Picture of Sigmund Corporation's building exterior, from the SigCorp Holiday Special.
The Sigmund Agency of Life Generation[1], also referred to as Sigmund Corporation, Sigmund Corp. or SigCorp, is a fictional company whose practices are the main premise of the Sigmund Corp. series.
The company employs a technology capable of altering one's memories; however, doing so on living patients would cause conflict between their new memories and their real lives. Therefore, the procedure is only legal to perform on people on the verge of death. The company utilizes it to offer a wish-fulfillment service for people who aren't satisfied with their lives and would like to remember a better one before they die.
Method[]
The company allows anyone to sign up for their service, and signing up can be done at any time. Clients choose how they want to live their second life, and the company will send their employees to perform the procedure when the client becomes comatose with only a little time left to live. Clients who are undergoing the procedure are called patients presumably for this reason.
The technology itself manifests in the form of the Memory Editor, a machine which is able to read the patient's memories and generate new ones based on those memories. The way it works is by transferring the patient's wish to their younger self to motivate them according to it. It then attempts to generate a whole new lifetime of memories where the wish comes true, based on the newly motivated version of that younger self along with real world data in the public domain. If successful, the memories will be transferred to the patient's present self, and they will remember that they've lived a happy and satisfying life before they draw their last breath. However, the machine may fail to motivate the patient, as with Johnny in To the Moon, and in those cases the machine's operators would have to intervene and try to make a change that would trigger the motivation in the younger self.
The company's employees who are assigned to the patients are specialized doctors licensed to operate the machine. The doctors work in pairs, and it seems that each pair consists of a Senior Memory Traversal Agent (who is trained in the ins-and-outs of traversing someone's memories) and a Technician Specialist (who understands and maintains the machine's code). Their main task is to traverse the patient's memories to find mementos, which are objects that exist in two or more memories and allows separate memories to be linked. Only after the memories are linked can the machine transfer the patient's motivations to their younger self. The doctors are generally dressed in white coats with a gold trim. They operate on a per-call basis, and as a result, their work hours are hectic and unpredictable. At times a patient who are originally assigned to one pair would be delegated to another due to unavailability, as is the case with Colin in Finding Paradise.
On specific days of the year, the Sigmund Corporation refers all calls and assignments to their competitor, the Hermann Corporation, as per contract, allowing employees of the Sigmund Corporation some much-needed time off. This contract also works the other way around, with the Herman Corporation referring all assignments to the Sigmund Corporation on specific days. This is possible either via mutual agreement between companies or as per regulation via a parent company.
The Sigmund Corporation's work appears to be highly controversial, due to the appearance of protesters in front of the building.
Trivia[]
The name Sigmund Corporation seems to be a reference to the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud who believed the function of dreams is to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awaken the dreamer.
Employees[]
- Dr. Eva Rosalene - Senior memory traversal agent
- Dr. Neil Watts - Technician Specialist
- Dr. Eddie Doyle
- Dr. Lisa Vazquez
- Dr. Logan Boswell
- Dr. Robert Lin
- Dr. Roxanne Winters - Technician Specialist
- Dr. Taima McMillan
- Dr. Willis McMillan
- Alistair (mentioned)
References[]
- ↑ Eva Rosalene's dialogue from To the Moon when she and Neil Watts encounter Johnny's last accessible memory.