Most oxygen-breathing species are compatible with a synthetic blood replacement fluid that will do the basic job of keeping your metabolism running; it degrades at about the speed that blood is replaced naturally. The fluid itself is stark white, so people who have had most of their blood replaced by it will wind up looking shockingly pale.
Beings with an allergy to the substance are advised to have an infotag implanted that any medscanner will pick up.
A wound stitcher resembles a bulky pen that can stitch wounds shut with a biocompatible thread.
Fleshseal spray foam sterilizes a wound, clots blood, and provides a scaffold into which the body’s cells can migrate during the healing process. It does a good job of gluing wounds together and drastically reduces scarring. It can keep indefinitely at any temperatures at which its intended patients can survive.
Living bandage is a variant of fleshseal spray; it contains tailored bacteriophages, bacteria, and fungal spores that will grow into a living bandage that kills infective agents, eats necrotic flesh, protects living flesh, and (once it has had about twelve hours to set up) doesn’t need changing; it can even get wet. It works for most major species, since the various microorganisms are engineered to react to their distinctive proteins by activating appropriate genes. The culture needs to be kept in a climate-controlled environment, though it’s sufficiently dormant that it can last for years on the nutrient supply in the can.
A trauma support system can keep a person alive for weeks even in the face of complete organ failure. It pumps and oxygenates blood, supplies nutrients, and filters wastes, and is smart enough not to take on a role that an organic organ is still performing. They’re used to get people to advanced medical facilities. The systems are smart enough to cope with a body that has been dead for up to an hour, carefully restoring oxygen at a measured pace to avoid cell damage. If you can get your friend’s head to one in an hour, they might survive.
Medical-grade chem sensors can pick up many subtle indicators even on the breath (as we’re doing with cancer now), so medical droids will often gather a fair amount of data by smelling a patient’s breath and putting an electromagnetically sensitive palm on their forehead.
All manner of drugs are available to most widespread species to boost energy, focus thinking, control moods, speed or slow metabolism, and banish sleepiness (like orexin in humans), and even the best ones have long-term side effects that make it unwise to rely on them often.
If you thought things were bad with a whole planet working on the best colds and flus and sharing them via global travel, imagine thousands of worlds doing it. The highest-tech worlds send regular subspace updates from their medical laboratories, providing sequence data for the surface proteins by which an immune system can recognize the latest pathogen. Those are then encoded into a mild rhinovirus and sprayed on the local citizens, who grumble and sneeze for a couple of days but develop immunity. (This is much cheaper than manufacturing vaccines and administering them to the populace.) These are then sent out via courier (and hapless traveler) to worlds that lack this level of biotech. With subspace transmission, this allows immunity to often spread faster than the actual disease.
Naturally, people who can pay for less virulent direct vaccinations will happily do so to avoid the inconvenience of the cold that’s coming out next week.
There has also been a fair amount of natural selection for disease resistance in the galactic population, and newly contacted planets often need extra medical attention.
Over five thousand years of galactic commerce, a number of diseases have evolved to jump between species. The usual galactic rhinoviruses and influenzas can jump between almost all parahumans.
DNA scanning isn’t sufficient to determine exactly how a being develops— there are plenty of influences from anything from childhood nutrition and diseases to microRNA— so Wanted posters generated from blood samples aren’t terribly accurate.
Major germ-line genetic work is one of the warning signs of a culture that is going to go off the deep end soon; it’s almost as bad a sign as building massive droid intelligences that you haven’t a hope of keeping under control, or working on strong nanotech.
If you’re in a hurry, you can get a transplant; they can brew up a retrovirus overnight to convert tissues from a donor of your own species to manifest matching histocompatibility complexes, and have a limb or organ ready to implant in a few days. Recovery from surgery takes a couple of weeks, and therapy for reintegrating a replacement limb another month or so. Healthy slaves are often bought as sources of transplants, and some vassals have sold their own organs, limbs, or entire bodies to keep their families from falling into slavery.
Most medical facilities stock a supply of pluripotent cells that are
compatible with each species they expect to help. These can be
convinced to differentiate into different types of bodily cell
(skin, liver, kidney) and then fed into tissue printers to provide
generic parts for a person; you can have a new Type O
liver in a matter of days, or less if your species is popular enough
that they keep some on hand. There is no risk of outright rejection,
but the tissues are never as good as your originals.
If you have a few weeks to sit around twiddling your thumbs while hooked up to a life support machine, a good medical facility can culture your own cells to make a perfectly compatible organ. Once you’ve healed up, these are as good as new.
Some of the most difficult things to replace are hands and feet, particularly the subtle bones involved in the wrists and ankles. If you have the cash and time, you can get new ones made— but it’s usually much faster and cheaper to get a cybernetic replacement.
It takes a couple of weeks to clone up the cell lines for a new organ; printing time for simple, homogeneous organs is only a couple of days, but it can take over a week to put together an entire hand and wristbones. Retraining the reflexes takes a month of intensive physical therapy or two to three months of regular use.
It’s also possible to regenerate limbs, but that requires wearing an expensive regeneration sleeve while your appendage grows back over months (one for a finger, ten for a leg). It’s more expensive than a cybernetic replacement and cheaper having it done via tissue printing. Regeneration sleeves are available with motorized-frame support, making it possible to walk on an artificial leg while your real one regenerates, though it’s clumsier than a cybernetic limb. Once the regeneration sleeve comes off, it will still take some physical therapy to get back to normal.
If you’re wealthy and expecting trouble, you can always shell out the money for a backup body, where your cells are cultured and pre-printed ahead of time. This usually consists of a set of spare limbs and organs, plus a supply of miscellaneous tissue stock, kept ready for transplant; cloning takes much, much longer to produce an adult body that could be harvested.
Cybernetic replacements exist for most bodily limbs and organs. Most internal organs can be created through tissue printing; doing so with fancy things like eyes, ears, or entire limbs is very expensive, so it’s common to have those replaced with cybernetics.
Cyberware is known to erode the ability of beings to feel a connection to their fellow sentients; obviously chromed-up people are a target of considerable prejudice. The more they have to think of themselves as machines, the more disconnected they feel. Cyberware that only provides baseline functionality has a minimal effect, though there is some from having to treat your body as something that needs maintenance and replacement parts. If it gives you capabilities beyond those of your species, it creates a greater sense of separation; the same thing happens if it’s skimping on the sensations that you would normally feel. Installing a biomonitor— which just provides readouts of your vital signs (EEG, EKG, blood glucose levels, etc.)— has negligible effects, and it can be charming when your robutler knows to bring you a snack when you need some blood sugar or warm milk at bedtime, and quite soothing to the blood pressure when your medical service contract gets cheaper.
Cybernetic replacement parts can learn to adapt to you much faster than organic ones. A person can be given a cybernetic replacement limb within hours of getting them stabilized from the trauma of losing an organic one, and they can be using it as well as their original organic one within a couple of weeks if they have good training software for the limb. (e.g.: the standard kata of your martial arts are already mapped, so when you go through them with the limb, it knows which nerve impulses to assign to which behaviors.) Cybernetic replacement can also be done in a field hospital. while culturing requires much better facilities.
Cyberware quality:
Cyberlimbs with switchable sockets also have a negative impact on self-image.
Characters with any significant cyberware or bioware must take an aspect to
reflect its effect on their self-image. This could be soulless
cyborg
, more metal than man
, cybernetic infojunkie
,
chrome over gold
, atoning cybermonster
,
organically augmented
, or even extropian bodhisattva
.
Some may lead you to feel superior or contemptuous or pitying of
others; others to feel miserable or isolated or self-pitying. The
aspect can be invoked for direct performance, or for its social
ramifications.
The more your ’ware distances you from human, the more it should
affect Empathy, Rapport, etc. If you’re tough, it’s
easy to fall into the habit of dismissing others as weak. It you’re
smart, it’s easy to fall into the habit of seeing them as dumb.
It causes social stress, much as the Force causes mental stress. If
Taken Out socially by your ’ware, replace an aspect with one
representing your detachment from humanity: Cold, Detached, Dispassionate,
Identifies with Machines, Flesh is weak!
, Droid Fetish...
(Cyberneurosis is a step on the way to cyberpsychosis.)
Tailored gut bacteria are available for a multitude of purposes, and every spaceport sells capsules of broad-spectrum cultures for most well-known species, enabling them to digest most foods, though they can’t do much about perception of flavor.
Engineered, sterile tapeworms are available to help with maintaining biochemical balances; they increase appetite somewhat (which helps with the increased richness of diet for people who can afford them) and improve a person’s general health.
Drug symbiotes are engineered organisms that secrete the drug you specify; they have small bladders to start instant gratification and, as long as your body has the raw materials for them to work with, can synthesize more. Designs vary from dial-a-mood to dial-a-psychedelic experience. You can postpone emotional processing of your problems for decades with a good one. Drug dealers hate it because a good one means you never need to buy from them; the good ones even monitor the drugs in your system and release compensating chemicals to neutralize overdoses of external drugs and prevent hangovers. (There are versions that have the anti-drug traits and medical-use-only secretions as well; those don’t get you in anywhere near as much trouble as ones that let you decide you want level 3 euphoria and level 2 hallucinations for the next hour, please.)
Complete changes in the color of skin, hair, and eyes are possible using tailored retroviruses that adjust the expressed pigment genes in epithelial cells; humans can even become Twi’lek blue or green if they wish, and some variants are even transmissible to offspring. Re-engineering skin to contain chloroplasts (green, dark red, blue-green, or purple) is possible (though no one has ever made it a germ-line modification), but requires culturing an entirely new hide and replacing it with complex surgery and an uncomfortable recovery.
Biotattoos are created
using neutered
retroviruses that infect cells but never
replicate. Small quantities of a retrovirus are injected through an
ultra-fine needle, where they insert their payload into the first
cells they meet; repeat thousands of times (usually under machine
control, unlike a regular tattooing needle) and a picture develops.
The tattoos take several days to begin expressing themselves; they do
not fade with age, but will stretch with the skin. Biotattoos that
express luciferase or similar chemicals can glow dimly in the dark.
Tattoos that change dynamically require more complex engineering and a
skin graft; some workaholics get ones that change subtly with their
own blood sugar levels and use them as a reminder to eat. Mood
tattoos
that react to transitory emotional states would require
cybernetic implants; the technology is possible, but there’s no
market.
The human coccyx is a set of fused bones with attached muscles, a blood supply, and sensory innervation, and can be extended into a non-prehensile tail. This can help with balance, though it also drives up the cost of clothing (especially spacesuits) and makes a person easy to spot.
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