There is mention of Eoxian body merchants purchasing corpses for reanimation, but few details. Does anyone have any insight into the legality of this trade? I mean, are there legal avenues established to purchase corpses, or what have you done to address this (if at all)?
I'm working a story arc where a group of smugglers is selling people to Eox, Apostae, etc. in a black market scenario and want to add more details for the intrigue/RP portions before we move to shoot-em-up mode.
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It's possible to use the rights to your corpse as collateral when purchasing a few cheap necrografts, worth 200 credits. If you don't pay off the loan before you die, they get your body posthumously. That definitely implies that what happens with your body is legally yours to decide, and, at least officially, your family probably can't sell your body off after you die to pay for a vacation.
That's the only official corpse trade I know of.
That said...
- Eox has its standing in the Pact Worlds because of its military might and the need for that against external threats. (Mostly the Veskarium until recently.) Eox was the Pact Worlds' main threat before that.
- Eox still has to abide by Pact Worlds law- their blood sports require voluntary participants who can get a free ticket to Absalom Station if they want to bail, and so on.
- The Corpse Fleet is suspected by some to be still under Eox's control, but it hasn't been proven.
My conclusions from that are:
- Eox has to strike a balance. They need to maintain good relations with their neighbors, but they are an undead planet only tolerated for their usefulness. Military might needs to stay high, but not come across as a bigger threat. Bodies need to be replaced to maintain or grow the population. Media helps improve their reputation and increase acceptance, and having someone sign over their body while alive is probably the gold standard for body acquisition that doesn't look bad.
- The Pact Worlds need a strong Eox because looking weak in front of the Veskarium will probably break any peace, and there are bigger threats like the Swarm. Let Eox get too strong, though, and that's an in-system threat. Pharasma doesn't have a vote, and Eox does, so there are probably some quiet official deals. At the same time, illegal corpse trade looks really bad, especially if there's a whiff of people being killed for it.
- War. There's a lot of fighting that goes on, and it wouldn't surprise me if Eox's forces have a lot of mindless undead Vesk kept out of sight of the populace, alongside more recent reanimated Swarm critter husks. For political reasons, enemies probably don't get reanimated as intelligent undead much, because it sounds local public opinion of undead.
- Necro-biotech. At least for ships, creatures are engineered specifically to leave useful corpses.
- Who wants to live forever? Lots of people. It's one thing to become undead in a fantasy setting where you give up so much and miss out on so much, but when there's artificial meat and vidgames and streams and so much more, becoming undead doesn't sound like such a bad thing. Eox probably has no problem with having enough "immigration" of new intelligent undead.
- If the Corpse Fleet really does have strong ties in secret with Eox, they're probably the ones doing a lot of the illegal business for plausible deniability. If they're not, then they have their own replacement bodies problem to deal with.
Based on the few numbers we know, nobody is getting rich off of a body or two, and it's just not worth it to go around killing people for their bodies. There's probably a way to sell one's body rights cheap for a bit of emergency cash now. It's the opposite incentives of life insurance, so it probably pays more the older and less healthy you are. Those rights are worth more once actually collected on, so retrieval is probably its own shady business like debt collectors and bail bondsmen. Conspiracies almost certainly abound.
So here is my question regarding the Body trade. If your family sells your body to it, is there a chance you will be come an intelligent undead?
Not a realistic one, from an economic standpoint.
If you're spending money on getting a body, chances are you want to use that body to earn money. You could make an unintelligent undead to provide free labor (minus various maintenance and control costs). You could also use it to source necrografts. If you make an intelligent undead, you've just made a person, and they're free to do whatever they want. But, there are probably plenty of people willing to pay to be turned into intelligent undead. It's not zero chance, but it'd be unusual case.
So here is my question regarding the Body trade. If your family sells your body to it, is there a chance you will be come an intelligent undead?Not a realistic one, from an economic standpoint.
If you're spending money on getting a body, chances are you want to use that body to earn money. You could make an unintelligent undead to provide free labor (minus various maintenance and control costs). You could also use it to source necrografts. If you make an intelligent undead, you've just made a person, and they're free to do whatever they want.
Why would you assume they're free to do whatever they want? The local necrovite lord presumably has laws and the means to enforce them on the subject. Don't want to pay off your contract with servitude? The local Pharasman church has several different plans to expedite your spirit's return to its normal path.
Actually, went back and checked the Eox section, and I was wrong!
Others are petitioners wishing to become undead to extend their existence—trading centuries of indentured service for timeless undead bodies—or body merchants, who help the bone sages repopulate their planet by importing corpses suitable for reanimation.
So yeah, body merchants are providing bone sages with bodies for general population use, and it sounds like that's the major source for it.
As far as the "free to go" thing goes, the necrovite lords do seem to actually play ball with the Pact Worlds laws officially, and we know from the Android section that creating a person to work for you is something that the laws actively try to prevent. Not to say it never happens, but at least from how it's presented, it didn't sound like the body merchant reanimations were stuck with centuries of work.
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So how is this for a concept?
I"m a skeleton who has just finished 200 years in a call center on Eox servicing Bonesages, and the other wealthy rulers of Eox. now to combat the accusations of slavery, I have actually been getting paid a fair wage, but it's I couldn't touch it until I completed my 200 years. Now that I have I am leaving this world behind to finally find a way to enjoy my unlife.
I have only vague memories of my before life... I might have been an elf? I think? It was so long ago.
I'm thinking an Envoy (put those customer service people skills to the test) or a Solarion.
No one is going to outlaw traditional Eoxian practices raising the dead anymore than gladiator blood sports on Akiton and Eox. You could outlaw Android slavery in the Pact Worlds because it was diffuse and no one doing it owned a planet, seats on the PW council, and a huge part of the PW fleet that can re-emerge with the Corpse Fleet if it wants.