In the new series of Black Mirror, there are, at a rough count, about five instances where people are uploaded. But it’s not all bad: others are downloaded. A few people become various projected versions of themselves, which seems bad, until someone else becomes a toy. Yet even they fared better than the person who has their consciousness transferred into a giant space bug (and they used to work in marketing, which is not a transferable skill).

SPOILERS! Watch the Alastair Campbell Charlie Brooker interview (includes spoilers)

If Black Mirror started off with the simple premise of examining how technology is shaping our lives, then now, in series four, we’re coming to its logical conclusion – what happens when our lives can be shaped into technology?

Here, memory can be given, like blood; pain can be transmitted, like Wi-Fi. Two people can squeeze into the same brain. Deleting stuff by accident, it goes without saying, will be really problematic in the future.

It is Charlie Brooker’s smartest series to date – and by far the most disturbing.

Like the other series, Black Mirror once again plays with genre, but here Brooker goes full bore. One, "Arkangel", about the technological lengths a mother will go to protect her daughter, is shot like an American indie. Another, "Metalhead" - filmed entirely in black and white - is a tense survival horror, starring Maxine Peake. The preposition is a simple one: what if drones didn’t just deliver goods from warehouses in the future, but also provided private security for them? Brooker’s brilliance is in understanding that the more mundane the machine (here: small, four-legged, almost dog-like), the more terrifying that it’s trying to kill you; that the really awful thing is the silence as it tries.

Others riff on date films ("Hang The DJ", wherein singletons are told how long each relationship must last) and scandi detective dramas ("Crocodile", wherein memories are forcibly extracted for insurance purposes) and Star Trek-like space adventures (the stand-out feature-length "USS Callister").

The first, "Black Museum", is like a homage to the Eighties horror classic Creepshow. We visit a curiosity museum in the middle of the American desert, home to various pieces of tech, each of which has a disturbing backstory that involved a murder.

Yet, what you mostly take from this series is that it’s not about the quest to stay alive, because that’s for the living. The standout stories here are about simulated souls, or those who might be, or those who spend so long in simulations the difference is moot.

If the best episode of last series ("San Junipero") was also the most optimistic about a digital afterlife – in that case, how we can be uploaded to a utopia of our choosing with the soulmate of our wishes – then here Brooker corrects that rare lapse of pessimism.

For instance, as Brooker plays around with in various ways here, imagine the reality of it. You’d wake, only to be told you’ve woken as a digital copy of yourself, and the truth is there’d be no fiercer hell. Because it’s not an afterlife, but a prison sentence without end.

This is the digital abyss Brooker comes back to again and again. Where we could have all the complexity – and fears and dreams – of ourselves, but none of the freedom and none of the hope. Email attachments, even in the future, don’t have rights.

It’s easy to load the morality dice here. When, say, that intelligence is in a beautiful robot played by Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina, it’s fair to say you have. But make that code just that, and suddenly everything from pausing a consciousness for years to making it feel excruciating pain for an eternity seems just a click away. It’s just code... isn’t it? Sure. But then we’re just flesh.

And that’s the real trick here - Brooker makes us feel the flesh of those who are not. One simulation spends his digital days head-butting a desk (“I’m trying to make it a hobby”), as pain is the only feeling his body was afforded: you take what you can get. Another is horrified by the objects she is put into and the ever-more-meagre communication she’s allowed. But the biggest horror, Brooker understands, is time – and the infinity of it that a digital life would provide. There’s hollow laughter to be had in one of the episodes when a person grabs another by the hand and earnestly says: “I hope we die.”

Black Mirror, it’s fair to say, got blacker still.

Black Mirror series 4 is released on Netflix 29 December.

Read Alastair Campbell's interview with Charlie Brooker in the Jeremy Corbyn issue of GQ now

© Marco Grob

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