Mickey 17 suggests that in a system designed to murder the worker, , and the system is the signal. Mickey’s survival is an error that the system attempts to correct via deletion.

Let us perform a thought experiment: If a human consciousness could be encoded as a video stream using OpenH264, what would the settings be?

When you next watch a video compressed with OpenH264—a YouTube tutorial, a Zoom call, a pirated movie—remember Mickey 17. Somewhere in that stream of bits, a clone is screaming. And the codec is calculating whether his scream is redundant enough to discard.

This mirrors the power structure in Mickey 17 . The colonists are told they are free. The clone is told he is an "Expendable"—a noble sacrifice. But the underlying patent (the colony’s charter, the ship’s AI, the human printer) is owned by a distant, uncaring corporation. Mickey 17 can see the source code of his own existence (his memories), but he cannot recompile himself without permission.