>>382379202
From what I gathered (major spoilers ahead) [spoiler]the people that entered the radius were "changed" or more accurately copied by the radius and would simply be remade every time they died. Each time they were remade there would be mistakes and less of the real person would be replicated until eventually they were just husks. Their dead body would still be in the radius for them to find and one explorer, trying to keep this a secret, would smash out and destroy the faces of corpses he found. Remembering the feeling of dying and the resurrection process being imperfect drove them insane and maybe ended up turning them into mimics or fragments if they died too many times. Mimics are a literal name. Just radius ash mimics of soldiers that entered the radius. It isn't clear if they were created/converted on day 0 by the radius or if they are just overly resurrected soldiers that still remember how to carry a gun. Everything else that was there when the radius was made is just a statue of ash now so I image the mimic creation process is getting better the more lives it takes. The changed can't survive outside of the radius and will suffer multiple organ failure away from it but dying outside of the radius kills them for good. Katya, like you, is of the radius' creation but still a mimic of someone who did exist. Your journey through the radius, gathering parts of her past, and learning about her life serves to complete the information the radius needs of her to make her into a complete human that can survive in the outside world. To what end does the radius want to send entities outside of its sphere of influence is unclear. Probably as a form of metastases or replication. The radius is, for all intents and purposes, a living thing. It will need to replicate to survive.[/spoiler]