Those just broke after a few resleeves, going mad and losing it. For the "stay alone doing nothing in this room for subjective years"... there is another point of pressure: they may have copied his mind, and run it again, and again, and again...
Ehhhh... just go full Eclipse Phase and perform psychosurgery on the ego contained in the cube to make it more willing and compliant.
EP, totes perfect for this sort of thing. Infinity is sort of like the "held back in history" part of EP. When people still cursed the darkness and were still way too attached to their meatbags. Posthumans are the new messiahs, lighting the way to find order of a new kind ... Heralds of the new order.
We are attached to our meatbags because a digital copy of a psyche is not us. It's a copy. The copy may not be able to tell the difference, but you sure will. I'll use SOMA as a reference here, specifically the last five minutes or so. Though, there is another portion involving getting information out of a copied individual.
I have zero idea what a SOMA is. Especially what the "last five minutes or so of it" refers to. I still maintain, that if a copy of me is perfect enough to pass inspection down to a genetic level and has my memories and/or muscle memories it's perfect enough to be "me". Metaphysical quandaries < drunken stupors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game) Some YouTube searches should clarify what I'm talking about. It's a walking simulator with horror/hiding mechanics.
For the rest of the universe, yeah. For yourself... nope. Thus the Lack sanity loss (or the Death SAN loss). Incidentally, the Quantum Thief trilogy of books presents a quite explicit "psychosurgery" system: grab a few "expert systems" (in fact, heavily modified copies of human minds...) and make them perform on copies of the target mind until it breaks... then roll over another copy, and another, and another... until you have all the data. The interrogation? Direct stimulation of pain and pleasure. Answer and get pleasure, the more useful the answer the more pleasure. Don't answer and get pain. And since you will run several copies from a "zero point", you can contrast their answers and see if they are telling the truth or inventing the answers... essentially save-scumming.
It may be perfect enough to successfully simulate you to a 1:1 rate. But we don't need genetic replication- just your memories on where you were the night of XX/XX/XXXX. And it's alright if you're not feeling overly talkative, none of your other copies are. It's actually very reassuring that the equipment is working! The variables will begin in three, two, one. I suppose the other side of this is sepsitorization, which is interesting, because as it only affects people with a cube. The cube backup copy being able to override the brain/body points to some horrifyingly terrible engineering.
The Heralds of the new order would be Onyx. Exactly. I started thinking to my self "how does Brave New World fit into this?"
It also strikes me that there might be anti-cube movements within these societies - probably demonized as "Atek Death Cults" in the media.
Pretty sure you don't want a copy of Fusilier Angus, that much stupidity is probably contagious, toxic, and self-aware. But there's a major thing about Cube-Clones. Revealing one was made deliberately is sufficient to probably get the entire Hexahedron disestablished. It would definitely end the careers (and resurrection chances) of anyone and everyone involved.
Nightmare fuel: the cube overrides the body connections, not the brain. So the sepsitorized user, at least those that are no aspects of Aleph, are trapped in their own body, watching horrified how they kill their own... I find that more plausible to "the cube's contents overwrite the brain's". And the CA can just take the cube, discard the body, and provide a new one. There are enough Unidrons to go around, after all... (yup, more NF: unidrones are "hollow men" using cubes inserted instead of brains remotely controlling them!!!!!). Just speculation, though... the most horrifying one I can think in a few seconds XD
Yeah, if you can capture someone you can always upload into a cube and do cube torture, that's a given, my post was more along the lines of the what you can do is significantly different. Whether you get the cube by capturing Angus alive on the battlefield and uploading later or by popping his cube with a grapefruit knife and fedexing it to Combined Army Torture Inc doesn't really matter, but the point still stands that the things you can do to Angus in a VR simulation is way more horrifying than what you can do to Angus in a shipping container in some disused dockyard somewhere
The problem with this is that banks contain cube copies already, as seen at the end of Outrage and one of the Dire Foes boxes. The RPG book has even more instances of 'we made a mistake with your cube' in character creation. Hexahedron's headache was from creating a copy, uploading into a lhost, and dispatching it into the field. I doubt they'd be in any trouble from extracting information from a digital copy of someone. On a related note, there were also some interesting interactions with the tohaa, something along the lines of 'when the real you gets back, we're going to kill you.' Seems odd to go through the trouble of creating a body just to debrief someone. And while I'm thinking of it, wasn't there some mention of a Lazarus group that had been rehabilitated after sepsitorization?
Key word in what I wrote is "deliberately". There is only supposed to be one of you running around. The current Infinity ethical system does not support forking/copying mindstate vectors (not the least of which is "which copy has the soul?"). So you get a very interesting conversation if you happen to be the accidental Cube-clone. Hope you can come to an agreement over which one of you 'survives', assuming that the memories can't be integrated. So when the Hexahedron went to the Cube-vault and created a fresh copy of their operative, it went from 'horrible accident' to 'deliberate malice'.
@Section9 I kind of wish that they had played up the unnatural nature of that in Outrage more - like Jethro and Knauf were sharing dreams, could sense where each other was, that kind of thing.
Well, they could predict where the other one was, in the sense of, "if I was over there, I would be [there]".
Obviously, Micro$oft was the one involved in the initial engineering. "Only the registered users will ever have access to this device, there's no reason to ask anyone wanting to have unlimited control over the system for their credentials."
To be fair, that's a very common assumption for software engineers who are not specifically into infosec
