Biobed

The "Shanti Essentials" biobed is a ruggedized scanner/fabricator for human bodies.

Despite the power of modern scanners and computers, it's impossible to image and record every molecule in a human body as digital data. The biobed uses quantum imaging to store a 'ghost' of the patient in its optical lattice. This ghost can be printed back into matter by precise fabrication. When paired with a blackbox implant (which transmits the last brainstate before death back to its paired biobed on a phase channel), a biobed can detect a colonist's death and reprint them with no loss of memory or subjective experience.

• Does not require power or raw material (automatically collected from seawater)
• When synced with a biobed, colonists will be fabricated in a new body (a "print") if killed
• Blackbox implant allows transfer of final memories, but not all possessions
• Biobed quartz memory is stable into geological time
• Used to store Cicada colonists during long interstellar flight

Because the ghost is not digital data, it cannot be edited or duplicated. However, a biobed can record many ghosts during a single session and store them in quantum superposition. In theory, a single biobed could produce many duplicates of many people—populating an entire colony with clonal strains of a few initial colonists. This process is illegal under Trans-System Federation Law, and blocked at the software level in all legal biobeds.