Question, how are new nomad minds made?

[Tenacity]

My nomad's a bit rusty, but I always viewed each nomad as being 'stored' prior to awakening, sort of like a hibernation. The nomad consciousness is simply awakened when needed, but there may be a limited number of individual personalities and consciousnesses available to the collective.

Treewyrm's point should also be emphasized - a single nomad mind can inhabit numerous "bodies". This is often how the keepers (back in my keeper days, anyhow) explained having multiple characters/ships - they were all really the same nomad, but that mind was being either split between several physical forms or it was hopping from one to the next.


A simplified way to look at it is this: A nomad's consciousness/personality is a hard drive. You can take that hard drive and plug it into one computer shell to use for a while, during which time it will accumulate additional files and information (pictures, music, so on and so forth). When that computer starts to become obsolete, or when a computer with different hardware is needed for a particular task (like a computer that has a printer attached, or one that has a projection screen attached), the hard drive is removed and put into a different computer for the new purpose.

Each nomad body is a shell, a computer, while the nomad mind is that hard drive that is constantly being installed and removed from those shells as necessary to fulfill whatever tasks it needs to.



Now to the complicated part: That hard drive, the nomad's consciousness, stores everything the nomad knows, but also stores it's individuality and personality (even though the nomads do not have 'individuals' or consider themselves such, they still have varying personalities and 'souls'). Whenever the computer is connected to the internet (i.e. when the nomad body is in telepathic range of the mindshare), all of the information it has stored is uploaded to the other computers on the network - all of the pictures, music, and everything is shared. This way, if the body is destroyed, the information lives on.

Similarly, the nomad's personality is copied into the mindshare whenever it uploads it's other information (every time it syncs with the internet). If a nomad is killed, it may lose short term memory and personality developments, but the most recent upload will have a saved copy of that nomad's consciousness.

In this way, a nomad can never really be killed unless it is destroyed both within the mindshare as well as within it's physical form.

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