Undeath: A Manual — Part 5 of 5 — Finally: The Rite of Endless Night
I can only assume that most of you came here in search of a quick path to bad-ass lichdom, and it just makes me tired. I mean, I get it. I can even sympathize if I try hard enough...
I can only assume that most of you came here in search of a quick path to bad-ass lichdom, and it just makes me tired. I mean, I get it. I can even sympathize if I try hard enough. To draw an analogy, I can really appreciate owning and operating a fast, powerful, and durable car. I don’t want to have to maintain it more than the bare minimum, though, and I sure as hell don’t want to spend half my life in engineering classes and materials science courses and prototyping labs and shell out for my own tools and shops to design and build my own. I know that any car I build from parts I personally scavenged from the junkyard is going to be, the very second I finish assembling it, also junk.
From that point of view, I get it. I truly do.
But to continue the analogy, stretching it to the breaking point even, you need to know that a poorly maintained and recklessly operated car is a hazard to other drivers. And also pedestrians. And people living in the neighborhoods where a car has crashed and caught fire. But also cars don’t go on a bloody rampage the instant they’ve ejected their next-to-worthless driver. Do you get what I’m saying? For all that cars can be very cool, traffic is a curse. Because from every driver’s point of view, all of the other drivers are idiots, and every last one of them is right.
If all you wanted was an extended life, you could have stopped reading a good while back. But you don’t just want to live long enough to piss on the graves of everyone who has ever wronged you. You want to help them into those graves, and take what you want from the weak and powerful alike, and be surrounded by people who are too terrified to piss you off, and to have the other powerful people, who are also too scared to piss you off, keep themselves at a careful distance, all of which you are certain is identical to an expression of the respect you have always felt that you deserved for merely having the nerve to continue existing.
We’ve all been there. Because we’ve all been frustrated eight-year-olds. Most of use get past it, though.
Do you think if I give you—and, simultaneously, a thousand people just like you—a concrete list of components to buy and diagrams of how to mix them all together and a carefully ordered list of carefully calibrated atrocities to perform and devastating ordeals to endure before you peel off your esoterically self-tattooed skin to preserve it as a cool and sinister leathery wrapping for your jerkied muscles and desiccated bones and canopically pickled organs, that you and you alone will somehow manage to dedicate the next few weeks, or maybe even a whole month, to buying it all and preparing yourself via some kind of terrible ‘80s-movie music video montage to put yourself down and then, by dint of store-bought magic and cookbook recipes, raise yourself from the dead and begin your jubilant climb to the top of the heap of the corpses of your enemies?
I almost wish it could work like that, so I could watch you—and a thousand people just like you—quit your jobs and abandon your families and empty your bank accounts and literally flay yourselves and disembowel yourselves and kill yourselves and, when all the smoke has cleared, watch maybe six of you take a handful of steps before the wheels come off and you join the ranks of the blood junkies and cannibal revenants and rage monsters and all the other quotidian under-the-bed, back-of-the-closet nightmares that I’ll be obliged to help finish dismantling as penance for having compiled and published the list in the first place.
Man, it is so tempting.
Sorry, you’re going to have to design and build your own car. And also learn how to drive it.
Critical Steps to Bad-Ass Lichdom
You must prepare a workspace that is as spiritually sterile and flow-neutral as you can make it. Think Faraday cage. If you don’t know what that is, look it up.
You must strengthen your spiritual form to the point where you can exist without a physical form indefinitely within your workspace at least and, ideally, for lengthy periods outside of it. If accidents and traumatic experiences occur, they are likely to occur outside of your protected space. You must be able to survive long enough to retreat to safety.
You should consider preparing at least one place to which your spirit may retreat in the eventuality that something goes catastrophically wrong with your physical form. This may also be your workspace, but you may find that redundancy is a good thing.
Ideally your safety retreat will have at least a minimal physical form for you to inhabit in case you need to assist any automatic processes that are repairing or recreating your permanent form.
Speaking of which, you must create a master design model in some form—either a reference homunculus or encoded instructions or whatever seems best for your project and the media you’re using—of your permanent form. Successful implementations will use this model as the reference for automated repairs and regenerative capabilities. Optimally this model should have the capacity to be updated, otherwise your form will not be able to grow or adapt to circumstances. You must decide how to handle the trade-offs between resilience and flexibility and the vulnerabilities that can be introduced by making the design easily updatable. Vulnerable portions of your nonphysical form (memories, motivations, capabilities, etc.) may also be recorded in the master model so that automated restoration will be possible in the event of severe trauma.
Call the above an extended exercise in self-knowledge. Be certain that anything you neglect to document in detail will eventually be irrecoverably lost. Any capability you do not adequately describe will be flawed. Any improvement to your form that you attempt once you move in will be undone by your repair processes if you do not design for growth or adaptation. If you are ignorant of how any process works, expect it to go haywire and fail catastrophically.
You must design a mechanism by which the master model may be read and the information contained therein be used to to construct or repair the form you have designed. This process may be ongoing or periodically triggered—but must primarily include reconstruction and repair of the reconstruction and repair process itself.
You must design containment and protection for this master model as well. You can call this encapsulated model and its containment vessel a phylactery if you like, but there are many that would roll their eyes—or someone’s eyes—at that.
You could do worse than to study how all of this is done in nature, with DNA and RNA and the nuclei that contain them. But remember that, while they are respectably robust, evolution’s designs are supremely wasteful and unnecessarily convoluted.
You must be prepared to labor and experiment in your protected workspace, creating would-be immortal monstrosities in miniature and destroying them until you feel you can start to approach your design goals. Any complicated self-regenerating parabiological system will have bugs to work out. I guarantee you that you will not want to trust any one else’s design, nor will you want to move into and live permanently in a design that hasn’t been fully tested and debugged.
Above all, you must review ALL of this material repeatedly and make extensive notes before you even consider getting started.
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Best of luck. You can be assured that when you eventually screw this up, I’ll be there to haul your uppity revenant carcass out from under the bed or out of the back of the closet or out of that clogged drainage culvert or wherever your various animated remains end up.
Congratulations! You made it to the end of Undeath: A Manual!