I. Venezia

Prior to my half-sane adventure in search of additional Marcos, I experienced a sort of moral conundrum; I was travelling to Venice for the more-or-less express purpose of acquiring more Marcos (I was told by the Purrito to “stuff the bag” with Marcos). What, then, was my obligation towards the original Marco? I could make a utilitarian argument that bringing him would allow me to take idiotic pictures of him on the RER, or on the navette, or in the airport, but all of this was a cover for the fact that I felt like not bringing Marco would be denying him a trip “home.” I then wondered about the soul of a Marco; are Marcos a connected hive-mind, where the experience of the new Marcos acquired in Venice would be shared with the old Marco left behind in Paris? Are Marcos clones of one another, like the transporter that does not work quite correctly: in the horror-show (read: oh god they probably work like this) version of the Star Trek transporter, a copy of the person being transported is spit out at the other end, while the original person is disintegrated. If you’re the sky-piloting type, you can hand-wave this away with “well the soul is probably moved to the new copy simultaneously,” but if you’re inclined towards the evidence that the sense of self arises from the neural knot inside your skull, the implication is that were I to walk into a transporter, an independent copy that looks like me, talks like me, walks like me, annoys the Purrito like me is formed at a distant location, but then I (the local I) die. The net number of Geeps behaving like Geeps is preserved (and the universe can tell no difference between the two), but this particular meatbag, the one that is me, the one that I give a shit about because it ism from my perspective me, is disintegrated. (Transporters: fuck that).

All of which is to say that I’d be denying the original Marco a trip home. Another Marco that’s a copy of a Marco (which is to say, our Marcos diverged earlier in the timeline) would have his experiences, and would probably (assuming no trauma between now and the point of divergence from Marco prime) thus be happy in the same way that our Marco would be. Our Marco would still have been left in the cold, however, and I’m not sure how I feel about net-Marco happiness coming at the cost of our-Marco happiness.

On the other hand, bag space is finite. You can guess as to how things ultimately played out.

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