#and the way that they're framed both inside and outside of the original narrative can heavily influence us if we run into it too often

[darkysilverwing]

I find it hard to believe that it’s the freedom ending. If Chaz’s words are to be(e) believed, then every core pulled out is a person killed. From there it’d be hard to go to VVR2, since Butter’s headsets show people like Elon still alive. There’s two ways to merge, either through accepting Chaz’s offer and losing the fight. I’d feel it’s likely to be the former, since both the aforementioned people still living, and I don’t think the employees of Activitude would be particularly happy about working with someone who killed their peers. There’s also the fact that the freedom ending was also called the murder ending in either the alpha or beta, though it may not matter since it didn’t make it to the finished game.

I’m pretty sure it’s said somewhere that Eliza was brought over to Scottsdale? Like Hernandez, although I forget where it’s said. I guess that means she’s dead, with the whole deletion.

I personally don’t agree with the whole coin flip SOMA thing. The Board made copies of the citizens before the shutdown, which would mean that the originals experience the shutdown while the copies would only have the memories up until around the announcement. I also feel if it was like that, there’d be less panic, and despair and more hints to such. There’s also confirmation of a soul of sorts, with Gavin’s body and all. As for Bee, that may just be because Bee is inhabiting an avatar, kind of like with all of those Chaz in the ping pong(?) room. It would also kind of make Marty’s whole speech somewhat invalid, which I don’t think the game would make.

Also, fun fact! Cryogenic freezing would destroy your body just as much as the other choices. It would destroy your cells, as the water inside you would freeze and expand. Of course, we don’t know what other advancements the world in VVR has made, but since all other options seem like a final goodbye to the body, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same.

I enjoy talking about vvr with you, so I hope this doesn’t come of as negatively argumentative.

I'm sensing no negative arguments here lol ^^ but I can break down some of these arguments.

Like if you start removing cores chaz starts sounding quite desperate to have you merge, now this might be because merging will stop you from destroying everything but at the same time if you merge with every core but one removed or you don't remove any core and just let him merge you at the start all the same characters are there and bee is still allowed to do work, which makes me think that death might not be the same in virtual space and they're fine working with a murderer after maybe a few tweaks to some base programming.

I mean in either ending we basically murder Hernandez but in vvr2 he's up and kicking, so it's possible that as long as chaz is online there's ways to bring them back. A bit of temporary murder. As for the reset ending I do find it difficult to determine if it could be cannon to the second game. There might be ways to frame that narrative but the more I look at it the more unlikely it seems.

I do think bee deserves a little murder though, as a treat.

As for the soma thing, in soma the humans kinda decided that the humans in the machine were no less them than they were, and thus it was kinda like a coin flip, heads they'd be in the machine, tails they'd still be outside. Then the humans would "Rig the coin flip" by entering the machine, having their minds copied over, and then as soon as the copying was finished they'd kill themselves in a weird philosophical mentality of maintaining continuity. However this is just a philosophical standpoint, one I'm sure the AI would have been on board with if deletion were instantaneous and not a slow, drawn out apocalypse.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by the revelation of a soul via gavin's body? And the bee interpretation seems a bit weird, like bee's inhabiting an avatar, which then gets destroyed and then they just... rubber band into chaz once they're no longer bound inside of that avatar? I mean you could possibly make an argument for that but the tone shift made it feel a bit more serious from my perspective.

And as for Marty's little speech about them being upset because the humans trusted them and now they're being murdered, it could all be a bit of digital philosophy that also comes with the idea of copying an individual. I mean the original and the copy are no less real from eachother, both feel real to themselves, and so murdering one or the other is still a terrible thing to do even if there is a backup. Kinda like murdering a twin I guess.

Now onto Cryogenic freezing, when you pick that option the techs actually tell you that the particular option chosen is actually unavailable because no one ever comes back, which implies that there's the option to come back but since everyone chooses cryogenics "Just in case" they've probably got way too many bodies. So I think Cryogenics are a viable option in this universe.

An few equally fun facts about cryogenics though are the facts that there's a type of frog that can secrete a chemical that freezes the frog very slowly and instead of developing sharp ice crystals the frog produces more rounded ice crystals, which allow it to stay frozen 8 months out of the year. Research is being done to see if this process can be applied to humans but may take several years of testing and tweaking.

Also, it's sometimes suggested that one of the first ever microwaves were designed to help thaw out cryogenically frozen hamsters, because the previous method of warming them up with red hot spoons did work, but it also caused serious burns. The hamsters could survive having up to 60% of the water in their body freezing and still come out basically unharmed. This is why I sometimes fantasize about colony ships where humans are sent out in space to explore the cosmos, but instead of humans the people on the mission just transfer their minds into that of hamsters and we get little intergalactic hamster astronauts.