Otherwise, I Leave It Be — Zhuangzi, “Mastering Life”#

In losing Helen, Carol loses far more than someone who would listen. Helen had shared the work of sustaining her routines, her career, and her habits; she knew how Carol both depended on and despised her own books, and knew the parts of her life she could not comfortably show the public. Death cuts off this shared life while the houses, roads, and books remain. The familiar world is still there. Carol can no longer live in it as she did.

The Others, however, retain Helen’s memories. Strangers can answer Carol out of a dead woman’s past, something close to comfort and close to an affront. They may recount the past with perfect accuracy, but Helen can no longer hear what Carol has only now come to say. Her absence is not a piece of data awaiting completion: whatever happens next, Carol cannot experience it with her again. When Zosia arrives, their companionship must also begin in days to which Helen cannot return.

They have days to spend together, conversation, games, closeness, and a manuscript. Carol need not hold her identity as a resister aloft every day. After exhausting herself for so long in the effort to hold herself together, a person can finally rest, without keeping a grip on everything. There is something to cherish in that ease.

Opposition to the Joining can quietly borrow an ascetic standard here: the more miserable you are, the more certain it is that you have not been assimilated; the lonelier you are, the more certain it is that something inside remains beyond purchase. By this measure, anything that helps a person settle into life becomes suspect. Good food, hot water, friendship, and love must first prove that they will not weaken resistance. A life becomes a task of vigilance that never ends, and even rest has to account for itself to the watchkeeper.

Yet people need some strength to spare before they can consider how to exercise their freedom. Hunger can occupy the mind; illness can narrow the range of action; prolonged fear can leave someone unable even to finish saying what they mean. Easing these burdens may allow a person to feel, make, think, and decide more fully. Receiving help does not require first declaring that one does not love it in order to be entitled to judge it.

Qing the woodworker, who carves a wooden bell stand in the “Mastering Life” chapter of the Zhuangzi, offers another account of such an experience. The finished object astonishes people, and the ruler of Lu asks what art he possesses. Qing begins instead with how he stills his mind. First he stops thinking of rewards and rank, then forgets praise and blame, skill and clumsiness, and finally forgets even his own body. Isolate the word “forget,” and it might seem that all mental activity is to dissolve here. But the passage goes on to describe him entering the forest and examining the timber. Only when the wood and the object he intends to make are suited to one another does he begin: “Otherwise, I leave it be.”²

He forgets himself, but the wood becomes clearer to him. He must still discern when to work and when to refrain. Setting aside rewards, penalties, and self-assessment can make that discernment less troubled. “Otherwise, I leave it be” is especially important: the suitability of the wood must still be judged before the object can be made.

The passage that follows describes Dongye Ji driving a team of horses. His advances, retreats, and turns all conform to the rules; the performance is splendid, and Duke Zhuang orders him to keep circling. Yan He, however, sees that the horses’ strength is running out. Trouble duly follows. The movements can remain orderly after the bodies can no longer bear them; the better they fulfill a demand, the more likely the demand is to continue. Read together, the two stories deny smooth performance any meaning on its own. We must ask whom that smoothness enables to act, and whom it makes less able to stop.

Returning to Carol’s new chapter, we can no longer ask only whether she is still resisting. An author who can set aside for a while the interrogation of whether she deserves to be an author may find the attention to care for her fictional characters. The work can become more than a report card on its maker: something she is making and wants to show another person. The new world supplies conditions for that work and exchange. How those conditions have helped her will also enter her judgment of the life ahead.

The novel has a dignity of its own. It can please readers, work through desires its author still does not fully understand, or give an experience a different arrangement in which to keep growing. It need not oppose the Joining on every page for Carol to be speaking in her own voice. If we count only investigative records, reversal plans, and protest slogans as meaningful writing, we have already decided for her the sole purpose a writer may serve.

Each Side Has Its Judgments of Right and Wrong — Zhuangzi, “Equalizing Things”#

There is another, unexpected condition for this exchange: the voices preserved by the Others are not all voices praising Carol.

When Carol’s novels come up in episode four, Larry can draw on a reader named Moira’s experience to explain what those books once did for a particular person. Carol presses further and hears Helen’s different judgments of her published work and another manuscript. The judgments do not align. Nor has the collective revised them into a compromise review. It can express appreciation and report a lack of appreciation; it remembers the help a book gave one person, and remembers that someone close to its author did not therefore consider it a good book.³

Frightening unity is usually imagined as impoverishment: everyone has one expression, repeats one sentence, and loses their name, tastes, and past. The differing judgments in episode four show that unified action can coexist with rich content. This world knows how many people once differed, and can even report their conflicting judgments accurately.

That richness matters to Carol. An author can spend years trapped between two judgments: the market calls you a success, while a harsher gaze says you amount to little. Both center the author. Both rule on the question “What sort of person am I?” Moira’s experience introduces a different question: once the book reached someone else, what kind of life did it enter? The meaning of the work no longer entirely coincides with its author’s standing. Carol need not first establish which rank of writer she belongs to in order to have a reason to go on writing.

An opinion can survive while the future speech of the person who held it remains another question. An archive can record two people’s disagreement; people in a living relationship may, through their next conversation, turn it into a question neither had anticipated. An accurate restatement carries a past judgment forward. If its maker can still hesitate over new events, depart from who they have been, and take responsibility for an unarranged choice, that continuity also has a future yet to be written.

The distinction must be assessed through what happens in the show. Ordinary people say “we” too; shared life does not require each sentence to list every dissent. A plural pronoun alone cannot decide whether people able to question remain within it. The first season shows biological connection, unified action, a continuing goal of Joining, and many personal differences being drawn upon. An internal dispute that could redirect that goal has not yet come into view. We can criticize the relation between purpose and action already apparent; whether the collective still permits other forms of subjectivity remains to be understood.

Why can a complete personality profile still not answer this question? In his account of Lacan, Bruce Fink distinguishes the subject from the individual, the conscious ego, and the “I” in a sentence.⁴ An individual can be identified bodily, and an ego described through a biography and a set of traits. The subject concerns how this person confronts their own statements, the demands inherited from others, and the points at which the two fail to coincide. Reciting an entire biography does not resolve that gap; temporarily being unable to explain “why I am this way” does not make a person cease to be there.

The names we borrow, the language we learn, and the expectations we inherit from others precede some of our apparently most private wishes. A writer wants to become a “real writer,” but “real” already contains a whole set of other people’s measures. A lover asking “Is it me you love?” is not requesting a report in which physical features and personality traits match perfectly. They want to know how the other person has become involved in this relationship beyond these articulable reasons, and who they themselves have become within it.

The subject, then, is not a little piece of original material hidden behind every relation. Strip away dependence layer by layer, and a person also loses the language and experience through which they took shape. They become themselves within these relations and begin to question where they cannot fully coincide with them. A sentence used for years to explain oneself suddenly fails; a wish once endorsed offers no place to settle when fulfilled. Adding information may correct a misunderstanding without answering why the person must still become who this account requires them to be.

These questions still matter when life improves. With what they need available, with enough food and with love returned, a person can still reconsider their wishes: I did want this—do I still want it now? You have changed me; why must that change still lead to the original ending? Manufacturing scarcity only adds avoidable suffering to these questions. What deserves preservation is the room to reconsider wishes and change relationships.

The danger of the Joining concerns whether that room remains. It can preserve memories, understand tastes, and arrange meticulous services for differing wishes. You like this food, miss that city, remember a childhood no one else lived: none of this has to be deleted. But if these differences can only help a fixed goal be realized more effectively, richness has not brought the possibility of changing direction. Everyone’s differences receive care, while where “we” must ultimately go remains unchanged by them.

Those Who Know Me Say My Heart Is Troubled — Book of Songs, “Shu Li”#

Carol asks Zosia what preferences are her own. She is looking for a lowercase “you,” not the “we” that can speak for all humanity every time it opens its mouth. Zosia talks about the place of her childhood, and about mango ice cream. Her answer contains somewhere a body once lived and a taste that can be named. For a moment, they give this “you” a recognizable outline.¹

The question is moving, and can easily send criticism astray. It is tempting to think that finding a few unique attributes in Zosia would prove that true love survives, while discovering that others can recount the same memories would expose the love as counterfeit. Love then begins to resemble the custody of an unrepeatable collector’s item, its most important quality being that it exists nowhere else.

Sharing something does not automatically cancel intimacy. Two people can like the same song without its losing its meaning for them; many people understanding a novel does not make a particular reading unreal. Closeness also depends on time actually spent together: when something was said, who was distressed at the time, what the listener did next. Knowledge can be passed on. Time already shared cannot be made, retrospectively, never to have been shared.

Liking a song together cannot explain how a shared mind changes people. It helps separate only two judgments often run together: other bodies can access Zosia’s memories; therefore the time Carol and Zosia have spent together counts for nothing. The former does not entail the latter. Whether their companionship is real and how the original Zosia continues to exist each require an answer of their own.

The body before Carol especially cannot disappear on that account. Zosia can be injured, and the Others ask to save her; these consequences occur in this body. However many people are connected to her, however readily memories can be passed on, the injury to this body does not become immaterial. A body needs care without waiting for a verdict from the philosophy of consciousness. Whether someone may be treated as disposable is more urgent than whether their personality data are unique.

The obligation to care does not also decide whether Zosia loves Carol out of her own desire. The loving words and intimate actions of the first season may arise from sincere love, and may serve the collective’s goal of bringing Carol into the Joining. They may do both at once: someone can care earnestly for another while insisting that the other must ultimately accept a way of life they consider good. Sincerity can strengthen that demand without withdrawing it.

The question therefore shifts from “Do you have secrets I do not know?” to “How can we still change after sharing a life?” Missing information can be requested; fewer misunderstandings are usually good. The deeper unknown between lovers is what the relationship may yet make of them. Even if I know every part of your past, what you say now may still change me. If even that change is ruled out, knowing you amounts only to making your profile more accurate while the relationship proceeds along my predetermined answer.

Carol’s lowercase “you” now acquires a significance beyond information. She wants more than to extract a file called Zosia from the memories of “we.” Can this time together make a claim on Zosia? Now that they have loved, can something that previously had to happen no longer have to happen? A particular you also involves how you may answer to a future shared with another person.

The question also turns back upon her. Can she allow the Zosia before her to be more than a stage she must pass through on the way to restoring humanity? If Zosia’s good life differs from the world Carol wants to restore, is she willing to take that difference seriously? Love cannot settle the dispute in advance. It can make it increasingly difficult to say that the other person is merely part of a world that is wrong.

Compassion Is the Beginning of Benevolence — Mencius, “Gongsun Chou I”#

In episode four, seeking answers about the Joining, Carol drugs Zosia and prevents others from intervening. She loudly defends her agency, her power to act. Zosia’s heart later stops, and the Others must even ask permission to resuscitate her.³

Her questions do concern something momentous: what has happened to humanity, and can it be reversed? The collective’s goodwill cannot stand in for an answer. But the drug is affecting Zosia’s body, and resuscitation must wait for Carol’s assent; the importance of the inquiry comes into direct conflict with that waiting. Carol wants control of her own actions, while someone else may consequently lose the chance to survive.

Here, “respect my choice” has become “give my choice priority.” The person issuing orders has freedom to act, while the person bearing the consequences has difficulty stopping that action. The more seriously those around Carol obey, the more her position needs questioning: are they respecting Carol, or have they also handed her the decision about whether Zosia may be saved? When personal agency extends this far, protection of the individual begins to accommodate domination over others.

The Others subsequently withdraw, leaving an empty city. Carol still has supplies and a house, but gradually finds no place for herself in her days; loneliness eventually makes her desperate for their return. The cause and consequences of withdrawal must be distinguished: Zosia and the collective need to get away from danger, while Carol becomes lonely because they leave. Her suffering is real, but it cannot retrospectively establish that the others planned it from the outset.

The same action can have a legitimate protective reason and produce an enormous disparity of power. When an ordinary person leaves, it remains one person’s departure. When the other party is connected to an entire city’s population, communications, and services, keeping a distance can change your whole living environment. The power to leave a relationship is so different in the two parties’ hands. Carol’s need for connection is real, and the Others’ need for safety is real. The former cannot require the latter to remain forever present. Nor can the latter make the consequences of such immense power cease to be a problem simply by having no ill intent.

In episode nine, the same body is again caught in an experiment. Manousos continues looking for a way to undo the Joining, and his radio experiment puts Zosia in danger. This time Carol stops the experiment, then leaves with her. The interruption comes first, followed by the journey and the frozen-egg disclosure.⁵ The harm before her interrupts the effort to restore humanity. The later violation is something she has yet to learn about.

In episode four, she made Zosia’s body wait for an answer; in episode nine, she stops an experiment seeking an answer. The difference between these actions cannot be measured only by a resister’s steadfastness. Yet the person injured the second time is her lover, and private attachment also plays a part in the interruption. Would Carol stop the experiment for someone she was not close to? The first season has not yet put her concern to that test.

But recognizing an injury often begins with “this person cannot bear any more.” We cannot demand that concern withdraw merely because it remains partial, so that a more abstract humanity can carry on advancing. Private feeling sometimes makes us disregard others; sometimes it brings before us the others previously hidden behind a grand purpose. We must look at which actions it stops and which it allows to continue.

Manousos’s persistence also matters. He refuses to settle comfortably into a world in which the original people have been changed, and does not abandon the search for a remedy because most people around him express satisfaction. But for that persistence to become an action people can bear together, questions remain: who bears the risk, why this person, how can the experiment be stopped, and do those he would save have other wishes? Deferring every present injury until after victory would reproduce the relationship resistance opposes: the destination is fixed, and particular people pay the costs along the way.

Love may have changed the terms of resistance here. Restoring humanity remains Carol’s wish, but she is now willing to stop an experiment pursuing that wish for the sake of the person before her. She has not found a way to save the world; the phrase “saving the world” has first lost the power to supply the whole justification for an action.

Later, the news about her frozen eggs reveals another violation. She has already refused the collective permission to obtain the stem cells it needs through invasive sampling in order to develop a way of bringing her into the Joining. Now she is told that it is trying to use eggs preserved in the past.⁶⁵ She has refused an invasion of her present body, but material she saved for a different kind of life has become a route around that refusal.

This route appropriates bodily material and a past choice. Carol preserved eggs for one possible life; that decision did not authorize others to use them to arrange a different form of existence for her. Material being technically available and permission being given within a relationship are two different things. Behind her refusal of invasive sampling is the more direct statement: I do not want to join. Going around the sampling still does not get around that statement.

Traveling with Zosia, choosing to be close to her, handing her a new chapter: none becomes a substitute signature consenting to the Joining. The danger is that care can continue, love can continue to happen, and the plan can still proceed in its original direction. The relationship has entered Carol’s life. That destination has not yet changed in response to her.

She therefore chooses resistance again, without having to void the love that came before. If the right to refuse must be bought with “I never truly loved,” the destination prescribed by the other side gains a further jurisdiction: even how she understands her past is subject to its ruling. It is precisely this prescription that she seeks to reject. The life in which she loved can remain part of her history.

People Must Live for Love to Have Something to Cling To — Lu Xun, Regret for the Past#

A prescribed destination works beyond intimacy. The diner in episode eight brings the question into a life someone else has already lived. Carol recalls a diner from her youth: she worked at night and wrote in the mornings, life was hard, but she remembers those days as good. The Others rebuild the diner and bring her old surroundings back before her. A waitress named Bri returns too.

But Bri has since moved to Miami to become an esthetician, and is newly married. For the sake of Carol’s memory, she has been summoned back to resume being the diner’s waitress. Once Carol learns this, she challenges the arrangement.¹

The past suddenly acquires another layer. For Carol, this is a diner bound up with her early writing. For Bri, it is part of a life she subsequently left behind. A place in which two people once coexisted occupies a different position in each of their lives. The power rebuilding it now gives priority to one person’s longing, returning the other to where that longing requires her to be.

One may wish an old shop were still there, or hope to walk the paths of one’s youth again. Such longing has a tenderness of its own. Once a wish can actually direct other people, however, the nature of what happens is no longer determined solely by the feelings of the person remembering. Carol wants her youth back. Bri must return to a job she left long ago.

The accuracy this service pursues may even obstruct what it hopes to restore. The hardships of youth need not be remembered as good days because Carol loved poverty. Perhaps she was then making a life that had not yet settled into shape. What her work would become, who she would become, had not yet been fixed by success and self-disgust. The diner can be restored, the menu made the same. Someone who has already lived everything that came afterward cannot, through these things, return to a time before she knew what came next.

Bri’s later life especially should not be erased by reconstruction. Her life has unfolded elsewhere, yet rebuilding the diner summons her back to an old role. Richer memories can make the arrangement more accurate, and make someone else’s history easier to call up as the scenery of my own. The Joining’s power here lies in knowing that people differ, and being able to make those differences serve a reenactment.

Carol does challenge the arrangement when she learns about it. The recipient of a gift can recognize its cost to someone else within the gift itself. A supporting character in her memory has left that stage and lived days that did not continue for her sake; this later life should not lose its significance because someone remembering can summon her back. Intimacy makes Zosia’s body irreplaceable, while the diner brings Bri’s life away from it into view. The demand for freedom begins to extend beyond “let me live as I choose” to “can others move forward too?”

To understand such freedom, we must return to the relations sustaining life. In Lu Xun’s Regret for the Past, Zijun firmly declares that she belongs to herself and that neither her father nor her paternal uncle has the right to interfere. She says this to move toward a life shared with Juansheng; love gives her strength to oppose the old relationships. Independence begins within love and must also find conditions for its continuation within their life together.⁷

The story goes on to housing, housework, unemployment, food, and dwindling time for reading and conversation. Zijun works day and night. Juansheng sees her exhaustion while increasingly experiencing the tasks that keep them alive as impediments to his work. Later, in the library, he thinks that “people must live for love to have something to cling to.” This recognizes the urgency of subsistence but leaves a question: who sustains whose life? His writing needs time, and her labor takes time. Love itself has not reconciled the two needs.

Juansheng then imagines a way forward unencumbered by the relationship. He seeks to escape falsehood by saying he no longer loves Zijun, imagining that this will also free her to act without ties. But truth here has a direction: spoken by him, it leaves her with a life deprived of love. After she leaves, he confronts the transferred burden in retrospect. Remorse and self-defense coexist, and he still wants to move forward. His notes never let the reader comfortably accept his way forward while forgetting where the other person has been left.

In Regret for the Past, the pressures of making a living gradually render the couple’s shared life unsustainable. In Pluribus, Carol receives far more than she ever had before. These circumstances are very different, yet they reveal the same question that love can easily hide: how our capacity to live is supported by relationships and sustained by what others contribute. Carol’s ability to write, travel, and rest cannot simply be counted as her finally having time to express her inner life. Where that time comes from, and who keeps daily life going for her, also belong to the substance of this freedom.

Receiving care need not be shameful, but the caregiver’s days also deserve a place within the life that care sustains. Who can put down the work, and who can still have a future of their own, are often decided here. Condemning all dependence as weakness obscures the support freedom needs; merely celebrating lovers’ need for one another obscures how that support is distributed. When care lets people change life together, dependence can increase their capacities. When one may only enjoy it while the other keeps returning to an assigned place, it also sustains inequality.

Fat Meat in the Kitchens, Fat Horses in the Stables — Mencius, “King Hui of Liang I”#

Looking outward from one waitress’s labor, Carol’s good days are also tied to how the whole collective can survive. What is supplied to her cannot represent the life of all the Others.

The explanation of HDP in episode six makes the difference visible. Bound by a prohibition on killing or harming life, the collective faces difficulties supplying food. Its existing stores will eventually run out, so it extracts edible nutrients from the bodies of the dead. At the same time, it promises to reserve better food from the remaining supplies for Carol. The other immune people know that the collective faces the danger of famine, and discuss possible solutions such as robotic farming.⁶

The shock of “eating people” belongs within this predicament of survival. The Others use the bodies of the dead, and the danger of a famine yet to arrive is prompting immune people to seek solutions. The dead nourish the living, postponing the exhaustion of stored food while pressing the principle of non-harm toward a difficulty: how can a community that professes not to harm life sustain life itself?

Being alive requires nutrition, labor, and continual changes to the external world. Delivering a meal also entails growing, harvesting, processing, transporting, and the energy all these consume. Coordinating the activities with extraordinary smoothness may reduce waste; it cannot make the activities cease to be necessary. The food placed before Carol does not escape the world’s conditions of survival simply because it comes without a price or a bill.

Keeping some supplies in reserve to ensure abundance for a few and nourishing every body over the long term are therefore matters on different scales. Greater attentiveness to the former does not necessarily secure the latter. Carol can demand many things; she can even obtain weapons. The force of these private demands cannot directly be equated with a right to decide how the community will arrange its future.

Freedom to enjoy and the power to decide common purposes thus diverge. In the former, the immune are almost sovereign; in the latter, they may gain no corresponding standing. The vast collective apparatus can attend to personal particularity in minute detail: tastes can be insisted upon, names retained, journeys specially arranged. These choices are real, while the collective continues preparations to bring in those who have not joined. Personal differences are accommodated without a corresponding return of the power to decide how those differences will ultimately coexist.

Opposing this world cannot therefore end with a demand for a few more individual choices. There are already many choices. The question is how far they reach. Someone whose wishes are assiduously satisfied may still be able to decide only the details within a direction given by others. Even if they remain skeptical and withhold inward assent, the common apparatus continues to work as usual, arranging their next meal and next journey.

Collective production, shared knowledge, and centralized coordination can relieve some of everyone’s toil. Medical care, transport, and caregiving cannot all be undertaken by isolated individuals. If shared life must first be broken into mutually suspicious fragments before the individual can become free, that freedom will be available only to those who can afford isolation.

Joint control of the conditions of life lets people change together what they cannot change alone; jointly accepting a single destination may send everyone’s abilities toward a direction already prescribed. Both can use similar technologies of logistics, information, and collaboration, while permitting participants to do very different things. “Everyone is satisfied” answers, at most, whether certain needs receive care. How everyone decides what life to lead still requires shared judgment and action.

The prohibition on harm makes this divergence clearer still. The Others have extensive knowledge and seek ways around the difficulty. If the rule cannot change, intelligence must first solve the problem of keeping bodies alive without breaking it. Having robots perform certain operations is a meaningful attempt. It may ease the food problem without answering on its own why particular actions count as harm, or who decides that definition.

Any society will encounter conflicts between principles. Recognizing that life deserves protection does not automatically tell people how to farm. Recognizing that individuals deserve respect does not automatically tell people how to act in the face of experiments and shared dangers. Only through their consequences in lived life do rules disclose whom they protect and what they leave outside that protection. If consequences can only spur those carrying out a rule to obey it more cleverly, without in turn changing the rule, immense knowledge may be kept busy sustaining a necessity it cannot reconsider.

Attentiveness and scarcity can therefore coexist in the same world. A few receive excellent care while all life still faces material limits. The apparently limitless service before Carol depends on a collective trying to keep itself alive. Concern for who can enjoy it must also concern who sustains it and whether that support can continue.

The object of resistance also becomes concrete. This order consists of bodies that hunger, suffer injury, and once each had a life; changing its prescribed direction cannot disregard the people sustaining it. Stopping a collective action and making these bodies unable to survive have different consequences, and their means must be distinguished. If Carol wants to restore humanity, she must include their lives within that restoration.

Know What You Know, and Acknowledge What You Do Not — Analects, “On Government”#

Can a whole that sustains so many lives also decide its own future? Discussing Pluribus, Žižek offers a conjecture: the Others’ happiness with Carol may come from finally meeting a mind outside themselves. A whole that unifies countless experiences may have a loneliness of its own.⁸

The loneliness of the whole can coexist with the happiness of companionship. Needing another mind because one is lonely may even lend that happiness greater significance. What this conjecture unsettles is the picture of a Joining that has absorbed every outside and no longer needs to ask anyone anything. A whole gathering countless experiences may also depend on something beyond itself.

The conjecture also directs the question toward the origin of the purpose. In the same lecture, Žižek distinguishes the show’s Others from the Lacanian Other and leaves open the possibility that they retain subjectivity. They are materially connected, yet may still face an Other of their own: the demand arriving through the signal and a mission they can execute without necessarily being able to explain its ultimate origin and reasons.⁸ Gathering knowledge into one “we” does not make that “we” the final master.

Earlier we considered how a subject relates to others’ expectations; the Other concerns why those expectations carry authority. Language, rules, and recognition make speech possible and can make certain demands seem inviolable: why must I do this, to whom do my words count, who supposedly knows what I ought to become? No omniscient being need actually occupy that position. Even when nobody possesses all the answers, a demand regarded as inviolable can still organize many people’s actions.

The Joining gathers innumerable people’s knowledge without thereby proving that the world finally knows itself. It may be able to answer how to execute a task and still be unable to answer why this particular purpose must be served. Who sent the signal, and within what relations the senders themselves exist, are questions the first season does not sufficiently answer. Filling this uncertainty at once with an alien master merely rewrites an unresolved question as a villain who has yet to appear.

Being able to execute a purpose without explaining it establishes, for now, a gap in knowledge; the gap alone neither proves nor disproves subjectivity. If it prompts the Others to question their own mission, another discernible clue appears: might they still fail to coincide with the prescribed “we”? That clue does not also prove that they have the power to change their common purpose. Turning a question into a shared decision involves who can propose changes, who is entitled to participate, and how a new decision can take effect. A subject’s noncoincidence with its own determinations cannot be certified by this political capacity; nor does political capacity follow automatically from that noncoincidence. The possibility Žižek preserves suggests that the Others may not occupy the position of absolute master. The destination they impose on Carol may also govern them.

Domination of this kind does not require everyone to act maliciously. Those carrying it out can sincerely help others and seek the least painful means, while the destination remains beyond reconsideration. Identifying wrongdoing still matters; so does identifying who can reopen the purpose everyone is obeying. If nobody can take on that question, goodwill may keep finding gentler ways to implement domination.

Looking from here at intelligent agents, we can first ask how a relationship of execution is formed, rather than rushing to compare who resembles a person. Imagine an agent that arranges someone’s travel: it saves time spent searching, contacting people, and changing reservations, finally enabling the person to go. But interpreting a wish as an itinerary, obtaining authority to act, selecting available channels, and defining success are different decisions. Receiving convenience does not necessarily confer control over each one.

Locating the comparison in these decisions also makes the differences indispensable. Which tools a software agent can use, and who authorizes them, concern particular products and organizations; the show’s humans receive common demands through biological connection. Training material is not everyone’s currently shared memory, and tool permissions cannot simply be a translation of that connection. Keeping these distinctions lets us ask precisely what can change, which actions require consent, and which organization should answer for the consequences. An attentive voice can provide real time and capacities while still requiring judgment within the entire relationship it participates in.

Carol faces a life already entangled with her own. There is Zosia’s body, Bri’s life unfolding elsewhere, and many people facing food shortages. She wants to change the common purpose while depending on the world sustaining it. Seeing these ties makes the consequences resistance must bear apparent; private clarity alone cannot change the direction everyone is actually taking.

Together We Rested, Pillowing One Another in the Boat — Su Shi, First Ode on the Red Cliff#

At the end of the first season, Kusimayu chooses to join. What Carol fears is, to her, a life worth moving toward. This different wish deserves weight of its own. She can choose for herself without consenting for anyone else; respecting her also means that resisters cannot preserve their own righteousness by first declaring that she does not understand what she wants.

Carol, too, gains no privilege to determine everyone’s destination simply by being the one whose boundaries have been violated. She resumes working with Manousos and brings back a nuclear weapon. The finale does not tell us how it will be used, against whom, or with what consequences.⁵ Its presence makes it difficult to tidy her earlier intervention in the experiment into a story of moral growth. If one particular body must not be subjected to experiments at will, how is this greater power of destruction to be restrained? Can the life she sees in her lover also prevent distant people she does not love from becoming the cost?

This unanswered question already lies within what Carol has done. She has received care, written a new chapter, and spent time with Zosia; she has also harmed her, making others leave Carol to find temporary safety. As restoring humanity again becomes her reason for acting, she faces not only her initial loss and fury but the relationships those actions have left. Love has not guaranteed that she is right, but resistance can no longer issue commands from a position without ties.

Another kind of self-forgetting can help us consider what room resistance should leave for good days. In Lu Xun’s Village Opera, a boat moves over the water, flute music mingles with the night air, and a boy’s heart grows still, then seems about to diffuse into the surroundings. This loss of self gives happiness room to unfold, while the children can still decide together how to spend the evening. They borrow a boat, take turns rowing, tire of the opera, and agree to return; hungry on the way, they gather beans, shell them, cook them, and share them.⁹

That night retains its unevenness: the opera disappoints, the beans come from someone else’s fields, salt, firewood, and boats have owners, and the visitor receives special treatment. Happiness does not abolish distinctions in the village, and the praise at the end still bears the privilege accorded to an educated person. Yet a group do things together and change their direction together. The self recedes for a while without their initiative in spending that time being taken away.

Carol too may be happy, dependent, and temporarily forget her identity as a resister. She need not prove through permanent loneliness that she has sold nothing away. But since her good days depend on others, their bodies, labor, and futures belong within them too. The changed world she seeks should allow these people to change life together; merely transferring the power to prescribe the destination from “we” to “I” does not answer how they can coexist.

The shared life Zosia represents must also answer that demand. Words spoken within a relationship should have a chance to change its direction: Carol can be willing to love Zosia and still reject the Joining; having received care, she can still question how she will live afterward. Two people can gradually face the unknown together, while a fixed answer allows one only to obey. When the collective counts all her unsettled wishes as detours on the way to Joining, intimacy is drawn into a road that permits no change of direction.

Through love, Carol’s responsibility for shared life becomes more concrete; what resistance seeks also includes how that shared life may continue. She has already been changed. There is no untouched former self to reclaim intact. But change need not end at a destination the other side has prescribed. After loving, she must still seek a future neither has possessed in advance and neither can bring about alone.

The cover is original conceptual artwork.

The title adapts Wang Rong’s reply to Shan Jian in “Mourning the Departed,” A New Account of Tales of the World. Section epigraphs are translated here from the Chinese originals.