Sonja van Baardwijk-Holten <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>Reminds me of a short story. A well known female artist is assasinated. Her
>memories had been stored and this backup is uploaded into a new body after
>her
>death. Then she gets assasinated again. So again her backup is downloaded
>into
>a new body. She experiences some discontinuity because her backup always
>lacks
>the last episode of her previous life. Finally she gets to meet the very
>persistent assasin. Turns out its a male. Somebody had stolen her backup by
>mistake and downloaded it into a male body. The copy felt so strong about
>being
>not unique that he had to try and assasinate her time and again so he'd be
>the
>only original.
That's not quite the plot or the ending...
SPOILERS
The copy wasn't just a male body - it was a genetic clone that was tweaked
to be male (gender-switching is trivial in this setting, so that's actually
a minor point; the story would work just as well without it). The kidnappers
ditched it as soon as they realized they'd stolen/cloned/downloaded the
wrong person. As an illegal clone it had no rights and thus was subject to
immediate execution if caught. However, since it had the original's genetic
signature it could subsist - barely - by tapping the original's bank
account.
The clone murdering the "original" was more of a desparation measure than
trying to be unique. If the clone was caught it would be killed, but it
really had no hope of replacing the original. Based on the laws in place at
the time, the clone had no chance for survival... thus leading to the
ultimate ending of the story.
Joshua
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