Mortality is a funny thing for Nekovalkyrja.
I keep wondering what will happen when I die. Not the technical aspect, thats well understood. We have a whole branch of sciences to understand that. But what we haven’t figured out, with all this knowledge, is wether the soul exists or not.
Do Nekovalkyrja have souls? Do I have a soul? Do my sisters?
When we’re backed up into a new body, thats not us anymore. The original instance of that person died, and it can’t come back. Backups have a complete record of memories and personality, but thats just a copy of the information. If I share a file from one device to another, I’m not moving the original information around. The second device only gets a copy of that information.
As exact a copy that might be, it’ll never be the original instance of that data.
And thats what they’re doing when they back us up. They make a copy and save it to the ships memory storage. No matter how convinced my backup is that she is Junko Hasegawa, she wasn’t the person who breached the Krampus. It wasn’t her hands that fought aboard that space station.
Thats objective fact. I can’t deny it without being untruthful. But every time it crosses my thoughts, it terrifies me. Not just the dying, but the idea of someone stealing my life after its over.
I always imagine it as being stuck on the other side of an impenetrable one-way mirror. You can see everyone and the person wearing your face, but you can’t do anything. Beat your hands against it, but no one notices. They talk to the not-you as you, smile to the not-you, leave with them. Whole while your just screaming at them to come back, thats not you and all they need to do is turn around.
But then I wonder about souls.
How would they work? What would they be made of? What mechanics dictate the presence and ability of the soul to define the self?
Am I just looking for a convenient escape hatch? Just a myth made up back when our ancestors lived in caves and made stories to understand the world? Something so stained into our cultural fabric that we still have it uncountable eons into the future?
When does the soul infuse the body, and how can it tell whom it belongs to? Its possible for multiple instances of one person to be created from a backup. Is the soul a gestalt thing, capable of sharing itself between these clones, or would only one of them be fully realized? How would you even be able to tell?
…I think I might just be afraid.
Ultimately, I can't know any of this. I can’t measure any of it, even consult someone who has properly gone beyond death. Only when I pass will I know, and that secret I’ll keep like all the eternity of corpses before me. Though, that statement, its structure, assumes their will be anything left to know anything.
I know one thing, though. When I die, another Junko will rise again somewhere. She’ll fight and die and live again and again. Maybe someday, when the last war is won and Yamatai is gone, one of me will remain and bear witness.
No idea if thats a good thing or not.