Grand Theft Me: Difference between revisions

* Unique variant: in ''[[Surrogates (film)|Surrogates]]'', the remote-control body of {{spoiler|Peters}} is hijacked by not one, but two different characters, one of whom had {{spoiler|Peters'}} real body murdered in order to use the robot as [[The Mole]].

* The central theme of the film ''[[Face Off]]''.

 

 

* In Timothy Zahn's "Soulminder" stories, a technology is developed that can draw a person's essence from their body and store it elsewhere before returning it. It's meant to assist in lifesaving procedures, but naturally it doesn't take long for somebody to catch on that it also enables Grand Theft Me. Unfortunately for the first person who tries it, a dying crime boss, it turns out that placing your soul in someone else's body causes you to start taking on ''their'' personality, and he's so transformed that he eventually turns himself in.

* ''The Main Noon'' and ''Home of the Wanderers'' duology (the first has a [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0353899/ movie adaptation]) by [https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/4382033.Aleksandr_Mirer Alexander Mirer] has a whole [[Alien Invasion]] working like this. Eventually it turned out that they are "drop troops" who are supposed to scout out the place, disable defenses if necessary and send a call for the ships with "colonists" - the latter making it a [[Race Against the Clock]]. They also can interact with computers (or be [[Mind Probe]]d) while in a little crystalline storage thingy, but it's not ''quite'' what we'd see as [[Brain Uploading]]/Downloading: the "intermediary" devices noticeably change weight when loaded or unloaded, and the original owner of a body is not harmed, merely suppressed. Also, the infiltrators can {{spoiler|take over stupid animals - obviously, without opposable thumbs one can but watch and need a translation device or taking another body even to report, and being a common rodent entails risk of not surviving to extraction... but they ''do'' remain sapient while literally hare-brained; and their presence gives a body [[Healing Factor|regeneration]] and ability to survive even otherwise fatal wounds}}. It's not quite reliable, since some creatures (even many humans) can resist control of a possessing mind. It also turned out they are plagued by a secret society devoted to stopping this "colonization". After all, it's essentially a pyramid scheme: on each assimilated planet "colonists" produce children, who at the end of ''their'' natural lifespans are ''also'' saved in storage and added to the queue waiting for new bodies... and so on. The sequel deals with aftermath of the first operation and some thought out details on the civilization of The Way who send those body-snatching ships. While [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien]]s (with [[Faster-Than-Light Travel]]) subtly give the invaders a [[Spanner in the Works]] or two - they won't do something as crass as nuking every mind-colony ship they can find, but now they can pick from hundreds of millions of potential agents who come with deviousness of cultures adapted to all sorts of conflicts and challenges, enough of stakes in the matter to take huge risks, and enough of mental fortitude to suppress trained and experienced Drop Troops, let alone sleepy civilians who in body-swap are as much of passive participants as their victims. Which, naturally, adds up to an opportunity far too good to pass.

 

== Live Action TV ==