>>149130030
My theory is that they’re actually copies of real people, that the Amazing Digital Circus (the game or experience or whatever, not the show) saves a copy of you to experiment with to figure out what the real you likes and dislikes. It works with the I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream connection too: part of the horror of that story is that there was no real way to escape AM because either he keeps torturing you forever, you die somehow, or somehow destroying AM and THEN you die because he had already completely destroyed the world. Likewise if they’re all just programs then their options are limited to keep going along with the program, abstract, or somehow shut down the program and die anyway.