The Master of Puppets Chapter 25
“I didn’t want this for her.” “I know,” Jakari said. “But it’s not all bad. The two of you will have all the time you want now.” “You think so?” Mamachi said. “I know a lot of Migrants have trouble with it.”
It has been a very interesting thread throughout this whole narrative that the functional immortality of the gadans is not seen as a good thing by any of our heroes. This is a technology that came about as a last ditch attempt to survive a genocide, not as the result of some altruistic or egalitarian society reaching it's technological peak. It immortalised the gadan but also their fear and pain storing their memories and scarred neural patterns. People can spend hundreds and thousands of years fixating on things. Multiple times Jaraki muses on the fact that the reason the conflict has gone on so long is because the people who started it are still alive. There is this sense that without the spectre of death the gadan have started forgetting how to move through life, getting caught in a holding pattern of war because what else is there? What would they move onto? For how long?
Skylar is getting poured into a phylactery and given the same kind of TOP matter body as a gadan. It's an attempt to save her life because the alternative is too horrible for anyone present to live with. Even still, the question lingering in the air is "would it be kinder to let her die."
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