Allyx/Aether

It also makes me curious if the process of a person's memory being digitized and then uploaded into some kind of artificial space is what causes some of the memory fogginess—though, if they are simply code, it could also mean that their memories themselves can be edited. It kind of blurs the boundary of what is artificial and what is real, and with the added context of the humans likely being made up of the same zeroes and ones Caine is, it makes their fundamental misunderstanding of each other even more compelling.

But anyway. They are doing a SOMA. Kinger even mentions that Scratch (one of the OG programmers) had a special project he was working on, likely motivated by the fact he was dying from a brain tumor. I bet the dude wanted to create a digital world he could upload his consciousness into so he could live on in some capacity. It makes me curious why each of the circus goers would get a brain scan the first place. Maybe they were volunteers or testers for the program? Or maybe they were sick/injured and were copied before their "real" bodies died.

When analogue signal is converted to digital signal there is always loss. Thats because analogue signal is communicated through waves whereas digital signal is communicated through 1s and 0s. In order to convert waves to 1s and 0s, the wave has to be split into sections. During the splitting process, loss occurs where the split is (bc you’re converting a continuous signal into a discrete signal). However after the splitting process the digital signal does not degrade. It stays perfect until the hardware itself starts to deteriorate (eg a cd, the signal stays perfect but the cd itself deteriorates over time). Compare this to analogue signal, which decays every single time it’s repeated (eg the signal in a vhs tape. Bc it’s coded onto magnetic tape, the code is the magnetic tape and will inevitably deteriorate)

Highly analogous to memory. Analogue memory would be the natural body’s use of memory, deteriorating over time. A brain scan would experience loss when it splits the analogue memory into a digital memory, hence why they cannot remember some things

"I'm sorry," Xie Lian said. "Something like this has to be made clear."