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Welcome back to Movie Recaps. Today, I will show you a crime, drama, mystery film from 2017, titled OtherLife.
OtherLife is a 2017 sci-fi drama exploring a virtual reality tech where one year equals one minute, raising ethical and psychological dilemmas.
Key Takeaways
- OtherLife blurs the line between reality and virtual experience through advanced memory programming.
- Prolonged or improper use of such technology can have serious psychological and physical side effects.
- Ethical dilemmas emerge around consent, rehabilitation, and the commercialization of immersive experiences.
- The film highlights the complexity of brain function and the risks of oversimplifying mental health conditions.
- Technological innovation must be balanced with caution and moral responsibility.
Summary
- The film OtherLife centers on Ren Amari, a scientist developing a biological software that programs memories indistinguishable from reality.
- OtherLife allows users to experience extended adventures in minutes of real time, effectively buying free time.
- Ren tests the technology on herself and her comatose brother, hoping to use it for medical recovery.
- The technology poses risks including dissociation from reality, seizures, and potential brain death.
- Ren faces ethical conflicts with her co-founder Sam, who proposes using OtherLife as a prison rehabilitation tool.
- Ren’s father expresses concerns about the moral and physical dangers of prolonged use.
- A glitch causes Ren to experience six days inside the simulation during one real day, revealing potential for longer experiences.
- Ren’s experimental use leads to a friend, Danny, suffering seizures after trying an unapproved simulation.
- The film explores themes of memory, consciousness, and the consequences of manipulating the brain chemically.
- Legal and moral questions arise about categorizing OtherLife as a drug or software and its societal impact.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Spoilers ahead! Watch out and take care. Music like a heartbeat can be heard, along with the close-up image of a woman’s blue eye.
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Blackness creeps inwards towards the center, then disappears. A kaleidoscopic blue and green image settles into that of a bridge on the ocean.
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Ren Amari and Jared Amari sit on the beach in black wetsuits. Ren asks Jared if he wants to go back into the water.
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He declines and asks if she is going to stay there forever, but gives in after Ren tempts him with the goggles and flippers.
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They both swim through the clear water. Another kaleidoscopic image settles into a view from a building window. Ren opens her eyes with a stream of black fluid dripping from her right eye.
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She is sitting on the floor, surrounded by empty plastic eye droppers. A countdown clock shows that OtherLife will go live in a little over six days.
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Voiceover begins from Ren sitting in an interview with the TDA, a drug administration. An interviewer comments on her exceptional academic record, which ended four years ago. Ren responds that it was due to an accident where her brother nearly drowned.
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The interviewer offers her condolences, but Ren clarifies that her brother had survived the incident.
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They discuss OtherLife as a difficult-to-classify technology. Ren describes it not as a drug, but as a biological software that allows one to program new memories, indistinguishable from reality on a chemical level.
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Ren visits her brother in the hospital; he is in a coma. She sets up a laptop and headband device to read his brain waves before she uses another eyedropper to drip the black fluid into his eye.
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Then, Ren is on the train, where she declines a call from her dad, Robert, before arriving at a busy workspace.
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A coworker, Byron, tells her to clear the approvals in her queue. Back in her OtherLife, Ren jumps out of a plane and parachutes to the ground before she wakes up in a testing room with Byron.
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A cut back to the interview reveals that Ren’s father has been vocal about the potential dangers of prolonged exposure to her technology.
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He fears physical symptoms could include seizures and brain death. Ren confirms that there are risks, as abuse of any substance could be risky.
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Ren describes her technology in a voiceover as she tests a hiking experience. She describes it as a script that the brain follows like it would any other memory, using pieces of the subconscious to create a perfect day.
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But she also says that there is no chance of it lasting any longer than that.
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Ren tests a snowboarding experience in which she climbs a snowy mountain before snowboarding down.
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But the experience repeats, returning her to the cabin at the beginning of the day.
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She finds herself stuck as the setting warps and changes around her until Byron manages to get her out.
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By the time he does that, she had already gone through six days inside the experience.
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She insists she can fix the code and that they can still use it because the snowboarding experience was going to be a big seller.
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At a sales meeting, Sam, the co-founder of OtherLife alongside Ren, presents the idea of OtherLife to potential buyers.
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He talks about it as buyable free time in which one can experience full adventures before work or on their lunch break.
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Sam explains how OtherLife was more than a simulation and could add years’ worth of experiences to someone’s life.
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He finishes the presentation by asking the clients what they would like to do with their OtherLife.
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When Ren arrives, Sam introduces her as his co-founder and asks her to explain some of the science behind the technology.
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After the meeting, Sam and Ren disagree about what the company needs going forward. On her way out of the meeting, Ren encounters Danny, who was waiting for a date she had forgotten about.
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She apologizes but says she has to work. Back at the interview, the interviewers read out loud from reports about how users can end up dissociating from reality.
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They state how such an experience could seem isolating. Ren and Byron work late that night to debug the snowboarding experience.
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The countdown clock shows OtherLife will go live in about five days. Ren finds the error in the code and tests the new version without issues.
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They continue to work late, and Byron asks about the number of tests Ren has done.
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She tells him 482, which he compares to living about 20 days in OtherLife during one real day.
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Danny comes in to deliver a report Sam had asked for on the long-term use of OtherLife.
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Ren reveals she did not know about it as she reads it. She also asks Byron not to go to Sam behind her back.
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Byron thinks that the recursive glitch that they’ve been getting could be the key to longer simulations.
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He and Danny decide to go out for drinks, but Ren stays behind to keep working.
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She runs the swimming simulation with her brother again and is again surrounded by the empty droppers from her tests.
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She records the result of her 340th test and states that it still needs more testing.
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The interviewers discuss medical applications of OtherLife for brain and memory disorders, along with the potential moral issues considering that it puts ideas into people’s heads.
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Ren insists she has no other applications in mind. Ren returns to her brother’s bedside to try OtherLife on him again; his eye twitches and she feels hopeful.
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When a nurse comes over, she hides her tech and asks him about it. The nurse reveals that things like eye twitches do happen sometimes.
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She leaves, goes home, and looks over the data. Byron and Danny call her about what she’s missing during their night out, and she gets an email from her father about withdrawing her brother’s life support.
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The next day, Ren visits her dad at the college campus where he teaches. They discuss OtherLife, its morality, progress, and how it could help her brother.
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Her dad is worried about a glitch, but she continues to insist that it’s just bad code.
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He insists that depression, anxiety, and other mental conditions could also just be bad code, except the brain is more complicated than that.
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Ren accuses him of giving up on her brother and claims that if he’s conscious in there, he just needs a way to get out.
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Her dad states that he could unplug her brother without her consent and is merely asking for her support.
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Ren goes to work, angry. She asks another coworker named Cass for help with taking her files out of the system.
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Sam and Byron notice that the amount of nanite stock they’ve been going through is much higher than her reported tests.
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They ask what simulation she’s using, but she won’t tell them, just saying it is still experimental.
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Byron leaves and she talks with Sam alone. He proposes the idea of using OtherLife as a prison, to rehabilitate people and allow them to live out their sentences in minutes.
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But Ren refuses and Sam gets angry, shouting at her to get back to work on the actual product.
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She leaves and runs into Danny outside. He tries to find out what’s wrong, but she doesn’t want to talk about it.
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Instead, they both leave and have sex. Afterward, Ren shows Danny the snowboarding experience. They talk about how everything, including memory, is a chemical.
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Danny talks about how he did not expect the experience to feel so real. Then, as Ren checks her phone, Danny grabs another dropper from her purse and tries it, thinking that it was another of the same snowboarding experience.
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Instead, he gets one of Ren’s experimental ones where she swims with her brother. He starts having seizures and won’t wake up, so Ren calls an ambulance.
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The countdown clock is a little under five days from release. Ren and Sam talk with legal counsel. She corrects them when they call OtherLife a drug and explains that it is actually a software.
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Sam decides to talk to Ren alone and questions her about the experience that killed Danny.
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Every other experience had been tested and approved repeatedly, but only Ren had test...
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In a cut to the interview, the interviewer asks Ren what her ambition for the technology is, but she doesn’t answer.
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In order to handle the situation without sending Ren to jail, Sam arranges for a deal where rather than having charges pressed against them, Ren would agree to be a trial patient to a one year confinement in Otherlife.
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Sam pressures her to do it, to keep the company alive but she doesn’t want to.
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She realizes that Sam had still been planning to use the confinement application of the tech behind her back.
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Sam insists that a minute of her life is better than the alternative considering she killed someone with an untested sample.
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She agrees. Ren, Sam, Byron, and several officials go to the testing room. The 365 day trial is much longer than the usual 24 hour simulations so Ren nervously questions Byron to make sure that everything has been checked over.
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Once Byron puts her under, she finds herself in a small room where one wall is a screen with the large numbers 001.
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She can hear the electronic buzzing from the digital number. The room has a sleeping mat, a toilet, a tablet and pen, and a hatch for food, water, and toiletries.
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She exercises, eats, and keeps notes on her tablet about how to improve the space, only to remember that no one else would be able to read those notes.
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When the cell resets for the day, the light turns red and the number changes to show 002.
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She remembers Danny seizing and bangs her head on the wall. Ren hums and reaches her fingers between the grate on the floor to distract herself on the third day.
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On the fifth day she remembers swimming with her brother, and she remembers losing him and seeing him wash up on the beach.
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She promises her brother she wont forget him. She starts taking notes of people who woke from long term comas and what triggered those recoveries as the days go by.
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She argues with herself about whether or not her brother is truly gone, and whether she can actually return life with programming.
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Day 365 arrives, and she waits as the lights turn red. But, then the room resets to 001.
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Ren panics, and realises that the exit routine did not work. She shouts, and starts breaking things.
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Eventually, she lays still in the damaged room, but hears wind whistling. She opens the hatch and finds a gap which she pushes at.
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Through the gap she finds and rips at a plastic sheet and climbs through into a warehouse-like room containing her plastic-sheeting-covered cell.
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She finds stores of the food and water she’d been consuming, a monitor room, and a guard’s desk.
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The guard returns to his desk and sees her so she grabs the keys and a coat to run from him, stealing a truck to get away.
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Ren ends up walking along a busy road, finding ads for otherlife and seeing people everywhere.
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Ren calls the hospital to ask about her brother, and returns to her workplace to find it empty.
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She buys some new clothes, and sees a magazine cover with Sam’s face. She goes to the police and they find that there was a missing persons report filed for her, but that she was also listed as having residency in Italy for the past year.
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She tries to tell them about what happened with Otherlife, including the fact that she was the co-founder.
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But, the police don’t find any evidence of any charges filed against her. When they go to check out the cell they find nothing but remnants.
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She checks her apartment, but someone else has been living there for the past year and the attendant at the front desk won’t let her check for her stuff.
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Meanwhile, Sam arrives, promising that he had come as soon as he’d heard and wanted to get her somewhere safe.
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The attendant at the front desk does not let Sam into the building and Ren tries to avoid him.
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She eventually manages to sneak out without Sam seeing her. Ren goes to find Cass for help, who lets her in and gives her something to eat.
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Cass reveals that the other workers thought that Ren had cashed out and left to go to Italy without saying goodbye.
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Ren also finds out that Danny didn’t die, and sees him again. Ren, Cass, and Danny gather at a restaurant where Danny talks about his experience in the swimming simulation, where he felt like he was drowning.
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He woke up in the hospital but was fine after a week of testing. The launch of Otherlife also went well, confinement being a backbone of the company with proposals for some sentences to last decades or even centuries.
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Ren decides that she wants to get to the bottom of what happened, Danny tries to encourage her to run or tell the media.
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Ren reveals that she registered her dad’s patent which he refused to use, with hope of helping her brother.
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But, that patent had now been stolen by Sam. Using Cass’s ID badge, Ren and Danny sneak into the Otherlife building to look for Ren’s data.
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They find Byron’s office and Danny holds him back so Ren can use his terminal.
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She finds her hard drive and takes it back but Byron manages to alert the authorities so Ren punches him and they both leave.
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Danny and Ren manage to escape, but Cass is captured by the authorities. Ren explains that they will need an Otherlife printer while they drive away, but since the Otherlife building has most of them, they leave the city to get to the one at Robert’s
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house. When they arrive they find the house empty so Ren gets to work. She wakes up the next morning at the desk, and she and Danny take a moment to take in the location as they have breakfast.
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Ren apologizes to him, he forgives her and they have sex. The image of her eye from the beginning of the movie appears, and she wakes to the sound of her dad coming home.
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Ren goes to talk to him and tells her dad about how Sam stole her work.
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She also realizes that her dad was the one who filed the missing person’s report.
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Returning to the printer, Ren explains her swimming simulation. She says that when Danny took it it gave him the experience of being underwater and he drowned, subconsciously choosing that option for how the simulation would go.
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Ren’s intent when designing the experience was to create multiple branches to give Jared a choice, and an option where he could get out alive and thus wake up.
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Her version of Otherlife was one with the option to rewrite memories, which was dangerous and druglike.
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She also expressed worry that the company would eventually refine it to that same point.
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Robert says he’ll call the TDA to raise a safety challenge, which’ll tie Sam up for a while in a review and give them time to finish it.
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But, Ren prints the experience and insists that it will work when her dad asks if she had already finished it.
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She goes to the hospital to give it to her brother. After a few moments, he wakes up and Ren is happy, but then he begins to seize uncontrollably.
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Ren hesitates, crying, then finally pulls the plug. She stays by his side at the hospital into the night until Sam approaches her.
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He describes seeing how Jared had made a decision to live in a dream world rather than wake up.
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Ren starts seeing flashes of the testing room, of people shouting and confused, and of Byron telling her to wake up.
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The hospital disappears and she returns to the beach yet again, alone, and realises that she’s still in her Otherlife.
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She walks into the water and lets the waves crash over her. The water shifts to kaleidoscope imagery with distorted voices, eventually turning red.
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Ren wakes up in the testing room, and punches Sam before trying to destroy the recording.
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She eventually calms down and sits with tea as she thinks about her brother, and her interactions with her dad and Danny while in the experience.
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She answers the ambition question in the interview that she wants to give people a special chance at a kind of life they might not know otherwise.
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The interviewers approve the programming for public consumption. Sam and Ren talk where she apologizes for punching him and tells him she wants to withdraw from the company to focus on research and development.
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She would leave the company with Sam but would keep the patent. This angers Sam, and he throws something from his desk once she leaves.
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Ren attends Danny’s funeral where he is cremated, and talks to her dad about Sam.
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She asks him to come with her to the hospital. Before Ren can get to the hospital, she receives a call from Sam.
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He tells her that she needs to see something in person so she goes back to the office and is greeted by things being put away.
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She finds Sam and Byron reviewing her experience. They realize that she had managed to break out of the prison, and get excited about it as a potential interactive experience.
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But, Ren refuses to help and tries to leave. Sam convinces her to sit down as he explains why she should help, but then he tries to force her back into the same experience.
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At first, Byron refuses to help until Sam tells him that the sooner he helps, the sooner Ren can get back to them, so Byron sets up the experience.
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Ren finds herself back in the prison, where she starts thinking her way through the days and she manages to wake up on her own.
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When she gets up, she wipes the fluid from her cheek and forces Sam into the same experience.
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Her and Byron watch as Sam goes through the days until the system crashes and they realise that they will have to wake him up or he could die.
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But, Ren waits to do so until he has gone through all 365 +1 days like she had.
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Sam wakes up, and Ren and Byron leave him to sob in the chair. Later, Ren meets with her father at the hospital and they mourn Jared’s death.
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Ren returns to the bridge at the beach and watches the ocean.
Topics:OtherLifevirtual realitymemory programmingscience fictionethical dilemmasbrain technologyvirtual prisonpsychological riskstechnology abuse2017 film
