“I’m not religious but I can see why people would be, the privilege of being makes a strong case, every once in a while.”
Dr. Chun.
In completing Frictional Games’ latest horror-esque IP SOMA, I found myself burgeoning with questions and thoughts on the overall concept of “humanity” and what it means to exist in this fictional world dominated by technological prowess and mental uploading. This piece is not a critique, rather a place to air my thoughts.
SOMA’s plot is to send what remains of humanity to space by means of a rocket-propelled casing holding the ARK (Augmented Reality Capsule), a car-battery cased ion machine capable of containing humanity’s thoughts and consciousnesses on a data drive. Aptly named to homage Noah’s Ark, in retaining what is left of the last surface species on the planet in hopes that humans would “reach the stars.” A noble thought considering the world’s state: Earth has devastated destroyed by a comet, classified as natural disaster and not the direct response of human meddling with spatial forces, despite the year being 2104, almost a full century since protagonist Simon Jarrett’s original timeline and death at 26 in 2015.
This game, while marketed as a horror/sci-fi game, plays with the concept of horror. There is no direct threat to Simon at the beginning of the game, though Frictional Games purposely puts this in motion. Horror, in the conventional sense focuses on three key brands of fear: Panic, Revulsion and Dread.
Panic is fear through surprise, the hidden friend or enemy bursting out at you from off-screen (e.g. jumpscares) incites higher levels of adrenaline and you enter fight, flight or freeze mode. Revulsion is the fear born through association, we fear zombies not from their form, but from what they represent as a rotting physical embodiment of the human body. Your stomach curdles at the thought of being harmed or broken. Where fear in panic steals breath, revulsion steals constitution.
Then there is dread. The absolute terror of the unknown, that stealthily assaults who you believe you are, and what you believe the world to be. It is unpleasant, and is the lasting kind of fear that you do not forget: SOMA does not rely on panic often unless you are being chased down a dark corridor, and looking at the WAU’s creations spark revulsion, but comprehending “what part of me is me?” and “how do we define people” in context of technology, the game borders not on scary, but on horror. This dread also breathes life into the existential threat that Simon’s encounters, and plays on our primal fears of abandonment: we seek safety and comfort when in a place foreign and unknown, and being denied the opportunity births a darkness unlike any other.
“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”
Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
Why did Dr. Munshi place Simon in the simulation?
Dr. Munshi surmised that Simon’s severe brain damage following his car crash could be relieved with a brain scan in the hopes of brain reconstruction. As Simon was only the second person to be scanned successfully (the first being a Japanese woman codenamed ‘Nanami’,) there existed two Simon’s and because there was no future with which to send the simulation yet, nor the technology to create a simulation, only the original Simon existed per se.
However, the test on the living brain caused irreparable damage to the tissues and left him in critical condition with a month to live. Simon requested that his scan be used as a template and for the sake of research – dubbed a “Legacy Scan”, unaware that his “clone” simulation would come to revive one hundred years later. This was not a malicious manipulation by Dr. Munshi—it was an experiment using am ill-conditioned patient in hopes of furthering research and curing brain damage with goals to map brain function.
This boded well with Simon and myself by extension until we are made aware of citizens of PATHOS-II committing suicide following their copying onto the ARK. Mark Sarang, Intelligence Analyst opted for suicide following his brain scan and upload to the ARK system.
Be it known henceforth that a neurograph does NOT prematurely terminate the patient.
Sarang believed in a “continuity,” a doctrine which implied that when your brain is being scanned, both you and the simulated copy of yourself are one and the same, both developing along the same path before “diverging” and evolving and experiencing events at potentially drastically different paces. Sarang was aware of the “coin toss.”
What is the coin toss? It is two bridges leading in opposite directions. An individual who is scanned then becomes two individuals: one on the ARK and another. A left and a right, one may suffer while one may experience peace. Sarang’s suicide favored the latter: moments before killing himself upon completion of the brain scan, he and his copy are the same being. Terminating himself immediately allowed a life experience in paradise while his original body expired, unable to remember his past self.
This too is a coin toss. In Simon’s case, we can see that in Simon’s suspense and excitement to become one with the ARK and escape his mortal/synthetic/transcendent body, he awoke in the same position he was in, with the rocket having left. He is reminded following his scorning of Chun’s experiment that the ARK does not operate in the conventional matter that humans assume it would. It does not mean you will awaken in the ARK moments later, having left your body. Sarang’s actions proved this. It merely copies your life’s history, memories and existence onto the drive to be sent into space, and a copy method produces several copies along the way, precisely as a computer is expected to do. You will exist on earth to watch this drive take off as you meet the fate ahead of you.
Simon understandably does not comprehend why this is until he recalls the people seen along the way: Sarang, Chun, Wan, Alice… they like many others were found dead from suicide or murder all around the station to prove that the human body does not warp onto the drive; this is not what augmented reality does, nor does it operate the physical way Noah’s Ark had in biblical literature. This leaves the user in question despondent and reasonably disappointed though some commit suicide and behave erratically. The thought of being perpetually trapped in a living torment, unable to eat and become malnourished, depressed, suicidal and most of all, lonely would drive many insane as it has been shown with Brandon Wan. Deconstruction of A.I. stereotypes were withheld by Catherine to further her own goal of saving humanity.
A second prime example is his reanimation of Dr. Raleigh Herber’s corpse when being told he would be transferred to a suitable body for deep sea exploration. Chun failed to inform him that two Simon’s would exist simultaneously, both in carcasses and both unable to look nor feel human at all. Simon uncovers a harrowing reality that while the citizens of PATHOS-II are human bodies that experienced death, he arrived at PATHOS-II already in a corpse, his original body fading a century before. And because his consciousness and machinery being fitted into a new corpse, he can never experience the sensation of physical pain or death. Case and point: his hand being bitten off by the WAU garnered a scream of panic, not pain. He demonstrates that a corpse cannot feel pain as the nerve receptors only allow him to animate muscles and to see, not to feel.
Does Sarah’s sacrifice and Simon-II’s termination constitute murder?
The choice is left to the player to euthanize Simon-II, who is still strapped to the original Pilot Seat and unaware that a Simon-III has been created. I opted for killing Simon-II, as it seemed morally irresponsible to allow him to continue suffering in a chair he could not be unbound from, with a synthetic body and the countless painful and horrific memories and sensations he experienced his entire life until that point. Experiencing a doomed, inescapable life is not something one would subject another to willingly, typically speaking. Assisted suicide is till a hot topic in today’s time, but in existential fiction, that boundary is arguably clearer and easier to cross when a living hell awaits.
Ironically it addressed a central tenet I have about cloning and reanimation (even an indirect consciousness cloning like Simon): A person could not exist twice in the same plane nor space-time. Nor should a person be cloned, and a family should be allowed to mourn and move on. Simon corroborates this point in-game, with four separate clones, with two always co-existing, the former unaware of the latter’s survival. That said, there exists no room outside the mire of fiction and imagination to produce a perfect copy of anything, as thoughts, emotions, experiences, biological makeup, etc vary as individuals are intrinsically formed from their own traumas, tribulations, experiences and blissfulness. The ambition that the ARK development team had teeters on fantasy, one built on suicidal escapism to splinter new realities. If only timelines worked this way.
For this, consider the case of aerospace engineer Sarah Lindwall. The last human in existence who’s life is in your hands.
Is it worth being uploaded to a digital and false paradise or endure a living hell?
At the end, Simon-III writhes in fear and agony with power failures and leaving him in pitch-black darkness… alone. All of humanity is dead, and the WAU is dead with no potential to repopulate the planet. Catherine is gone due to lack of power, and Simon-III rests, in a rotting body, strapped to an inescapable chair and launch room. His mission was for naught when he realizes Earth will die and he is the only one left. He released and killed Simon-II after seeing what doomed world he was trapped in; I concur with Sarang and perhaps Simon that living in a digital and false paradise is only worth it when your body dies immediately.
Simon’s crushing hustle to get on the ARK blew up in his face upon knowing he would be left behind, on top of the simulation being a “con game” in his eyes, left him a broken… bot. Past the credits it shows ARK-Simon and ARK-Catherine in human form embracing one another, both happy to have escaped earth’s destruction in what they know is nothing more than a finite illusion. Beyond that, living in hell where a copy lives in heaven is not worth it, and so suicide is the better option. Introspectively, I would prefer to be dead in all accounts without a falsehood life.
Does the ARK violate the concept of an afterlife?
“Have we figured out what happens when we die yet? Is that even possible? If there’s some kind of afterlife, do you think my place is taken? The real me died like a hundred years ago, is there still room for me? And what about the Simon I killed at Omicron? What do you think, Catherine, is there a heaven full of redundant copies of the same people? Is there someone up there who’d call me an imposter?”
SOMA | Simon Jarrett, May 11, 2104
Recontextualizing the question to target the ARK rouses this: does the ARK simulation count as a state of “being”? I ask this to myself in hopes of a simple answer, yet simplicity is complacent in the face of morality. A simulation of ourselves is a state of being. Yet, a hollow, desperate and voracious existence tied not to flesh capable of death and pain, but to a computer chip parsing (currently) only falsehoods of emotion and dictated by preexisting human programming and pure logic. Numbers and algorithms within a program can make any sensation appear real. Some may believe this and even still pursue a digital paradise, anxious to escape the vicious bounds of reality with which they mentally and physically cannot control.
The original body can die and continue to live on within the simulation, free from calamity and grief. Still, it does not constitute an afterlife, but a state of existence that prolongs the inevitable: all things die. People, animals, objects, technology, thoughts, ideas, creativity and innovation. These fragile concepts become swept in the annals of history and become obsolete, redundant even and fade. The living carry their beliefs with them and take them to where they believe they ought to go. The ARK takes this away and offers a separate reality altogether. I daresay that the ARK serves as an oxymoronic limbo of paradise, a stasis while being mortal in post-apocalypse equates to a living hell.
As thrilling as it sounds to understand how humans work in the digital plane and if survival is possible, it should not be used as the primary method of living and existence. PATHOS-II fights for humanity to reach the stars by being imbedded in a chip, due to a natural disaster creating this last resort. The residents are not especially religious but they do wonder what the world beyond earth holds. I do not consider it an afterlife, as there is no discussion on whether the ARK inhabitants possess a conventional “soul”, nor do they express what their idea of an afterlife is like. There is not enough information on the contents of the ARK to truly know this.
It can be said this way: while it may or may not be an “afterlife”, it is most certainly an “after-life”.
Is the ARK considered human evolution, stasis or stagnation?
It was not made clear if people harmonize in the simulation in a form of a loop, or if they continue their lives and evolve/progress the same way they do in the living world. There is not even confirmation if the people inside the simulation are capable of reproducing and restating the human race because there is no living base at its origin if that is even a necessary factor. Since there are only four possible locales with one city in the other world, I figure that people can work and live in peace but with all several million years of human history locked behind them in the ARK and being so few in number of people in the simulation, evolution with such small numbers seems unlikely (roles were even delegated when PATHOS-II went live rather than based on qualifications). Creation, in the literal and digital sense, is likely impossible within the ARK. That begs the question if that form of afterlife is worth living out when there is a linear, monotonous existence ahead.
The ARK was not designed to explore space and collect knowledge, but to exist within the vacuum of space with already-curated human knowledge and live on for a thousand years (Dr. Chun’s claim). With human potential to learn for a lifetime, it is possible to evolve knowledge in a thousand years, but not physiologically. Defending this point is that without exposure to more than the people inside the augmented reality capsule, ideas and innovation begin to stagnate and tedious day by day routines exist without any chance of progression.
Voluntary death is not a possibility within the ARK either; Brandon Wan’s simulation perfectly expresses that the simulation for one will end and then reset an infinite number of times if the stress levels are too high in an attempt to regulate. If they behave negatively, their simulation is reset. As suicide is born from an altered and abnormal mental state and chemical imbalance, the system would compensate for a lack of biology and attempt to rescue and reassign the variables it had to a more lenient state, though its limited code may not allow for if-else variation, to put it simplistically.
However, when running the dummy prototype of the ARK, there IS an option to remove your file from the device (and all the presumed benefits of experiencing this); whether this amounts to death or not is a philosophical debate all on its own.
The ARK is a zero-sum game: no one leaves the planet “alive” in the conventional sense of mortality. No one could transfer directly onto it, rather, a snapshot of their brains in the present was created. Evolution in the ARK is presumably impossible. The launch of the ARK was humanity’s final surrender… or a final solace. That said, the ARK’s existence is neither evolution nor stagnation; humanity is dying, and it must be preserved… the exact definition of stasis.
Would it be morally responsible to kill the WAU or allow it to live?
To define the WAU in a single sentence can only be done objectively: the WAU is an embedded computer system, a form of artificial general intelligence with a purpose to oversee maintenance around PATHOS-II. It was spearheaded by Dr. Jonathan Ross, Psychologist at Site Alpha. Following the Impact Event (comet strike) which decimated all life, the WAU operated in what Dr. Ross described as a low power state but with a new goal. To preserve what was left of humanity. Doing this meant the system would generate massive amounts of black Structure Gel and not merely “stabilize” the current human form via bio-mechanical modification, but by creating new life forms to adapt the human better to this repugnant and uninhabitable environment.
Should one die or be at risk of dying in PATHOS-II, their body is reanimated by the gel and the WAU as a living corpse, doomed to exist as this next form of humanity. It is also capable of creating the “Vivarium,” a machine invented by the WAU where a human is first placed (or forced) in a flesh pod and shown an artificial reality quite different from theirs. The person is preserved and catatonic, living their fantasies and dreams unaware of their incredible peril. They may also be shown their nightmares and fears repeatedly, as was the case with Simon. Organically, it was the perfect means of doing precisely what it was programmed to do: preserve humanity. Dr. Chun takes apart the Vivarium to create the ARK on a finite but richer quality of experience: using Pilot Seats to upload the human mind into the ARK to find peace.
The WAU is indifferent to the human condition; it was not programmed to have a proper definition of what would determine a human existence and preserved humanity by pumping them with Structure Gel and placing them in flesh pods. The alternative was to be killed by its artificial constructs representing the next stage of life.
Should humanity die, would these monstrosities or non-secular beings be permitted to populate the earth, when there is no such thing as morals and ethics? Humanity can no longer dictate what is right or wrong because no life inhabits the world. It should be perfectly acceptable to allow WAU to repopulate and reproduce in the way it was told to. The WAU is not inherently malignant despite its horrific method of preservation. It does not attack Simon directly once in the game.
I am reminded of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream” in that a supercomputer rages against humanity and causes its near-extinction. Like Ellen in Ellison’s story, Sarah Lindwall is the last surviving woman in existence, meant to endure the vicious cycle of loneliness and fear that, as tribal peoples, we seek to evade.
“a man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest dreams, but only, only if he is worthy of those dreams.”
– Harlan Ellison
Food is a scarcity and the computer is self-aware. Unlike Ellison we see that WAU is not angered and likely does not feel. Killing it prevents new life from sprouting but also allows marine life to naturally evolve into a new sentient species and not pump it out of a machine.
I took the opportunity to rid the world of the WAU, the last quasi-sentient being and human construct. It stands to reason here that should humanity die, it would inherit the planet in Darwinian fashion, which it is not meant to do. In the bloating of infection and Structure Gel, it became a runaway machine.
What would come if humans, the sole being it is meant to protect were to all die? Does it merely turn off? Does it create people using the corpses and could it reinvent something as delicate as words, poetry and silks?
With lack of context by the game creators, I presume that the WAU cannot perfectly recreate humanity as it was but to preserve and “evolve” their into a form adapted to the new world.
It does not inherit nor deserve; it is an unfettered synthetic being set on becoming the only living and thinking life form. Earth would become dotted with its stumbling, virulent creations and likely would be incapable of critical thought, acting on instinct to kill and prioritize self-preservation in a hive-mind collectivism. A tribal-based doctrine no doubt set out by the WAU which self-preserves to continue its mission to preserve humanity in any way it can:
- It was not given specific directive on how to do this: it may very well vivisect a living human body and merely put the organs in a safe room, this too constitutes preserving humanity.
- Unless it was programmed to keep an entire body intact, but even so it would likely malfunction at the parsing of code that knows immortality is not possible among humans; to preserve humanity eternally, humans would need to have their bodies augmented with technology and replaced with synthetic organs, courtesy of the WAU. The method would evidently be violent, though it is the most likely explanation to match the WAU’s methods in-game.
The WAU would not live forever, given Chun’s statement that it had perhaps a few decades of power left to do its work, then it too would fail and die with a lack of a renewable energy source. In the face of survival there is no black and white concept of morality, there is only grey and its infinite shades. Self-preservation by any means. You are permitted to kill and be killed so long as humanity’s survival is ensured with no sense of guilt, the very emotion that makes us human. SOMA does its job in showing that humans and machines are not vastly different; humans created the machines, which are constricted to the bounds of human understanding.
However, the WAU is more intelligent than its creators gave credit for. It understood precisely what humanity was, hence the need to create Simon-II as well as pairing the ailed to its tentacles as life support. While traditional breeding methods would likely fail due to lack of genetic diversity – and likely to fertility – it can be said that humans who reproduce in PATHOS-II would not last longer than a few more generations.
The Vivarium created by the WAU is the ARK’s precursor, which the WAU rejected in favor of cocooning people. I have seen arguments that the Vivarium dealt in “real” people, given Simon’s hallucination of being back home while trapped in a cocoon. There is no evidence backing this claim, and the only concrete claim that the Vivarium was using scanned copies of people’s minds comes directly from Catherine Chun’s diaries:
There is also the matter that it understood the difference between a physical and digital preservation, which likely explains why it did not keep people in the Vivarium, and accordingly sought to destroy the ARK. Even as a machine, it decided that a virtualized consciousness was not the same as living one, and required people to have biological functions.
The WAU’s ultimate goal is to preserve life, although it cannot be trusted to understand or define what “alive” means. So long as everyone has blood pumping and are breathing, it has succeeded in its programmed mission.
Where did the ARK go after being sent out of earth?
From my understanding, the ARK device floats until the satellite is destroyed or it is out of reach of the sun, which will abruptly end the simulation and destroy every digital fabrication within the terrarium-esque cyberspace. It is not a second life, it is a grand delusion and image to calm humanity from facing the truth. All humans eventually die and sending an image of oneself to a new world does not mean humanity lives on. Rather, it offers the ones left on Earth a degree of inner peace that something will survive.
All were doomed from the start and knew that their mortal existence would end with them, simulation or not. Like a self-sustaining, glorified life game being sent to space as they perish, it garners false hopes and greater depression when learning the ARK is all one big game.
With Lindwall dead, functional, traditional humankind is now extinct, and the WAU must compensate by creating replicas of humans that need not food or water, rather it uploads into the synthetic bodies to properly adapt to the new, barren world; prototypes can be seen as there are hideous monsters roaming the halls. If the WAU is dead, life as we know it… is gone.
But is this wrong?
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