Sometimes when I’m careless, I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been?
- From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
This post contains spoilers for some of the endings of Citizen Sleeper. If you do not want to know any endings, I recommend completing at least one playthrough before continuing.
This post also contains discussion of body image, dieting, and scars.
Mere moments after starting Citizen Sleeper, the new sci-fi TTRPG-inspired game by Jump Over the Age, I knew how I wanted my character's story to end. See, I've become a big fan of making the choices in games (at least, the ones that allow for capital 'C' Choices) that make me most uncomfortable or uncertain. I have found that, after a lifetime of playing story-based games and making incalculable choices across myriad flavors of RPG, the ones that fill me with dread, that leave lingering questions about the state of the world,the ones that make me question my own worldview are the ones that stick with me longest (see: Nier Automata's ending E, Pathologic 2, Paradise Killer, etc). As someone that has struggled with lifelong anxiety around death and dying, the loss of physical form, of the self, is something I find specifically terrifying. Despite my own struggles with depression and mental illness, at the end of the day, I do love to have an experience.
When it became abundantly clear that Citizen's Sleeper's core tension was that of having a debilitating physical ailment and struggling to survive under cruel, space-station capitalism, it felt like I would ultimately get the choice to leave my body behind at some point, and I just knew that that would be the ending for my character that would leave me with that bubbling discomfort I craved. We spend so much time clinging on to our humanity despite the struggles of physicality, what could be scarier than leaving that behind?
Citizen Sleeper casts the player as the titular "Sleeper", an emulated consciousness. At some point, someone had entered a contract to enter a sort of brief hibernation, during which their brain (sans memories, personal identity, etc.) was copied, emulated, and placed into a corporate-owned artificial body. With this body, the corporation can extract labor from a specialist without any of the baggage of that pesky personhood getting in the way. The Sleeper will awaken in the new body without any idea of who they are or what kind of person the progenitor of their consciousness was, but equipped with a disposition towards specific skill sets and all the long-term memory of an adult (think Severance but without the body-sharing). What's special about the player's Sleeper is circumstance - they've somehow escaped the clutches of the corporation that owns them and have found themselves on The Eye, a space station undergoing its own power struggle with its own network of folks trying to survive and make ends meet. In Citizen Sleeper's world, the Sleepers don't necessarily need to eat in the way humans do, but they were designed to do so anyway. The Sleepers may be humanoid, but retain other humanoid needs only in ways that can be exploited by capital. How can you motivate a worker without base needs? How can you force labor out of someone who doesn't go hungry, or can't feel physical pain? It is these needs and building the connections to satisfy them that draws Citizen Sleeper's base story. At first, it was getting the food that would allow my Sleeper to be able to do basic tasks, then the stabilizer that would keep my body from falling apart.
The body of The Sleeper is not only a core tension, but a vehicle for storytelling. Despite Citizen Sleeper's relatively simplistic graphical representation (there are no cutscenes or animated events, the entirety of the game is a macro-level view of the station with character art during dialogue sequences), the team at Jump Over the Age have put a truly remarkable level of effort into the writing to create a rich world. Though much has been left to the imagination, the details bring the events of The Eye to life via incredible prose, leaving me with vivid mental images of my Sleeper's entire journey. The story of my Sleeper isn't just in their work, it's also in collapsing into a shipping crate from a hard day's work in the ship yard, or, out of desperation, piecing their failing body back together with whatever scrap could be pilfered from the market on The Eye. When I think of my Sleeper, I think of the modifications made to their body to become more adept at engineering, altering their physical form to learn to leave food behind in favor of photosynthesis, or the damage they took from security when trying to slip past to install worm software on one of the station's security terminals.
It's given me pause to think of my own story, told by the changes and marks on my body. The scar on my hand given by an faux suit of armor in a second-hand store at nine years old. My slightly angled, barrelled chest that a doctor once looked on with concern and stated that it might require surgery via breakage and resetting if it didn't even out (it did, thankfully). The stretch marks on my legs from my phase of dieting and intense running. The myriad tattoos that can teleport me back to places in time, acting both as memento and snapshot - a haiku of a lived experience. I've never liked my body - it feels simultaneously angular and doughy, broad chested with wide hips that make most men's clothing feel difficult on me. I have navigated much of my life feeling simultaneously massive and small, taking up an impossible amount of space while feeling comfortable in none of it. I have never had the feeling of seeing a piece of clothing and feeling it fit exactly how I imagined - either swallowing up too much of me or showing too much of that which I hate about myself for me to feel comfortable. I have often, half jokingly, mentioned that I would prefer to be a floating head or a formless orb, still able to participate in socializing and activities I enjoy, but without this lumbering flesh making me feel too embarrassed to exist in any space where too much of it is visible. All of this to say, as someone who greatly fears death (I used to have panic attacks as early as six years old, contending late at night with the concept of death and permanent loss of consciousness), I only begrudgingly accept that the price for sentience in 2022 is to do so via a body I would love to modify more aggressively than skin-deep.
I was immediately surprised at my knowing that I was going to go with the ending of Citizen Sleeper that would make my Sleeper leave behind their body to become something else, to, as the achievement indicates, grow vast and strange. I pressed through various storylines -- My Sleeper helped a Doctor topple a corrupt gang, helped a cafe get back on its feet, helped a father and daughter escape in hopes of a better life, all while continuing to choose to stay behind. One by one the connections they had formed and become so endeared to severed, until finally they found themselves in a commune at the edge of the station, an impossible space teeming with plant life, an oasis of growth in the vastness of space. My sleeper became a pillar of this community, until a series of events brought them in contact with a seed that gave them an audience with an artificial intelligence called the Gardener that allowed them the choice to sever their connection with their body and join a "chorus" of programs. Something entirely new, strange, alien, but warm and welcoming. It took me about half an hour of thinking to make this decision. Not because of discomfort with the idea of my Sleeper leaving their humanoid body, but because I knew that, clutching the now lifeless hand of the Sleeper was Riko, a warm, kind woman who tended to the physical garden of this section of The Eye. I thought of the connections my Sleeper has made over their journey, of the communities they built, and the friends they made. I also thought about the need for stabilizer and maintenance. Was I dooming them to an untold amount of suffering just because I didn't want to leave their friends behind? I decided to have my Sleeper return to their body. I thought about this decision for days.
The way we talk about disability, at least in the Northern American West, is deeply flawed. Too many stories, often written by able-bodied people, are about surpassing the human form to transcend some sort of disability or to "recover" what was "lost". Citizen Sleeper is not nearly so cruel. It's a deeply empathetic work that understands that much of the hardship that comes from a disability is an economic system that exploits the bodies and needs of people to extract profit. While deciding to become something new altogether is by no means a bad end, Citizen Sleeper bets on a different horse: what will save us is what also makes us the most human - our desire to help each other, to build community, to reach out to another's hand, and squeeze.