(it's best to be familiar with signalis before reading--i'll be spoiling large portions of it below the break, for one, and i'm also going to be sparse in explaining some of the worldbuilding and narrative elements. i've added a few footnotes to exposit in the event that you're broadly familiar but missing bits of context, however.)
what's the difference between a daydream and a memory?
your initial response might be something along the lines of "daydreams are made up, and memories are real." this isn't entirely wrong: daydreams are more or less intentionally made up stories, and memories are built on events that we experienced. memories aren't recordings, though: they're malleable. humans can easily create memories, or alter them, creating vivid pictures of things that never happened at all. when memories reach that point, there isn't really a distinction! what was real doesn't exist in the brain. only what we remember, and what holds our thoughts still.
really, without external information to reinforce our memories, there isn't all that much of a distinction between entirely fictional experiences and those that actually happened to us.
in signalis, ariane yeong is a young woman wholly dissatisfied with her life.
it's difficult to blame her, to be honest. she lives in underground on rotfront, a frozen moon, tending to her family's photography store and getting sent off to compulsory military service under an authoritarian regime. she feels alienated from the people around her-- she doesn't fit into the role constructed for her. feeling isolated, restrained, and without control, she elects to sign herself up for a near-solitary mission to search for extrasolar bodies, planetary or otherwise.
before she leaves, ariane finds photographs of several vinetana soldiers. one of the photographs depicts two women: alina seo and another unnamed woman.b alina very strongly resembles ariane, and that connections seems to catch in ariane's mind. ariane asks around about this photograph--she sends it around, asking family members about alina. ariane is compelled by the photo, and brings it with her on her mission.
as time passes on the extrasolar mission, ariane once again begins to feel more and more trapped. she maintains health and sanity to an extent, but eventually, as the ship's systems fail, most notably its nuclear reactor, ariane is forced to cryogenically seal herself for increasingly long periods of time--decades, if not centuries.
when put in cryogenic sleep, though, ariane seems to continue to dream.
she dreams of the other people she could have been. she dreams of S-23 sierpinski, the facility she would have been sent to had she not gone on her mission. she dreams of alina seo, the woman who looks just like her. sierpinski is not a happy place--it's a re-education camp and mining facility--but it's a place full of people interacting with one another. it's something that could have been better than dying slowly--or not dying, as ariane is bioresonant.
what this means is complicated, and not clearly defined in the story, but bioresonants are those who are in tune with the very nature of the human mind, and also reality itself. at their most powerful, bioresonants can change the climates of entire planets, create gravity out of nothing, and control the minds and perceptions of others to do their bidding. for bioresonants, the difference between the world in their minds and the world around them can become functionally non-existent. as ariane dreams, her dreams begin to leak out into what is real.
there are three chapters in signalis: the first, synchronicity, has an elster unit descend into S-23 sierpinski, the aforementioned mining facility; the second, liminality, has elster fight through a senseless hell filled with gore and rusted metal; and the third, gestaltzerfall, has elsterc explore ariane's home, sector C of rotfront.
someone with appropriate context might immediately draw some connections via the names alone. throughout the events of chapter one, the thoughts and influence of ariane exert more and more influence on what is "real." alina seo is present on the facility, despite the chronology of such an event being nonsensical.d a great number of elster units arrive at the facility at some point. one of ariane's old friends, isa is present. most notably, though, an infection is ravaging the facility, first turning people into monsters, then turning them into literal tumors. here, not only are ariane's thoughts present, the sickness in her body and mind is brought about as well. ariane's daydreams of her other life have well, synchronized with the reality of sierpinski.
the title of the third chapter, gestaltzerfall, literally "shape decomposition", is a psychological phenomenon where complex shapes and patterns are only recognized by the brain as their constituent parts. this is a fitting metaphor for the "infection" as we see it--gestaltse are reduced to silhouettes, while replikas' durable bodies hold them together, not quite dissolved but reduced from complex people to tools fulfilling roles. the chapter itself depicts rotfront, as ariane in her wounded state remembers it--the people there there are only shadows or objects. isa, ariane's friend mentioned earlier, succumbs to the infection here: she is something, and then she is nothing, just one bloodstain on the floor out of many. while chapter 3 is literally a depiction of the place ariane used to live, it also shows the degradation of her memory.
so. the first chapter seems feature what is left of ariane's daydreams, and the third depicts what is left of her memories. what lies between daydream and memory? what is the thread tying them together?
in chapter 2, liminality, ariane's current physical and emotional experiences are made real. replikas made of mismatched severed limbs stumble through disconnected impossible hallways. no longer is there a spreading plague of flesh and tumor, for there is hardly anywhere left for it to spread. the floor is wet with blood, and the walls and ceilings pulse with an unsteady heartbeat. the setting of chapter 2 is diseased, in much the same way that ariane is. there is little left but flesh.
combined, the three chapters of signalis show us what remains in ariane's mind. ariane's sickness slowly progresses as the years go by, and she begins to lose herself to the illness. eventually, the only people she can sustain (or perhaps the only people that can withstand her sickness) are her beloved elster and herself. everyone else is lost--and so is ariane, if elster takes too long to find her. eventually, ariane must die, and she cannot help but take everyone else with her.
a vineta is an ocean planet that seemingly was once earth. it's been nearly totally destroyed in the civil war between the "revolutionary" nation of eusan and the traditionalist empire of eusan.
b it's not clear exactly who this is, but it's heavily implied to be the original "template" for elster (explained more below.) some people think she's also related to isa's family, which is very possible!
c a cutesy nickname for "LSTR". elster is a replika, which is a biomechanical android copied from a human "template." different replikas are built for different purposes; LSTRs were originally built to be extrasolar pilots.
d this might not necessarily be true-- i mean, this entire post is just one interpretation, but this particular thing especially isn't quite set in stone. it's unlikely that alina would have ended up at sierpinski without ariane's influence, though, given her origins and place in the timeline.
e "gestalt" is the name for people that aren't replikas. "normal" humans, as best as we can tell.
