Sander is the common term for the dehydration system used in my Alliance Space Defense stories a technology I came up with that reduces currently un-needed crew members to a few pounds of silica gel and de-ionized water with their mental state stored holographically in the ship's computer. This allows for extremely long deep space deployments using minimal resources for air, food and water inside the space craft. A copy of the crew members profile is transmitted to Alliance HQ to restore the crew member should something bad happenn to the vessel, like blowing up. It is normally not used to restore a crew member who died in combat. The sander is a closely guarded secret because the Alliance considers it far superior to the Cryotubes used by their mortal enemy, the Ergon Union. There are other templates that can be used when reconstituting a crew member, such as the very illegal but always present Lola protocol which is a profile based on a wicked sexy prostitute from Seka-5 who has actually been dead for a couple centuries.

Basically, the sander is a McGuffin used to turn men into women for use in my stories. In this book, Capt Wainright's mental image gets mixed with the profile of a teen girl.

Melanie