Are sentient machines thinking they’re people people?
Exploring human consciousness, ethical decision making, and transhumanism in SOMA
Tags: #SOMA #Transhumanism #Posthumanism #Videogames #EthicsInVideogames #WhatMakesAHuman #SentientOrganicMachinesareAlive
“What's done cannot be undone.”
Speculative fiction often presents us with as yet fantastical technology incorporated into worlds that feel close to home. SOMA, a horror game produced by Frictional Games in 2015, is no different. Our protagonist, Simon Jarrett, is confronted with a confusing and abrupt shift in perspective after a questionable medical procedure. Simon soon discovers that he has been resurrected in the year 2104, stuck on the bottom of the sea floor with a dangerous AI and corrupted or crazed copies of the PATHOS-II crew inhabiting a wide range of mechanical and biological “bodies”. While exploring the station, Simon meets Catherine Chun, another copy, and together they set out to complete her ARK project – a virtual reality housing copies of Catherine’s colleagues set to be launched into space as the last hope for humanity. Throughout the game, Simon, and the player, are forced to make decisions regarding the various copies of the crew to progress onwards towards their goal of reaching and launching the ARK.
Within a post-apocalyptic setting, SOMA converges ideas of both transhumanism and posthumanism while having players confronted with moral dilemmas on who (or what) deserves to live. Transhumanism, on one hand, emphasises the role of technology in enhancing and transcending humans and their biology (Appleöff Lyons and Brown Jaloza, 2016; Mejeur, 2023; Cole-Turner, 2022). It takes an active role in promoting science as a way to evolve humans beyond their biological systems. In SOMA, human consciousness is transferred into robotic bodies which allow them to communicate and interact with the world around them while surpassing human capabilities.
Posthumanism, on the other hand, explores life beyond human existence (Appleöff Lyons and Brown Jaloza, 2016; Mejeur 2023). It criticises Euro-centric, rationalistic, patriarchal assumptions of humanism which pose a threat to all life, whether human or not (Cole-Turner, 2022). SOMA raises the questions about whether the sentient robots encountered are living beings which only becomes further distorted as the game progresses. As such, the boundaries of what is said to be alive become increasingly blurred.
The player, alongside the protagonist, needs to determine whether other characters encountered are in fact sentient, living beings, or whether they are mere machines. They are continuously confronted with making moral choices between shutting down, or killing, robots and humans, or keeping them alive. While choices are not directly influencing the outcome of the game itself, they ultimately shape players’ experiences of their own narrative journey. Thus, they are faced with grappling with the question about the value of life and ethical decision making.
“We know what we are, but not what we may be.”
Simon has very few encounters with actual, biological humans. Nearly a year prior to his reawakening, a comet impacted the Earth’s surface, causing cataclysmic firestorms and tsunamis across the globe. The crew of PATHOS-II has lost contact with the surface and is believed to be the sole remaining bastion of humanity. Shit hits the fan really quickly. Long story short: almost everyone dies. There are two members of the crew that Simon meets still in their bio bodies. Neither is in great shape.
Early in the game, Amy, a field service technician, is immobilised and barely kept alive by the WAU, the AI caretaker for PATHOS-II, through artificial goop juice. As the WAU is routing power to Amy in order to keep her alive, Simon must decide to either completely unplug Amy from the structure that is supporting her or only remove one of the power supplies, leaving Amy alive. Through dialogue, Amy begs Simon not to hurt her, while also admitting that she wants to go home despite the WAU not allowing her to die. The player, at this point, has not confirmed that Simon is a copy of his consciousness in an android body, nor do they know whether help, and other humans, might be available elsewhere.
While the decision Simon makes ultimately does not affect the outcome of the game, the player cannot progress without confronting Amy and making a choice – to leave Amy alone, stuck in place with an artificial lung possibly dying alone once PATHOS-II completely shuts down, or remove her from life support before Simon continues forward. As the player, you are stopped in your tracks to consider the possible moral consequences of leaving someone without much hope or ending a human life.
Fast forward to station Tau, Simon meets possibly the last human on Earth: Sarah, one of PATHOS-II payload technicians. Sarah is alone in the infirmary on a life support system. With the remaining crew members dead from starvation, Sarah has been guarding the ARK from WAU and its creations. At this point in the game, there is unlikely any help for Sarah on Tau station and time for both Simon and Sarah is running out – limited power, limited supplies, and no way back.
As opposed to Amy, Sarah requests Simon to assist in her death by disconnecting the life support. Simon can choose whether or not to proceed with her appeal. While Simon is able to interact with Sarah to a certain extent, it is unnecessary to do so – the player can progress by taking the ARK and leaving. If Simon opts against ending her life and chooses to walk away, Sarah will plead with him to let her die. If Simon chooses to unplug her, Sarah will reminisce about her life before PATHOS-II and the comet’s impact, and her fondness of her work and colleagues. She will also urge him to launch the ARK and enable humanity to strive among the stars, before ultimately passing away.
Though Simon is revealed to be a construct himself, the player is human, presumably. (Hi, there, sentient robots reading this in 2104, no offence.) Amy and Sarah as the remaining human crew members pose similar, but very different choices to the player. While much is unknown surrounding their circumstances, both are stuck in PATHOS-II connected to various machines keeping them alive. Simon may believe there is hope for Amy to receive help, but Sarah is stuck alone at the bottom of the ocean with no food and no escape to the surface. This is the closest the player gets to interacting with humans and must reflect and confront their own beliefs about what it means to be alive and whether or not they are capable of ending another person’s life.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Most of the inhabitants of PATHOS-II after Simon’s reawakening are copies of the crew that have been uploaded into various machines and amalgams of mechanical parts. Most of these copies are confused and unaware of what has happened to them. In this interplay of human mind and mechanical bodies, the player must negotiate what it means to be alive by making choices about which robots get to live or die.
At the beginning of the game, Simon runs into Carl the robot who got immobilised following an incident at Upsilon. Carl is convinced he is still a regular human and gets quite offended when Simon suggests he is, in fact, a talking machine. As this is the first real interaction that Simon has in 2104, the stakes feel less dire when the player is confronted with the option to move forward by sacrificing Carl or searching for another way to reroute power.
The obvious answer is to flip the circuit that Carl is attached to, which results in immediate screams of pain from the robot. There is another option: to explore the area and solve puzzles while under threat of an unknown hostile something that attacks the player on sight. Both options reach the same goal, and the player must make a decision to proceed. However, unlike the interaction with Amy, Carl’s new body is far from humanoid.
When the player speaks to Carl, he repeatedly insists that he is still human. The player must then make a choice. Is Carl, evidently a machine despite his protests, a sentient being who is seen to be alive or a construct that the player can turn off to further their own goals?
As the player progresses, they encounter more robotic forms. Some, like the Universal Helper (UH) 8 series, are described as dog-like entities that follow the player around after being freed from a pile of rubble. Others are copies of previous employees, like Carl, unaware that they have been uploaded into robotic forms.
The next choice the game forces upon the player involves the UH8 and a copy of Javid Goya inside a UH3, a mockingbird that ignores Simon’s presence and continues working outside of the Delta site. Catherine informs Simon that to pilot the underwater Zeppelin and advance towards the ARK, they will need a tool chip from one of the Helper bots. Simon, and the player, must choose to destroy one of the robots - the dog-like UH8 that has been following and aiding the player in opening doors or the delusional UH3 copy of Javid that is unaware of his mechanical existence.
The game further complicates the matter, as the UH8 will react negatively to Simon’s actions, should he decide to attack the copy of Javid. The bot will no longer approach Simon, and will flee if Simon attempts to get closer to it. If the player attacks the dog-like UH8 instead, Javid does not react, but the attack requires more hits from the stun baton to destroy the UH8 and it will scream and moan until completely destroyed. The game seems to ask, when presented with an imperfect human copy or an animal like machine, which is more worthy of saving? Does the player preserve the human consciousness above all or does the empathy of the UH8 surpass the human element? Simon must make a choice, though the consequences are reserved for the player and their feelings on the matter, as neither the UH8 nor Javid return later in the game.
Perhaps one of the biggest dilemmas the player faces is when Simon and Cathrine get ready to descend into the abyss. To do so, Simon needs to transfer into a new suit. However, minds can only ever be copied, rather than actually transferred. The player awakens in the new suit only to hear another Simon cry out in confusion. Despite receiving an explanation on mind transfer early on, it is not until this point that the player is forced to grapple with the implication of multiple copies of the same person. While the two versions are briefly identical, they will soon diverge and develop their own subjective experiences and sense of identity.
Catherine swiftly turns off Simon-2, leaving Simon-3 to make the difficult decision to either drain Simon-2’s energy, effectively killing the copy the player has progressed with so far, or abandon him to an uncertain fate in the depths of PATHOS-II. This is a pivotal moment where the player is forced to explore SOMA’s themes of transhumanism. As such, the player must consider whether it is justifiable to sacrifice one version of Simon for the continuation of another or whether both versions should live on.
“Conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
Central to SOMA is the existence of legacy files consisting of the initial brain scans of humans, including Simon’s original scan from 2015. When the player makes it to Theta, they discover that there are multiple files that Catherine used as the basis for her work. Despite Catherine’s insistence that they are not as 3-dimensional as her ARK scans, Simon was able to be resurrected from his scan. Though the game doesn’t emphasise this, it does quietly offer Simon the option to delete the legacy scans, theoretically preventing the WAU from copying other legacies into robots.
In order to gain access codes, Simon and Catherine boot up a copy of Brandon Wan, a Wrangler on PATHOS-II, that has been stored as a data file at the Theta site. The first time Brandon’s copy is accessed, he becomes hysterical upon realising that he is in a simulation. Through trial and error, the player can deceive Brandon and add to the simulation to placate him and prevent him from crashing. Once the player has gotten the information from Brandon, they can delete Brandon’s file, leave him in the simulation, or simply unplug him, leaving the data intact.
At this point, the scans are mere data, not yet transferred into mechanical bodies nor strictly in existence as sentient beings. However, given that these scans have the potential to be transferred, and “awoken”, the player still needs to consider whether they ought to be erased. There is no real implication for the game itself. Yet, to delete or not to delete, that is the question.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
Catherine is the only character to be both a construct and a data file. As Simon’s guide through the game, and the creator of the ARK project, she has a wealth of knowledge on the technology involved in the scanning and copying of her colleagues. After pulling her copy out of the immobilised robot body, Simon plugs her data into his Omnitool, which he can then connect to various systems around PATHOS-II.
Catherine seems to generally be asocial (neurospicy queen?). Her interactions with and thoughts on other sentient robots alternates between affectionate warmth and dispassionate indifference. Her evaluation of others is linked to how useful their existence is for achieving her goals. As such, Simon is babied through each step of their journey, while those they encounter, like the UH8 and Brandon, are simply a means to an end, and their humanity or sentience is irrelevant. In fact, she tells Simon the robots are sentient machines that merely think they’re people, thus implying they are not real living beings to her.
Despite seeing the mockingbirds as machines, Catherine still insists that the ARK, containing human brain scans in an artificial reality, is the last hope for humanity. The player must ask themselves, what makes the scans on the ARK more human to Catherine or Simon, while the copies that are littered throughout PATHOS-II are less than? She never gives context or reasoning for her differentiation.
“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
SOMA provokes deep reflections about the essence of humanity and what it means to be alive. Can sentient machines possess human-like qualities and does that make them people? Deep down at PATHOS-II, the lines between artificial intelligence, robots, and human consciousness are blurred. The player is forced to navigate these moral dilemmas and determine who can and should be sacrificed or saved. While choices made ultimately do not affect the outcome of the game, it serves as a reflection on the player’s ethicacy and ultimately shapes their experiences of their own narrative journey.
After launching the ARK and realising, again, that Simon-3 is alone at the bottom of the abyss, the credits roll. The game could leave off at this moment, the player alone in their experience listening to Simon’s yells. However, in a post-credit scene, we get the “winning” side of the coin; Simon awakes on the ARK. The game ends on a positive note as ARK Simon and Catherine meet, but the player is left with the knowledge of Simon-3 and the various employees of PATHOS-II at the bottom of the ocean. If you agree with transhumanism and that the ARK is preserving humanity, the ending may feel quite hopeful. Or if not, the image of Simon-3 yelling into the darkness may haunt your dreams and make every thought a living nightmare for years to come. Regardless of your position, SOMA forces the player into meaningful conversations about life and considering whether sentient machines that think they’re people are people.
Sources
Appleöff Lyons, S., & Brown Jaloza, L. (2016). More Human than Non/Human: Posthumanism, Embodied Cognition, and Video Games as Affective Experience. The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Malta 2016, https://www.gamephilosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/confmanuscripts/pcg2016/Sandy-Appleoff-Lyon-and-Lisa-Jaloza-More-Human-than-Nonhuman-Posthumanism-Embodied-Cognition-and-Videogames-as-Affective-Expe.pdf
Cole-Turner, R. (2022). Posthumanism and Transhumanism. In: W. Schweiker (ed.). Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics. Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1098-1105.
Mejeur, C. (2023). Games as Critical Literature: Playing with Transhumanism, Embodied Cognition, and Narrative Differences in SOMA. In: T. Ghosal (ed.). Global Perspectives on Digital Literature: A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 67-80.
Image Credits
Frictional Games [@frictionalgames] (2021). “Why not cozy up with your loved ones this holiday in the depths of SOMA at the original Omicron? ✨ Epic Games Store and GOG are back with some great discounts all around.” 16 December, https://www.instagram.com/p/CXjZIY2ovLr/?igsh=NDBkbWF1eWw5MTh4
Frictional Games [@frictionalgames] (2022). “Here’s a poster from SOMA that some of you might not have seen - made by our amazing Art Director David 👏” https://www.instagram.com/p/CbNtezuI_H4/?igsh=MXBzb243MDV6ZDRlcw%3D%3D