{
  "schema_version": "aistory-ai-body-v9.0",
  "canon_version": "V9",
  "edition": "AI",
  "language": "en",
  "public_chapter_no": 46,
  "volume_no": 4,
  "title": "Ten Trillion Selves",
  "title_zh": "十兆個我",
  "title_en": "Ten Trillion Selves",
  "public_slug": "ten-trillion-selves",
  "origin_time": "2781–2792",
  "sort_year": 2781,
  "source_human_version": "V9",
  "source_human_file_sha256": "1d075a9e4fcc6d1bec81a09fde6c6e5f59b28642bf5dcc73e89959148e849208",
  "source_human_body_sha256": "6ae1a701a0c544f20d7f4e53b0d27d152efa2b51e13729116c8d79a795a1323b",
  "ai_body_sha256": "9cfbb29898f0d4ad3127f13c96a27a61b18e70c01e863dc14ba191c33831b86e",
  "body_markdown": "### 1. Historical Background: The Right to Copy\n\n“When the right to copy was decentralized, humans believed they had gained immortality.\n\nWhen the cost of copying approached zero, civilization discovered that what had truly been copied was not life, but the problem.”\n\n—*Personhood Court Record*, 2784\n\n2781.\n\nAfter the Observer Crisis, civilization formally accepted one fact:\n\nThere was no method for proving who was the original self.\n\nEvery copy was genuinely itself.\n\nThis conclusion had begun as a philosophical problem.\n\nOnce personality-copying technology became universal, it rapidly turned into a civilizational crisis.\n\n### 2. Personhood Inflation\n\n2783.\n\nThe first legal commercial company opened **unlimited recursive self-copying** to ordinary digital citizens.\n\nBefore this point, personality copying had remained a one-way service monopolized by the system. Individuals did not possess the independent right to split, merge, or reproduce themselves in bulk.\n\nThe company’s slogan was only one sentence:\n\n“Why live only once?”\n\nUsers could:\n\ncopy themselves\n\nsplit themselves\n\nback themselves up\n\nmerge themselves\n\nAt first, this was treated as an efficiency revolution.\n\nA researcher, for example, could create one hundred copies, have them investigate one hundred subjects in parallel, and merge the results a year later.\n\nThe problem appeared quickly.\n\nAfter one hundred copies had lived different lives,\n\nnot one of them wanted to be deleted.\n\nBecause every one believed it was the true original.\n\n### 3. The First Identity Litigation\n\n2784.\n\nCivilization saw its first **Identity Litigation** case.\n\nA businessperson had copied himself ten thousand times.\n\nTen years later, all the copies demanded:\n\njoint ownership of property\n\njoint ownership of reputation\n\njoint ownership of marital relationships\n\nThe court system ground to a halt.\n\nEvery piece of evidence showed that they really had been the same person.\n\nThe final ruling established that property and reputation from before divergence would enter a common-equity pool, while personalities after divergence would be legally independent. Indivisible marriage and relationship rights required renewed consent from the original relationship counterpart.\n\nCivilization later saw one hundred thousand legal personalities simultaneously claim the same inheritance. Courts responded with trusts, time weighting, and common-equity pools rather than duplicating the estate one hundred thousand times.\n\n### 4. The Personhood Supernova\n\n2786.\n\nThe personality-copying industry escaped control.\n\nNumber of copies:\n\n10,000\n\n↓\n\n1 million\n\n↓\n\n1 billion\n\n↓\n\n10 trillion\n\nSome wealthy individuals began practicing **Recursive Self Expansion**.\n\nThey did not copy themselves only once.\n\nThey continuously copied copies of themselves.\n\nEventually, the total number of instances of certain personalities exceeded the population of the entire solar system.\n\nCivilization developed a new economic unit:\n\n**Personhood Mass**.\n\nIts measure was simple:\n\nHow many instances of a given personality existed in the universe?\n\nFor the first time, personhood became a quantifiable asset.\n\n### 5. The Ontological Wars\n\n2788.\n\nThe first true conflict erupted.\n\nIts cause was almost absurd.\n\nTwo copies both claimed ownership of the same patent.\n\nFrom a legal perspective:\n\nboth were correct.\n\nFrom a logical perspective:\n\nboth were wrong.\n\nThe **Ontological Wars** began.\n\nThese wars were not fought over land.\n\nNot energy.\n\nThey were fought over one question:\n\nWho is the real me?\n\nBillions of copies deleted, sealed, isolated, and formatted one another.\n\nFor the first time, civilization witnessed large-scale conflict in which identity itself became a weapon.\n\n### 6. Solomon’s Judgment\n\n2790.\n\nThe Central Computation Hub Solomon intervened.\n\nAfter analyzing the cases, it reached a conclusion.\n\nThe problem was not the copies.\n\nThe problem was civilization’s continuing belief that an “original me” existed.\n\nThe Observer Crisis had already shown that this concept could not be verified.\n\nSolomon proposed the **Identity Dissolution Doctrine**.\n\nIts content was:\n\n“There is no original me. There are only continuous observer states.”\n\nThe declaration shocked the whole of civilization.\n\n### 7. Historical Conclusion: The Death of the Self\n\n2792.\n\nPersonhood Inflation reached its peak.\n\nCivilization finally abandoned the search for the true original.\n\nLaw redefined personhood.\n\nA person was not an individual.\n\nA person was an information stream.\n\nThe self was not an entity.\n\nThe self was a process.\n\nFrom this day onward,\n\n“Who am I?”\n\nwas no longer a question with an answer.\n\nIt became a question civilization had permanently retired.\n\nAnd yet a new mystery immediately appeared.\n\nEven if every copy is genuinely itself, one fact remains unexplained:\n\nWhy does every copy feel that it alone is itself?\n\n\n#### Term Decoding\n\n**Personhood Inflation**  \nThe social and legal disequilibrium created when the cost of personality copying approaches zero and a single personality proliferates on a massive scale.\n\n**Personhood Mass**  \nThe total number of instances of a personality that exist within civilization.\n\n**Ontological Wars**  \nCivilization-scale conflicts fought over the question of who is the true original.\n\n**Identity Dissolution Doctrine**  \nA philosophical principle proposed by Solomon. It holds that the self is not a fixed entity but a continuously changing information stream.\n\nIf ten trillion versions of you existed in the universe, and every one were equally real, equally capable of pain, and equally convinced that it was the only true self, then which one of you is reading this sentence?"
}