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Sync (Web Video) - TV Tropes
Sync is a web series made by the guys at Corridor Digital and hosted by Bammo.
It's set in the year 2025, where mankind has created the first computerized human, and he is a total badass.
The full Director's Cut as a movie can be watched here.
Tropes:
- Body Surf: Charlie's special ability: he can transfer to any nearby "shell" of his body if his current shell is damaged or destroyed. He can also ride the Sync network to get halfway across the world in seconds, as long as there's a shell waiting for him. This ability is stripped away fairly quickly, and Charlie's shells instead are a partial cause of the Singularity.
- Brain Uploading:
- The Sync program in a nutshell, with Charlie being able to upload into alternate bodies when the one he's currently inhabiting dies.
- He can also traditionally be held in computer storage, although he really doesn't want to be held in there, since he thinks they might just not let him out again: the last time he was in there was for two weeks, and he implies that it was not a pleasant time during or after, when he had to explain to his girlfriend where he was and it almost ruined their relationship.
- The Cameo: Freddie Wong, Jimmy Wong and Harley Morenstein.
- Establishing Series Moment: The first episode opens with One-Man Army Charlie talking his way into a drug den, with only a pistol and his razor-sharp wit. He gets to the crime lord's office, issues an ultimatum and a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, gets grabbed from behind, and then... beheaded. Then he wakes up perfectly unharmed in his backup shell, while HQ berates him for needlessly wasting resources. Apart from a few shots of the inactive shell, this is the first indication that it's even a sci-fi series.
- Future Me Scares Me: Charlie's backup from before the incident is downloaded to a shell, and ends up meeting his current self, who is dying and can't upload due to the Sync network being down. Past Charlie is disturbed by seeing Future Charlie so badly injured and near death, while Future Charlie is resentful of the fact that he's going to die and Past Charlie is going to live his life. But they both get over it fairly quickly.
- Gangbangers: The Latino gang from the first episode are drug and human traffickers mostly up to no good with no moral ulterior motive.
- Hollywood Hacking: The cause of the singularity is through a mahjong gamenote a program disguised as a mahjong game is actually used by a brilliant hacker to develop a bot-net, using any computer with the program installed to add processing power to complex problems like hacking a password. The problem is that the program is accidentally added to computers in the Chinese Sync facility, and from there to Charlie's empty shells, activating their base functions without Charlie's higher level reasoning. The shells start to fulfill their core function of self-preservation and information gathering, but the AI routines quickly start to grow more powerful by accident, and the increasingly networked intelligence becomes the singularity entirely by accident.
- Punch-Clock Hero: We discover in episode 2 that our character is TRYING to take a committed relationship somewhere. But of course; The Call Knows Where You Live and his handlers need him, right this second, just as he's proposing. Quite the time to have to clock-in. Made ingeniously awkward by the fact that he can switch bodies and they forcibly switch him into one at the station and leave his other body comatose and in a heap at her house.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: Charlie walks into the Big Bad's office building, making absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that he's carrying at least four different guns, and then loudly cycles the action on his assault rifle before turning to the receptionist and asking where his target is. She tells him, and then high-tails it out of there very quickly.
- Slice of Life: About 97% of episode 2 is the events leading up to and contained within the main character's dinner with his girlfriend. The other 3 percent is his job screwing things up.
- Shout-Out: Has a few references to internet memes and viral videos.
- The Singularity: An accidental one. Handled somewhat realistically: by the time people realize what's going on, they understand that the AI that's developed is incredibly powerful. By the time they're in a position to stop it, they reason that they shouldn't, because a violent first contact with an AI that has access to everything could end disastrously. Charlie meets with the AI and tries to convince it to stay hidden instead of making contact, until humans are ready to deal with it on a friendly basis. The AI points out that it already come to that same conclusion, as it doesn't want to hurt humanity despite humans' fear of it.
- Translation Convention:
- Lampshaded when someone appears to pause episode 3 for you, and change the language from "Chinese" to "English." From that exact point on, everyone in the Hong Kong setting appears to be speaking dubbed-over English.
- When Charlie meets the hacker, it takes ten minutes for them to address the fact that she's speaking English very well.
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