Mangoes and the Possibility of Johnny's Revival

Carl stepped out of the warehouse. Biotechnica's discovery set countless possibilities spinning through her mind, making her temporarily put aside her mission and think about Johnny, the Relic, and life technologies that skirted the edge of ethics.

"Biological cloning. Bionic bodies. Reviving extinct species..." she murmured, unconsciously slowing her pace.

Johnny was still trapped inside BallBall's body. If he were to truly come back to life, what he needed was not an ordinary body, but a vessel capable of carrying his wild soul.

Carl had seen plenty of advertisements for androids on the market—flawless skin, standardized features, like mass-produced dolls. They lacked the most crucial spark of a soul. Just like those bionic pets the wealthy treated as luxury goods, no matter how lifelike they looked, they were only empty shells.

Cloning was theoretically feasible, but Carl understood its traps all too well.

She had heard too many rumors about cloning at the Afterlife Bar: some corporate executive had cloned himself as a spare organ bank, only for the clone to develop an independent consciousness; someone had spent their entire fortune cloning a dead lover, only to discover that the newborn "her" grew up to be a complete stranger.

Carl thought of that old bastard Arasaka Saburo—he would rather go to such lengths with Relic technology, even turn on his own son, than attempt cloning. Why?

Carl stopped walking and looked out at the Badlands in the distance.

The answer was simple: a clone was not the "original."

Even with one hundred percent identical genes, differences in environment, accumulated memories, and neural pathways could create a completely different being. Like the same Katana, which could carve utterly different paths in different hands.

What Arasaka Saburo feared most might not have been death, but becoming someone else—imagine that control freak waking