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Everyone On Earth Is Offered One Of 3 Powers

We Just Write

We Just Write

Blatantly Plural
Location
New England
Pronouns
Plural
So, let's say a friendly neighborhood ROB swings by Earth, and offers everyone a choice between the following powers. In addition, he also makes it clear that everyone's descendants will have a power as well, randomly selecting between their parents if they've got different powers. Anyone in Low Earth Orbit gets the deal too.
  • Doppelganger: Those who pick this power gain the ability to be in two places at once. They can process and act on the sensory data from both bodies with no issues, along with an appropriate increase to multitasking ability, but they aren't otherwise smarter than they already were. Both bodies require appropriate nutrition and sanitation considerations, and their sleep schedules are synchronized. If one of a Doppelganger's bodies gets killed, they're incredibly disoriented for several hours. Re-spawning their other body requires the consumption of additional food equal to their body mass (including a huge amount of protein of course) and assimilating it over the course of a month, before they just sort of... step out from behind themselves. It can be proven that the ability of a Doppelganger's bodies to communicate is limited by the speed of light, even though there's no sort of detectable signal.
  • Responsive Physiology: Those who gain this power gain conscious control over their metabolism and healing processes. This allows them to easily adjust their physiology to be a champion sprinter one month, an amazing high-altitude climber the next, followed by a champion weight lifter soon after. They also can heal much faster and slowly regenerate entire limbs if needed, along with other injuries that wouldn't heal normally. Bear in mind this is nowhere near instant, it still takes up to a month to re-spec their physiology depending on how big the changes are. Other limits include that if they're losing weight they poop a lot more, and if they're bulking up they eat a lot more; they also don't have control over their immune system. A required secondary power that they receive is a working knowledge of how human physiology works, so that they won't screw up and kill themselves.
  • Mental Grasp: Those who pick this power gain telekinesis capable of exerting up to 80 Newtons of force, reduced by 20% for every meter between them and whatever they're manipulating. They can manipulate anything they can perceive with whatever detail they can currently perceive it at. Yes, this includes looking through a microscope. Please bear in mind that this is Manton Limited not to directly affect biological matter, and they still have to expend whatever amount of energy they normally would in order to move something.

ROB won't leave people alone until they pick a power, constantly badgering them about the matter. However, if they can't make up their mind, and make ROB pick for them, they become a Wildcard (either A or B). Wildcards have one of the normal powers listed above, but noticeably improved in some way. Here are the Wildcard versions of each power. Being a Wildcard is also hereditary, but is recessive. If someone winds up with an alleles for each type of Wildcard, then they get both benefits, along with their own '+' trait.

Doppelganger Wildcards
A: A normal Doppelganger can be in two places at once. A Doppelganger A can be in four places at once.
B: A normal Doppelganger needs a month to re-make their other body and has to eat a huge amount of food to do so. A Doppelganger B only needs to wait 48 hours, and doesn't need the additional food.
+: A + Doppelganger only needs enough food for one of them, no matter how many of them there are.

Responsive Physiology Wildcards
A: Time required to re-spec physiology is reduced to 3 days.
B: Recipient's body can now repel diseases of all sorts with a 100% success rate.
+: Aging halts at ~30 years of age.

Mental Grasp Wildcards
A: Force falloff over distance is reduced to 5%
B: Maximum force is increase to 2 Kilonewtons
+: Users can affect themselves, enabling flight.
So, with that in mind, how is the geopolitical situation likely to change? What alterations would need to be made to society to account for these new abilities? How will people react when the +es start showing up? And most importantly, what power do you pick (assume you don't know about the Wildcard thing). Personally, I'd go for Doppelganger.
 
Geopolitically, not a lt changes though Superpower Registration becomes a law very quickly. Dopplegangers will have a bitch of a time when it comes to providing alibis for crimes or such, Sporting events lose all meaning, mental grasp individuals get charged with so many crimes.

Also, being a Wildcard is radically unfair if informed in advance; once granted their power though they're likely to be executed, or inducted into forced breeding, or worse.
 
So, I'd actually be liable to wind up with a wildcard power in this scenario, because I'd be asking questions as to what the baseline powers limits are and be completely unable to decide without an answer from ROB.

Does the doppelganger power allow me to customize my alternate's appearance? If yes, what limits are there to customization? Can they be successively overcome by altering each doppelganger within the limits and then killing the previous iteration? If I don't want to keep a body around, can I reabsorb it to save on the month long wait and corpse disposal? By how much can I alter my physiology with the regeneration power? Can I change my hair or skin color? Can I change my bone structure? Can I alter my face? Can I change my sex, regenerating the organs as appropriate? Can I alter my hormone balance? Can I purge myself of cancer, extracellular junk, and disease? Can I extend my telomeres? Can I alter my genes or any other small scale manipulation? Can I make myself functionally immortal by regularly cleansing and resetting my biology?

I figure I'd quickly drive him nuts with the questioning and just give me a random power, possibly with whatever wildcard most closely fits what I want.
 
I'll go for the "Mental Grasp", and travel down the route to become a master craftsman.
 
Amorous Intent said:
So, I'd actually be liable to wind up with a wildcard power in this scenario, because I'd be asking questions as to what the baseline powers limits are and be completely unable to decide without an answer from ROB.

Does the doppelganger power allow me to customize my alternate's appearance? If yes, what limits are there to customization? Can they be successively overcome by altering each doppelganger within the limits and then killing the previous iteration? If I don't want to keep a body around, can I reabsorb it to save on the month long wait and corpse disposal? By how much can I alter my physiology with the regeneration power? Can I change my hair or skin color? Can I change my bone structure? Can I alter my face? Can I change my sex, regenerating the organs as appropriate? Can I alter my hormone balance? Can I purge myself of cancer, extracellular junk, and disease? Can I extend my telomeres? Can I alter my genes or any other small scale manipulation? Can I make myself functionally immortal by regularly cleansing and resetting my biology?

I figure I'd quickly drive him nuts with the questioning and just give me a random power, possibly with whatever wildcard most closely fits what I want.
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Doppelgangers look like themselves, and don't get to customize. Yes, you can reabsorb a body.

Altering your physiology is limited to what a baseline human could theoretically achieve, but this can still be very impressive. Yes, you can change your skin or hair color, though please be aware that it takes time for your new hair color to grow in. Changing your bone structure is limited to repairs and reinforcement for the most part. No, you can't alter your face structure much. Yes, you can change genders, but not on a genetic level. Altering your horomone balance is most definitely an option. You can get rid of cancer no problem, but you don't have control over your immune system. No, you can't extend your telomeres or alter your genome. No, you can't make yourself immortal.
 
Silveraith said:
Geopolitically, not a lot changes though Superpower Registration becomes a law very quickly. Dopplegangers will have a bitch of a time when it comes to providing alibis for crimes or such, Sporting events lose all meaning, mental grasp individuals get charged with so many crimes.

Also, being a Wildcard is radically unfair if informed in advance; once granted their power though they're likely to be executed, or inducted into forced breeding, or worse.
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Care to explain why Wildcards would get such a raw deal? Also, I fixed a typo for you.
 
I just write said:
Changing your bone structure is limited to repairs and reinforcement for the most part. No, you can't alter your face structure much. Yes, you can change genders, but not on a genetic level.
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Okay, I'm going to stop you right there, because I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant. Your gender is a mental thing, and changing it means extensively rewiring your brain. Changing your sex, like I asked, would require extensive adjustments to hormones, bone structure, facial structure, adipose tissue, and pretty much undoing and redoing what your reproductive organs go through at birth. Genetic alterations are not strictly necessary. Being able to alter your hormones lets you do shit like increase HGH to make yourself grow taller, as long as you're younger than ~25 or so, so massive skeletal changes aren't out of the picture either.

Honestly, I'd make the power be limited to achieving anything within human baseline, rather than what baseline humans can achieve. Want to give yourself a double myostatin knockout (and thus be buff as fuck)? Knock yourself out! Want HIV resistance? Fuck you, that's transgenic (simian SIV resistance) and inaccessible without getting outside gene therapy done. Tired of being a pretty princess and want to be Hunk Manmeat for a change? That might take more than a month, but it's doable. Want to be the little girl? Creepy, but plausible. Want to make yourself immortal? Well, you can pretty much guarantee living up to ~120 in relatively good health, but you're going to need extensive gene therapy to inject transgenic and de novo sequences to handle things that no human has evolved the capability to handle.

Amusingly, there's some evidence that telomeres can be lengthened (or at least maintained for longer) by regular exercise, which means that telomeres and epigenetic changes are accessible to baseline humans. :V



Edit: Actually, there are quite a few extremely impressive changes baseline humans can make, but only if they're young enough. IIRC, embryos can actually regenerate like zebra fish; a burst of hormones during the right stage of pregnancy can change your sexuality, gender, and even sex (c.f., complete androgen insensitivity syndrome); transgender children can pass perfectly (minus the primary sexual characteristics) if they start hormones before puberty, and are much more likely to pass acceptably before 30; human growth hormone can make you grow up to be a basketball player even if you're 5' nothing before ~25 or so; et al. Is the age gating removed or is ROB's answer "lol git rekt"?

What about people with genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis? Are they fucked too because what can be achieved by baseline humans with the disease is vastly inferior to what the average person could achieve? What about allergies and autoimmune disorders like Celiac's disease? After all, genetic tampering is forbidden.
 
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Amorous Intent said:
Okay, I'm going to stop you right there, because I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant. Your gender is a mental thing, and changing it means extensively rewiring your brain. Changing your sex, like I asked, would require extensive adjustments to hormones, bone structure, facial structure, adipose tissue, and pretty much undoing and redoing what your reproductive organs go through at birth. Genetic alterations are not strictly necessary. Being able to alter your hormones lets you do shit like increase HGH to make yourself grow taller, as long as you're younger than ~25 or so, so massive skeletal changes aren't out of the picture either.

Honestly, I'd make the power be limited to achieving anything within human baseline, rather than what baseline humans can achieve. Want to give yourself a double myostatin knockout (and thus be buff as fuck)? Knock yourself out! Want HIV resistance? Fuck you, that's transgenic (simian SIV resistance) and inaccessible without getting outside gene therapy done. Tired of being a pretty princess and want to be Hunk Manmeat for a change? That might take more than a month, but it's doable. Want to be the little girl? Creepy, but plausible. Want to make yourself immortal? Well, you can pretty much guarantee living up to ~120 in relatively good health, but you're going to need extensive gene therapy to inject transgenic and de novo sequences to handle things that no human has evolved the capability to handle.

Amusingly, there's some evidence that telomeres can be lengthened (or at least maintained for longer) by regular exercise, which means that telomeres and epigenetic changes are accessible to baseline humans. :V



Edit: Actually, there are quite a few extremely impressive changes baseline humans can make, but only if they're young enough. IIRC, embryos can actually regenerate like zebra fish; a burst of hormones during the right stage of pregnancy can change your sexuality, gender, and even sex (c.f., complete androgen insensitivity syndrome); transgender children can pass perfectly (minus the primary sexual characteristics) if they start hormones before puberty, and are much more likely to pass acceptably before 30; human growth hormone can make you grow up to be a basketball player even if you're 5' nothing before ~25 or so; et al. Is the age gating removed or is ROB's answer "lol git rekt"?

What about people with genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis? Are they fucked too because what can be achieved by baseline humans with the disease is vastly inferior to what the average person could achieve? What about allergies and autoimmune disorders like Celiac's disease? After all, genetic tampering is forbidden.
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Yes, I meant sex change. My bad. Also, thanks for the clarification, yes the age gating is removed.
 
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Amorous Intent said:
Want HIV resistance? Fuck you, that's transgenic (simian SIV resistance) and inaccessible without getting outside gene therapy done.
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You can do this without dragging in non-human DNA. A double CCR5-(Delta)32 mutation would give you effective immunity to the disease. You might be able to contract it but it's profoundly unlikely. The flip side is that this particular double knockout mutation would leave you more vulnerable to West Nile Fever and general tissue swelling due to infection. Even a single CCR5 deletion raises your resistance to HIV significantly (at least five or six times for even the most high risk populations).

CCR5-(Delta)32 is normally found among those with Northern European descent but isn't particularly common with it slowly being less common the further south you go before terminating at the Mediterranean. One in every several hundred Europeans are likely to be double knockouts.
 
One thing to keep in mind is that since dopplegangers need to eat you have effectively increased to population by about 33%. I'm not certain what impact increasing the population of the world by two and a half billion people overnight will do but I'm going to guess "not good things".

And this is before you understand that you've essentially created endless armies of suicide bombers. One of the major limits on suicide bombers is finding people willing to kill themselves for the cause. That number will go up dramatically when blowing yourself up means not actually dieing and anybody insane enough to take up the offer can do it once every 30 days or so.

Doppleganger is going to cause the collapse of a huge chunk of society, nevermind sex changes or lifting coffee mugs from your nightstand to your hand without getting up.
 
Aaron Peori said:
One thing to keep in mind is that since dopplegangers need to eat you have effectively increased to population by about 33%. I'm not certain what impact increasing the population of the world by two and a half billion people overnight will do but I'm going to guess "not good things".

And this is before you understand that you've essentially created endless armies of suicide bombers. One of the major limits on suicide bombers is finding people willing to kill themselves for the cause. That number will go up dramatically when blowing yourself up means not actually dieing and anybody insane enough to take up the offer can do it once every 30 days or so.

Doppleganger is going to cause the collapse of a huge chunk of society, nevermind sex changes or lifting coffee mugs from your nightstand to your hand without getting up.
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By the same token of course, professional organ donors are now a thing.
 
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