Sunday November 18, 2007
Book 9: The Body Politic — Part IV: We Kept the Party Hats

Transcript

Narrator: Brainstorming session in progress. . .
Massey: Remember when the Tunguska caught up to us? Xinchub let slip the fact that he was immune to mindripping.
Doctor Bunnigus: Do you even know how mindripping works, Massey? Being immune to that is like being immune to organ donation.
Massey: Exactly. You can be immune to organ donation. Just plant an explosive in your ribcage and set it to go off if you flatline, or get cut open.
Massey: What if these nanobots could transfer a human mind from the brain to someplace else in the body? Everybody thought Xinchub's head was destroyed, right? Maybe that wasn't a shell-game switch, or a parlor trick. Maybe his blood-nannies moved all the data from his skull to someplace else.
Elf: So. . . he's immune to mindrip, because when you go looking for brain cells to read, they're blank?
Massey: Exactly. Xinchub's body is valuable because he holds the secret of mindrip immunity.
Vog: Then it only has very short-term value, and only until the secret is known. Moving the data is not the same thing as securing the data.
Captain Tagon: Hang on, Vog. . . You just said something important.
Captain Tagon: I keep my passwords on the back of a sticky that I move to a new place each week. Are you saying that's not secure?
Vog: Not anymore it's not.