Death

There is nothing easy about death and least of all is its definition. Death is defined as the cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. A legal death and its definition may at times, be something different than what medical science has to offer. Brain death, and the ability to sufficiently show the total cessation of brain activity can get a bit murky when we are talking about a person’s consciousness. In particular, when and where a person’s consciousness ceases to exist according to what may show on a scan, as in the case of determining a drowning victim who has been resuscitated, or a person whose heart has stopped due to extreme weather, say in the case of an avalanche victim.

By medical and legal terms, these people may very well have been “dead” or may have shown a legal sufficient degree of systemic brain activity that the medical community would consider along with the lack of biological vital signs, brain dead. Whether or not that person’s consciousness has shuffled off the mortal coil and into an eternal oblivion is very much debatable and requires even further testing especially now where science has set their respective sails deep into the ocean of stem cell research and biohackers are setting up pirate shops all along that coastline. Death as we once knew it, may already, in fact, have an outdated definition

In 1968, one year after the birth of Beatrice Fontaine, an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School reexamined the definition of brain death and defined irreversible coma, or brain death, “as unresponsiveness and lack of receptivity, the absence of movement and breathing, the absence of brain-stem reflexes, and coma whose cause has been identified.”

The three essentials of brain death are coma, the absence of brainstem reflexes, and apnoea. A person determined to be brain dead is legally and clinically dead.

In early 2017 a group of critical care physicians in Boston who had long since tired of being the governing body that would determine actual Brain Death in their patients, in secret began to look at the advances of stem cell research and the anti-aging industry as viable sources of data that they could use in order to determine the state of human consciousness.

The waters were murky at best in the early stages of Biogenetics and these doctor's and nurses were taking a huge risk with not only their reputations but their collective careers as well in simply considering these factors as actual research who tests criteria included anything from what was considered monster AI to what would later even be called Frankenstein medicine in some circles.

The idea of surgically placing a microchip into the human brain, what is known as BMI, (brain machine interfaces) in order to stimulate and encourage the release of hormones or regrowth of other cells was still very much a taboo subject to the point that a small group of these doctor's and scientists had resolved to conduct secret experiments on themselves in order to speed up and release their research.

Some even went as far as to ask some of their terminal patients if they would be interested in becoming test subjects themselves. What they thought had been a groundbreaking and risky move on their part, however, had already started almost seven years earlier in late 2010 when a representative from a well known Social media corporation first approached Sophie Sautereaus doctor with a proposition.

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Finbar O'Leary was a Dubliner who came to the United States at the end of the Celtic Tiger and his string of failed strip clubs. He was in debt when he first stepped foot into his cousin Tommy Boyle’s Irish pub in Dorchester back in 2001 and he remained that way for almost five straight years, constantly looking for a way to get back on top. Anything was possible in America, it wasn’t like Ireland, one could actually get a loan from the bank with little more than good credit and a solid business model. Finbar borrowed one of his cousin’s best suits and set his mind to doing just that when he partnered with another fellow Irishman to form OutterWorldz.

In the beginning, it was meant more or less as a way to keep in contact with friends and family, a 3d space to share pictures and videos, much like Facebook is today, but with the addition of emulated consciousness fitted into an avatar, controlled by a programmable robot known as Bots, which was little more than an empty avatar being controlled by scripts. to move freely within a virtual world.

It was a solid business plan and much to Finbar's delight, he had managed to not only gain the interest of such esteemed Institutions like MIT but a slew of very wealthy investors as well.

Outer Worldz launched its beta client in early 2002 and by 2003 it boasted an impressive number of residents somewhere in the number of about 500,000 and by late that same year had already surpassed the one million mark of dedicated citizens or PPM's or people paying for monthly subscriptions and by early 2004, the number of owned Bots by its subscribers had grown to almost three times that number.

In late 2009 cryptocurrency was back on the rise and what had started out in mmog's as in-game marketplaces that were game currency based, began to accept and trade in other forms of monies such as Bitcoin and the use of Pay-pal. Gamers were now finding themselves making almost as much money on the grid as they were at their Real Life jobs and whole new industry was being formed with some companies being represented by cartoon characters wearing rideable pink ponies.