"Dr. Cheung is not my pet."

"Someone explain 'neuroscientist' in more detail?" says Mial.

"Neuroscience is the rather medical study of brains. Dr. Cheung does groundwork in uploading, which would be the instantiation of a person's mind in software; it's at least sixty years away, even optimistically, but if it works it could mean universal immortality, and depending on some other factors possibly resurrection of adequately stored deceased individuals. I pay him a salary, reimburse him for research expenses, and provide software support, and I'll pay his assistant too when he finds one he likes, because that seems very cheap for universal immortality."

"Yeah, no kidding," says Mial. "Although I'm not sure 'software' sounds like a nice place to live."

"Well, obviously that would require some work, in order for the uploaded individuals not to have to spend all their time in a featureless wasteland, but we've already got a lot of preexisting technology for connecting experiences to minds, mostly used for immersive fiction. Delivering experiences to an upload is almost certainly much easier than getting someone uploaded in the first place. Certainly all the tests will be on animals until we're extremely confident that uploaded people will not be better off dead. And if the virtual environment turns out to be very complicated or people simply don't prefer it, it should be likewise fairly straightforward to put them in robot bodies - or even figure out a way to clone blank brains and redownload them, although that's uncomfortably close to the current leading brand of functional immortality, which involves human sacrifice, and I'd want to be very sure no one would be tempted to take shortcuts with the downloading."

"Thank you," Mark says dryly.

Stalas squeezes Mark's hand and says, "I'm missing something here. Human sacrifice...?"

"If someone wants to be immortal in the current state of technology, first of all they need to avoid sudden death in any situation that isn't amenable to cryopreservation and subsequent revival, and second of all, when they get very old or develop other intractable health problems, they commission clones of themselves, who grow at an accelerated rate to adulthood and are then murdered and receive brain transplants. This is not very popular and it's only legal on one planet, but it happens on a routine if not overwhelmingly frequent basis. Mark is a clone, just not for that purpose."

"Mark's half-alt Lalita - who was married to my alt Isabella - was genetically engineered, differently enough from me to have ceased to age and such that his blood, transfused, can heal an amazing variety of conditions very quickly, albeit not as instantly as it sounds like your lights can. So I may be able to make non-software-based inroads on the galactic lifespan with what he left for me to look at."

"That's interesting," says Koridaar. "Does his blood make people cease to age too? Or have you not had the opportunity to test it?"

"Isabella's received transfusions and hasn't noticed any effect over about seven years," says Linya. "But it's possible she simply wouldn't have noticed; I'm younger than she is and I can expect to look younger than a non-engineered person of the same age for my entire life, and our alt didn't share our face and was also shy of four years old. Perhaps she's aging much slower than she otherwise would. We don't have any better data. Bar can tell whether substances are safe for possible recipients that she has available to look at, and we have one full dose left - I don't need it to try to duplicate the effect at home; I have his genome sequenced."

"...hmm," says Koridaar. "Is that a suggestion?"

"Yes," interjects Miles.

"Let's make the experiment."

"Noted. I'm sure I can find some way to pass the time. Reading your runecasting textbooks, maybe."

"I think I heard the phrase 'translation spell', so you'll probably still be able to figure them out after you've got them home. I wonder if you'd find pens useful without a background in computers or an infrastructure designed for them. Probably not very, but maybe enough to be worthwhile."

"Pens...?"

"Holo pens." Linya pulls hers off her necklace and draws a line. "They'll store any sort of thing that can be considered information - text, images, holos, sound, etcetera - though you need another bit of equipment to get sound out again. The tutorial is designed for people who've seen comconsoles before, though, the version for the uninitiated isn't done yet."

"That looks very interesting," says Koridaar.

"'Comconsole'... tell me more about those," Mial says thoughtfully.

"They do what pens do, but you can't pick them up to draw with or carry them around, and they don't need a peripheral to produce sound. Oh, and all these devices network with each other - I can send a message from my pen to Miles's without having to be nearby."

"I want one. I want dozens. I want to manufacture them on Elcenia," says Mial. "Pens more than comconsoles but I don't see why I should limit myself."