All right.

Humans breathe a highly corrosive gas known as oxygen. By itself, oxygen can rust most metals, and cause most proteins to decay at an alarming rate. It’s a miracle humans survive at all.

Here I go.

Possibly because humans survive in an atmosphere that seems designed to destroy everything, they tend to enjoy doing things with a high risk of death. For decades, their main mode of transportation was in the top ten causes of death. They consider jumping off bridges and drinking lethal amounts of alcohol “fun”. In fact, an increased risk of death made their enjoyment of it increase in turn.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Good-bye.

For every one human who would look at a situation and say “that’s stupid, I could die”, ten humans would immediately volunteer to go first. But if there was any sort of reward, even an imaginary one, keeping humans from trying it is practically impossible.

Tupananchikkama

----------------------------------------

Mirror splitting was not cloning. Nothing had to be grown, and nothing was taken from a questionable source. If a human was split, they were truly identical in every single way, with no “original” and therefore no “lesser”.

Psychologists loved the new questions raised by there suddenly being two of one person. Religions tried to pretend most of the questions raised did not exist. Governments tried to ban splitting, gave up, and spent a frantic week inventing new laws to regulate it.

The main issue was, once cracked mirrors became more and more available, it wasn’t particularly expensive to split a human. Most companies that made some sort of product had a dozen or so mirrors, and in most cities there was a place willing to rent theirs out by the hour when their regular employees had gone home for the night.

And then came the question: was splitting oneself for the purpose of a death battle legal?