"You want to clone her?"
The Terminal’s face appeared on the large electronic screen, looking sowhat eerie due to the distorted proportions.
"Yes, is it possible?" Li Zheng nodded, feeling uncertain because of the Terminal’s attitude.
The Terminal pondered for a mont, and a large stream of data flashed across the screen, seemingly calculating the feasibility of this task: "Cloning a deceased person has no successful precedent in the Outer City, but I can try, as long as we can find any living cell tissue from her body."
Li Zheng’s eyes lit up: "Does this an there’s at least a fifty percent chance?"
"Not that high." The Terminal’s face was somber, not optimistic about the prospect: "Do you know why cloning technology once thrived in the Outer City, yet no one has successfully cloned a deceased person?
It’s because this matter violates fundantal rules; the dead cannot be resurrected by any ans unless a backup plan is in place before death. Even so, when life reaches its end, the backup plan becos ineffective.
But regardless, I will try first. Place her coffin on that platform over there, and I’ll see if there are any living cells still present in her body."
The ground to Li Zheng’s left rose, forming a platform just suitable for placing Yan Guang’s Crystal Coffin.
He put the coffin into the capsule residence and placed it back on the platform, the Terminal issued an instruction, and the platform slowly descended into the ground, with two floorboards popping out on each side to restore the ground to its original state.
"Your place is quite advanced, gadgets everywhere." Li Zheng admired, recalling that the Terminal had previously raised counters filled with dangerous items from the underground, indicating there was an unknown-sized area beneath the Central Hub, all under the Terminal’s jurisdiction.
"It’s okay, I need to conduct many experints regularly, so the modifications are quite thorough." The Terminal glanced at Li Zheng warily, fully aware of his tendency to dismantle things in the Matrix, concerned he might dismantle its place too.
Fortunately, Li Zheng had no such intention and instead skipped the topic, asking: "You said you’ve never attempted to clone the deceased, yet you’ve been the Terminal for who knows how many years now? Has our original body not died?"
"Strictly speaking, from the mont I beca the Terminal, our body was considered dead." The Terminal explained: "I rely preserved the body through special ans, and it still has faint remains of activity. Now, countless years have passed that even I can’t quantify, and the body is nearly at its limit. When it completely loses its activity, it will be impossible to produce a clone."
"Impossible to produce another clone?" Li Zheng’s eyes shifted: "I’m still here, right? Can my cells be used to continue cultivating clones?"
"I knew you would bring up this topic." The Terminal had an expression of having foreseen this: "Our body cells are not like eggs, how could they achieve the cycle of chicken laying eggs, eggs hatching chicken, endlessly?
From the birth of the first clone, I conducted related experints, although I cannot explain the specific principle to you as it would take too long and require too many specialized terms that you likely wouldn’t understand.
So, to put it simply...
In short, the clone’s cells, or rather the DNA strand, have an added layer that even I cannot decode. As long as this layer exists, cells extracted from a clone cannot be cloned again."
Li Zheng nodded thoughtfully: "Can it be understood as the universe’s will doesn’t allow life to achieve ’eternal life’ through such clever ans, hence imposing this restriction on life?"
"That’s a reasonable understanding." The Terminal replied: "When a clone is born, its mory is blank. I have also mastered the ans of instilling mory into this blank slate. If soone constantly clones themselves and frequently updates the mory technique for the clone, it can indeed achieve an alternative form of eternal life."
Li Zheng thought a bit and raised another question: "If... I an if, soone copies their mories and pastes them into a newborn baby’s head, wouldn’t that also achieve a similar ’eternal life’ effect?"
"Like the ’body possession’ ntioned in novels?"
The Terminal pondered for a mont and answered: "Almost impossible. The brain of a newly born life is incredibly fragile, incapable of accommodating a large mory load.
Just like a 256GB hard drive, you attempt to transfer 10TB content into it.
Forcing it would only cause an overwhelming data stream impact, breaking the baby’s mind, turning them into an idiot."
Seeing Li Zheng was still puzzled, the Terminal spoke before he could ask: "Even if the target for mory infusion is an adult, it wouldn’t work. Even if an adult could endure the mory impact, there would still be other limitations.
Because an adult already has their own autonomous consciousness, and a complete mory is a manifestation of clear consciousness, similar to installing another operating system on an already OS-installed computer, which ultimately leads to either installation failure or the overworked processor eventually causing a crash."
"Hmm..." The Terminal paused and added: "Another possibility is turning into a dual-system functionality, with two consciousnesses alternating to control the body, similar to..."
Li Zheng interjected: "Schizophrenia?"
"More precisely, it’s dissociative identity disorder." The Terminal corrected: "Schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder differ significantly in literal aning, and should not be conflated."
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