.self

by Christopher Sebela, Cara McGee, Rebecca Nalty, Aditya Bidikar

Synopsis:

Postscript backs up everything about a person into a file ready to be loaded in a printed body that offers one final chance to wrap up loose ends after they’ve died.

Nat Winters has finally achieved something like a perfect life. No more scraping or getting by. She has a home, a husband and a job turning into a career.

When Nat’s Postscript gets hacked and her file is torrented, her life gets set on fire by these tweaked copies of her running around the world, chasing down their own versions of her deferred dreams. As more of them begin coming to town, looking for her, Nat will be forced to confront a dozen different sides of herself and try to fix the mess they’ve made. But as she tries to contain things, Nat finds out there’s a contingent of Blanks out there who want to hurt her, even kill her, on the orders of a mysterious enemy who is looking to make this identity theft permanent.

.self starts with an interesting concept: there’s a service that allows you to record all your experiences, right up until you die. Once you die, you’re uploaded into a blank body in order to allow you to move around, meet people, and provide closure. But what if that file gets out into the world early? What if dozens of people torrent it, download you, and put create copies of you? What will those copies do?

I think there’s a lot that could be done with this concept, but .self goes with a fairly straightforward route. Some clones want to kill Nat and take over her life, some want to punish her, some want to be their own person, etc, etc. I wasn’t sold on the idea that these clones were what they said they were: one tells Nat that they’re alternate versions of herself, versions that took a different path, but how? If they’re based on her recent data, they’re all the same. And they all seem to know what they are, and have no blurring of identity between their new self and Nat.

They’ve also all been downloaded into all kinds of bodies, not ones that look like Nat, but there’s little exploration of how weird that might be.

Overall, I thought that at each turn, the most predictable choice was made, and a story that could’ve dug into identity mostly just turned out to be about a modicum of personal growth for Nat, unconvincingly presented.

The character designs are cool, though.

Rating: 2/5