The Afterlife

[Rynn]

death and selfhood don't have quite the same meaning in some OA societies as we do.

Indeed. For most OA societies throughout their history death will be something pretty much voluntary. The technology to record an individual's genome, phenotype and connectome would be very mature. Most sophonts could have a memory box implant to keep an up-to-date connectome map and regularly transmit a copy to several external back-up sites. In the Sephirotics these back-ups could be archai run and span the godweb. In addition medical, policing and safety technology would be so advanced that harm is very unlikely and very treatable if it does occur.

Even the biggest disasters in OA resulting in the destruction of entire solar systems (like in the case of the amalgamation) are likely to have negligible casualties as sophonts suspected/confirmed to be dead could be reinstated digitally or physically.