|
>>
|
d6af4f.jpg
Grey Dream Wind
d6af4f
>>361109
Grenades need hugs too.
>>361093
When I was young and dumb, I wanted to test my mettle and tried taking down a few old fashioned tribals for glory or something stupid. I was also young and incompetent, and beat a couple of them up pretty good before I got subdued. Long story short, they didn't like me too much, and were also very curious just how much abuse I could take. Made a nice memory, but I don't remember enjoying it too much while it was going on. Long time ago, that. It was also the worst amount of damage my ego ever took having to get rescued like that, at least until I was able to hunt them down again. Still young, still stupid, but it went better the second time. For me, anyway.
>>361082
Here's the big science question. Splitting a neumono in half, to have them regrow on both ends. That is possible and it has been done. Let me explain to you why I'm not in a squad of 10 clones of myself in a very wordy fashion. I'm not a scientist, so take the following explanation with a grain of salt. I may have had some details rattled loose.
When a neumono's limb is lost, the body figures out the details of how to regrow it. Where the incision was made, how much is lost, how far to grow it, all of that. It takes a lot of data, and a lot of room in the body. If a little baby toe or even a leg is nourished and kept alive and so forth, the chances that it has all the data to regrow the entire rest of the body is astronomically low. Theoretically, we also have a DNA or equivelent that has our blueprints to the body, but we can't actually read that any better than a human. It's all the brain power spread over our body, and having 100% of the body data is spread out over a good portion of ourselves.
The record is 53% body mass lost and still surviving, with a theoretical threshold of 58%. That's in a perfectly distributed neumono with 232% total brainpower for regrowth - if that one were cut in half perfectly, he or she would have 116% data on each end, which, being more than 100%, would be enough to regrow the whole neumono on both ends. Now, in theory, it sounds like you could split any tough neumono off 50/50 and he'd regrow, but here's where it gets complicated. The data isn't evenly distributed across our bodies, and it varies from person to person. It could be a cut across the abdomen. It could be a cut just below the armpits. Hell, it could just be an arm, although the chances of that are astronomically thin. Extremities have less data. And remember, 232% was a theoretical threshold, it's considered extremely rare for anyone to have the 200% needed.
Now, we don't have the technology to literally read where all of that data in the brain is, so where we would split a neumono in half would be little more than an educated guess. Then to try it again on the same neumono, you would have to wait for him to heal. And here is where it gets impractical.
If you're cut in half, it'll take a damn long time to heal. Not proportionally longer compared to a finger, ear or leg. With those, you still have almost all your brain to figure out how to repair it. If you're cut in half, unless your body is a genius at it, you will just scrape by with enough information, and the process of your body figuring out just what is up will take much longer just to figure out how to begin regrowing itself. If you put it simply, the more body mass you lose, the time it takes to regrow will be exponential.
So we have a test neumono. Damn good soldier. Best a hive could see. He gets cut in half with an educated guess to try and grow him again. It fails, no surprise, but a finger or ear could regrow in a few days, a full limb could come back in a week or two, but an entire bisection would take months or years. And here's the kicker! The data, the data the body holds to regrow itself, doesn't grow in the same place again. Where it was in the living half will spread some to the regrown areas, the regrown areas may have some more redundancy built in, and the whole distribution shifts. So scientists can't just say 'oh, that almost worked, let's bisect this one just an inch higher.' It's pretty much random.
But here's a point in favor of trying to do all of this successfully. Our regrowth data has a tendency, we found, to move away from areas that are lost frequently. If you lost a leg 10 times and nothing else, almost no brainpower for regrowth would move to that hotspot. So if you bisect the same neumono several times across the torso and chest? The datas and redundancies will move to the extremites. In the most extreme examples, if a neumono, say, had 212% of the total brainpower to regrow himself, then the arms and legs might just have 50% each. So repeatedly bisecting the same neumono will increase the chances each time, and do it all the time for a decade or two, and you'll have very good chances to get that neumono to start multiplying, cutting each clone off and again, multiplying and doubling.
By then, that super soldier that just spent 10 to 20 years on a hospital bed is probably a bit combat rusty. I answered another question that losing a limb every once in awhile may make memories fuzzy, and that was limbs. We're talking full scale bisections. Spending all your time regrowing, that super soldier will probably forget what a gun looks like, and may be a totally different person. And I also said that you probably wouldn't get much mental illness for losing a body part now and then, but again, for bisections?
By the time it's all said and done and successful, your once prime soldier will be a broken shell, and you'd be multiplying retarded amnesiacs. If I wanted competent teammates like myself, I'd just go get knocked up and spit out my genetic data in 3 months.
|