From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
identity slippage
Not to be confused with the glitch. Identity slippage is a local perceptual event; the glitch is structural incompleteness.
Identity slippage describes Leif's perceptual collapse at the service station in Chapter 4, wherein the mechanic becomes the police officer he tackled in Chapter 1. The narrative states: Leif sees "ten layered versions" — not a ghost, not a twin, but the same person perceived as plural, identity as divisible and singular at once.
The cause remains unresolved. Leif's bandaged eyes might distort recognition; damaged memory might conflate experience across time; the person might literally be both roles enacted sequentially. The novel offers no resolution. This ambiguity is canonical — adaptations split across interpretation: manga literalizes it as body-horror double-consciousness; anime tends toward metaphysical doubling (the person is a "recurrence"); films range from amnesia-confusion to mystical superposition.
Identity slippage connects to the cycle: if time loops, a person encountered twice is the same person in two roles, yet Leif's damaged mind cannot reconcile them into sequence. Some scholarship reads slippage as a microcosm of the glitch — proof that the story's halves do not connect smoothly, that identity itself is unjoinable across the seam, that cycles produce not resolution but multiplication.