Lore:Death

Concept

Death	Other Names: The Big Sleep Related Pages: Nanotrasen Consultant Related Lore: SolFed, Nova Sector

Death. The Big Sleep. The bane of all mortals and, in the hands of a competent engineering team, several immortals. Death exists in this setting, despite Medbay's best efforts, people are not in this world forever, and extending the life you have here tends to have consequences or tradeoffs.

Rules (OOC)

As this is a game-first server, the lore around Death is constrained around a few of our rules.

Blackout Policy exists to allow murders to happen with out punishing the killer for not RRing the victim and ruining the rest of a 3 hour shift for them.

As this server is based around player freedom and mechanics, two things must be able to hold true:

• A character can be Round Removed but show up next shift.

• A character can die to anything, the player can hit the DNR button in their verbs at their choosing (or take the DNR quirk), and even refuse to play that character again.

That is, you cannot compel another player to force their character to stay dead, or to stay alive. We do still ask that you uphold the General Player Policy about fitting the setting in a grounded way, so have some way of reasonably addressing your miraculous return ("I don't know why" is valid, as is "(Rule 7) That shift was non-canon. Whatever you saw, happened to someone else.", whereas "I'm a God, I just do that" and "Meme magic" are both rulebreaks.)

Additionally, treat death with some gravitas. As much as you OOCly know you're not going to hit the DNR button, and all you're OOCly going to lose is like 10 minutes while a Paramedic finds you, there's always the chance each final breath is your final final breath. As per Rule 3, don't self-terminate for "little reason."

Avoiding Death

For as long as there have been two cells in this galaxy, someone has wanted themselves to not be dead. As technology has advanced from the 2100s, more means of preventing long-term death from taking hold have come into common practice. Here is a non-comprehensive list.

《 Avoiding Death 》
Genemodding: Manipulating your body to use alternative genetic paths, often to the benefit of longevity. This may be as simple as removing genetic predispositions to diseases, or as extensive as rerouting entire metabolic pathways to reduce or even reverse natural wear and tear. Science nerds may recognize the term "telomere" and how it relates to aging.
Symbiosis: Usually viruses with the Eternal Youth symptom, even less long-term healing viruses qualify as helping to avoid death. Legally, Cortical Borers are labeled as a Death Accelerant, as their consumption of brain tissue is linked with long-term mortality, but when your alternatives include immediate death, a shortened lifespan is still longer than your "natural" one.
Cryostasis: Trading off conscious time for eventual tech solutions. You're living across a longer span of time, not necessarily for a longer length of consciousness. Modern technology has enabled the Stasis bed, which slows biological processes for surgical means, though some long-term thinkers have used this to draw out their time in the universe.
Access to Health Care: Unsurprisingly, the general mortality rate is much lower in sectors where doctors are capable of treating "bullet to the face" syndrome. Legally, defibrillating someone whose body is dead is only a "short-term death," which does not trigger most bereavement clauses in contracts. Mannitol and Formaldehyde can draw out a "short-term death" for a significant amount of time.
MMI: For longer-term bodyless brain operation, the Man-Machine Interface serves as a bridge between neural impulses and the outside world. While newer models of the MMI automatically synthesize a tiny trickle of mannitol to counteract natural brain rot, older MMIs are routinely found with half-rotten lumps of idiot fused to the connectors. These MMIs can cheaply be inserted into a Cyborg shell or AI frame, which does strip them of some rights and bind them to some laws, or expensively inserted into a fully Synthetic body, restoring their legal personhood.
"Entangled Mindswapping": A staple of the MECU's upper brass, an Entangled Mindswap is a primitive form of Man-Machine Interface, closely resembling old tropes of Brains in Jars. As a result of the limited resources and production during the MECU's early days, the oldest of their leaders found themselves collaborating from inside room-sized brain preservation machines. For various reasons, these individuals are resistant to transfer to more modern MMI designs. Perhaps their neural pathways have expanded beyond their synapses, perhaps their brain has rotted to the point of insanity, perhaps they simply don't trust any SolFed designs.
《 Species-Specific Restoration 》(TODO: separate into a different table? differentiate "avoid" and "reverse" in this table?)
Ethereal Crystalization: Upon death, an Ethereal will crystalize. "Retreating into voltaic chrysalides to regenerate their bodies." This results in what most folk consider as "Permanent brain damage," but is simply part of their lifecycle.
Slime Hybrid Core: Upon critical injury, a Slime person's core will remain, their damaged body dissolving to encase the core in a protective shell. You need to pour an ambiguousbuggy amount of liquid Plasma on it to restore the slime person's body.
Ashwalker Tendril: Her Mother's Grace, she permits eggs to be hatched upon the surface to birth live, fully-fledged Ashwalkers. An Ashwalker's corpse can be stuffed into these eggs to regenerate them, or if the Ashwalker sacrificed enough to Her Mother whilst in life, she may grant their soul the grace to be reborn in a new egg, not as an entirely new Ashwalker but as themselves again. The mechanics around this are ill-defined. If you don't find the correct mechanics to prompt this grace naturally, you can always Pray or Ahelp to get permission.
Vox's Cortical Stacks: The Vox swap their brains and Cortical Stacks between bodies all the time, as needed. Some Voxform are more specialized for tasks, and rather than optimize them to also socialize, it's often easier to just pop their consciousness out and insert it into a more general voxform. The station does not have a means to replicate this, as this is a closely-guarded Vox secret (or at least, the means to do so).

Reversing Death

《 Rise From Your Grave 》
Sometimes Death just happens but you're not ready to go just yet. There are ways to reverse even long-term death, often at a terrible cost. Often, this is at the cost of either your original Body or your original Self.
Common Backgrounds
Replica Pod: Add blood from your body into a Replica Pod seed, and watch it ensnare your loose Resonance and grow into an entirely new body with entirely new biology. This new body lacks blood, and thus is not able to grow a third Replica Pod. Cheap, common, and readily available in most Seed Vendors, this was one of the first resurrections available to Humanity. In modern times, there are better means if you're able to entertain options. Persons who thought they were on the cutting edge of immortality and had the foresight to stash large quantities of their human blood do find themselves able to use it to grow a second Replica Pod seed of themselves when the first is incompatible with further life, but they face their own existential horrors. Even under optimal circumstances, with each new Pod, they have to watch as their lifespan trickles away, literally one drop at a time. Less poignantly, there's also the risks of blood preservation (that stuff rots too!) and blood theft. While there aren't too many across the galaxy, these specialized blood banks these days are more secure than regular banks. After all, the Resonance doesn't care which Replica Pod seed it grows into you, it's just the first to be harvested. At least one kidnapping has involved an untimely death and a prepared Replica Pod. There have been niche biohistorians attempting to take ancient blood samples and restore them to viability, but it can take decades only to find their resonance has long since dissipated or been reused. Do note that typical station-side blood synthesizing methods do not preserve the unique DNA of the original blood, and are thus inviable for Replica Pods.
Silicon Transfer: The arduous, complicated process of digitizing neural synapses and translating them to an inorganic medium, often a circuit board or distinct Positronic Brain. Works about as well as putting a round peg in a square hole: technically works but leaves everyone involved in emotional distress. In order for the resonance to transfer, they need to "free" it from its existing shackles, but surely that can be done through means less primitive than a blender, right?
Resonance Transfer: Pulled from the corpse using a Soulcatcher, the raw Resonance. Can be implanted into a sacrificial human-like brain via the RSD Phylactery. While the Soulcatcher does its best to copy memories from the deceased brain's hippocampus, and the Phylactery attempts to translate between the Resonance data and the completely different structures of the new, sacrificial brain, things just don't fit perfectly. This is not your flesh. This is not your skin. This is not your face. This is not your heart. Your heartbeat is different. Your breaths are shorter. Your breaths are longer. Why do you breathe like that? Why do you see like that? These thoughts aren't as fast as they once were. I'm thinking too quickly. The soda lets you see faster. This is not your flesh. The metal coffin tries to make you forget, tries to make the flesh look like yours, but it's not yours. It never was. It never will be. I want my skin back. I want my flesh back. I want my life back. Some folk take to this process better than others.
Cloning: No. Illegal since the 2200s. Used as a bioweapon against too many populations, when bypassing the algorithms that ensure exactly one copy of a person exists. There are dangers to a clone, imperfect or otherwise, lacking your Resonance. There are dangers even if your Resonance is open for insertion. The body may reject you. As such, in SolFed, cloning is strongly frowned upon and dangerously illegal. Outside of SolFed, it's still not a great idea.

Permanent Deaths

《 I Am Inevitable 》
Dance with the Reaper long enough, and he's sure to step on your foot. All times must come, but some are more flagrantly forecasted than others.
Common Diseases, Maladies, and Concerns that keep you dead.
Hereditary Manifold Syndrome: HMS. A recently discovered affliction, commonly referred to as a virus. In truth, the mechanism behind HMS is far more sinister: the timeline is actively rejecting you. Without regular supplements of Sansufentanyl, your body will gradually revert to a different timeline over the course of roughly 30 minutes, starting with nausea as your ear balance mechanisms adjust to a different gravity, leading to coughing up blood as parts of your organs no longer sync with your flesh, and ultimately, you collapse in a pile of dust, recalled to your "home" timeline. Hopefully, you didn't need to bring that dust with you. Secret Syndicate Knowledge: HMS is caused by Sansufentanyl. Assassins have been known to be dispatched after high value Psychologists with an autoinjector of the stuff, dooming them to an inevitable fate. Interdyne allegedly invented and certainly patentedTODO: Trade Secret? ugh I'm in a CLASS about this nonsense. Sansufentanyl, and each Interdyne outpost holds the secret recipe for making this week'sAs the disease involves alternate timelines, it's no surprise that the recipe also changes randomly over time. Regardless, Interdyne's patent on the drug somehow retrocausally always holds true to the current recipe. Sansufentanyl.
Death Degradation Disorder: DDS. A catch-all label for the numerous symptoms that add up to one thing: You're going to be permanently dead soon. TODO: include information about common ways to treat it, rezadone sleeping carpotoxin whatever, and common ways it triggers: once per death, counting up while dying... as a personal indulgence, reference both the Catsec and the Doctor researching DDS.
Plasma Man Fungus: The fungus that composes Plasmamen is not one that lightly takes your consciousness as it devours and repurposes your body. Once the fungus has fully taken hold of what little flesh it retains, there is nothing left to revive of you. Some Plasmamen have reported that gradually subjecting yourself to the fungus allows a sort of psychic connection and negotiation, so that while the New You will not be you specifically, they report it as more of a symbiosis than a takeover; do note they have a strong incentive to lie about the process.
Legion: Technically reversible, but countless souls have found themselves on Lavaland and engulfed by a Legion skull, ensnared by the skull infesting your flesh, preserved for hundreds of years as a mindful beast. These Legions will command your vocal chords to lure in additional prey, though they tend to only be able to conjure simple or recently uttered phrases.
Ashwalker Tendril: Sacrificing a human body to the Tendril gives the Ashwalkers favor in their god, see above, and fosters the growth of a new egg. While the brain is not consumed in the process, 9 times out of 10 the Resonance is ensnared by the tendril and inserted into the new eggRead: the player chooses to spawn as an Ashwalker, giving birth to a fresh Ashwalker and leaving the brain useless.
DNR: Catch-all term for "we don't know, but we can't resuscitate them here." Most common DNR causes can be reversed at a dedicated DNR-centered Medical Facility. The Interlink has a prepaid shuttle program to and from the nearest facility.

Mortality Rate

TheI rate it 8/8. Nova Sector and several other anomalous zones have a lower long-term death rate than more stable space, statistically significant but not overwhelmingly so. They also have other factors that prohibit any particular group from establishing a low-death civilizationRead: There's no big scramble for the Fountain of Youth sort of mass upheaval. in the area. Actually, you've probably seen several of these attempts if you've explored Space. Abandoned medical facilities, overtaken by wildlife or by anomalous madness that just doesn't happen so much in normal space. Also: normal space doesn't get Anomalies popping into your office every hour to turn everything into pizza and then explode with the force of a black hole.

In short: In the Nova Sector, you are much more likely to "survive" a bullet through the skull, but also much more likely to get sucked into a black hole by an impossible clown beast who has strong ties to your former boss's stomach.

Several theories have been proposed by various expertsCrackheads., including:

• You're always 20 minutes away from a top-class Medical Bay, who even when overworked can attend to you within an hour.
• There are several supernatural forces in play around Nova, all of which have a vested interest in keeping you alive to serve their bidding.
• Medical scanners lie, and nobody actually dies for real around here.
• We killed Death years ago and are toying with its corpse.
• We've all been dead this entire time.
• Nanotrasen hires a lot of stunt doubles.

Work in Progress: Footer subject to change at a moment's notice. Do not take a red link's presence, struck-through or otherwise, as confirmation (or denial) of their canonicity.

Nova Sector Lore
	Common Species	Humans, Tiziran, Unathi, Moths, Ethereals, Azulae, Slime Hybrids, Teshari, Synthetic Humanoids (and assorted robots), Pod Persons
	Other Species	Genemodders (Felinids, Ice Walkers, Dwarf), Ashwalkers, Hemophages, Snailpersons, Ordoht (Formerly Skrell), Plasmamen, Flypeople, Vox (Primalis et al), Tajaran, Vulpkanin, Xenomorphic Hybrid, Rouges (Abductorkin), Miscellaneous Species
	Nanotrasen	Nanotrasen, Central Command, Emergency Response Corps
	External Groups	The Syndicate, Interdyne Pharmaceutics, DS-2, Cargo, The Spider Clan
	Nova	The Nova Sector, Indecipheres, Freyja
	Concepts	Bluespace, Plasma, Faster Than Light Travel, Resonance ("Souls"), Death
	SolFed	SolFed, Earth in 2565, The SolFed Armed Forces, The SolFed International Capital District