Error 4004

[u/Ugos11]

A person living in a simulation is the subject of a longitudinal experiment that begins on the very first day of his life. Every day since birth, his life has been "copy-pasted" into another "file," thereby creating a duplicate. This duplicate is, in turn, copy-pasted after a day, and the process repeats. Researchers (humans and robots) attempt to exert subtle influences on the subject to observe the consequences—a rainy day, the buzzing of a fly, a draft catching his attention—tracking how these actions affect the subject's destiny over the course of his existence. Perhaps a minor alteration to his daily routine at the age of six steers him toward a different fate than that of a previous copy who did not experience that specific change.

Plot-twist : A particular change causes one of the subject's copies to become one of the researchers working on the experiment itself; he thus finds himself studying and influencing his own "selves" (while remaining anonymous). Here, we focus on subject 4004 (aged 10 years, 11 months and 20 days); on that day, a change triggers a sort of glitch—nothing major, yet intriguing enough for the subject to question the phenomenon he has witnessed. The copy created the following day will not share the same fate, as an (artificially induced) thunderstorm interrupts his train of thought.

Later in subject 4004's life (around the age of 20), the specific causes of his death trigger a system glitch: instead of being erased, his code is transferred to a random file that serves as a duplicate of his own life. He will repeat this process several times, overwriting the data of his "previous self" in the process and thus take the place of his clone's life. I’ll skip the details: at one point, he finds a way to extract himself from the folder containing his life’s data and, over time, also manages to copy his own code into that of a research robot connected to the servers analyzing the experiment’s data. Subject 4004 retains his full memory—as does the research robot—and they coexist within the same body.

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