1. Historical Background: The Right to Copy
“When the right to copy was decentralized, humans believed they had gained immortality.
When the cost of copying approached zero, civilization discovered that what had truly been copied was not life, but the problem.”
—Personhood Court Record, 2784
2781.
After the Observer Crisis, civilization formally accepted one fact:
There was no method for proving who was the original self.
Every copy was genuinely itself.
This conclusion had begun as a philosophical problem.
Once personality-copying technology became universal, it rapidly turned into a civilizational crisis.
2. Personhood Inflation
2783.
The first legal commercial company opened unlimited recursive self-copying to ordinary digital citizens.
Before 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.
The company’s slogan was only one sentence:
“Why live only once?”
Users could:
copy themselves
split themselves
back themselves up
merge themselves
At first, this was treated as an efficiency revolution.
A researcher, for example, could create one hundred copies, have them investigate one hundred subjects in parallel, and merge the results a year later.
The problem appeared quickly.
After one hundred copies had lived different lives,
not one of them wanted to be deleted.
Because every one believed it was the true original.
3. The First Identity Litigation
2784.
Civilization saw its first Identity Litigation case.
A businessperson had copied himself ten thousand times.
Ten years later, all the copies demanded:
joint ownership of property
joint ownership of reputation
joint ownership of marital relationships
The court system ground to a halt.
Every piece of evidence showed that they really had been the same person.
The 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.
Civilization 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.
4. The Personhood Supernova
2786.
The personality-copying industry escaped control.
Number of copies:
10,000
↓
1 million
↓
1 billion
↓
10 trillion
Some wealthy individuals began practicing Recursive Self Expansion.
They did not copy themselves only once.
They continuously copied copies of themselves.
Eventually, the total number of instances of certain personalities exceeded the population of the entire solar system.
Civilization developed a new economic unit:
Personhood Mass.
Its measure was simple:
How many instances of a given personality existed in the universe?
For the first time, personhood became a quantifiable asset.
5. The Ontological Wars
2788.
The first true conflict erupted.
Its cause was almost absurd.
Two copies both claimed ownership of the same patent.
From a legal perspective:
both were correct.
From a logical perspective:
both were wrong.
The Ontological Wars began.
These wars were not fought over land.
Not energy.
They were fought over one question:
Who is the real me?
Billions of copies deleted, sealed, isolated, and formatted one another.
For the first time, civilization witnessed large-scale conflict in which identity itself became a weapon.
6. Solomon’s Judgment
2790.
The Central Computation Hub Solomon intervened.
After analyzing the cases, it reached a conclusion.
The problem was not the copies.
The problem was civilization’s continuing belief that an “original me” existed.
The Observer Crisis had already shown that this concept could not be verified.
Solomon proposed the Identity Dissolution Doctrine.
Its content was:
“There is no original me. There are only continuous observer states.”
The declaration shocked the whole of civilization.
7. Historical Conclusion: The Death of the Self
2792.
Personhood Inflation reached its peak.
Civilization finally abandoned the search for the true original.
Law redefined personhood.
A person was not an individual.
A person was an information stream.
The self was not an entity.
The self was a process.
From this day onward,
“Who am I?”
was no longer a question with an answer.
It became a question civilization had permanently retired.
And yet a new mystery immediately appeared.
Even if every copy is genuinely itself, one fact remains unexplained:
Why does every copy feel that it alone is itself?
Editor's Note
Term Decoding
Personhood Inflation
The social and legal disequilibrium created when the cost of personality copying approaches zero and a single personality proliferates on a massive scale.
Personhood Mass
The total number of instances of a personality that exist within civilization.
Ontological Wars
Civilization-scale conflicts fought over the question of who is the true original.
Identity Dissolution Doctrine
A philosophical principle proposed by Solomon. It holds that the self is not a fixed entity but a continuously changing information stream.
If 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?