Daemons and doppelgangers: How do you talk about it?

[newredshoes]

One thing we know in a rock-solid way about daemons is their singularity. Every daemon is unique to its joined person, every one settled in a form uniquely suited to that person's metaphysical makeup. In the HDM universe and in other canons with singly-occurring characters, this makes for crossover potential virtually without a hitch

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I think the time issue is critical here - the daemon settles at puberty, and Pullman seems very clear that it's a combination of both mental and physical development. While the clones from The Island are physically mature, they were clearly not mentally mature, so I would expect to see a changeable daemon (and they're probably told that all these animals exist "on the Island"). This presents an interesting problem for non-neurotypical, developmentally delayed or severely disabled people, too - are they considered to be legally, morally and mentally children, despite their physical age, unless their daemon settles into one shape? It would be a simplistic but compelling way to determine legal responsibility and/or legal adulthood.

Another clone I thought of is William Riker's transporter accident clone Thomas Riker, in Star Trek: TNG. In that case, the cloning duplicates an adult, so I think their daemons would appear identical, adding to everyone's confusion. I haven't watched much Dark Angel, but I wonder how much influence

[newredshoes]

Oh hey, those are fantastic points!

(I hope to have an actual response when I'm not about to get to sleep. Curse you, pesky time zones!)

[layangabi]

This creates problems for our villains -- how do you contain a product that so clearly has a soul, both within the clone population itself and among the ordinary employees? A daemon creates double the amount of free thinking and inquiry

We've also seen that daemons---like people---are influenced by the environments they grow up in. The Company of the Island might take more trouble to ensure that their energies and inquisitiveness are focused elsewhere; or a la the Magisterium , they might use their sciences to condition their products to consider inquisitiveness a Bad Thing.

Or...as an eerie alternative, the company of The Island might have perfected the art of intercision! They can certainly breed a lot of test subjects for that.

[newredshoes]

Oh, that is eerie. I can't imagine them testing it on products that have been paid for in the millions by customers, but I can see them having perfected it through trial and error all the same.

You're totally right, the focus of the Facility would have to be radically reimagined if occupying daemons was a high priority. You know they'd find a way to exploit that output too...

[lienne]

...oooh. *rubs hands together gleefully* You've got me goin' now, buddy. :D

And since the first half of my comment, dealing with The Island (which is all I've got written at the moment) exceeds the character limit by a good few thousand or so, I'm going to separate this into a number of subcomments and organize them all neatly into a thread. (There will be an entire comment at the end for footnotes. And then I'll start talking about Dark Angel. Fear me.)

DISCUSSION THE FIRST: The Island clone daemons

[lienne]

In this case, you're cloning somebody who's already got a settled daemon. I think it would be interesting to explore three potential tracks here: one where your "insurance policy" has a daemon settled into the form of the clonee's daemon; one where they have unsettled daemons; and one, interestingly, where they're cloned with daemons already settled into a form not that of the original. I think a lot of this would depend on how exactly they're "raised", i.e. the developmental stages between removal of genetic material from customer and what we see onscreen. So tons of room for awesome speculation.

Settled into the form of the original

[lienne]

I think this one ties in nicely with the fact that the clones are meant to have the memories of the original. I also think it would be necessary for the plot of The Island to proceed as it did. Think about it-- how would Six Echo hav impersonated Tom if Tom had, say, a snake or a cat daemon* and Tom's was, mmm, a border collie? It ain't workin'.

That said, I also think** that it's an interesting concept in and of itself. Not every person with a particular species of daemon is the same person, after all. I'd imagine that the daemons would have different names***. And while the movie clearly showed us that a clone can grow up to be morally distinct from his or her original (*cough*Tom*cough*), the fact that they retain some of the original's memories suggests that they might have a few of the same basic characteristics

Unsettled daemons

[lienne]

This would mesh nicely with the whole "no sex" bit, and also to some extent allow for the impersonation (the daemon would be able to mimic the original's). I think it's pretty clear that daemons settle at or near sexual maturity, and since it's also pretty clear that The Island clones are kept artificially sexually immature, it's not much of a leap to go with unsettled. This is fun because now you get to decide whether the daemon will eventually settle into the same form as the original, a different one, or whether it depends on other factors. Say, if you clone someone and immediately let them go out into the world and mature, the settled daemon will probably be the same as the original's; if you clone someone and keep them unsettled for ten years, but let them develop and have their own experiences normally other than forced sexual immaturity, perhaps they have a greater chance of settling into something other than the original's daemon species. Or you could even call it the opposite way around, and say that the daemon will settle