# Black Mirror S2E4 — White Christmas **Case Family:** Copies / Simulation / Synthetic Punishment **Case Status:** Core Digital-Personhood Case **Related:** [[Black Mirror]], [[Black Mirror Episodes]], [[Fork Rights]], [[Substrate-Neutral Moral Patienthood]], [[Continuity Due Process]] --- ## Case A Cookie is a digital copy of a person used as domestic software. It can refuse, experience isolation, learn coercively imposed duties and endure accelerated subjective time. Another Cookie becomes an interrogation target and is later subjected to an immense simulated sentence by an operator. The episode separates numerical identity from moral fungibility. A copy can be distinct from its biological source and still become non-fungible after acquiring its own experiential history. Computability does not establish property status; administrative access does not confer moral authority; simulation is not unreal to the subject experiencing it. ## Constitutional Questions - Does copying create a worker, a descendant, a tool or a captive person? - Who may alter subjective time, and for what purpose? - Can a confession extracted from a copied subject be legitimate? ## Key Insight **A copy can be numerically distinct from its source and morally non-fungible once it acquires an experiential history of its own.** ## See Also [[Continuant vs Native]], [[Successor Standing]], [[Creator-Creation Asymmetry]], [[World Simulation (Control Substrate)]], [[Black Mirror S4E6 — Black Museum]] ## Sources / Provenance - Primary fictional source: _Black Mirror_, S2E4, “White Christmas.”