SuperhumanAbilityModule:Fourth Wallbreaker

There's something about Fourth Wallbreaker, some quirk or flaw, that has brought about an unexpected result.

Uniqus meant for the SAM to make the user aware of any and all observers, both direct observers and live broadcasts, and those who view recordings in the future. It also allowed the user to do almost anything as long as it was entertaining to the only unbiased quantum observer to ever sense the actions of the user; the user's subconscious.

Since the conscious mind of the user could just say "everything is valid", and the people around the user could just say "nothing is valid", the only way to allow fair use of Fourth Wallbreaker was to measure the subconscious thought process of the user, determining whether the user would be amused by the user's intended actions if the user's life was a work of fiction. According to medical knowledge on Gaia as of the year 12020 GHE, the subconscious is the mathematical sum of the conscious and unconscious minds, with no will of its own. This combined output of the subconscious mind is what is commonly referred to as "belief", thus the subconscious would be the perfect quantum observer for the purpose of determining if something is "entertainment", a subjective metric even before accounting for free will.

When users started spouting nonsense about aliens watching them, Uniqus reduced the range of being able to know of recordings viewers to within a hundred years. No dice. Ten years, still no fix. They removed the ability to know of people viewing recordings entirely, still no fix.

A dozen attempted fixes later, and there were hearings with the Council of Descendants. Uniqus accused the Descendants of watching people on Gaia remotely, since that was the only explanation for the SAM to detect live viewership where there should be none.

This is the story that Uniqus goes with when stating that Fourth Wallbreaker is no longer supported and all copies should be turned in for a refund, because the alternative would be to admit that the programming of their SAM pushed the limits of what a SAM can do until it broke the psyches of its users. That being said...

Uniqus protested that it had tried to repair the SAM multiple times and were unable to fix the problem. It was at this point that the Council told Uniqus and the world that, hypothetically speaking, there were other sources of live viewership, things beyond the New Real that could not destroy or modify the New Real but could peek in and observe whenever they wanted. If such entities existed, the Descendants would have no way of knowing.

Since the Descendants claim that outside viewers are purely hypothetical, the government's official stance is that Uniqus is most likely at fault, and has required that Uniqus recall all Fourth Wallbreaker modules.

The users, unfortunately, have other ideas entirely. Paranoid and prone to conspiracy theories, most are convinced that something sinister is happening. Some claim Uniqus is a front company for a conspiracy by the uber-wealthy elite, in order to cover up the existence of an afterlife in dreams accessible via the Fourth Wallbreaker SAM. Others believe that the Descendants are the "lizard men" and have trapped humanity in an artificial universe in order to have a supply of human babies to eat. Others still claim that the Descendants are "the greys" or "the fae", trying to prevent panic while a metaphysical war of immortals is being fought against an alien threat.

In short, the SAM drives you crazy and using it is not recommended.

Trivia

 * In a meta context, the reason the SAM still detects "observers" is because of the reader viewing the events of the New Real by reading a book.
 * The alternative is that the unconscious mind is somehow sentient, which would mean any user would be their own observer... even if the conscious mind was explicitly excluded from being a valid quantum observer to prevent the self-observation paradox.