Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Lady_Silvermoon]

regarding the themepark full of children remark
while it's likely there are children that are of the endless, we are told that the endless take form of their happiest moment in life
iirc some of the child NPCs you assist in the side quests turn into adults

And some died as kids, probably of levin sickness. But knowing some of the kids I wiped out probably died at a later age wouldn't really make me feel any better about wiping them from existence to demoralize a program. I needed a two day break from the story after that part.

The real Otis died. We watched it happen. There was the Otis who was alive when he was transferred to a robot with his soul intact and there's the copy-Otis that exists in Living Memory. That if nothing else should serve as proof that the Endless are just copies of dead people. The Endless are fully aware of what they are as well, which is likely why they are able to pass peacefully. If the Endless were more like Otis and were transferred to another state while alive and continued to live, that would be one thing but the Endless died and their memories were ripped out and placed onto a server where they continued to act out "happiness" to please a pampered princess, who is also dead.

The Endless are "fully aware" you say? So...like self-aware? They know who they are, what they are, where they are, like people? A copy of a person is still a person. You put me in a transporter, make two copies, you have two people. A dead person is still a person. The characters wouldn't be upset by the Alexandrian use of souls if that weren't the case. And the soul cells aren't even sentient and self-aware like the Endless are. And if the Alexandrians were destroying the souls the way we destroyed the Endless, I would see that as a monstrous act. Right now, my lack of objection to the soul system is it's opt-in. If the Alexandrians started sucking up souls out the aetherial sea to use as power ups, I'd take issue with that, cause those are sentient beings, chilling in the afterlife, watching us, making comments and sometimes saving the universe. You can't just do anything you want to them cause they are dead. And if people wanted to chill in the amusement park instead of the aetherial sea, I'd leave them be rather than delete them as a workaround to bad programming.

Sphene isn't preserving the Endless because she's spoiled, she's preserving them because she's subject to a badly programmed imperative that was so poorly written that it's deleting her actual memories in order to fulfill it's objective. She's what this whole project is for, and the AI meant to preserve her is deleting her so that it can do a genocide. And instead of caring about the code that's impairing her judgement and subjugating her will, the focus is deleting the Endless cause they are "unnatural and twisted."

Is Alexa a “sentient being?” Is Siri? It’s an AI bot, “trained” with the memories of formerly living people. As convincing as they are, they are artificial copies of people who are already gone.

So the same bot that's deleting it's primary objective is also running a rebellion against itself and orchestrating it's own destruction while also conducting calculations to merge with another shard to preserve the things it's strongarming us to destroy? While also having PTSD flashes about the death of the princess it's actively deleting to preserve the people it's actively destroying? Preservation: Worst.Programmers.Ever.

We should have called Cid.