For a while now, I’ve been thinking idly about a story in an sf future where bodies are as changeable as clothes. It’s a fairly straight-forward process, in my imagination. You walk into your closet, close the door, and select the body you want to inhabit next. Then your current body is cooled and/or anaesthetised, robot helper arms undo the zip at the back of your head and neck, and your brain (complete with optic nerve and spinal column) is removed, the previous body rotates into storage, and your new selection is produced. You are popped back in to the new body, with eyes, ears, circulatory system and nervous system re-attached through plug-in sockets, then zipped back up, and woken up. Bingo, it’s a brand new you.
You could have a whole selection of different bodies — a corporate business body, an athletics body, a party body, a seduction body, a manual labour body, a fighting body, male, female, black, white, young, old, whatever. The obvious type of story for that sort of setting, where identity is so fluid and mortality so avoidable, would be a mystery or suspense. Whether I write anything from this premise or not, the reality of it sounds like fun. I’d like some spares :)
Coco Body Transplant by Natalia & Gabriel
Surprisingly, we may be getting closer to this sort of operation becoming feasible. In 2001, Dr. Robert White successfully removed the head from a monkey, and transplanted it — with no apparent loss of mental function — onto the headless body of another monkey. It wasn’t the first time he’d managed it, either; that was back in ‘63. It’s not possible to reconnect spinal tissue yet, so the frankenmonkey was paralysed from the neck down, but otherwise it functioned well, the poor bloody thing.
White believes that humans could benefit from the same procedure, and that it is just a matter of time. Quadriplegics, already paralysed from the neck down, generally die from organ atrophy within five or ten years. A full body transplant could give them a way to survive longer, even if it doesn’t give them back any movement. Unsurprisingly, a lot of spinal injury researchers consider this whole line of thinking utterly abominable. They point out that it’s much saner to look at repairing spinal column breaks. When did sanity ever stop science, though?
Others are already thinking further ahead, of course. A cloned body, with the development of the brain somehow suppressed, could potentially give you an endless supply of new ‘you’. It’s just a short step from there to trading clone-bods with other people, much like Magic: The Gathering cards :)
I, for one, welcome our new headless clone overlords.
I told a somewhat similar story to my RPG party once, back in the old days. It involved a certain Society of the Beheaded, whose members – half-crazy, Lovecraftian heads in jars – used a selection of headless bodies for various… purposes. The extra twist was that these bodies could walk and act on their own, though in a rather mindless and bestial way. (Besides Lovecraft, Burton’s Sleepy Hollow movie was a strong influence back then.)
I do hope you’ll write your story someday. I’m truly curious about how you’d flesh the idea out. :)
Spares would be handy! The Second Life game sort of provides this from a virtual aspect.
The later run of Moore’s MiracleMan and Gaiman’s run of Miracleman dealt heavily with the Qys – a race who created and collected spare bodies. Nice gear as you’d expect from those two, but as you say, grand concept.