Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 9 - Selves

A common narrative string throughout several of the stories of Futures Gleaming Darkly (bit.ly/futuresgleamingdarkly) is that of the self. I am no philosopher and many greater minds than mine have dedicated their lives to determining the boundaries of personality and identity. Psychology, Sociology, religion, there are just so many factors. I did not attempt to add to their great legacy.

However, it is a subject that I wanted to showcase and explore. Namely, we have Fundamt, Selves, Selvesquest, Kontroller, and The Doctors Fenster that highlighted this theme. SPOILER WARNING!

In Fundamt, Patience watches different moments in her life on a television screen, as if she’s watching a show. In the story, there is the “Present Patience” and the “Past Patience”. I had fun figuring out a way to distinguish the two. She has memories of these events, but she is watching them from the outside, years in the future. Is she the same person as the one that appears on the screen? Are any of us the same person we were yesterday, last week, last year, etc.?

Selves features a couple using a technology that allows them to manifest a representation of themselves and feel one another’s touch in a virtual reality landscape. However, I have not touched on the fact that one can edit their Self, the avatar that appears in the space. The protagonist notes that the other has changed their physique in slight, but noticeable ways. How are and aren’t we the selves that we present online? Especially in my younger days, in the Wild West of the World Wide Web, I did not always tell the truth about myself. I created and destroyed any number of characters to play, as I saw it.

This leads us into Selvesquest, the MMORPG embodiment of the Selves technology. Building off of the theme of Selves, this story focuses on gaming in particular. Games allow their players to do things and be things that they otherwise couldn’t. For the protagonist of the story, Sylvia, this is to be a baker. In a world of sword slashing and monsters, she just wants to bake. Where is the line between the player and the character and how do they bleed into one another? I’ve experienced this a lot playing D&D. My character may be a half elf bard that can play an autoharp and perform spells (in case you’re wondering, I’m not and can’t do any of these things), but I put a little bit of myself into him. In my everyday life, I try my best to be a social bard and help others, as the in-game character does.

Similarly, Kontroller finds Iris Birch able to jump into another body in the real world. The vast majority of us want to change at least one aspect of our physical forms. If we were able to "rent" another body, one that was stronger by design, would we use it responsibly?

And lastly, we have The Doctors Fenster. In this story, a clone is created from the DNA of a cadaver. This is something that has been explored in science fiction many times, but it has always fascinated me. In the story, the body they use as a template is a person that had a life and family. Their creation is a copy of that person. Obviously, this means they are not the same. I hint at the end that being a reconstruction of the previous person, this new person has at least some of their predecessor’s memories. If I were to go missing and be replaced by a clone, how would anyone know the difference? Even if it behaved differently, would everyone just chalk it up to stress or my time while missing? At what point would the clone be able to inhabit my life and at that point, what is the difference between us, if everyone in my life acknowledges it as me and it goes on as me? It would only matter to the me that the clone was based off of.

I enjoy the mental pretzels that come from these quandaries and they are usually the best part of scifi. I don’t have an answer to any of the questions that I’ve posed, but I enjoy asking them nonetheless. I hope that my stories have given you the fuel for an introspective fireside chat.