Sometimes we want to play someone who has experienced physical need, who has needed a job and money, someone human -- but not Terran. Familiar, yet still of Puzzlebox.
Mortality is meant to fill that need, and perhaps one other: A prison for the immortal, and maybe a place where they can die.
If it can be found. For while it is near The Mess, those who escape it, even those with memories better than Morty, have trouble remembering how to get back. Though broken, Mortality is still part of Puzzlebox, and therefore has its mysteries.
Mortality isn't a place you can go to in the MUCK (yet) -- it's supposed to be a place that people are from. In a sense, being from Mortality and coming to The Mess is supposed to be like the Puzzlebox equivalent of leaving a third-world country to come to America. The fact Mortality is supposed to resemble an American city -- somewhat -- only increases the irony.
The first thing you have to understand about Mortality is the Nobles. These are entities that live outside Mortality, on its borders, and rule it. They can do this because they have full access to all of Puzzlebox's functions, and therefore are the source of raw materials and food for the tiny city. They use Toys and other automotons as enforcers, afraid to go into the city itself
The Nobles are a varied lot, but they have a few things in common. They are aristocratic: It is in fashion among them to adopt noble titles like "Duke" or "Queen" -- one's rank is assigned by one's peers, according to overall esteem, and woe to anyone who claims a rank one's peers do not agree with. The King and Queen are the unquestioned rulers, who have made the entire social whorl of Noble existence revolve around them. It is in fashion among the Nobles, regardless of species, to have bodies that are tall and elfin.
In fact, among the more superstitious mortals of the city, the Nobles are regarded as English peasants once regarded the fae -- the things they can do are called Glamour. (Sufficient technology, indeed.) And not without reason: The Nobles are capricious and very interested in human creativity. They trade food for art, and this is why they maintain Mortality in its broken state: They believe that scarcity and mortality produce the best art, and their definition of "art" is pretty broad. To them, a tragic life is art as well.
The Suburbs act as a buffer between most of the city and the Nobles. Imagine 1950s/1060s suburbia: Neat lawns, little houses. But this is a hysterical lie... The order of the Suburbs is an attempted bulwark against the chaos created by visiting Nobles and their servants, and an attempt to soothe the superstitious, almost primal terror the Suburbanites experience when they trade art (usually from other parts of the city) to the Nobles for food and raw materials (which are in turn traded to the inner city). In the Suburbs, the Nobles have wrought an interesting thing: the backup system and ability to instanstiate still works for them (unlike inside Mortality proper), but not for the Suburbanites.
In Mortality proper, the Suburbanites are considered sort of "country rubes": Superstitious (and who can blame them) but neccessary. The city itself very much resembles a 1950s American Midwestern city in style, with a touch of 1980s or 1990s technlogy (like computers and audio tapes) here and there. They build and live, and elect a Mayor every four years from the City Council. They have factories, a constabulary, money (one hundred Pennies equals a Painting), a prison, a museum, and humble backyard scientists and tinkerers... Not to mention a thriving community of artists, musicians, and filmmakers.
However, if you scratch the surface, there are differences: They have little sense of history, knowing only that they live in Mortality, that it is part of Puzzlebox, and that it is somehow broken. They know nothing about other cultures, other than rumors of a vast city of Nobles (The Mess) nearby, that the Nobles prevent them from fleeing to. They try desperately to live "normal" lives, shutting out the chaos around them. Their music, while reminiscent of certain styles of supposedly Terran music, particularly those that came about in the early 20th century, refers only to themselves. They have legends that some might think echo Earth, but many that don't, and none go far outside the confines of the city. Artists and storytellers are both looked down upon and held in awe: Though as vital to society as the Suburbanites, they sit close to the bottom, because the average person from Mortality doesn't understand why the Nobles place such importance on art and its attendant creative chaos.
This need for order, for stability, combined with no sense of history or alternative power structures -- no Nazis that were fought a decade before, like in 1950s America, and not even their dreamers have come up with anything resembling Communism -- makes Mortality particularly susceptible to fascism or Stalinist communism as an idology, despite, or even because of, its democratic tendencies, which are a reaction to the aristocracy of the Nobles. In some ways, the Nobles, as bad as they are, are possibly shielding Mortality from worse things, preserving a touch of its innocence.
...As for a place where death is actual and permenant. Well, that's pretty easy to compare with Elysium, since it has this same issue. If the Mess backup system doesn't record you at all (natives of Elysium are all like this for the most part), then you're left to whatever options you have in the 'Outbox' to survive. If a Mess resident went to Mortality and died, they'd better be sure to eliminate all their backup info somehow in the Mess or they'd just reappear /within/ the Mess upon 'losing signal' in Mortality. Dying there, if you've been a part of the Mess, would require some rather deliberate methodology. To date, I don't know of any way to access the backup information easily as it is the domain of the enigmatic Functions, though some interesting effects have occured (such as scrambling or replacing) with restoration after a severe trauma. --Mel
Interesting, and a good point. Which leads me to the other possible use for Mortality: Since you can't instantiate there, it might make an excellent prison for people you don't want to be allowed to use their backup. Part of the freedom from coersive violence comes from the ability to instansiate a weapon... I think I'll modify the above appropriately.
"Pleasantville" was very much an influence -- I was thinking of their "Geography Lesson" when I was talking about Mortality's curious lack of history. "Dark City" was probably an influence without me realizing it... I liked the film. -- Morty