Postmark Bedsheet
Regeneration is a messy business
In Doctor Who, the central conceit is that the title character – a more-or-less immortal time traveler – can regenerate, the same mind and memory in a wholly new body, with personality quirks that reveal themselves as the Doctor grows used to their new skin and the actor and writers settle into another season of adventure.
The closest analogue to this in real life, I’m convinced, is major surgery. The you that takes an antibacterial shower at 5am and goes to the admitting desk is not the same person that is wheeled out to the parking garage a few days or weeks later. Your house has a smell to it when you come home, one that you never noticed in your old incarnation. Your movements are painful and hesitant. People you love talk too slowly and loudly, and the furniture is arranged in a way that vaguely upsets you.
It’s almost profane to think about other human beings literally cutting into your body and reaching inside. Think of how new that concept is in the grand scheme of human evolution. For millennia, someone poking a hole in your exomeat was their way of getting you to die in a lot of pain so they could take your food and pelts. Now here’s someone who went to school to learn how to attack you with a knife and then sew you back up like a burglar destroying the evidence!
And the anesthetic, the only reason you don’t actually die or go mad from the pain while they’re rummaging, turns your brain into God’s own lump of Play-Doh and boy, does it take a while to snap back to factory settings. If you’ve ever woken up in an ICU, you know. Your relatives have the crazypants stories to prove it.
