… instead of making a unique individual spawned from a synapse record instead created the reverse of a horcrux? For those who haven’t seen the Harry Potter movies or read J K Rowling’s books, a horcrux is an object (potentially “alive”) into which a wizard can split his/her soul to make themselves harder to kill. They also provide an intermittent link (apparently in an on-demand, individual basis) between themselves and the horcruxer.
In The 6th Day, syncords are used to transfer a person’s identity, memories, etc into a human blank.
In the Newsflesh trilogy, we’re not told how cloning is done, but just that there is a way of recording the state of someone’s brain and implanting it into a new body.
In Jet Li’s The One, we are presented with a multiverse in which everyone exists in alternate versions of themselves – but when one of the multiverses loses an instance of a person, their physical energy/strength/etc is transferred to their remaining “selves” until eventually all instances die, at which point there is no place for the energy to transfer, and it is eliminated (I think – it wasn’t really explained in the film).
Discounting the possibility of a multiverse, what if every time a clone was created, while the current state of mind was implanted to give a common history, going forward all simultaneously-extant instances of the individual would not branch their histories, but instead would create a hive mind, each gaining the experience of the others via “inverse horcruxification”? Ie, instead of splitting the soul, it would diversify the mind, and create extra ‘containers’ in which the person can experience the world.
Multiplicity kinda went down the line of thought, but while all the clones worked together, they weren’t creating a shared memory/history of their “lives”.
I think it could be pretty cool to explore this concept in a good book/movie (or even series).