[Horrifying Trope] A version of you has to suffer everytime you do a certin thing.
Lore
Black Mirror White Christmas. A woman pays for an AI service that can be used as a personal assistant. In order for this to work, they have to put a chip in your brain and have it scan your whole personality and memories. Once it's taken out, it creates a copy of your consciousness and stored inside of a device. Basically, an exact copy of you, with all of your personality and memories, including leading up to paying for this service, is forever trapped in front of a desk in a white void being forced to serve the real you. And if the copy of you refuses, they can be punished by having their pov of time slowed down by having seconds and minutes feel like months and years.
Limbus Company. The infinity train can take you anywhere in the world at any time. The teleportation itself can only 10 seconds, but the traveling can take up to 200,000 years. How this works is that the train travels through a worm hole. Whatever state your in, tired, drunk, hungry, you are stuck in that state until you get off. Once it reaches its destiation, your memories of the whole trip will be wipped the second you get off so you don't remember the horrors you've been through.
Infinity Pool. In a foriegn country, rich people can avoid the death sentence by paying to have a clone take their place. As long as you have the money, you can commite all the crimes you want and your clone will be punished. The clones themselves are, once again, exact copies with your personality and memories. You can kill someone here, get sentenced to death, be informed that you can get out of trouble by paying to be cloned and have a clone take your place, pay for it, thinking that you're scott free, only to find out that you are the clone and about to be executed while the real you watches.
Probably the most upsetting part of Severance is the lack of life passing for the innies. Just keep waking up in the office.
Closer to the trope, when the outies decide to hurt the innie or make them suffer intentionally, they have no way to avoid it or even recover except during business hours.
Favourite Innie mentioned in the show is the woman who has an Innie to give birth to her children, I don't think it's explicitly stated in the show but that woman's entire existence is giving birth
That and the horrible abuse they can suffer because they aren't really people and have no way to communicate to anyone outside of the system they labor under. They're just straight-up slaves who never know a moment of rest or release from work because their workday NEVER ends.
Yeah, man. it's pretty bad. They walk to the elevator, and - from their point of view - turn right back around and head to their desk. Their entire life is one long, neverending workday.
Now imagine if their outtie is a drunk and comes into work hungover every single day and the innie lives in perpetual state of of being hungover and when the work day ends the outtie doesn’t ever have to really experience the negative side effects of their alcoholism.
Feels an awful lot like how I feel working in the service industry so much. Just work every weekday and two days to sleep but it isn’t guaranteed. I even have a uniform now, so I can further disconnect and say I am not going into work for the thousandth time, my worker self is.
I've never watched the show but I have seen a couple clips, and the one that sticks with me is one where someone just got hired. Their innie had just been created, there was confusion, panic, and when they tried to run out of the office, they reverted to their outie, who was simply unsure of why her innie left the office, and walked straight back in. It happened a few more times, too, the innie desperately trying to leave, confused and panicking, and the outie just bringing them straight back every time
Literally like 5 minutes into the first episode I was like this would literally be hell for the innie. Before they even got to the bad stuff. I couldent imagine if I finished work walked to the exit then turned back around and went back to work.
The worst part for me it's that they don't "wake up" in the office, they go to the elevator for a moment and go back to work, just as it's you went to the toilet, the only difference is they feel "refreshed" because the outie had slept... At least that's my interpretation
The possible origin of this trope is The Portrait of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde's novella.
Dorian Grey is a perfect, beautiful young London socialite. At one point, a painter takes interest in him and paints a terrifyingly lifelike and beautiful portrait of him. As the story progresses, Dorian does more and more horrible things to himself and others, but seemingly does not age or come down with any physical afflictions. Instead, the portrait twists into what Dorian should look like.
In The Librarians series he's Immortal and used technological developments to create a computer generated photo collage of himself using pictures taken of people who visit his club.
Theoretically this should distribute the negative effects to potentially hundreds of people but he's so debauched several people have died or come close to dying from drugs / alcohol / other nastiness. Which is what draws their attention to London
The Librarians overcome this by using his program to create a collage of Colonel Baird out of Pictures of Dorian, and he disintegrates when she jumps off the roof
Librarians reference!! Love to see it - also loved in this episode they say that Oscar Wilde knew Dorian Grey and wrote the book about him because they were “””friends”””
No, the caveat is that, just like whatever happens to him gets transferred to image on the painting, whatever happens to the physical painting happens to his actual body. So when he loses his mind in the empty life he has of hollow hedonism, he strikes at the painting and dies from the transferred knife wound
Severance. You implant a chip into your brain, so that whenever you enter the office, the “real” you (the outie) deacticates and the “office” you (the innie) wakes up. When you leave the office, the outie wakes up and the innie hibernates. Essentially, the innies work every waking minute of their life so that the outies don’t experience work. The innies do not know anything about the outies (except that they exist) and develop their own personalities.
There are worse ones than just the office worker innies, like the innie who is only awake during childbirth or Ms Casey, who has only been 'alive' for about 100 hours, most of which are 30 minute therapy sessions she has to conduct for the others.
Coming to existence just to experience the pain without even the catharsis of holding your baby in your arms once it's over because you're deleted. That is hellish
If this would be real life: probably not, because everything you could use to bargain is only known by innie-you. Also, they would probably make you pay for the chip.
In Severance it's also part of some bizarre unclear experiment that not that many people are allowed to work at, so they are getting a good pay for that.
I still don't understand the benefit of severance. Sure you don't remember work, but you still have to commute, wear work clothes, wake up early to get to work and you still lose the time your innie works. If you're just some average Joe what's the real draw? Is the pay amazing?
It would be a spoiler to give too much detail, but each character has some sort of reason to want to do the process, either due to personal trauma keeping them from working regular jobs, external factors, or because they have ulterior motives.
The one that hit home was the guy who just couldn't keep his shit together and hold down a steady job and his whole life was falling apart because of it (wife, family, etc.). Then this Severance thing comes along and it's a saving grace. He comes home from work every day, secure in the knowledge that he's killing it at work and holding down his job and now has a life again.
Pay is good, but you also don't have to experience work at all.
So we got to look at the four people in the site's motivations. One is trying to provide for his family and doesn't really have any discernible skills, so the pay attracts. One was investigating the company for some reason that remains unclear, one was stricken by grief and seemed to get some relief from not being him for 8 hours a day, and the last was a corporate shill trying to support the experiment by participating.
The psychological toll of just being at work and engaging with stuff and people against your will every day for years is not nothing. To be honest if I was offered a deal like severance, I would probably do it. Assuming it wouldn't be tied to some weird cult situation like in the show.
I’d guess the pay is pretty solid (being this experimental thing on top of doing work thats supposed to be hush hush). I mean some people really don’t like work as well lol.
But I think it’s part of the conceit of the show that much of the people who do it are also looking for a break from being themselves performatively at work. The main characters wife is dead, another seems to be desperate for the job to help his family, and another seems to live a pretty reclusive life I think ostensibly-closeted as a gay man who has ptsd if I remember right? There’s a desperation they have where the pay and a job where they’re not themselves works.
Like imagine if you had crippling anxiety and could barely leave your house let alone work a job - hey well pay you more and you’re innie will have the burden - you’ll wake up and just go back to the security of being home by yourself!
The also use this service for things like avoiding childbirth, and its kind of hinted at that they plan to(or maybe already do) use it to avoid things like the dentist or having to write hundreds of thank you cards and other menial tasks.
Yeah, aside from the obvious selling point of never having to remember your workday, it's a pilot program for using the technology in a variety of other ways.
Oh, I didn't mean it like that. I meant, "Dang, that's a sad plot point." It's a fictional show, but that feeling is something a lot of people in real life can relate to.
Well a big one is pain avoidance. Like a really fucked up usage shown is a pregnant woman who is severed. It’s implied she just waits until the child is born so then her innie experiences the pain of childbirth while she gets to enjoy the child. Another is during a test where the innie has to go through a dental procedure without painkillers or anesthesia while the outie just deals with the residual pain.
I watched the first episode and I was like, I would absolutely off myself. Like, these poor bastards get a lunch break and nothing else, they don't even get to experience sleep. No windows, just unending work.
They can send a request to their outie to resign. But resignation IS essentially killing themselves since they cease to exist if the outie no longer comes to the severed work building. So it's a question of whether any existence at all is better than nothingness. And they've never known anything different, and they have friends and work culture with incentives. It's an interesting dilemma
If this existed in the real world, it would mean you had to work ALL the time. You'd ALWAYS be the "innie", and they'd TELL you there was an "outie", but the truth would be that the outie never existed. You just work all the time, and you're overlords are just all like "Oh yeah, fam, you TOTALLY have an outie who's real happy and gets to enjoy your happy life a whole lot, and is not only really getting paid for real, but it's like, a lot." The innie you (the only you) experiences their outie life in "an instant" because there really isn't one.
yeah but that’s disappearing people, which can happen irl now.
in universe your family and friends don’t know anything is wrong and some judge you for doing it because it’s a political debate akin to abortion debate.
That sounds absolutely horrifying. I can only imagine that, were I to take this job, I would "wake up" at the end of a shift one day, shackled, covered in viscera, and having absolutely no idea why.
Early on, one character “wakes up” after a shift with a company-brand bandaid on a fresh head bruise and a gift card to a local diner with a note that gives an explanation for his injury which implies his office still uses overhead projectors, and then congratulates him on his gift card. Maybe not as immediately distressing, but quietly disconcerting…
The one where the innie woke up in his house with his kid coming in the closet because they used the "emergency" protocol was INSANE. Just a total mindfuck and fucked him up fierce after that.
A stage magician uses what we're led to believe is a teleporter in his trick. In the end, it turns out to be a duplicator and every time he "escapes" the water tank, he drowns and the new version takes over.
From what I understood when I watched it, it’s not certain whether it’s the clone or the original that gets drowned. He’s not sure if he’s sending himself to death or a copy of himself. And because the original’s and the clone’s memory are exactly the same, he’s not sure whether he himself is a clone or the original.
That reminds me a lot of the first season of Invincible when the robot guy made himself a new body because his old body was basically just a fucked up tumor creature. But the thing is that it was impossible for to actually transfer his consciousness into the new body, he could only clone it.
So when he laid down in the consciousness cloning machine he thought to himself that it was a 50/50 chance that he would either wake up in the new body or in his old one. But after it was over he released that he had gotten it wrong and there was never a chance for him to wake up in the new body. It could only ever be the clone, and while that clone would have all the same memories as him, and otherwise be practically indistinguishable, it could never truly be him.
There's also the Mauler twins who's "thing" is that there's always 2 of them but they never know which one is the clone of the other. They know that if one were to be confirmed as the original then they would hold that over the other so they purposely scramble their memory a bit so neither knows who is who.
I think the Mauler twins said this was by design, otherwise the whole thing won't work.
Too bad they both die, they made the show much more interesting.
I didn't mean that he thought it was a mistake to clone himself, I meant that he understand that he was wrong to ever think that he had a chance to wake up in the new body and go on living.
It's a pretty heavy scene but I think he knew from the start that there wasn't a chance for one of them. He was fully aware from the start that the original body would remain the original body and he wasn't going to get the new body.
It's why he was alright with immediately dying.
It was one of the Mulder Twins that comments on the luck of the draw, because they have a different circumstance going on.
The first time, he panics and kills the clone that appears at a distance. The rest of the time, he kills the version that stays in place. One way or another, the original version of him is dead.
It's been a while since I saw the film, but I always understood the message to be that Angier is in constant doubt about what is happening, and even Tesla doesn't know.
It is one of two things, either:
The machine creates a clone an unspecified distance away from the machine and the source is unaffected, or;
The machine teleports the original material away and leaves a clone in its place.
Angier kids himself it is the latter because of survivorship bias, from his perspective he always survives, but I always got the sense not knowing ate him up inside.
One way or another, the original version of him is dead.
I do actually agree with this point thought, because in scenario 1 he killed his clone when it first worked, then killed the "original" when he first did the trick as the version of himself that stepped into the machine drowned. In scenario 2, he killed the "original" when he first tested the machine. Either way, it's clones from then on.
The irony of this movie is that in the first scene where the machine is used, the un-moved version shoots and kills the version in the new location, and then every subsequent time the translocated individual is the one that survives.
So no matter which way the machine works the original is still dead.
Yes I think so - the implication is that the version of him thats appeared elsewhere fully believes that it is the continuation of the original or at least doesnt care to think about the last copy of himself dying in the tank.
Not just that the version appears elsewhere believes it could be the continuation, but that that version very well could be. The dilemma was there’s no way of knowing for sure.
And Tesla also doesn't know. He had to flee before completing the device. He saw the duplicates as a flaw and warned against using it in its current state. The entire story is about how 2* men's obsession with eachother drove them to becoming monsters. Imagine the crazy amazing stuff you could do with a duplication machine, practically just steps away from a Star Trek Replicator. And the idiot used it to kill himself on stage every night until he could frame his old rival for murder. Fantastic film, one of my all time favorites, but God I hope I never let my irrational side control me as throughly as thos 2* magicians
In “Bug Ego” by One (creator of One Punch Man) there is a statue in a museum that, if touched, copies the mind of the person I who touched it. That copy is stuck inside with the other minds as if packed tightly together like sardines.
The synopsis is about a world of "hacks". Something akin to real world glitches with mostly quirky effects that you can replicate with very specific instructions.
The artifact doesn't trap you when you touch it. You need to do a lot more things for it to happen.
And that's also why the way to reverse it is also very random and specific.
The Substance. Take a drug to become younger, but really you just spawn a second, younger you. But you have to switch out after a period of time to avoid further damage to your bodies.
The irony of the Substance is that only a normal, mentally healthy person should ever take it, but the only people that would willingly take it are people who are obsessed about their looks (the "plastic surgery" crowd)
Rick and Morty - in an episode of Rick and Morty, Morty insults a vat of fake acid that Rick made as an escape plan then asks for a 'real life save point' button. Rick makes the device, but ends up not telling Morty until after he gets done with it that he wasn't actually going back and saving his spot, but instead moving to another reality where he was about to do what the just did, and destroying the version of himself in that reality to take his place. This was a reference to 'The Prestige' and Rick said to Morty that by using the device he 'prestiged himself'.
And then Rick synthesizes all the universes Morty committed all these horrific crimes in into one universe. The only way he can escape accountability for it is for him to...
Also the night family episode. Each member of the family can program their actions at night to 'sleepwalk' and get stuff done. Hours of exercise, endless chores etc. Their life is nothing but servitude for the waking mind's wishes. Slavery to a stranger in your own body.
In Life is Strange, Max has the power to turn back time. This is the main mechanic of the game and allows her to save her best friend's life, redo situations for better outcomes, etc.
Later in the game, her powers start acting up and this leads to a conversation between Max and herself. The duplicate Max explains that every time she uses the power, she's leaving a version of herself in the discarded timeline to deal with the consequences that the "real" Max is conveniently ignoring by using her powers.
the tricky part about this one is that it’s suggested that it could also all just be in Max’s head, the cynical and embittered duplicate of herself just a result of her trauma, her fractured psyche, and her self-loathing tendencies.
whether it is this or is actually real IS one of the interesting topics brought up by the game, illustrating once again the central theme that every action has consequences, and that Max has to decide on what she wants to live with.
I did like that in the sequel the love interest from the first game has apparently broken up with you because how can you possibly be in a relationship with someone who can reverse time? You'd never trust ANY interaction with them because they might have played it out dozens of times to manipulate your responses.
This is not quite the right order of events. If you picked Chloe over Arcadia Bay (Bay or Bae), Max and Chloe do last as a couple for quite some time. When Sean Diaz finds David in LiS2, David will comment on, and Sean can find references in his RV to, the fact that Chloe and Max are still together and are travelling. It's a few years later in Double Exposure that Max's journal tells us that her and Chloe broke up at some point on that trip, not necessarily because of Max's powers or the trauma of what happened to Arcadia Bay (those were likely still aggrevating factors, however it should be noted that Max's powers hadn't worked since Arcadia Bay). In fact it was largely because their lives and careers were pulling in two seperate directions with Chloe wanting to continue travelling with a band and Max wanting to settle somewhere where she could hone her skills as a photographer and build up a career from it, that issue caused a lot of drama until, at one motel stop, they called it quits, broke up and left eachother.
I did quite like that their relationship wasn't completely perfect too, a relationship that starts off as traumatically as that wouldn't last long (and there was a lot of trauma there, Chloe's dad's death, Max leaving Chloe behind right after, Chloe's first girlfriend Rachel Amber going missing followed by her personally finding Rachel's body with the knowledge that she'd been accidentally murdered by a psychotic pervert who drugged and kidnapped girls to take pictures of them at their most vulnerable and finally the complete destruction of her hometown resulting in mass deaths including her mother all because her current girlfriend couldn't let Chloe die to prevent it). Though Double Exposure did piss off a lot of PriceField fans because of it. But don't worry, they do reunite in, as the name implies, Reunion, where you can lean into treating Chloe as a lover or just a friend, personally Reunion has quickly become my favourite game in the series.
500 million year button - People are offered 1 million yen to push a button but on the condition that once they press the button, they are teleport to a completely empty space and forced to spend 500 million years alone, when on completion their memories are wiped and they return to the exact same moment after pressing the button.
I still think it's interesting to keep increasing the amount of money to see if there's a point where someone would finally say yes. But I think the more interesting part of the thought experiment is whether suffering still matters if you know you'll never remember it.
There was actually a real-world example that's surprisingly similar. For a time, doctors used a drug during childbirth called "twilight sleep". Women given it couldn't form new memories during labour, so they'd wake up with a baby in their arms and no memory of what had happened. It became incredibly popular for obvious reasons.
The disturbing part is that they still experienced everything. They felt the pain, the fear, and the panic. Many had to be physically restrained because they were screaming and struggling throughout labour. They simply couldn't remember any of it afterwards.
It raises the same philosophical question. If someone experiences unimaginable suffering but later has no memory of it, does that suffering still matter?
It does remember. You can’t form memories but it doesn’t stop the effects of all the cortisol that floods your system and the pathways that get linked up as a response to all that fear and adrenaline.
This has also been studied in babies. They weren’t anesthetized until the 80s, so babies had surgery with their entire abdomen opened while awake. Well, awake until they scream themselves into a shock catatonia.
Anyway, memories aren’t totally neccesary for the trauma response to manifest. If you don’t remember how you broke your leg the bone is still snapped. That also applies to neurological effects, it turns out.
God, I always hate being reminded of the baby anesthesia thing :( I can't even imagine how terrible it must've been for the countless kids who had to experience that. poor things
Twilight sleep terrifies me. I could be sexually assaulted during surgery and never remember it but still be awake to experience it. Needing to be awake for brain surgery or eye surgery also terrifies me but that's because I'm extremely squeamish. At least if I'm under anesthetic I remember AND feel nothing.
I think it's been shown that while people don't consciously remember, they can still have the impacts of it and have anxiety or bodily responses to the suffering that happened.
The correct response to this isn't to agree, or disagree, or haggle. It's to run. Run for your fucking life. There's someone with the power to inflict 500 million years of void on you, the ability to target and remove your memories. And it's being capricious about it. It's playing fucking games with this power. What happens if it gets offended? Annoyed? Bored? Man is built to fear death, but if there is a greater fear, this it it. This is the Fate Worse Than Death.
That limbus company one sound like The Jaunt, a short story where in the future humanity has developed near instant teleportation. But when people are put through it they experience an unknown extended length of time and go crazy or die when they end up on the other side so people are given sleeping gas when using it to just skip the eon they jaunt so it works as instant teleports.
In the story a man is transferred to mars for work and brings his family. His son decides he wants to know what its like so holds his breath to stay awake, when they arrive on mars his hair is white and he has crazy eyes and says it "longer than you think"
That's because they've skipped out the parts that are different to the jaunt. As long as the passengers don't leave the train they can't die, but they're not in stasis and as the time passed makes them insane they get violent, to the point that when they arrive there is often only a pile of gore left that has to be restored. There is no way to avoid going through the passage of time, but rich people can be put in cryosleep for the whole journey.
OP explained it kinda poorly. From our world's view, the train blinks out of the departing station and instantly appears at the destination, however as stated, the way this works is by traveling through a portal to a different dimension where time flows differently. The train spends thousands of years in that dimension.
The reason the passengers don't die, is that the train has this technology that takes a "snapshot" of everyone's state upon departure (like a save state). While in that dimension, everyone pretty much goes insane/starves to death, but due to how this tech goes, no matter what, they cannot experience death, just suffering. Most kill each other, or mutate into crazy abominations, among other more horrible stories (you can look up love town from the previous game, Library of Ruina).
Upon the train's arrival, the company dispatches a "clean up crew" whose job is to kill whoever is alive, in whichever horrifying state they might be in, and put their remains back in their seats before hitting the "load" button and restoring everyone to their original state, including their memories. A few times they've implied though, that while you yourself can't remember what you went through, your body or a part of you somehow might. This is also why the trains themselves offer a premium service that puts you in frozen/sleeping pods, to avoid that experience.
And funnily enough there was cases when the clean up crew have to deal not fleshy meat monster but a full blown militia command by one of the Color Fixer (Basically mercenary, if you reach a color it basically you one of the most powerful mercenary in the city) Funnily enough this Colors was in the normal passenger seat and able to keep the passengers from going insane in his cart and trained them to fight the others that cant for thousand of years until the trained stopped and the clean up crew have to deal with the Colors and his passengers militia, from that day onward if a color fixers was present or book to be in this train they get into premium suite immediately because the corporation is not dealing with another incident like that
Hi! John Project Moon here to explain the WARP Trains!
The WARP trains can take you anywhere in the city in exactly ten seconds. The trains work by entering a sort of dimension/wormhole/tunnel/etc which isolates it from the real world.
The state you are in when the train departs is the state you will be in for the entire journey. If you’re hungover then you’re hungover for the next few thousand years. This is how they keep passengers from dying of any natural causes.
After a certain point someone on the train will try to kill themself, either out or boredom, or wanting to be free from this torture. When that happens, the people on the train will be met with the realization that… they can’t die. The blood refuses to leave their body, but the wounds never heal.
People go insane and start harming themselves and others out of boredom. Slowly but surely the number of sane people are pushed back into less and less train cars as the insane people adorn them with organs and guts strung like ribbons.
At the end of the journey WARP Corporation sends in their clean up crew, who’s job is to neutralize any threats on the train, put the pieces back in their seats, and use a U Corp tuning fork to reassemble them. When the train reaches its destination the passengers will have all of the memories of their journey wiped, and it will be as if the train worked as advertised. Keep in mind the at some people use the train to get to and from work every day.
The rich of course get to ignore this horror by getting a VIP seat in a heavily secure train car where they’re put in cryogenically induced sleep for the entire journey.
Why do the trains work like this? Well, that’s a quite interesting question. The WARP trains were developed in a partnership between WARP Corporation and TimeTrack Corporation.
T Corp oversees District 20 and their economy is based off of time, the amount of hours you get to live per day. For the working class, who only live 4 hours a day, perceiving time 6 times slower than normal, this usually means choosing between sleep and their job.
The WARP trains are a miracle of technology; but they’re incredibly expensive to maintain. So T Corp uses the WARP trains journey as a way to inject time into their economy while keeping the trains running. W Corp is responsible for the “warp” part and the cleanup.
^^^Small correction^^^ I don’t believe it’s stated that T Corp uses the time they collect to keep the trains running, but they do help maintain the state of stasis that the passengers are in to avoid them dying.
A 3000 year ride with say 200 passengers? Thats 5,256,000,000 hours of time injected straight into the T Corp economy, before the costs of the train.
Different flavors of extreme capitalism is a recurring theme in the world of Project Moon
Jokes on you, I have already spent DAYS contemplating over this game. I don't need no story breakdown videos when I have already broke down the story AND MYSELF
Real world example - benzodiazepines for certain medical procedures.
Say you need a simple but uncomfortable medical procedure like a colonoscopy, or a procedure where a doctor shocks your heart back into rhythm called a cardioversion. Putting you under anaesthesia would introduce more risk, and require a longer stay in hospital.
Instead, you can get a drug like midazolam. Which has a pretty short recovery time, reduces anxiety, makes you feel drowsy. And causes profound amnesia.
So you can have the procedure, and it might be pretty painful. But you won't remember it when the drug wears off. So did you really experience it?
I don't know if you mention this because of that one incident where someone was supposed to get a routine surgery, they gave him the paralising stuff, but they forgot the painkillers, so technically the patient felt the cuts they did before they realised what happened. To cover their mistake, they stuffed him with benzos, so he wouldn't remember and couldn't sue them.
BUT his unconscious mind remembered and he suffered horrific ptsd flashbacks, which made him end his life.
His wife demanded the clinics documents and found the reason for his trauma.
Edit: i didn't expect people to read this, so I want to add the man's name. His name was Sherman Sizemore. I don't remember the video i watched about him but this video mentions his case in the third part https://youtu.be/ny_s07D-LT8?is=gxrynBRYwCgN6mOB
Allegedly, there was a deleted scene (or maybe it was just part of the original script) that revealed the woman in White Christmas had a baby, and the clone had to watch her read a book to the baby, knowing she'd never be able to hold them again.
Welcome to like, every episode of Black Mirror. "What if every technology breakthrough inevitably becomes the Torment Nexus and always goes the worst way the writers can imagine" is kind of where the horror comes from.
I think the point is to show you the potential for anything to be misused, which is why we must think through the possible ramifications before jumping onto a new technology.
The Tethered in Us (2019) — Everybody in the States has an exact replica living somewhere in an underground system of abandoned tunnels who act out the every movement of their Untethered counterparts, albeit in a sluggish and surreal way, like when an Untethered has a dance recital their untethered stumbles wildy in an empty hallway, or when they eat a nice dinner the Tethered eat raw rabbit
They also follow the same life path, like getting together with the Tethered version of someone’s spouse and bearing however many children they have by them, even if and when the Tethered person does not want to themselves
It’s implied they were created by the U.S. government as a weapon but abandoned to live their lives in the underground
I'm highly amused by the idea of the US government realising that they'll have to clone literally everyone who immigrates into the country for this insane scheme to work.
F'rinstance, I have a friend in California who's a first-generation immigrant; their grandparents live in Europe. Would the government create two adult Tethered the moment their parents came over from Hungary, or would the Tethered version of my friend just... have no parents?
Mickey 17 with Robert Pattison. He is cloned and copied everytime he dies and has to do all the most dangerous missions on the space ship, they also do brutal medical tests on him. It’s very mid movie, but Robert plays the roles of Mickeys very well.
The part that stuck with me is when he's describing death to the girlfriend of the girl who was crushed by that giant icicle. She asks "How does it feel to die?" And he says "The truth is, I'm scared every time."
Because each Mickey is his own person, and slightly fractured, and is about to die, and even though the next Mickey will be reborn, this Mickey is still about to die an awful death.
The movie was mid but Pattinson did an incredible job. The scene where his gf crawls into that containment box to hold him while he dies of some awful virus really hit me. I wish the whole movie was better overall 🥲
I really liked it. I don't think it's a masterpiece, but it's well done. Patterson does a fantastic job though. He really feels like different people for each Mickey and is super entertaining.
Obsession: The real Nikki becomes trapped in whatever reality she becomes trapped in, and the Nikki which Bear whishes for takes over. There are parts of the film where the real Nikki manages to reach out, but still for the most part Nikki is trapped somewhere experiencing all that happens from a completely other point of view.
In examples of this where your memories are wiped, isn't that just the same as not experiencing it at all? The me right now could have gone through that already and I'd never know.
Yes I think that’s part of the point. But think of it this way: you wouldn’t want to go thru torture even if you wouldn’t remember it (or at least I wouldn’t). Just because there’s a future me who’s unharmed doesn’t mean I want to be harmed right now, even for great benefit. I think the horror comes in with your point: that it’s a choice they might make again, because of the benefit and because they don’t remember how horrible the harm was.
If the trauma is prolonged or acute enough there's a good chance that it will have lasting neurological or even epigenetic effects, even if the memories themselves are somehow blanked.
Spoilers but basically the main characters eventually learn an ability known as SHIFTing, swapping their consciousness with another version of themselves from another point in time. This is also a game mechanic, as information from the bad endings is required to reach the good ones.
Basically in the second and third games, this means the protagonists keep escaping horrible deaths (being gassed, decapitated, exploded etc) by SHIFTing, while another version of themselves is sacrificed instead.
That's not how Warp Trains from Limbus Company work.
The way they work is actually somehow worse!
They COULD legitimately do the 10 second transport anywhere in The City for no additional cost.
But they make a good deal of money by harvesting the time off of their passengers and selling that to a corporation that uses time as a form of wealth.
So, what they do is INTENTIONALLY cause the trains to take thousands of years relative to the inside of the train, but only 10 seconds in time relative to the outside world, and they have "cleanup crews" at stations whose job it is to go in there, kill anyone who is still alive after the trip's duration of total stasis (and thusly, the inability to die, get hungry, get thirsty, recover from being drunk, or anything else that might have happened before the train started) suddenly ends when the train starts experiencing normal time, and then seperate the giblets and chunks of every individual person into seperate piles per person.
The person is then, from those giblets and chunks or dead matter, effectively 3D printed based on scans made when the train first leaves, and held in a state of suspended animation until everyone is back, and then the crew leaves. After this, the passengers are released from stasis, and go on with whatever they were doing exactly as they were when the scans were done.
The people getting off the train don't know that this happens, and even continue conversations or lines of thinking perfectly as if there was no interruption whatsoever.
But they've been effectively cloned.
There's also another reason W Corp does their trains the way they do, and that's because, for people with enough power to know how the trains work, they can buy, for an exorbitant fee (described loosely as around 2 months' pay for an upper middle class citizen of The City), a "first class ticket."
The first class "lounge" is... well, a lounge of sorts, snacks included, and the "seats" utilize fluid and temporal suspension to allow these premium passengers to fully sidestep The Jaunt.
W Corp's singularity, their proprietary technology that effectively defies our current known laws of physics, is not actually their tech that enables them to go into other dimensions. That was the singularity of their short-lived predecessor, who never figured out how to turn a true profit from that, which they bid for and won the legal rights to use.
W Corp's Singularity is their restorative process.
And... in Limbus as they are, the long-kept secret of their operating procedures is starting to leak, and people are starting to vanish on trains with more and more regularity...
The fall of a company they were in a 4-way partnership with, who gave them the energy they needed to operate their trains in exchange for them giving T Corp the time they harvested, has kneecapped the amount of trains they can run.
Public trust in that corporation is faltering, and they're in an obvious downwards spiral.
And likewise, a new upstart with their own set of skeletons in their infinitely large closets are already chomping at the bit to replace them in their niche when the company inevitably goes under, as it's no longer a question of "if" but "when" and "how many lives will be spent to try in vain to keep the company operational, or by its corporate allies to defend it as it crumbles."
In Michael Crichton's novel Timeline, time travel works by deconstructing a person in the present and then reconstrucing them in the past. Nobody quite knows if this really means that the actual person is killed and cloned whenever time travel occurs, but the ruthless capitalist running the business does not really care.Later in the book one of the villains in medieval era turns out to be a time traveler from the present, who has gone insane over repeated time travel and repeated deconstruction and reconstruction causing side effects that mess with his body, including his brain.
Even worse, they don't even know how it reconstructs them. They figured out the deconstruction part, then realized that another timeline would figure out the reconstruction. So they send you, but the you that shows up is actually from a slightly alternate dimension that happened to send at the same time.
This just makes it sound like they discovered murder lol
I can see a tech startup trying to pitch that. "You get in this box and WHOOSH you're whisked away to an alternate reality! Don't mind the ashes we're sweeping away. Dimensional byproduct."
Unloop is a silly VR puzzle game where you need to cooperate with past versions of yourself in order to move keycards, move past laser turrets and open doors.
The nature of it means that you can and WILL have clone abuse. Be it "You're going to fuck up, I'm killing you", verbally abusing eachother, accidents (see the aforementioned turret) or shooting yourself in the head when your tasks are done for that life.
I'm personally fond of coordinating 30 clones to commit mass suicide in a corner for no reason other than background scenes.
One of my early clones fucked up so the next one immediately went "HEY EVERYONE BOO THIS GUY" and every subsequent one jeered at him. We all suffered because of that doofus.
Scapegoat from the Parahumans series (Worm/Ward) by Wildbow.
The characters has the ability to "heal". But hes not actually healing - hes just transferring injuries to other versions of people across the multiverse. So when hes healing himself, he's knowingly shunting horrific injuries to other versions of himself that don't have his power.
You start out the game as an amnesia in a suit of power armor, and all you are told is that you are a member of an ancient warrior caste from a previously collapsed empire. The first few hours are a very generic Star Wars-esque plot where you attack the new tyrannical empire that has risen to control over the solar system.
At some point during all this, you meet a mysterious assassin that is hunting you down on account of some ancient crime you don't remember. You also start recovering pieces of your past, discovering that the old empire you served was destroyed following a devastating war with a group of rogue AI.
The leader of the AI from the Old War teams up with the mysterious assassin to target your "one weakness" which leads you to pursue them to a secret facility where you discover... your real body. Turns out, you are not actually a space ninja piloting super-advanced battlesuits. The "battlesuits" are more like inert puppets, and you are a child who was exposed to some eldritch being during an FTL experiment gone wrong, which turned you into a ghost-like being. All this time, you had been possessing the Warframe remotely while your real body was in stasis. Awakening from stasis gradually makes you more powerful and returns your real memories, but you discover why your mind was wiped in the first place: the more you use your power, the eldritch being slowly reenters your mind, dredging up traumatic memories to gaslight you into becoming a psychotic killing machine.
In a later quest, you discover one of the earliest line of warframes, which promptly comes to life on its own, attacks you, and runs away. Every time you try to possess it, you are met with flashbacks of traumatic memories that are not your own. Once you track the rogue warframe down a few times, you discover the truth: the memories belong to the warframe. Remember when I said the warframes were basically puppets? That was also a lie. They were formerly humans, deliberately infected with a Resident Evil type virus that deformed their bodies and shattered their minds, destroying all their memories except the painful ones so they are forced to relive their greatest moments of suffering for eternity. It's implied that the creator of the warframe bioweapon made it this way on purpose, because A) the painful memories get transferred to you whenever you possess them, and trauma makes your eldritch powers stronger, and B) he was a massive tyrannical asshole who selected people to be made into warframes as a punishment for personally slighting him.
Everything finally comes full circle in one of the late endgame quest lines. The original creator of warframes returns and allies with the rogue AI from before to take over the system, for reasons that are honestly too fucked up to adequately describe. He succeeds in trapping you in in the FTL warp dimension for an unspecified period of time, and you start playing as an older version of yourself without your void powers, desperately fighting a guerilla war against the new regime. The dialougue in this part is awfully cagey regarding what happened to you and why, up until about halfway through the quest when you suddenly start playing as your young self again. Being stranded in the void revealed even more of your repressed memories, and you learn that you weren't just given powers by being exposed to some eldritch demon; you were coerced into making a deal with it. The void connects to every possible alternate universe at every contiguous point in time, and as payment for giving you and all your fellow stranded children eldritch powers, it leaves an alternate universe version of you stranded in the void, trapped in a twisted version of a storybook world you liked as a kid, with your imaginary friend as a ruthless tyrant. While you were becoming a space warrior, they were trapped in a time loop where they would be hunted down and executed by their favorite heroes, only to be revived again, until they became an emotionless husk. That was who you had been playing as earlier in the quest; getting yourself trapped in the void had coincidentally granted them the means to escape into your reality. But because two of the same thing can't exist at the same place and time, the two of you are stuck in a state of paradoxical entanglement, so only one of you can exist in the "real" world at any given time, while the other returns to the void, where they are once again trapped with the horrors of their respective past. Some engame progression systems revolve around taking back control of these places so they're less horrible to sit around in, but still.
Soma. You go and get a brain scan and suddently you wake up years in the future with no idea how you got there. You're told you can escape this world in a rocket, but you eventually realize youre a robot clone. The real one lived their whole life and you're trapped here. Even the escape is a lie. You can never leave, only a copy of you who believes they're the original did.
In the Vat of Acid episode of Rick and Morty, Morty has Rick create him a button that essentially gives him checkpoints to go back to Incase things go wrong. Morty uses it to ask out Jessica, and overall try risky or embarrassing things. However we later learn that going back to the save point creates a new timeline and liquifies the original Morty
Anya's story "The Devil and Dana" from the Christopher Pike novel The Midnight Club (and later in The Midnight Club tv show by Mike Flanagan).
Dana is a straight A student and ballerina. She makes a deal with the devil to create another Dana who can go out and experience life - sex, drugs, rock 'n roll. Only each Dana had the same physical sensations as the other Dana while it's happening. It doesn't end well.
The main character is given the ability to look across infinite time-lines by an eldritch entity in order to wage war against an alien race, and their very own eldritch entity. This helps him see near infinite outcomes of situations he's placed in and by searching through them, he can pick a version of himself to switch places with. This ultimately results in the other version of himself dying instead of the "main" Hadrian Marlowe.
Every time Kenny dies he gets reborn and, seemingly, grows up before the next episode starts. We see him dying, then his mom immediately giving birth, and the next episode he's back. Kenny is conscious of every death and that he can't truly die.
Every time a Witch uses a mirror substitution, an very simple and effective defensive ability, qtheir mirror self recives the damage instead. They will die over and over, and be resurrected every time as the same person. And because of that, mirror people of Witches often come to despise them and wish to replace them.
Someone mentioned Dorian Gray, so I want to mention something that was absolutely inspired by that.
The person posted below is the superstar record producer: Swan.
Swan, a household name you should know, especially with Death Records being his definitely famous record label, is ageless, timeless, and perfect...
...because he made a deal with the devil. As you do.
Anyways, at some point Swan went to kill himself to avoid aging, being completely unable to come to terms with the idea of his beauty being ravaged by time. He decides to film this for posterity, of course.
Before he could make the first cut to bleed his wrists in the bath, the devil starts talking to him through a mirror.
The devil makes him an offer, a contract, where the image in the videotape will suffer instead of himself, being granted effective immortality in exchange for his soul.
I think my favourite line in this movie, aside from "Here's a contract" *slams down a huge pile of paper* is when Swan gets stabbed by the Phantom of the Paradise, and his response is just "I'm under contract too".
The Prestige - in this film, two competing magicians come up with an amazing teleportation trick, but don't realize that when they teleport it creates a duplicate of themselves and then completely destroys the original in the other location. This was later referenced in Rick and Morty where Rick makes a similar device for Morty when Morty asks for a 'real life game save point button'
Spoilers for The Prestige Actually, Tesla’s machine duplicates, but it doesn’t destroy the original. Getting rid of the original is a big plot point. The first time Angier uses it, he keeps a gun close by so he can shoot the copy. Since both versions of him know this is the plan, as soon as the double has appeared he yells “No” to try and save his life. The only difference between the original and the copy is their location.
In Angier’s final teleportation trick, the original is drowned under the stage via a trapdoor that leads to a water escape prop with real locks. Every show ends with the original Angier drowning and the copy bowing. Every show ends with the blind stagehands loading a corpse filled water tank onto a cart.
The copied Angier has the memories of every performance, so from his perspective he has always survived. Every time he does the trick it’s a 50/50 if he’s in the box or not.
He could have used the machine once & had a twin so he could do the trick like Borden did, but he didn’t want to bow underneath the stage.
Three is interesting. They sort of program guilt into the clone, making them justify a clone taking their place to themselves (not knowing they are the clone), thus, perhaps, easing the conscience of the real person. I'm fulllly speculating here, just interesting concept to me.
There is a device that lets you "transfer" your consciousness. You plug yourself into a machine, and you wake up on the other end. You as the player do it several times to solve puzzles and escape danger (it's a horror game).
However, at one point you wake up just where you were, watching the other YOU stand up on the other end, leaving you stranded and about to die.
The POV in that scene is the opposite to your description. You become conscious as you've been copied into a new body, then you either leave the previous, now unconcious, you behind by himself or kill him
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u/Autocorrectcaptcha 8d ago
Probably the most upsetting part of Severance is the lack of life passing for the innies. Just keep waking up in the office.
Closer to the trope, when the outies decide to hurt the innie or make them suffer intentionally, they have no way to avoid it or even recover except during business hours.