<div class="quoteheader"><div class="topslice_quote"><a href="https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=74959.msg3351823#msg3351823">Quote from: PeacethatPowerbrings on 25-07-2010, 06:16:19</a></div></div><blockquote class="bbc_standard_quote">"It was the same name which the humans used for themselves," she said, "to distinguish them from other humans, but as we are now the only group to bear the name, it has become the name which distinguishes us as a life-form from all others. The first of us kept it because they were told that was what they were, we have no changed it becuase it seemed unecessary, being that, as a noun, of requires only to be an arbitrary label."<br/><br/>She liked his thinking, he was right, of course, at least mostly.<br/><br/>"They are, in a sense interchangable, at a full-body level, though our bodies operate differently," she said, "I could not use my designer's arm without some high degree of adaptation in the connection. Though, you are right, the parts of my body are, well, unimportant, though I do have a certain sentimental attachment to my appearence, and the function it possesses is preferable for me. You are right in assuming a high degree of variation, though, my desinger is a near-perfect sphere with one-metre diameter. It operates sets of distinct limbs remotely."<br/></blockquote><div class="quotefooter"><div class="botslice_quote"></div></div><br/>He was silent for another few moments, absorbing and filing away the visual images. He had been fascinated by the idea of nonhuman sentient life from a young age - where many children his age would have gotten an air car as a graduation gift, he had instead chosen a trip to Beowulf and Sol to encounter Beowulfan gremlins and Old Earth dolphins, and eventually emigrating to Sphinx to satisfy his curiosity about the only human-sapience-level race known in the galaxy. His scope of awareness was expanding at exponential rates, but there was only so much he could take in at once.<br/><br/>"But you and your...designer...share, at your core, physical identical nanomolecularly assembled 'brains'? Are your bodies interchangable to the point that if you desired, you could have your brain removed from the humanoid casing that you have now and placed inside such a spherical housing, or vice versa? I suppose what I'm asking is, once a physical housing has been chosen by you or for you, can it be changed as easily as I might change my clothing?"