So, I like Eclipse Phase. It's a great setting, with lots of potential for storytelling, interesting ethical questions, and enough technology to enable wonders, but not enough to eliminate unintended consequences.

Canonically, several kinds birds, octopi, pigs, quite a few cetaceans, and most of the great apes have been uplifted. Elephants were, too, but there were only one or two at that point, and none of them made it off-planet when humanity geth'd themselves. Dogs and cats are presumably in progress. After the low-hanging fruit is finished, what comes next? Well, my money is on social tool-using, home-building mammals with a sense of play and a pre-existing technical aptitude - otters. (Seriously, they're infamous for disassembling their exhibit at the Monterrey Bay aquarium)

In a survival situation, what justifies this expense and tying up qualified personnel and AIs? My answer is that on those few aquatic habitats designed to house uplifted cetaceans, you might want some technical personnel who are comfortable in both the flooded habitat area, and the dry service areas. There's plenty of bodies available - either robots or clones or uplifts - that will handle either environment with aplomb, but nothing at all that can handle both without breaking its stride.

So, last night I worked on the story and the novel technical process of doing uplift without all the vivisection - also, I sketched someone (probably one of the R&D staff) climbing out of a combination healing vat and ego bridge, having just copied his brainstate into a vat-grown ("pods," short for "pod people," in the jargon of the setting) clone of their work-in-progress otter uplifts, trying to figure out how to think human-like thoughts in a significantly different brain structure, with an unfamiliar hormone balance and endocrine system. Why would you risk copying your mind into another species, let alone another body? The latter, because space travel is ruthlessly hard, or perhaps because you just caught an acute case of the dead. The former? By dogfooding their own designs, they get to know how the progress towards humanizing their ottery brains, or at least expanding their existing abstract reasoning abilities, without all of the electroshock, brain dissection, and distasteful parts. Also, the first generation of uplifts get to be raised by their own kind, after a fashion, rather than in what amounts to corporate orphanages.

This also has the happy side effect of satisfying the desire to one-up the inner system corporate overlords, which opportunity outer-system socialists, anarchists, and libertarians would never turn down.

And this researcher? How are they faring? I'm not sure whether this is a late-beta or early-beta body they've slipped into, but eventually they'll probably sell their old mostly-human body, for the pod-grown otters will probably be pretty easy to adapt to, pleasant to be, and they'll have probably spent more time as one for the last few years, and might find themselves alienated from the human form by then. They'll probably volunteer to parent some of the natural-born uplifts, since they clearly find the project worthwhile, helping ensure that Lutra sapiens will be launched into the solar system without the psychological hang-ups of corporate indoctrination, indenture, and and such associated abuses.

And me? I'm working on building a stat block for playing these guys.

In the meantime, it's occurred to me that this is a canon example of an Integration test - climbing out of the ego bridge awkwardly, looking dumb because you are - literally not yet sure how to form words with a new face, tongue, lips, and throat.