Undeath: A Manual — Part 2 of 5 — General Categories of Undeadness to Consider
There are several choices for how to endure for longer than a typical span. I’ve organized a few general categories into a short list with the least problematic and easiest ones up front...
Did you miss Part 1? It’s best not to skip any juicy bits…
There are several choices for how to endure for longer than a typical span. I’ve organized a few general categories into a short list with the least problematic and easiest ones up front. Each has their own advantages and drawbacks that vary widely depending on execution, but I hope to give you enough information here in an overview so that you can find the more relevant specifics on your own.
Indefinite Life Extension
Two of the easiest ways to extend your life in your original body are fairly easy and achievable under even late 20th century technology.. First is what I call the Aquarium Water Change. Literally, it’s draining your blood a pint or two at a time and optionally replacing the fluid with nothing more than sterile saline. And here’s how it helps: your liver and kidneys work together to process poisons and toxins that build up from your diet and filter out the substances that are harmful to you into your urine. They do a damned fine job—but anything they can’t handle just…stays. Stays in your bloodstream and lymph channels, sticks to your artery walls, pesters your immune system’s various cells and lodges in your myriad tissues. It stacks up. So just drain it out.
I call it the Aquarium Water Change because that’s how and why you change the water in an aquarium. Periodically, by parts. To get rid of toxins that the filtration systems—hard workers that they are—just can’t handle. If the filtration works well, you can do it less often. But for any closed aquarium, you should still do it periodically.
It’s a bit of a hardship, especially if you opt not to replace the missing blood with a comparable volume of saline, but replace ten pints over the course of two or three months every year for few years, and then maybe repeat the process once every five years after that, while maintaining a lifestyle of healthy eating and exercise, and a decade or two will fall off of your effective age.
I don’t know why it isn’t routine. Blood is one of the few tissues in the body that humans can fully regenerate when there is loss. Emergency services have a use for your old blood, even. Advertising that it’s also a moderately effective rejuvenation technique would have people lining up around the block to donate blood.
So yes, also you can just voluntarily donate blood every time the opportunity is available. Don’t overdo it or you’ll get dizzy and fall down a lot.
This technique really only becomes difficult if you have diseases that makes emergency services not want to accept your blood. In that case you’ll have to make your own arrangements. And be discreet. People talk. Especially if you decide to replace your blood with donations from children, which some see as a clear step up from saline replacement. I’ll admit that there may be a few youthful hormones in young blood that might do you some good—but only might, and also only temporarily. And also: people talk.
The second technique: have someone collect and culture various kinds of pluripotent stem cells from your own body of all three categories—ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm—and have them reinjected at regular intervals, distributing them into relevant tissues especially near where damage has occurred and repairs are needed. Once technology has advanced a little, it should be possible to tease some of your own stem cells to form an undifferentiated blastocyst from your own tissues, the cells of which can be used to assist in healing and regeneration anywhere and everywhere in your own body. This process may also take years to complete, but the end result will, yet again, be decades’ worth of rejuvenation.
These two techniques together can restore up to fifty years of youth per completed course of application, which is more than enough time for medical technology to come up with other (socially acceptable) tricks—as long as you are otherwise healthy and can avoid other serious infirmities and accidents and hordes of villagers with pitchforks and torches.
Serial Incarnation
Extending life in your own body has a number of merits—simplicity and relative comfort of the procedures being first and foremost—but it may not be a very satisfying approach if you don’t particularly like your body or if it is diseased or damaged beyond your tolerance. In this case, you will need to either have someone transfer all of your physical attachments from your old form to a new one—or at least one that is new to you—or train yourself to make the transfer yourself.
I cannot even begin to tell you how much the former scenario is an exercise in trust. If you have not strengthened your noncorporeal skills, then both your body and your spiritual form will be at the mercy of the entity performing the procedure, and both are at risk of being exploited: possession, identity theft, imprisonment for ransom or enslavement, disassembly for hard-to-get parts, tissues, or components, outright consumption, etc. The opportunities for scammers are endless.
But let’s just say that a spiritual transferal is feasible. If it’s temporary, people typically refer to it as a possession, especially if the original occupant remains but is somehow constrained or partially tethered. Regardless, if you’ve mastered the necessary techniques, you can extend your existence via serial possession indefinitely.
The techniques you will need to master include those of severing your varying and numerous attachments to your current physical form, maintaining a noncorporeal existence for as long as is necessary to complete the procedure, and reattaching yourself to a different corporeal form. There are ways to terminally screw up every technique, including not severing completely all attachments to your old form and/or leaving critical portions of your spiritual anatomy behind. Also it is quite difficult to hold one’s spiritual components together without either a sufficiently strong physical tether or a sufficiently strong and well-fueled noncorporeal body-analog, and some critical portion or capability might slip free leaving the rest of you crippled and destined to disintegrate. Or you might not be fully prepared to dominate or constrain or evict the current occupant of your intended physical form, or the new body might become too damaged in the struggle for you to be able to repair it or control it or maintain your grip on it.
And if you intend to return to your original form, something must remain to keep it functioning and/or fresh enough to pick up where you left off. Whether that’s a specially developed portion of your old self or some kind of trustworthy delegate is up to you.
I heartily recommend that you don’t attempt a transferal to a new body until you have mastered existing for long durations, if not indefinitely, without one. I also recommend that you practice leaving and returning to your old body, because under the best circumstances you will want to be able to reanimate your old corpse should something unexpectedly go wrong.
If you are not in a big hurry to reach full capability, you can always latch onto an infant that has yet to develop anything resembling the usual noncorporeal structures and extensions. There are plenty of people who tell you to follow around people who are having sex and wait for the moment of conception but—unless you just happen to enjoy being a voyeur—it’s not necessary. Firstly, anyone who’s made it through a modern class on human biology can tell you that it can take many days after intercourse for an egg to be fertilized, if it happens at all, and that’s just tedious. Secondly, many fertilized eggs are spontaneously aborted before or after implantation for a huge list of uninteresting reasons, often before the host could have ever detected that there might have been a pregnancy. Typically this is for simple issues of nonviability, but it can also be for microbial or fungal infections, host unreadiness, stress or diet concerns, and a slew of other reasons before you get into the whole arena of medical or surgical interventions. Which, unless you are dominating the host as well, can also happen.
Just find a baby. Find a suitable one that has already demonstrated itself to be, at least marginally, viable and well cared for. Be prepared for a bit of a spiritual fistfight over the cribs of babies with attractive and wealthy parents. Depending on how well you can weather the flows and how long you can endure bodiless without disintegrating, the range of choices available to you may not be very good.
You may be gratified or relieved to know that, despite much hullabaloo to the contrary, children do not develop a spiritual ensemble that can compete with a trained noncorporeal entity until years after birth, in fact. The process of dislodging an undeveloped infant protospirit or simply anchoring oneself in place before a protospirit can develop is so simple and without complication that it’s a wonder any new souls are ever allowed to develop. Provided you’re not swept away by the flows—more on that later—any not-quite-departed spirit that wants to grab a new body and stay in the material world can easily do so—if they’re willing to put up with being bossed around by parents for a couple more decades and going through puberty again.
The trick of inserting your consciousness and memories into a developing brain isn’t at all automatic, however. Prepare to do some work on that score if that’s what’s important to you. It is, for reasons that may become clear to you later, exactly and precisely the same as learning to remember all of the details from your dreams—i.e., having your noncorporeal form report back on its nightly travels through dreamland in a way that will stick.
Developing a strong and supple spiritual body that can actually store the memories of a traveling noncorporeal personality, without a physical brain in which to inscribe memories, is a strong prerequisite. Memories are part of the noncorporeal essence that can easily slip away—and often the first things that do—when there is a spiritual crisis and imminent dissolution. The memories and mental traits that are stored in meat, in the physical form, tend to dominate, and have no trouble at all transcribing themselves into your spiritual components. Noncorporeal memories are frequently overwritten completely by whatever has been stored in a meat-brain whenever a physical form is reinhabited. You will need to get out of the habit of letting that happen. Especially as meat-memories are also notoriously unreliable.
There are also a number of nonhuman options for serial incarnation for those who are curious or understandably sick of humanity.
Noncorporeality
More-or-less perpetual noncorporeality is also an option. The noncorporal world is plenty odd and takes some getting used to. There are strange pushes and pulls in the noncorporeal world that we frequently refer to as flows. Without a physical anchor the flows are very hard to resist. Resistance doesn’t so much require effort as stamina and vigilance and a minimal bit of conscious agency.
Further, a physical form typically serves as an anchor for various noncorporeal organs and tissues that would not otherwise naturally stick together. Without a physical form, a healthy noncorporeal entity must have a complete enough spiritual physiology to maintain a kind of homeostasis with respect to the nonphysical environment or else it will come apart and dissolve—especially if it attempts to resist the flows.
Depending on who is doing the carving, a complete entity can be separated into anywhere between five and nine major components. If we interpret it to be nine, one of these components is physical, one is social, one is a kind of physicalish phenomenon that is difficult to explain in a summary like this, and the remaining components are the ones that must somehow clump together for a minimalist but functionally complete noncorporeal form. In this noncorporeal form, coarsely, there’s a spiritual body, some glue that is also a kind of fuel, and the rest is personality and mental and emotional capacities that can be further divided. Occasionally they can be further divided into delicacies by other creatures with strong presences in the noncorporeal environment, so it will be vital for you, so to speak, to learn a bit of noncorporeal self-defense.
Coarsely. I am speaking coarsely. For example, your blood can be listed as a single component of your body, but it is also composed of several thousand chemicals and cell-types, all of which have origins in other tissues and organs in your body. It’s a mistake to think of any nonphysical component of your person as a single uniform substance easily severable from the rest except as a kind of simplifying exercise. It can help in diagnosing defects and diseases, however.
In any case, in order to be minimally coherent as a nonphysical entity, one must have a strong and supple spiritual body and plenty of fuel and a substantial amount of practice regulating it, and one must have mastered at least one of a number of techniques for keeping the various mind/heart/soul bits contained in them and properly integrated with each other. This is merely for temporary existence without a physical anchor. And for staying in one spot.
To make this some kind of long-term solution you will need to learn how to hunt and graze and feed yourself. And how not to be hunted and eaten in turn. You will need to learn how to navigate and resist the flows reflexively, even when vaguely unconscious and recharging. You will need to learn how to interpret what your noncorporeal senses tell you is happening in your surroundings and determine whether and to what extent those happenings have any bearing on the physical world—provided you decide to keep a stake of any kind in the physical world.
The physical-world-adjacent noncorporeal world is trippy and dreamlike and oddly fragmented and contains many chutes-and-ladders-style shortcuts to…elsewhere. Elsewheres. Many, many elsewheres, not many of which will be comfortable or welcoming, except, in some cases, deceptively so. You will want a map or a guide or both, and you really should trust neither. But your alternative is to remain tethered to something physical, and unless it’s a body that you can move at whim, it’s just a kind of prison. You can ask any ghost, any haunt in its haunting, starving and hibernating until a flow of sustenance briefly reactivates it, until it is eventually harvested or it disintegrates.
The farther you get from the physical world, the stranger things get, until they stop making any kind of sense at all. It’s no shame for humans to recognize that they are creatures of the shallows, not cut out for the deeps.
This is all a bit of a gloss and not entirely accurate. Just because a place is nonphysical to you doesn’t mean that it is nonphysical to others who reside there, or that it wouldn’t be physical to you with the right kind of body—something consistent with local physics. There will be much more on this topic later.
Animation and Reanimation
Animation is a kind of hybrid state, somewhere between being properly incarnated as a living being and being noncorporeal, where a body is wrecked and remade to be a more suitable poppet or animated tether for a principally noncorporeal being. This can also include artificial and constructed bodies, mechanical or electrical devices, esoteric taxidermy projects, vehicles, etc. Techniques vary. Different techniques require physical forms of a specific kind, like healthy living tissue (perhaps a suitable animal or a coma patient), or tissue that had once been living but is now ritually preserved, or specially worked clay or stone or metal or fabric. The exceptionally powerful and versatile can work with a large range of materials.
That said, the reanimated mostly work with only one material—once-living flesh—and frequently only one specially prepared body made from that material. In those cases the body is usually the remnant of the body to which they had a living attachment. It keeps things simple and familiar, and can also provide convenient continued access to the assets and property of the associated identity. Occasionally a specially prepared sacrifice can be used instead, and in this case it may also be associated with an identity (or anonymity) worth exploiting.
In the strictest terms, it is not necessary for a reanimated individual to literally inhabit a poppet’s body and peer out of it at the world through the eyeholes, but learning that lesson goes against a lifetime of habit—and can expose one to some of the risks that frequently face the noncorporeal.
Every type of body or poppet or physical focus has its own issues. Maintenance and feeding, repair and reconstruction, social acceptability, parking and/or stabling, perhaps an unwholesome smell. Like with a living body, there can frequently be a point of breakdown where the forward-thinker would have an alternate ready and waiting. Where it gets complicated is that you need some kind of attachment to a physical body or object in order to manipulate it, and you need that object to be able to affect the physical world at all—which means you need to be attached to a physical object to be able to prepare another physical object to make it suitable for you to attach to it. Once your last physical attachment is destroyed, you are officially adrift as a noncorporeal entity.
So if you are a forward-thinker, the first thing you should do once you master control of your animated poppet is use it to prepare a backup poppet, just in case. Especially if you are not a strong swimmer in the seas of noncorporeality.
Stay tuned for the three upcoming episodes that complete this series:
Part 3 — How Things Go Wrong; Reality-Adjacent Real Estate; Planning Your Retirement