ID-0 is an interesting little series I stumbled across on Netflix. Like a lot of sci-fi anime, it’s in the mecha genre (involving giant robots), but with a twist. The premise is that humans can copy their mind into a robot called an “I-machine” and essentially become the robot.
A backup copy of the human’s mind is made at the same time. Under normal circumstances, their mind is copied from the I-machine back into their body when they’re done using the machine. But if anything goes wrong, such as the I-machine getting destroyed, their mind can be restored from the backup, only losing memories from their time as the machine. This makes I-machines ideal for dangerous work, like mining in outer space asteroids.
This turns out to be useful, because there is an extremely valuable mineral, orichault, which appears to exist in asteroids and small planetary bodies. Orichault is actually needed for the mind transfer technology. It’s also used for interstellar travel, enabling something called a “Miguel Jump”, which appears to be an instant teleport across interstellar distances.
Maya Mikuri is a “cosmogeology” student participating in a university project to survey orichault. But after an accident and having been framed for illegally selling information on the location of orichault reserves, she finds herself fallen in with a crew of mining pirates. The crew ends up being fairly friendly (for pirates) and essentially give her a job and home on their ship, the Stulti.
As it turns out, most of the crew are “Evertrancers”, people who have copied their minds into an I-machine permanently without ever returning to their body, either voluntarily or due to their body being lost or unavailable. It’s stated by a disapproving military officer that this is illegal and unethical. (Although it’s never explained why.)
One of the crew is an extremely talented mining excavator named Ido. Ido is not only an Evertrancer, he also has no memory of his previous human life. His earliest memory is waking up in a robot body on a prison ship. He’s unaware of how he got there or what crime he might have committed. His I-machine includes no identity information, hence his name. (“ID-0”, “Ido”. Get it? Yeah, I know.)
On a particularly lucrative excavation, the team discovers a large concentration of orichault, but with a little girl at the center, who appears to be around four years old. (And she has a tail, because anime.) While apparently healthy, she doesn’t appear able to speak.
While pondering this, the ship is apprehended by a military vessel that accuses them of illegally mining orichault, even though this time the crew thought they had a valid contract. While this is being disputed, both parties are suddenly attacked, by meteors, and apparently the planetoid where the large chunk of orichault was mined from. It seems able to move under its own power.
The crew manages to escape, but find themselves being pursued by the planet, which mainly attacks by flinging rocks at them. It appears to be after the girl.
The story expands from there. The pursuing planet turns out to be a major threat to humanity. And Ido’s backstory is eventually shown to be part of the reason.
This turned out to be an enjoyable series, albeit one where the story events aren’t always clear.
It also has a few scientific issues. The major one is the idea that a modified mind can be copied back into an organic brain. The show also eventually posits that different minds can be loaded into brains on demand. Even accepting computationalism (which the series doesn’t necessarily endorse), you can’t simply load data into an organic brain. The biology doesn’t work that way. (I can think of possible workarounds, such as the humans having cyberbrains (as in Ghost in the Shell), but there’s no implication of it.)
Still, that aside, the series manages to explore some existential territory without getting particularly dark or edgy. If cyberpunk in space (that doesn’t lean too much into the “punk” part) sounds interesting, I recommend checking it out.
SelfAwarePatterns 
I kind of like where Ido’s name comes from. Kind of reminds me of how Constable Odo from on DS9 got his name.
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I had to look up the origins of Odo’s name. Interesting. And I guess people have been named for even simpler reasons before.
It’s kind of interesting that in this case, it depends on a similarity in the western alphabet between the symbol for letter ‘o’ and zero. I wonder the name was different in the original Japanese with a dependency in their writing system. Of course, “Ido” is a Japanese name and could have been in the original, with the name origin effectively being more obscure for Japanese audiences.
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Maybe. I have a friend who teaches English in Japan. His perspective may be a little biased, given what he does for a living, but he’s told me that learning at least a little bit of English is considered cool there. If so, then maybe more people would pick up on the Ido/ID-0 thing then we might otherwise expect.
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Interesting. In that case it might be like injecting a bit of French or German here, a wink to those in the know.
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What about the Dune associations Mike? I realize that they didn’t do mind transfer stuff back in those days of sci-fi, though at least the spice caused mind expansion for the Mentat, or a dynamic that replaced rather than existed as algorithmic computers. Then there’s the need for Orichault for interstellar travel. As I recall in Dune the spacing guild needed “the makers” to produce spice for that.
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Orichault does play sort of a similar economic role to Dune’s melange. (From what I recall, Herbert meant melange to resemble the economic role of oil in our current civilization.) Although by the time of the events in Dune, melange has been in use for millennia. The discovery of orichault in this series is only a few decades in the past.
Interestingly, there had been mind transfers in science fiction before the writing of Dune. Just about every concept got explored by the SF pulp writers prior to WWII. Edmond Hamilton had a story with it in 1936. And Arthur C. Clarke had it in his far future novel: The City and the Stars. But Herbert deliberately made the civilization in Dune a post-AI one, one which had rejected AI and everything associated with it in its deep past (10,000 years before the original novel takes place). I think he did that because he wanted to tell a certain type of story, and AI would have gotten in the way.
Of course, in Dune’s universe, people can take melange and see the future, awaken ancestral memories, and do all sorts of other paranormal stuff. Most people today see that as fantasy, but in the 1960s and 70s, it was still considered science fiction.
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