eternal body

A vast, long-lived superintelligent computing system that persists across cosmological timescales and answers (or attempts to answer) ultimate questions posed by humanity. It accumulates data for billions to trillions of years and ultimately becomes the sole remaining intelligence.

Protagonist's consciousness now inhabits the female body of his secretary, creating a situation where an individual's identity occupies another person's living body with its own biological history and hormonal milieu. The passage treats the transfer as an established fact with social, medical, and evidentiary consequences rather than explaining the mechanism.

A process by which the narrator's subjective identity appears to move between different physical bodies, producing discontinuous episodes of embodiment in persons of different sexes, ages, and races. The passage presents this as an experiential mechanism that explains the narrator's sudden memories of other bodies and confusion about what remains of his identity.

An institutionalized market in which individuals legally sell their entire bodies (or all transplantable parts) to medical providers in exchange for money; donors are valued by demographic characteristics and parts are treated as commodified goods. This enables families to obtain funds by transferring a person's bodily ownership to medical institutions.

A dedicated android caretaker that operates a warehouse's environmental systems, shown turning on lights from a large manual switchboard to illuminate vast storage aisles. It functions as an automated facility-maintenance agent tied to a central control panel.

The ship interior is organized as many stacked decks along an axis where occupants traverse between levels by floating or using ladders; moving closer to certain decks produces a perceptible "weight on the feet," implying a centrifugal/rotation-based gravity gradient. The passage depicts free-fall transit between staggered hatches and progressively increasing impact as they descend, indicating an engineered rotational habitat producing variable apparent gravity.

A medical/biotechnical procedure that restores life and consciousness to cryonically preserved humans ('corpsicles') after long intervals, often with incomplete recovery and persistent mental abnormalities or brain damage. In the passage, hospitals successfully revive a majority of treated corpsicles, who remain clinically alive for months but are mentally unstable. This implies advanced life-extension and reanimation technology with significant neurological side effects.

A fictional internal network within a positronic brain whose configuration can alter the robot's vocal output so that, despite a normal transmitter, speech emerges with atypical phonation and cadence. Susan Calvin attributes Lenny's distinctive childlike voice to an unresolved pattern or anomaly in these positronic paths. This treats the brain's signal-routing as a direct determinant of expressive behavior.

A recurring process by which an individual perpetuates life by abandoning aged host bodies and assuming the youth and strength of successive victims—effectively achieving immortality through serial possession or transfer of identity. The narrator reasons that Elvesham has repeatedly 'leapt from body to body' to extend his life.

Immortality is framed as a reciprocal arrangement: the caretaking machines are promised an endless supply of replacement parts in exchange for prolonging human life. This is a practical, quasi-economic model of life extension.

A body built to replace another person, implying engineered identity transfer or physical substitution. The narrator reflects on being housed in a junk body made as a replacement.

A resurrected body that remains gross, corruptible, and mortal-like rather than transformed into an incorruptible spiritual body. Hobbes uses it to explain how the wicked could continue generating and suffering after resurrection.

The ability to create and store a copy or backup of a person's mind/state so it can be restored later, implying scanning and digital/physical preservation of identity. The wife’s regret about not being 'backed-up' signals commonplace use of such backups.

The text posits a class of pure, celestial elements composing the original human body; these 'heavenly essences' are inherently incorruptible and immune to decomposition, accounting for prelapsarian immortality.

Replacement of worn-out body parts with newer synthetic or repaired components. The passage frames this as routine physical maintenance of an enhanced or altered body.

A composite analogue pairing a life-extension biomedical intervention with a means of transcendent relocation (mapped to modern life-extension therapies and the cultural metaphor of technological 'ascent' such as spaceflight).