Voidmass The setting

The Drift

Over the course of the last century, three far-reaching technological advances have substantially modified the relationship of the individual with their own body and with the continuity of their own experience: prosthetic replacement, made possible by the development of cybernetic implants; consciousness transfer, made practicable by the spread of Soma; and suspended animation, initially developed for surgical applications but in practice employed above all in interstellar travel.

The three conditions have in common a transformation that the subject does not experience directly and which therefore introduces a discontinuity between subjective experience and bodily continuity; on waking, the individual is called upon to recognize as their own a body that has been modified, replaced or left for a long time outside conscious experience.

  • In prosthetic replacement, the problem emerges above all when the interventions become extensive: the progressive replacement of the organism can alter the recognition of the body as one’s own and produce dissociative disorders.

  • In consciousness transfer the discontinuity is sharper, because the subject wakes in a body different from the one in which their memories were formed. Adaptation normally requires from a few hours to several days and may be accompanied by phenomena of bodily estrangement and, in the most serious cases, of rejection of the new body.

  • Suspended animation introduces a different but no less significant discontinuity: conscious experience is interrupted for weeks or months and resumes in a distant place, often tens of light years from that of departure, after a period of neurological recovery.

In most cases these effects are transitory: in subjects subjected to extensive bodily modification, frequent transfers or long periods of suspended animation, however, recovery may require weeks and leave permanent psychological consequences.

Repeated exposures at short intervals moreover appear to produce cumulative effects, up to the progressive weakening of the capacity to recognize as one’s own the body, the memories and the experience lived. In the most serious cases the dissociation becomes permanent and can evolve into an irreversible psychotic condition. In recent decades the problem has assumed particular relevance among the crews of the longest interstellar runs and in the frontier colonies, where prosthetic replacement, transfers and suspended animation recur with greater frequency and tend to overlap.

Since 2100 these phenomena have been the object of an experimental surveillance protocol intended to measure the deterioration of identity continuity and, above all, to identify the threshold beyond which the risk of loss of control becomes concrete. The value thus measured is termed drift; the threshold beyond which the subject is considered at risk is conventionally designated the Depersonalization-Related Identity Failure Threshold (DRIFT). In common speech, subjects who exceed the more serious thresholds are said to have gone into Drift.

The Drift

The Drift measures the progressive deterioration of the capacity to recognize as one’s own the experience accumulated up to that moment. Those affected by it continue to remember what they have seen and what they have done, but encounter difficulty in regarding it as a continuous part of their own existence.

In the initial phases subjects describe the condition as a kind of “detachment”: the episodes remain accessible, but are perceived as belonging to someone else, or as learned from an account rather than lived; as the condition progresses the distance increases, and the subject encounters growing difficulty in attributing to themselves their own actions and their own work.

Anoetic, noetic and autonoetic memory

The concepts used to describe the Drift originate in the psychology of the twentieth century. In 1972 the Estonian psychologist and neuroscientist Endel Tulving introduced for the first time the distinction between episodic memory, relating to events lived, and semantic memory, relating to facts known. In 1985 Tulving articulated consciousness into three levels, termed anoetic, noetic and autonoetic: in particular, noetic consciousness consists in knowing that a fact has occurred, without reliving it; autonoetic consciousness consists in remembering an episode by reliving it as one’s own, that is, in being aware of having been that person at that moment.

In subjects in drift the noetic consciousness remains intact, while the autonoetic tends to degrade progressively: the patient retains access to the content of the memories and loses the capacity to place themselves within them. For this reason the specialist literature describes the condition as a conversion of autonoetic memory into noetic memory. The formulation also accounts for one of the principal diagnostic difficulties: the clinical instruments in current use measure the content of memory and not its attribution, and a subject in the initial phases therefore passes any standard memory test.

The causes

The Drift develops in the wake of alterations affecting the two fundamental components upon which the individual builds identity and the perception of self: the body and the mind.

  • The body. As the biological component diminishes, the subject recognizes their own organism less and less as their own. It is the cause that medicine knows best, because it is measured directly by the BRI, and it is the one on which SDS was originally defined; consciousness transfer and suspended animation contribute to it to a transitory extent, in the ways described at the outset.

  • The mind. Some confidential reports hypothesize the existence of presences capable of exploiting the psychic weakness of an individual in order to interfere with their experience and, in extreme cases, to take possession of it. These presences would appear to act only under certain conditions of proximity, differing from case to case, and subjects already in drift would appear to be more exposed. To date, the Wraiths constitute the only known phenomenon associated with this type of drift.

Somatic Discontinuity Syndrome (SDS)

A high Drift value can lead to the development of Somatic Discontinuity Syndrome (SDS), a chronic psychotic condition that leads the subject to adopt behaviour that is dangerous, antisocial and incompatible with civil life. SDS is considered irreversible, but in some cases it can be “cancelled” by resorting to a consciousness transfer into a biologically intact Soma, eliminating part of the problem (the excess of implants) at the root. Some insurance policies even provide for the periodic recording of Selfmark, with contractually defined RTO and RPO, so as to keep available at least one backup predating the onset of the syndrome.

Surveillance and protocols

Since 2100, the AEGIS installed aboard the principal interstellar ships have been employed to administer to the crew a battery of tests intended to assess their mental health periodically. Subjects classified as at risk are suspended from their duties and, in the most serious cases, barred from interstellar flight for reasons of navigational safety. Together with the measure, a recovery plan is also prepared and delivered, based on prolonged pharmacological and psychiatric therapy and on the use of treatments already employed for other clinical indications.

In recent years, the growing spread of cybernetic implants and the increase in cases associated with extensive bodily modification have led to the development of further preventive protocols; the measures under examination comprise more frequent checks on heavily augmented subjects, preventive assessments before the installation of new implants and minimum recovery periods between interventions, consciousness transfers and subsequent interstellar crossings.