.

The body as property

In a society that provides for the replaceability of the body, the body itself has become an economic good: a Soma can be bought, insured, financed, rented or supplied by an employer.

In the most extreme cases, ownership of the body occupied does not even coincide with that of the person using it: in the industrial colonies, for example, an MC may supply artificial organs, specialized limbs or entire Soma intended for particular duties. The cost can be withheld from wages, built into the contract or borne directly by the company; in this last case the body remains the property of the company. The result is that a worker may spend several years of life in a “Shell” that does not belong to them, only to find themselves obliged to buy it out or return it when the employment relationship ends.

Relationships of subordination of this kind become particularly serious in settlements where the MC also controls the clinics and the infrastructure needed for the transfer; in these cases leaving the company becomes almost impossible, since it may mean losing access to a new Soma and therefore the very possibility of being transferred.

The market in bodies

The market has adapted to the replaceability of the body by developing offerings that differ widely in quality, price and degree of customization: there are new Soma, available in standardized or customized versions, and used Soma, subsequently reconditioned for a new occupant.

Those with sufficient resources can commission a body built to exact specifications, choosing its aesthetic features and physiological parameters; those of limited means must instead rely on what happens to be available and may be forced to accept a “Shell” that has already been used, that is poorly suited to their needs or that is simply the first one on offer.

The Twenty-Seven

The Twenty-Seven, in the broadest sense of the term, that referring to individuals who have reached the lowest legally permitted Biological Retention Index value, occupy a particularly delicate position: legally they are human beings inside heavily augmented Soma, but their appearance may be largely artificial.

The fact that a few BRI points can separate a compliant condition from a non-compliant one has turned the 27 into a cultural category in its own right: the expression “being at twenty-seven” commonly denotes the adoption of an extreme, reckless and risk-oriented lifestyle, focused on the present and indifferent to future consequences.

As often happens in the wake of cultural transformations of this kind, productive society has progressively absorbed this new threshold into its own balance of power: insurers and employers tend to impose margins above the legal minimum, especially in activities where the loss of further biological tissue constitutes a concrete risk; armies, military units and particularly aggressive industries, by contrast, regard proximity to the 27 as an indicator of efficiency, replaceability and fitness for the task.

The same characteristic can therefore translate, depending on the environment, into stigma, professional requirement or mark of status.

Law and legal continuity

The replaceability of the body has also forced the law to adapt categories that had remained almost unchanged for centuries. Formulas such as “until death do us part” have lost part of their literal meaning: a marriage does not end with biological death if the spouse can subsequently be restored.

The question can become more complex, however, when the Selfmark used predates important events in the relationship: a person may wake up legally married to someone they remember having only just met, discover that they have children conceived after their own backup, or find themselves bound by decisions of which they retain no memory.

In regulatory terms, memory loss does not interrupt the legal continuity of the person: all acts demonstrably attributable to the individual (contracts, purchases, debts, family decisions and other legal acts) continue to have effect regardless of any subsequent restoration or of the memories preserved in the last Selfmark. In legal terms, restoration without memory is therefore treated in the same way as amnesia: the person remains responsible for the decisions taken, even when they do not remember taking them.

Inheritance

The same principle of legal continuity also has significant consequences in matters of succession: the destruction of a body is not sufficient to open an estate automatically, because the holder may continue to be considered legally existent for as long as a concrete possibility of restoration remains. “Estate death” can thus occur long after biological death.

To prevent this condition from continuing indefinitely, the legislation provides for an ordinary term of six months, running from the registration of the death or disappearance, after which final death may be declared, the succession opened and restoration from an archived copy authorized. This term may nonetheless be challenged or extended where there are concrete grounds making a subsequent restoration plausible, such as the existence of valid Selfmarks, cognitive copies archived in other systems or recovery procedures already under way.

Contracts, estates and holdings may therefore remain frozen beyond the ordinary term in contested cases; for great fortunes, especially where archives distributed across several systems are involved, the dispute can drag on for many years.

Mirror and identity

One of the principal challenges posed by consciousness transfer concerns the possibility that several instances of the same cognitive continuity exist at the same time: although the practice, known as mirroring, is formally prohibited and severely punished, such situations continue to arise through clandestine procedures, errors or unauthorized copies.

The existence of Mirrors has introduced into society a problem that the law can regulate but not fully resolve. Assigning legal continuity to a single instance establishes who keeps the name, the estate, the contracts and the liabilities; it does not, however, eliminate the fact that several individuals may share the memory of the same life and regard it as part of their own identity. For this reason Mirrors occupy a particularly unstable social position: although they bear no responsibility for their own duplication, they are nonetheless perceived as illegitimate copies, substitutes or potential usurpers. Even when one obtains a new legal identity, a Mirror has no way of claiming the property, relationships and emotional bonds acquired before the duplication.

The consequences are particularly evident in personal relationships: a Mirror may recognize as their own parents, children, friends and partners who legally belong to the recognized continuity; at the same time, those people may regard them as a stranger, an illegitimate copy or a second version of the same person. There is no shared social answer, and different families react in very different ways.

Similar difficulties arise on the labour market as well: in some sectors Mirrors meet strong obstacles in gaining access to posts, roles or duties that require personal authorizations, professional licences, security clearance or particular relationships of trust. The mere fact that they possess the skills and the experience of the original individual does not allow them to inherit that individual’s titles, seniority or credentials automatically; moreover, a Mirror may know trade secrets, confidential procedures, passwords since revoked or classified information belonging to an employer with whom, legally, they have never signed any contract. For these reasons many companies adopt policies forbidding the hiring of Mirrors for sensitive or fiduciary roles, and even the few that accept the risk provide for verification procedures, access restrictions and new confidentiality agreements, as well as grading them often worse than workers with equivalent experience.

Around these conditions a number of movements for the rights of Mirrors have arisen, such as Second Claim and Mirror Advocacy Network, protective associations and political currents that dispute the principle by which a single instance must retain full continuity. Their claims range from the recognition of limited rights over the relationships and the memories preceding the mirroring to the demand that all derived instances be regarded as equivalent continuations of the original individual. Among the best-known groups are:

• Second Claim, a political movement that claims for every derived instance an autonomous title to its own identity and to the shared history preceding the separation;

• Mirror Advocacy Network, an international legal-assistance network engaged above all in cases of discrimination, succession, family relationships and recognition of the civil rights of Mirrors.

Even taking account of these demands, which in any case remain very much a minority position, the social question remains substantially unresolved: the law can establish which instance holds an identity, but it cannot compel a person to treat their own memories as foreign, nor oblige others to recognize as the same person someone who shares them.

Religion

Soma, Selfmark and consciousness transfers have caused heavy consequences and deep fractures in all the major organized religions.

Most of the controversies do not concern cybernetic implants: the replacement of individual parts of the body, like the existence of cultured organs, artificial limbs and prostheses, are by now concepts accepted by many denominations, since they are seen and treated as interventions carried out on the same biological individual. Complete transfer from one body to another, with the resulting ability to counter death, has moved the question onto an entirely different plane.

A significant part of contemporary doctrine converges on the idea that the cognitive imprint, while able to reproduce memory and personality, cannot preserve the deeper elements that constitute a person’s identity. Religions that posit an individual soul and an essential relationship between it and the body take an even more radical position: no technical procedure can transfer an individual’s soul from one body to another, and no artificially produced Soma, however biologically indistinguishable from a human body, can be considered equivalent to a naturally born body. For the same reason, the recording of the Selfmark is also a problematic element, since it produces a representation of the person separated from the body without preserving its spiritual component.

As a result, believers belonging to the most orthodox doctrines categorically refuse to undergo procedures requiring Selfmark or consciousness transfer, while normally accepting other forms of advanced medicine; the more moderate orientations, by contrast, declare themselves in favour, holding that the soul can accompany the person regardless of the biological support.

Dissent and resistance

The refusal to make use of many of the new technologies does not belong to religion alone: over the course of the century very different movements have emerged which share an opposition to some or all of the technologies bound up with the replaceability of the body, though starting from motives that are often incompatible with one another.

Bioconservatism

Bioconservatives regard the continuity of the organism as an essential component of personal identity. The more moderate positions accept prostheses and artificial organs when these have a therapeutic function, but reject enhancements and complete transfers; the more radical ones regard every voluntary replacement of the body as a progressive loss of the human condition.

Environmentalism and anti-capitalism

Part of the environmentalist movements has developed a material critique of Soma technology. The production of bodies, implants and transfer infrastructure requires energy, bioreactors, raw materials, transport and waste treatment. These groups object above all to the use of such resources to prolong life indefinitely or to replace bodies that are still functional, arguing that the environmental costs of longevity fall largely on populations and territories that receive few of its benefits.

The same critique takes a different form in the anti-corporate and anti-capitalist movements. For these groups the main problem is not the replacement of the body in itself, but the fact that survival, identity and personal continuity have become purchasable services: proprietary Selfmarks, corporate Soma, body leasing and MC-controlled clinics are read as extreme forms of commodification: a technology presented as liberation from biological limits can turn even the right to go on existing into an economic relationship.

Positions within these movements differ widely: some call for universal access to Selfmark- and Soma-based procedures; others hold that no regulation can eliminate so deep a dependence on infrastructure concentrated in the hands of a few operators, and therefore boycott such technologies.

Supremacism, biopurism and other ideologies

There are also identitarian, supremacist and biopurist organizations that attribute a political, ethical or moral value to biological continuity: groups such as the Aryan Alliance regard the natural body as an expression of genealogy, descent and belonging, and read replacement with a genetically different Soma as a loss of the continuity they claim to defend. In these doctrines complete transfer represents a threat not only to personal identity, but to the very categories of blood and ancestry on which membership of the group is built.

Among the best-known organizations in this milieu is Measurehead, a biopurist movement born from the meeting of supremacism, anthropometry and genetic pseudoscience. Its adherents maintain that the worth and the identity of an individual can be derived from measurable bodily parameters, among them ancestry, haplogroups, skeletal proportions, endocrine profiles and germ-line continuity. Transfer into a genetically different Soma is read as a form of degeneration, because it would separate individual memory from the biological continuity that, according to the doctrine, determines its belonging and its worth. Measurehead couples these theories with rigid practices of physical, sexual, dietary and reproductive discipline, presented as instruments for preserving the somatic integrity of the individual and of their descendants.

A further current that in recent years has achieved a degree of notoriety and reach is that of the Fleshkeepers, commonly called the Incarnate. Its supporters dispute the idea that memory and personality are sufficient to define an individual, arguing that hormones, perception, pain, sexuality, motor capacities and biological history take a continuous part in the formation of identity: consequently, changing Soma means substantially altering the person who occupies it. Somatic Discontinuity Syndrome is often cited as clinical confirmation of this thesis. Unlike the other organizations, the Fleshkeepers are not opposed to consciousness transfer in absolute terms, but consider it acceptable only when the new Soma is a direct clone of the original.

Finally, there are a number of movements which, for political, ethical, economic or social reasons, defend mortality as a necessary component of human existence: the possibility of postponing death indefinitely is accused of preventing generational turnover, perpetuating the power and the privileges of the ruling class and distorting the relationship with time, risk and responsibility.

Continuity Consent Act (2099)

In recent years the refusal of restoration from a Selfmark has taken legal form in the Continuity Consent Act (CCA), adopted in 2099 by the European Federation and subsequently transposed, in substantially equivalent wording, into the legal systems of the other major Hegemonies. The CCA grants every individual the right to prohibit in advance the recording, the storage or the use of a Selfmark for the purposes of restoration.

The prohibition is given effect through a dedicated section of the Somatic Continuity Register known as the non-continuity register, open to consultation by health facilities, insurance companies and operators authorized to perform transfers. The person concerned can rule out any restoration, or authorize it only in specified circumstances, indicating for example required characteristics of the Soma, time limits, medical conditions or the requirement that the destination body be a clone derived from their own genetic material. Registration is voluntary, amendable and revocable at any time; where a valid entry exists, every restoration procedure must comply with its conditions even when technically usable cognitive copies exist.

IMPORTANT: Since the local replicas of the Register are reconciled only on the passage of the couriers, an entry or a revocation may not be immediately known in the other systems: a restoration carried out on the basis of the local state of the Register may therefore be perfectly regular at the moment of execution, only to prove incompatible with a more recent provision at the following synchronization. The treatment of such cases remains one of the points on which the case law of the Hegemonies is most divided.

Those who enter themselves in the non-continuity register are above all believers of the most orthodox doctrines, members of the Aryan Alliance and of Measurehead, the Fleshkeepers and the adherents of other organizations opposed, for various reasons, to restoration from a Selfmark.

The right to non-reproducibility

From the refusal of restoration a distinct question has also emerged: the right to prevent one’s own cognitive imprint from continuing to exist after death.

A simple prohibition of restoration does not in fact guarantee the disappearance of Selfmarks already held by clinics, insurers, employers or remote archives. The CCA therefore allows their deletion to be requested and automatic procedures to be set up for the destruction of residual copies on the occurrence of predetermined conditions.

This principle is generally termed the right to non-reproducibility: it concerns not only the possibility of refusing a new Soma, but that of preventing sufficient data from remaining to produce a new instance of the individual in the future. The resulting condition is substantially the same as that produced by continuity interdiction, with the difference that in this case it is requested voluntarily by the person concerned.

Gender and transition

Among the parameters that a commissioning party can set for their own Soma is biological sex. Consciousness transfer has therefore introduced an unprecedented possibility: choosing to inhabit a Soma developed from the outset with sexual characteristics different from those of the previous body, without having to intervene progressively on the latter. This possibility has taken on particular importance for the trans community and for many non-binary people, although its use is not limited to gender transition.

The law has followed the same logic already applied to other personal attributes: gender belongs to the person and to their legal continuity, not to the Soma occupied; the Somatic Continuity Register keeps the biological sex of each body among the technical data, together with the genetic profile and the other somatic characteristics, without attributing any identifying value to it. Earlier provisions on gender transition have thus progressively lost their specificity, being absorbed into the general regime governing consciousness transfer.

Access to this possibility nonetheless remains deeply unequal: commissioning a Soma developed to specific characteristics requires resources that most people do not have; those who cannot afford it are therefore forced to choose among the standard bodies available, or to fall back on conventional hormonal and surgical treatments.

The right to gender affirmation

Trans rights associations have concentrated much of their activity precisely on this disparity, arguing that a technology of this kind cannot remain a privilege tied to income. Their main campaigns concern the inclusion of consciousness transfers undertaken for gender affirmation in health systems and in ordinary insurance cover. In two of the five Hegemonies, the European Federation and the Pacific Alliance, and in part of the jurisdictions of the Meridian Pact, this position has been adopted; elsewhere, access to a suitable Soma continues to depend largely on the individual’s ability to pay for it.

There is no shortage, however, of positions openly hostile to these transformations; the opposition comes above all from circles that attribute a particular religious, biological or identity-related value to the original body. In particular, the denominations that consider soul and organism inseparable tend to reject the problem at the root, denying validity to any complete transfer. Structured opposition exists in secular circles as well: the Aryan Alliance and Measurehead read biological sex as part of the genealogy and of the continuity they intend to preserve, and therefore regard transition by means of a different Soma as a particularly radical form of discontinuity.

The question has produced deeper divisions among the Fleshkeepers: the movement’s traditional position admits transfer only into a direct clone of the individual, but some of its members consider it acceptable to modify the sexual characteristics during the development of the clone, provided that genetic continuity remains intact; the stricter quarters reject this reading, arguing that so extensive an endocrine and somatic modification produces an unacceptable discontinuity of the person all the same.

Whatever the various political, religious or cultural positions, there is no doubt that the spread of the Soma has helped to consolidate the distinction between sexual characteristics and gender identity, making it ever more common to recognize the latter as a component of personal identity, independent of the biological sex of the body occupied at any given moment.

Medicine and insurance

The distinction between loss of the body and loss of the person has also profoundly changed medicine: a doctor may face a patient whose Soma requires long and costly treatment, while a recent Selfmark would make it possible to discontinue the treatment, let the body die and proceed afterwards to restoration. From a clinical point of view the two solutions are not equivalent, but from an economic point of view they may be, especially when the Soma belongs to an employer, to an insurance company or to an MC.

This possibility has imposed new protocols on informed consent and on advance directives: a patient can require that their Soma be treated for as long as a reasonable chance of survival exists, or authorize recourse to restoration beyond given thresholds of risk, cost or functional loss. Disputes concern above all the cases in which the patient’s will conflicts with that of whoever funds the treatment or owns the body.

Insurers, too, have had to distinguish several aspects of survival that in the past were traced back to a single risk profile. Policies today separate cover of the Soma, cognitive continuity and memory loss, providing different protections for the treatment or replacement of the body, for the preservation and restoration of the Selfmark and for the damage arising from memories lost after the last backup; it is therefore possible to be insured against the death of the body, but not against the loss of months or years of one’s own personal continuity.

Work and protections

Consciousness transfer has enormously increased the economic value of the cognitive continuity of specialized personnel: pilots, technicians, surgeons, engineers and other professionals can retain decades of experience across several Soma, turning memory and skills into a capital that companies have every interest in preserving.

In some sectors this has led to the periodic recording of the Selfmark being made compulsory; in others, having a reliable “backup plan” is a requirement for access to particular duties. Typically, in these cases the CCA is circumvented by making hiring or promotion conditional on prior consent to restoration; it follows that refusing consent means being shut out of part of the labour market.

As if that were not enough, the system of protections guaranteed by the employer often introduces a further form of dependence: when the updating and the storage of an employee’s Selfmark are funded and managed by the company, losing one’s job can also mean losing access to the most up-to-date version of oneself and, in extreme cases, to the very possibility of being restored.

Normality and privilege

For the overwhelming majority of the population the body continues to be experienced in a way not very different from the past: the “Shell” may be replaceable in theory, but in daily life it almost always continues to be the only one available.

Most people pass through their entire existence without undergoing any complete transfer; even those who could afford it often resort to it only once, following accidents, illness or irreversible conditions, not infrequently finding themselves restored from a Selfmark months or years old into a Soma that is anything but ideal.

Only a small part of the population, generally very wealthy, has frequent backups and bodies ready for use, enough to treat the replacement of the Soma as an ordinary practice and the body as a modifiable component of their own identity. Having at the same time a recent Selfmark, an immediately available Soma and the resources needed to carry out a transfer remains a condition reserved to a very small minority of human society.