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kafkaoftherubble · 7 months

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把死人给带回来？难道...?！

// If They Are Bringing Back the Dead...

This post contains spoilers for Chapter 184.1 of To Your Eternity.

It also contains speculations galore. This is NOT a meta essay.

Shoutout to my homie branetheory in Discord!

Thanks to them, I was reminded of what Parts of My Brain had wanted to talk about:

Bruh. I can't believe ToFu made me so high last night that I forgot to talk about this.

Honestly I regret nothing Okay, memory water.

A little Kafka Aside: I'm gonna have to consciously ignore how... not-there the scientific backing for this is. Honestly, this Memory Water thing reminded me of the New Age/Pseudoscientific idea of "water memory" or Masaru Emoto's "water consciousness" thing or DNA teleportation. However, this is a story where weirder shits have happened, so suspension of disbelief willingly and gleefully granted. I just need to get this out of my head first.

To reiterate, Kaibara's experimental procedure involves

Extracting cells from a person's body

"Turn" it into water (how?)

Make a "clone" drink it (who?)

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Who could these clones be?

The only clones we know so far are the Mizuha clones. Their existence seems to imply a similar purpose to Hayase's descendants—they are supposed to inherit Hayase's Will, which is 95% "get injected with a tumor we call the Left Hand Nokker."

But Nokkers have long become invisible and fully integrated into this ecosystem. In the Future Era, they are embedded in tag chips, and they grant the bodies they possess all sorts of abilities and augmentations.

What would an inheritance of Hayase's Will even look like here? At first, I thought it would be similar: a tag chip with the Left Hand in it. Mizuha's, uh, possession (for the lack of a better word) manifested through the same mechanism other Nokkers used, after all.

However, the story gradually told us that the clones had all been massacred via an unknown operation for yet-untold reasons. Why would they do that?

Were these clones failures?

If they were failures, then it would make sense why Kaibara treated them as disposable; after all, in the past, the Guardians always exalted Hayase's Descendant(s) no matter how incompetent they were at their mission. Failure to secure Fushi's seeds I mean love never made them disposable enough to be killed, right?

So, as branetheory (crediting my homie even though they might not see this ahahhahah) also thought—

Could it be that Hayase herself has been successfully reincarnated in the body of one of these clones? (8)

I assigned this hypothesis an 8, or "80% confidence level."

Is she who you're gonna see, Bon?

Why would Kaibara need so many Mizuha clones in the first place? They only need one Descendant. They only have one Left-Hand Nokker...

Unless these clones were made specifically for bringing back Hayase. They were all experiments. Few experiments ever go right at the first trial. But this? Experiments this challenging and important as "recreating our legendary progenitor, Hayase?"

It will definitely require a lot of trial and error. So these clones were made to be expendables.

Honestly, who would name their offspring with numbers if they weren't meant to be seen as expendables?

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There is an interesting point to note: Memory Water only works if one has a Nokker implanted in them. Remember how Abel can't drink it and instantly know the answers to their stupid-ass questions?

So do all clones have Nokkers implanted in them? They all own a tag chip, after all. But there is only one Left Hand Nokker, and that bitch seems deadset on possessing only Hayase's appointed heir (or in this case, Hayase herself).

Does that mean

all the clones have their own Nokkers, but none of it is the Left Hand, until the Experiment? (3) OR

all the clones have empty tag chips until the Experiment, in which the Left Hand Nokker is then implanted inside before the subject drinks the Memory Water? (6) OR

other hypotheses I could not think of at the moment? (1)

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Doro and Her Sisters: Were They Trying To Stage a Rebellion Against Kaibara's Highest Echelon? (7)

Assigned (7); "70% confidence level"

Could this scene actually depict a failed experimental result, where #32/Doro was the subject? After all, she didn't look like she died in a massacre. She looked like she died alone, leaving her sisters behind..

Doro liaisoned with Fushi in secret. So secretly, Tonari didn't know it happened.

Why would she do that? Way back then, me and the Discord gang had speculated some sort of clash between Doro and the rest of Kaibara. At that time, I think our speculation was that it had to do with the Wish-granting Orb specifically.

But now, with this new information in mind...

Could it be that the liaison was part of the clones' planned rebellion? (6)

Assigned 6; "60% confidence level."

It could be that, in addition to passing vital information about Kaibara to Fushi (who is still not exactly forthcoming about what they know so far), Doro was also trying to ensure that the Wish-granting Orb will never fall into the Highest Echelon's hands.

Was her conviction formed out of concerns about what Kaibara might do with the orb?

Or was her reasoning more pragmatic—she didn't want Kaibara to have the power to crush her rebellion?

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Back to the number-as-naming convention. What if these weren't names, but the assigned turn of each clone for the ultimate experiment (6)? If that's the case, then Doro is the 32nd experiment that failed.

That's a lot. And the fact that she failed would mean the experiment will keep going. The clones will keep being bred to be used for these experiments. It's a conflict ripe for seeds of rebellion, right?

And so, there are extra hypotheses as to why the clones were massacred in the first place:

Hayase has been successfully reincarnated (8)

The clones' rebellion plan has been found out (7)

Hayase has been successfully reincarnated AND the clones' rebellion plan has been found out (5.6; 8/10×7/10)

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Dolly's Purpose(s)

While Doll's original purpose might have been for amusement and fun—Doro rescued it from some trash heap and just engineered it to be a playmate—I had always found its ability to dish out powerful punches suspicious. Why would a playmate be good at granting people concussions in the first place?!

And it was good enough to take out mercenaries, right?

I'm quite confident that Doll's punch is a defensive ability to guard whatever's stored in its memory (9).

I should review what Previous Me had speculated:

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves or consciousness

Doll holds the Left Hand Nokker within it

Doll is a combination of Doro's consciousness/brainwaves and its original AI

There is also the speculation that Doll is the Wish-granting Orb itself, but I think the confidence level for that hypothesis has gone pretty low... at least to me, personally. It sits at less than 10%.

Now, I want to add new hypotheses and rearrange them from most confident to least:

Doll's memories include Kaibara's top secret: key infrastructures, their real master(s), their experiments, whatever information they have gained about the Wish-granting Orb, their master plan to counter Fushi, and the like. Things that could give rebelling clones an edge. (8)

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves/consciousness integrated within its original AI (7)

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves/consciousness AND it is Doro's consciousness/memories that possess knowledge of Kaibara's top secret (5.6; 8/10×7/10)

Doll holds the Left Hand Nokker (less than 2)

The first (and by extension, the third) hypothesis can be supplemented by the fact that Kaibara really wants the Doll. Why, if not because the Doll holds vital information regarding the entire company?

They could go after it for Doro's consciousness, sure, but the priority would drop a lot more, wouldn't it? ...Unless the third hypothesis is true!

The second hypothesis can be partially supplemented by Abel's dedication to possessing the Doll; he really cherished Doro, and to him, the Doll could lead him to her again. He also claimed that Doro "is still alive," though when pressed, he gave no evidence.

Was it wistful thinking, or could he have been privy to Doro's experiment to transfer her consciousness into Doll? Did he really know nothing about Doro's death?

There is also the "Now I am human" line Doro uttered while blindfolded. Given we now know what the clones are used for, Doro might see her existence to be inhuman/subhuman because of her real purpose. Maybe, to her, she could feel more human by being a doll than in her human body.

Hell, who knows? Doro might secretly envy Abel's humanness—a guy who was likely born from normal copulation and couldn't fit in with the rest of the Tagged society, yet all the more a genuine human being than the rest of them.

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What is the nature of Doll's Brainwaves?

Could it have been a digital transfer, or could it have used a similar mechanism to the Memory Water?

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Miscellaneous Implications of Memory Water Bringing Back the Dead

Bruh I swear if they reincarnated the Nameless Boy to torment Fushi I will fucking sever my friendship with Left Hand Nokker and nuke their Paradise. Oh hi Left Hand, nothing over here.

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And that concludes my hypotheses round-up, updated to only Chapter 184.1. Remember! Y'all are always welcome to reblog and add your own thoughts to it!

Fuck, I will be so honored if y'all Fushi-fied my writing by adding absolutely anything.

Thank you for reading my ramble. Rest assured, I have prepared just the right image for the moment I clown myself by having most of my hypotheses come out spectacularly falsified: