Profile Rodrigo:
Rodrigo immigrated to Mars 13 years ago. Due to an automation mistake at the relay station Rodrigo’s earth body was awakened after his consciousness was processed to his immigrant body. Confronted with the problem of having two Rodrigos, Director of Welfare Kahn decided to exile the pair and maintain constant surveillance over them. Over the years Director Kahn has made watching Rodrigo carve out an existence in the harsh Martian wilderness her favorite pastime.
Rodrigo lived a mostly solitary life, scraping discarded tech left behind by the drones that maintain the vast network of power grids, mines, and garbage facilities scattered around the Ares Vallis dome. Occasionally Rodrigo would develop some new technology or create a unique program that Kahn would use to enhance the domes existence. These developments justified Kahn’s decision to allow Rodrigo to live out his natural life on the planet rather than having killed him back on the relay station.
Rodrigo struggled with his identity ever since he became split between two bodies. The Rodrigo from Earth knew he was the original incarnation of himself but he refused to believe that his clone was a different or separate person from himself. He believes that there is only one Rodrigo - just two perspectives. His mind is in two bodies, but it’s still the same mind, still the same identity. Rodrigo believes that his clone makes the same decisions that he would make in the same situation. Rodrigo believes that his two selves share the same identity, but have different experiences. This makes for a broader understanding and wider range of experience. Because Rodrigo believes his clone is no different from him, he accepts all actions and incorporates all thoughts his other self does and thinks as his own.
On the other hand, Rodrigo who was created on Mars believes that he is a completely new man independent from his original. From the instant that rodrigo laid eyes on his original self he understood that he was not the original man. From the very beginning rodrigo determined that he was less real and somehow inferior to his predecessor. Rodrigo believes that identity is not continuous between bodies. Bio-cycling does not extend the life of the original individual, it creates a new individual. Because Rodrigo believes consciousness is not transferred in the bio-cycling process, he believes that identities are being terminated prematurely without the vessel understanding that they will seize to exist. rodrigo has no proof for his theory and as a result he argues with his predecessor regarding the meaning of identity on a regular basis.
Flash forward to the present: Having access to the crashed transport and pods confirms what rodrigo has long suspected. The pods records a back-up of the consciousness during the bio-cycle process. However, consciousness still only exists within a body; which means it is impossible to interact with the back-up that is stored digitally within the pod. The pod records the back-up and then uploads the mind file to the new body. The process is handled entirely by the pod. There is no direct transfer of the mind, the mind does not leave the host, the process does not create vessels. The process of bio-cycling is not cut & paste as the Dome has stated, it is a copy & paste. This is the key. This is why the pods and the “vessels” are incinerated when they are taken down from the relay station. The Dome is destroying the body, the back-up, and the technology that would allow more copies of the immigrant to be made.
When the Dome destroys the body and the pod, it puts the immigrant under the control of the Dome. Without the Dome's cooperation the immigrant cannot be cloned again. Citizens are also bio-cycled in pods, the same way as immigrants, when a body ages to a undesirable degree. A citizen is an investment in the future of the Martian civilization, but a citizen with the ability to create duplicates of his or herself is a liability. The Dome maintains control by keeping back-ups and pods out of the hands of the citizens and immigrants. The Dome decides who is bio-cycled and who isn’t.
Concerning the future: Rodrigo is responsible for the rescue of two medical technicians from the destroyed relay station. He restored life to the badly burned technicians by bio-cycling them into the earth bodies of two immigrants. The pods from the transport ship that crashed down to the planet are storing a back-up mind file of the two immigrants who perished up on the relay station. Essentially, the two technicians are borrowing the vessel bodies while they figure out how to restore themselves to a new body of their own, at which time the mind file stored in the pods can be used to restore the identities of the immigrants into their original Earth bodies.
At the same time Rodrigo is being accused by Director Kahn of attacking and destroying the relay station. Kahn believes that Rodrigo attacked the station in order to steal the pods - perhaps to create more clones. Rodrigo must protect the technicians and the pods for him to survive this ordeal. If Rodrigo loses the pods or the technicians he loses the evidence that proves his theory. Despite Rodrigo's self-sacrificing actions, and his new understanding of how bio-cycling really functions, he is still being hunted by Kahn with no clear path towards absolving himself in the eyes of the Dome