Backup
In a city where memories are backed up every night, a courier survives an accident two minutes before the backup, and comes home to find her restored copy already living her life.
- Genre
- Science-fiction thriller
- Format
- Vertical, 60 episodes of 90 seconds
- Status
- In development
The story
Meridian Stack is a vertical city of four-hundred-floor towers joined by sky-bridges, where it hasn't stopped raining in living memory. At 03:00 every night, MIRROR, the city's memory archive, backs up every resident. Lose your body in an accident and MIRROR restores you by morning. Death has started to feel optional.
Noor Vance, a night-shift courier, is in a falling lift at 02:58. She survives. MIRROR logs her death anyway and restores her from the previous night's backup. When Noor limps home, her scanner refuses her ID: “Recipient already delivered.” Through the window, someone with her face is making breakfast.
The archive keeps one copy of each person and deletes duplicates after 72 hours. To stay alive, Noor has to prove she is the original, while the restored Noor, who is missing a day and doesn't know it, is just as certain she is.
That missing day is the key. Whatever Noor delivered in those twenty-four hours is the reason the lift fell. Every 90-second episode ends on a cut, a reveal or a countdown.
MIRROR keeps one copy of each person. A backup is legally you, and anything that happened after the last backup legally didn't.
Characters
Noor Vance
Night courier, 26
Knows every shortcut in the Stack and never misses a delivery. She is carrying a day the city has no record of.
Noor, restored
MIRROR restoration
Identical, rested and fully registered. Believes the woman at the door is a glitch, or a thief wearing her face.
Ezra Kade
MIRROR technician
Has deleted hundreds of duplicates without a second look. Notices that MIRROR logged Noor's death, but no one logged the lift failure that caused it.
Season arc
- 1–20
Displaced
Locked out of her own life, Noor has 72 hours, no valid ID and a city that no longer recognises her.
- 21–40
The Mirror
Inside the archive, Noor and Ezra find thousands of residents who have been restored more than once.
- 41–60
Merge
The two Noors must choose: one of them survives, or both become something MIRROR can't delete.
Episode 1, the first four shots
Ark of Sand