The Pilot's Path - YC121

Hmph. Talk of monsters and gods, of alienation and ascending… has it occurred to no-one that categorizations like these mean nothing? We are what we are, and do not benefit from giving that identity a name, a category, in the context of old things. Such a though merely limits our self-understanding.

Myself, then… I think we’re just people, until some new word, better than “Capsuleer”, comes along that can encapsulate and define us. We’re a new kind of human, beyond the baseline, but that means we’re beyond the context of the baseline.

We must abandon human context and values, though it would probably be for the best if their values and ours remain aligned. We must embrace ourselves, our state of being, as normal and sane.

We are not gods, though we can certainly act like it. We are not monsters, though we can certainly act like it. At the core of it, we’re just the next kind of people, the next standard for what can be considered normal.

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Come on, we’ve been all through this phase where we thought we had it all figured out, the answer to life, universe and everything. And then we had this idea that we needed to share this great enlightenment with everyone - I mean, of course. And then we write or dictate down this embarrassing mindflow for all to see, and as we all know, while it might become harder to find, nothing ever really leaves the Galnet. And here we are. And we’ve all done it, I’m not judging anyone here.

And to be honest, the writing does have some good points, but are overshadowed by somekind of apparent need of the original writer to explain the things that probably distressed them so that they no longer would not.

Like for example, the angst about not being in ones original meat shell and the supposed degradation from the original - which I guess is the result of incomplete or contaminated knowledge of the cloning process - is evident. The person who wrote this seems to also have been suffering somekind of dissociative disorder, considering how much they try to make a point that they are no longer human, tries to tell us that we’re not gods, yet tells us to act like gods.

I mean, I don’t know what troubled them really, I’m just making guesses, but I can see that they were deeply troubled by something that they tried to address and clarify, mainly to themselves, in that text. Which is fine, great even. Maybe it’s even good that you find inspiration in that text, even though I think it is mostly too much in love with the notion of being better than the rest of humanity.

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On just about every inhabited planet that has ocean life, more people die every year while attempting to wear socks, than are killed by sharks or other large marine predators.

Socks and alcohol Do Not Mix.

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Ehm, sincerely your first death is at the final stage of the capsuleer program after you passed all the other stages. Not as final test but just to check if everything was ok and ready to become one of us.
For the rest, this being agrees.

Self-euthanasia wasn’t the standard 12 years ago. You ask most older capsuleers, they likely lost their original body in their first podding, same as me.

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Oh, I like this, Ms. Teinyhr. Very astute.

Let’s see …

I think that bit’s partly based on a previous generation of cloning technology. Wasn’t there one where you had to pay for higher-grade clones, so the transfer would be clean enough for all your practical knowledge to make the jump?

Hee. Well … for good or ill (and I’d definitely say mostly for ill) … my predecessor really seems to have thought of herself as a monster. (Not human, not a god, not even quite animal in the usual sense; something else.)

It’s a reason she and Mr. Havohej got along, I guess. I don’t think she approved of Nation, though, so I guess she’d be at least as disappointed in him as he is in me.

Yeah.

So, to oversimplify a bit, she saw herself as a mass-murderer who’d personally killed at least hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people, and couldn’t understand why this didn’t bother her more. Rather than thinking about it in terms of the way power corrodes empathy (and always has) and the historical behavior of aristocracy, she thought something fundamental must have changed, making her perspective literally inhuman.

But, another way of describing her motivations is:

I’ve killed so many people. Any human being responsible for so much death would deserve to die. If I’m human, I should die.

I don’t want to die. . . .

I used to think this was … well, contemptible, cowardly (and also way too flattering to humanity). As I’ve become more entangled in this world, though, with more attachments and connections I don’t want ever to lose, I’ve started to maybe kind of understand better:

I don’t want to die, either.

I try not to let it influence my reasoning, but maybe she would have said the same.

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