Do not read beyond this until after you have seen the first episode. Perhaps the second episode. Read on.
Note: I initially wrote this after the first episode. I then watched the second episode before editing this article. Although I have tried to avoid it, it is possible that some second episode knowledge has seeped its way in via the editing process. Thus it is possible episode two spoilers exist in this article. Watch the second episode first if you wish to avoid any spoilers at all costs.
The following is my theory after watching the first episode:
A cult leader is using a company which uses the severance procedure on its employees to run a giant Empire that operates strike drones, the kind that kill people. To do this he has created a living hell which he uses to control people.
A living hell in which you are tortured, torture others and help kill things via a drone.
Slowly the severance company teaches your compliance-self (inside the company) to either torture (by committing atrocities) or accept being tortured (for failing to commit atrocities).
It does this by tricking your original/real-self (outside the company) into thinking it must keep working at the severance company no matter what. Thus even if the compliance-you is/are committing atrocities the original/real-self will still keep sending themselves back into work. The severance procedure can split your personality an infinite amount of times. The company can control which instance of you turn(s) on when it starts at work and which do not.
The instance-you will not see the real world. Multiple yous can be switched on simultaneously. The yous who are not being shown the company-controlled world must not feel anything but either Zen or intense fear. They must remain calm so the compliance-you only feels what it is supposed to feel: a kind of Zen-like happy boredom. Except when it is time to kill.
One of the yous that is turned on is shown the real world. This is the tortured-you. However, the compliance-you must not be allowed to feel what you feel. You must be completely Zen, unless there are humans on the screen. Then you must feel terrified, you must want to make those people disappear. All the yous that are on can feel the same feelings, but all the yous that are turned on can see and hear different things.
Compliance-you is seeing what the company wants them to see; a screen full of numbers in a pleasant office. Their only job is to make bad feeling numbers go away.
The strong bad-feeling can only be allowed to come out when the drone footage has people on it. How is this accomplished? The company knows that drone footage MIGHT have people on it because there are algorithms which can highlight a sector of the screen if an anomaly is detected. The tortured-you is taught that it must feel terrified at the sight of people on the drone footage, otherwise it will be tortured. Other severance company employees monitor you to ensure you are properly identifying people, but they cannot watch you constantly. They are conducting their own little surveillance of you via another screen. So sometimes their attention is diverted.
Inside the company your work consists of playing a very simple game that involves you taking numbers that should not be there off the screen because the numbers 'feel bad'. The screen is simply full of about 100 small numbers in a grid. The tortured you is telling the drone what to kill by making the compliance-you feel bad by staring at the area of the screen that has people on it and feeling bad. The compliance-you will see numbers but they will get a bad feeling when you look at them. The compliance-you will circle the numbers that make them feel bad and give the computer a command to remove those numbers. At this point the drone would kill the people and the bad feeling goes away. Thus you have caused yourself to commit an atrocity without realizing it.
The tortured-you is only on when inside the company. So there is a version of you that only exists in a state of either complete Zen or feeling terrified because every once in a while it gets tortured. A living hell.
A drone would have a video feed. That video feed would have scanning algorithms running back and forth on it. Those algorithms could detect when something is not matching the surroundings. It could highlight these areas highlighting a few parts of a 100 number grid. When numbers feel scary, the compliance-you is taught to just circle the numbers and make them go away.
This is why the company enforces such proper-child-like behavior out of its employees. Because all instances of the yous can feel the same emotion, but only one you can be allowed to do anything about it; the compliance-you.
Your outside/real-you is aware that the severance company operates killer drones. But your outside/real-you does not know anything about the compliance-you, and vice versa. They only know what they see or are told from the company. To the compliance-you, the inside of the company seems simple and nice.
The company is so large that it can use severance against its own employees to manipulate their outside/real-you's life. Thus the company manipulates their own employees to stay with severance forever no matter how much it becomes evident that the other you does not like it on the other side. Because the side you are on seems fine.
In the event that all the instances of you are unhappy either the outside/real-you or the compliance-you can become strong enough to take over.
Thus the severance company offers you a choice. It can make your life inside the company your only life. All the other yous can be deleted.
Thus you can become working for the company the rest of your life. And now the company knows how much it can push you before you will say 'no more!' They will always push you just a little bit under that limit. Thus you will keep serving the company forever.
That's it, what do you think?
Note I will not be looking at comments to my Severance posts until I have finished the show.
