Cost for Whole Clones Options

[Rajaat99]

I was wondering if the cost of whole body cloning was stated anywhere, and the amount of time it would take. Any help?

[Zeel De Mort]

Not as far as I know, nope.

M&M p151 has prices and times for individual things, like limbs, eyes, organs etc. A limb takes the longest at 8 weeks, so maybe something along those lines for the time, if you grew it all at once. The cost of the various parts could be extrapolated to get a price for the whole body.

There's some stuff in SR2 about growing various kinds of tissue too.

[Bearclaw]

There's no technology for transferring you, your personality and your memories over though, so it would just be a vat grown, adult sized baby. It would take months to teach it to walk, and years before it could even catch a ball. Many, many years before it could perform a trick like running and shooting at the same time with any skill at all.
So, although the idea is interesting, and it would make a cool home for your ally spirit, I don't really see any other uses.

[Zeel De Mort]

Well um, getting spare parts from it when you get your limbs or internal organs blown away would be one extra use. That's what Docwagon uses mine for anyway!

[Number 6]

Why not just get your brain put in? If they can put in a cyberskull, augment the brain with enhancers, or replace the spinal cord with synaptic accelerators, they can transplant a brain.

Damn, it's like Paranoia meets Shadowrun. Take Priority A money, buy a platinum DocWagon contract and a few clones. Get killed and a few minutes later "What I miss guys?" :rotfl:

[Joker9125]

[Omega Skip]

Here's a scary thought: Crazy Joe Billionaire has finally figured out how he's gonna become immortal. He has assembled a crack team of cybertech specialists and some bleeding edge technology for them to mess around with, and now his plan is finally coming together. Joe himself is wired with a state of the art simsense rig which is constantly transmitting full sensory (and, through the incorporation of a transducer, even mental) information to a high-tech host system which does two things:
-One, it keeps a complete recording of all his life since the day they started the system.
-Two, it reprocesses the data and streams it directly into a simsense/personafix feed which is passed on to each one of Joe's 20 clones, who are kept in hibernation at all times.
This means that if, for some reason, Joe should kick the bucket, the first clone in line will immediately be activated, possessing all of Joe's memories and experiences. Since Joe's clones are outfitted with the same simsense rig as Joe, they can start broadcasting right from the get-go, and the next cycle continues.

Joe is dead. Long live Joe!

[Edit] Of course, the myriad weaknesses in this crazy setup would make nice ideas for some runs... Imagine a decker crashing Joe's system, and all 20 clones walking around claiming to be the real Joe, or even worse, imagine a decker hacking Joe's "diary"... [/Edit]

[Berzerker]

Here's a question. When Docwagon or whoever makes a clone, do they modify it to prevent it from developing intellect? Meaning is the clone alive and able to be taught and function on its own or is the body there, but no one is home? Would they be vulnerable to Shedim spirits?

[Omega Skip]

Clones are usually forced-grown, meaning their brains don't develope to a point where they could be called "functioning along nominal human parameters". They don't receive the stimuli needed to develope personality or intellect, and I mean that on a purely biological level. The neural pathways that are formed during infancy just lie barren - forced-grown full clones are a human wasteland. So the answer is no/yes, meaning No, they don't take special precautions, if only because they don't need to. And I think they shouldn't be vulnerable to Shedim because, technically, they're alive.

Sorta. Kinda. As alive as a vegetable.

[Joker9125]

Heres a thought Why dosent the universal bortherhood start making clones and start using them for spirits. All it would take are a few good mergers(the ones where they retain human form and abalities). Wouldnt that make a great run.

[Necro Tech]

See Universal Omnitech for more information on Vat boy, the high muckey muck whose large deformed brain and organs lives in a big tank somewhere down in central america as doctors try to grow him a new body or fix his old one. I think it orginally aapeared in the Aztlan sourcebook.

[Joker9125]

Are you reffering to Thomas Roxburg(I think that was his name) He was also in the Dragon Heart saga

[Zeel De Mort]

You mean Thomas Roxborough?

See p107 of Target: Matrix for some info on him, and see Gibson's novel Count Zero for where they stole the idea from. :P

[Neon Tiger]

Heh, this kind of thing opens up for some "6th Day" madness.(Wasn't that the Governator movie with clones and stuff?)

Imagine:

GM: You exit to the street, and see a black van pull up, the doors open and several shady looking inviduals step out. Roll initiative.

*Combat ensues, players manage to kill the guys rather easily. The characters leave the scene and go to their hideout to lie low for sometime.*

GM: On your third day hiding, you hear a knocking on the door. After that, the door gets kicked in, roll init.

First player to go: Ok, what kind of guys are attacking us?

GM: You look at them and realize they look just the same as the bunch you slaughtered a few days ago.

Players in unison: WHAT?

One of the shady guys: Damn you b*tch, that gunshot wound really hurt!

And so on...

:silly:

[Berzerker]

I'd imagine that the UB didnt go the cloning route because its expensive. The initial expenditure to set up a cloning lab must be astronomical. Recruiting poor slobs off the street is a cheap source of bodies and it made the Brotherhood look like saints until the truth came out.

Edit: After reading over the rules again, I dont think the clone replacement for a dead person would work. In the BBB p. 304 it says "Regrettably, no replacements for brain or nervous tissue are yet available, and fully viable clones exist only in the realm of fiction." Thats not to say that someone couldnt come up with the tech, but its not currently available. From the sound of it, the clones are braindead and their nervous tissue doesnt develop.

[nezumi]

The key to making cheap clones is learning how to impregnate yourself (alright, that isn't technically a clone, it has a high rate of genetic diseases and may come out with some surprising results, but it's all your DNA. I, a brown eyed man, can produce a blue eyed girl.)

In shadowrun, it was previously stated that all attempts to produce living, independent clones have failed. It is simply impossible to create a clone that can survive on its own or have any personality at all. They don't say why, I'd say it could relate to essence and magic and stuff. This would also explain why UB didn't use clones. You're welcome to ignore this rule.

Re: Long live Joe, some of you may recollect not a year ago when the first human clones was the big thing in the news. There was a group of nutcases in California who were supporting it specifically because they thought they could implant their memories into the clone and thereby gain immortality. I don't recollect the name of the group, but they're all bonkers. The question then is, why do you put yourself in a clone? Why not just steal any old baby? Does the fact that the child have your DNA make itself somehow more deserving of getting its brain taken out? I'm not sure what their method of choice was, if it was brain or head transplant, they could've been just cheating their way around problems with the immune system, however in SR this problem has been properly addressed. Once again though, I suspect body snatching would suffer the same problem as cloning; a serious conflict with the essence of the two people resulting in death. Such a shame.

[Joker9125]

[Joker9125]

[Berzerker]

For the UB, grabbing vagrants is still a cheaper method. For their purposes, I dont see a high tech solution being more attractive than the low tech method.

As for price, Docwagon wont create a standby clone unless you're putting out 50k a year for platinum service. In M&M a limb costs 25k, so I figure I'd price a clone somewhere between 30k and 40k. You have to figure that whoever is doing the cloning to harvest a single limb is going to chop up the rest to sell off to other customers and docwagon is gambling that not everyone will need their cloned parts in the first few years and spreading the cost of the clone out over severals years of a contract (can they depreciate the clone on their taxes? :) )

[Person 404]

[Zeel De Mort]

Hmm.. SR3 does indeed say "no replacements for brain or nervous tissue are yet available". This being the case, how do clonal replacement limbs work if they have no nervous tissue in them?

In any case, while I can accept that cloning the entire brain might be too much, surely by 2063 nervous tissue can be replicated.

[Omega Skip]

I read it like this: In order to develope a fully functional brain, a human being (and almost all other animals) must be exposed to certain stimuli: Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. Without these stimuli, neural pathways responsible for pattern recognition, coordination, or even basic input processing cannot take shape - like a fully equipped computer, but with a completely empty harddrive and missing a BIOS.
The process of establishing neural pathways (in humans, I should add) is assumed to begin while the organism is still a fetus, but it doesn't really take off until the baby is a few months old, and then BANG! The infant starts recognizing people, begins adapting specific patterns of behavior in response to certain stimuli, and in time aquires his first few words. After some time, there's another leap in the child's developement, called the "vocabulary explosion", which marks the first significant step towards developing an independent and self-sufficient conscience.
But before this can take place, a lot of synaptic connections have to be formed, and these connections can only develope if exposed to outside stimuli. Shadowrun's clones are vat grown, and therefore I assume that they are not exposed to the sensory input needed to complete the growth of a brain. However, nervous tissue found in the vegetative nervous system does IIRC not require outside stimuli to develope, so the clones should have underdeveloped, malformed brains, but normal vegetative functions.

Which, to wrap this post up, would explain why there's no replacement parts for the central nervous system, while other, non-cerebral nervous tissue can be replaced easily.

[Nikoli]

Couldn't they pump in a simsense feed and re-create that stimulus?

[Kagetenshi]

[Joker9125]

I think they would have to pump simsense feed intot he clone while its developing and I dont really think its a good idea to put a pice of cyberware into a growing and expanding brain for obvious reasons. Of course a trode setup might work. Im not sure I dont mess with this stuff to much in game.

EDIT: