video.

[dissent]

[ It's late, and Anders is up on the surface, face lit occasionally by the rolling crackle of the sky. But he's not thinking about this strange place called Earth, his eyes distant. ]

Has anyone else met someone they... knew in their Matrix, but who was extracted from a different Matrix?

[ He's fumbling with the question, not sure how to ask what he wants to ask and not daring to voice what underlies it. ]

There are other versions of us still living their lives. It feels like I'm ...

[ A pause, and he decides not to follow up with whatever point he was planning, sighs instead, switches the feed off and tries to work out if there's some way to delete the recording from the network. ]

Comments

[echopraxia]

Identical in each way. It is a function of the matrix that I was held in.

( the context for it doesn't make it less unsettling. )

It is so easy, to move me from one to one to one. So perhaps it is so easy to replace me there, and then, also here.

[dissent]

[ If anything the context makes it more unsettling. ]

So, you had multiple bodies?

[ He's so lost. ]

[echopraxia]

Not at the same time. I would die. And the body would die. My - self. Would be moved to a new one, and I wake up. To me, in this matrix, I think it is all one body, that heals. It is not.

( ...yeah. )

[dissent]

[ She can't see it, but Anders shivers. Unfamiliar with cloning, what she's describing sounds like the darkest sort of magic. But he can't even imagine what it's like to be one of the many, one person in a long line of people, even if she had thought she was the same person reviving. ]

In a way, none of those earlier experiences were ever yours. Just an idea.

[ Wow, tactless. But he goes on, fumbling for some awkward reassurance. ]

That means you're the most real here, where you are.

[echopraxia]

( there's a very long pause before she says, )

I do not believe that the body is the whole of the self. But I believe that I am real.