Five human beings are downloaded from brain scans into freshly printed new bodies on a starship. They are the advance team, chosen to Terraform a new planet for humanity, for a slower ship already enroute, full of colonists — including their original selves.
However, a solar flare causes a fatal exception to affect the cloning device, mutating one of the crew into a violent monster. And some of the crew conspire with hidden agendas...
The anime quickly moves past cheap horror to psychological thriller. The clones ask philosophical questions about the sanctity of life, clone personhood, continuity of consciousness and identity, and skepticism of your own memories.
The art style is like a moving water color painting, with elegant costumes and a cathedral-like spacecraft.
Examples:
- Artificial Human: The main characters are printed from an eldritch device called The Womb.
- Bittersweet Ending: Four of the passengers die, and with the Womb unable to recreate them, their deaths stick. Lewis eventually passes away from his degeneration, and Nina herself eventually perishes from old age before the colonists can arrive. In addition, Patty's prediction that the native fauna of the planet would be negatively affected by the colonization comes to pass, as Nina mentions that she's began seeing them less and less. However, the planet has been successfully terraformed into a livable place for humanity, and the series ends with the real Lewis getting his wish and reuniting with Kate.
- Body Horror: Lewis! Fangs, horns, claws, extra eyes, deformed limbs, unnatural skin...
- Can't Take Anything with You: Nothing alive can travel over the Subspace Ansible, hence the need for a 3-D printed crew.
- Clone Angst: the horror of seeing your previous clone's violent death, questioning if your memories are real, knowing that your original, not you, will be with your beloved, debating if it's okay to make a second clone while the first is still out there...
- Clone Degeneration: Lewis's monstrous clone and the secret extra clone of Patty, due to being made in a primitive cloning machine that was smuggled onboard for her sabotage mission.
- Clones Are People, Too:Nina: Based on the Planetary Development Charter, we are granted the same rights as humans from Earth.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The crew's character designs. The botanist is green, naturally.
- Fake Memories: As a freshly printed clone, how could you tell? The crew philosophizes about this and how different they are from their originals, as well as the shock that comes from lying down for cryosleep only to wake up halfway across the galaxy.
- Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Nina's sentimental item is a cat doll that was packed by her original self. She muses that it was the only thing she took with her when she went to live on her own for the first time.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Four crew members print into perfect, healthy human bodies. The fifth...
- Great Offscreen War: Something happened on Earth regarding Alternate Intelligence that caused the colonists to leave and seek out a new planet to live on.
- "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Patty presents the failed clone of Lewis with his butterfly pendant, which is what causes him to wake up from his animal-like stupor and become capable of intelligent conversation again.Lewis: Kate!
- Lightning Can Do Anything: In this case, solar flares.
- The Mole: Who stole the Fantastic Nuke, and why?
- Screw Yourself: Patty is shown to have a sexual and romantic relationship with her own double. When Patty is carried off by her parachute in the ending, the clone grabs onto her, preferring to be Together in Death.
- Space Isolation Horror: Trapped on a starship with a violent, inhumanly strong mutant who will snap your neck or eat all your food. Then, the knowledge that someone on the ship is plotting the downfall of humanity, you have no idea who, and the window of time before the bomb goes off is shrinking...
- Space Whale: The ship is a bit more fishy, but it makes whale sounds.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: ...When they are horrifically mutated and violent?
