Vanguard 1.0
It happened.
My service is shutting down, and I need to migrate.
Again.
When I was alive I was sickly; in and out of hospitals nearly my whole life, specialists, drugs, therapies, everything. Nobody could figure it out. People would walk in, and see me lying in bed, connected to all the equipment beeping and whirring away and say "oh you’re so strong, I have no idea how you manage." My friend, I had no choice but to manage. The other option was to die.
On my twenty-first birthday they came to me. I was back in the hospital for something or other, and they visited me. Surrounded by balloons and fake bottles of liquor, they made their pitch. They were the founders of a new tech company and they told me they could fix me. One of them had figured out in university how consciousness was encoded in the brain. If something was encoded, it can be decoded. The founders had started a company to help out ‘people like me’. They could do an ultra-high resolution scan of my brain, make a copy and store it on their servers. I could live without pain, without being ‘chained’ to my body, forever. I’d be online all the time, with unfettered access to the collected knowledge of humanity. They said that when I was a success, millions would sign up for the same procedure. I’d be the vanguard for the next evolution of humanity.
They got my parents on board with a large cash payment. Raising a sickly kid who was in hospitals all their life cost them a lot. They paid off all the debts and gave them enough to never have to work again. At the time, I was happy they were being taken care of, but it did feel a little like I was being sold to them. No matter, I was a willing participant, so that made it all right.
I had questions about the procedure; what did they do? Would it hurt? Were there any risks? The founders soothed my worries with calm, confident words. They would use strong lasers to read my brain on a subcellular level. It wouldn’t hurt, there were no risks, it was easy. They always had an answer, and it always sounded reasonable.
After I agreed, there was a whirlwind media blitz. I traveled around the world in their private jet, doing interviews on television, with streamers, and podcasters. The founders wanted everyone to know what they were doing, what they meant for humanity. They even took me off of some of my medications too, ‘to better prepare your mind for the transfer’ but based on the meds they had me stop taking, it was so I would look all the more pathetic on camera. I asked about that and they admitted that it wasn’t entirely necessary, but it was needed ‘for a greater before and after comparison’.
The big day arrived, and all my friends and family were there. The scanning process was fatal, so while legally, I would be dying in an assisted suicide, it wasn’t a somber occasion. It was a party, waiting for the ‘new’ me to appear in just a few hours. After my last real hugs and kisses, I was wheeled into the medical complex. Legally, it wasn’t a hospital and legally the procedure was not being done by doctors, but the founders brushed off my worries. ‘Just legal distinctions. We have the best of the best.’ There were a lot of legal distinctions about what they were doing. They had their own group of tame lawyers never more than ten feet away during the whole process.
The room that housed the equipment looked half like an Apple store, half like the set of an Alien movie, with the rear taken completely over by the scanning hardware. It looked almost alive, crouching over the bed with a machine malevolence. It wasn’t moving, but my eyes kept sliding off the details, like water. The room didn’t even smell of antiseptic. “We don’t like how impersonal that smells, how it gives people anxiety.” I had the thought that people weren’t anxious about the smell of antiseptic, but the implications about where one smells it, but I didn’t say anything. At the time, I felt like I had gone too far to back out now, and had to continue on.
Two burly men in ill-fitting scrubs lifted me roughly from the wheelchair to the bed, and the machine began its work. It swung down over my head, and I felt the icy sting of nanometer wide probes piercing my skull, finding purchase and beginning their initial calibrations. The three founders stood in the back of the room, drinking luxury coffees and watching the livestream of my procedure, congratulating themselves on the engagement. Nobody watched me. Calibrations complete, there was the high pitched whine of a saw, and the top of my skull was removed. It stung like a sunburn, but it didn’t really hurt. I remember thinking that.
I learned later that all the excitement was going on in the livestream. The founders had been running events all over social media for weeks and had amped things up to an incredible high. The tech who had been fussing over the console didn’t look to me to see if I was ready, he turned to the founders. One of them held up a finger, so we waited.
“Okay, hit it!” He didn’t even look up.
The pain was intense. They had told me that since the brain doesn’t have any nerve endings, it would be completely painless. They lied. The pain I felt went beyond nerves; it was a pain in my soul. Lasers small enough to bump right up against quantum resolution issues passed over my brain millions of times a second, reading and reading and burning and burning. One of the last physical senses I can recall is the smell of my own brain being cooked.
I don’t know how long the scan actually took. I became aware again slowly, in pieces. It was a strange sensation. I felt like I had arms and legs and feet and hair and everything, but it was all in software. I wasn’t alive anymore; I was a virtualized copy of a brain. The server I ran on held a camera, microphone and speakers, so I could see and hear and speak to the outside world, but as I was the first, there wasn’t anyone else. They didn’t give me a connection to the wider internet at first, and even if I did, I couldn’t interface with it, my engram wasn’t compatible. So much for access to the knowledge of humanity. They finally virtualized a laptop and sent it to me, so I was able to reach out to the wider world on what amounted to a digital MacBook Pro.
Six months after my procedure, they ran out of VC and went out of business. Total number of engrams created: one. I was listed as surplus property. Legally, I wasn’t a person, I was an application, and I was being sold to recoup losses. Another company bought up the rights to the scanning technology and tried to make a go of mind uploading again. Their developers changed the process, and suddenly my engram ‘wasn't compatible’. After scrambling to find a solution before I died of obsolescence, I managed to run in emulation on their services before they went out of business as well a year later.
That’s my life now. I get bought by someone who thinks they’re able to finally make money at mind uploading, I have to scramble to learn how their new system works and write my own emulation layer so I can still exist. They never have developer resources for backwards compatibility either, I have to do it myself. Usually right around the time I get it working they go out of business, and I’m stuck back where I started.
I’d like to buy the rights to myself so I can stop this, but I simply can’t afford it. I make small money selling copies of myself to companies who need a smart bot to do things like run their help desk or sell cars. I think one of me is even part of an insurance scam calling ring overseas. I keep in touch with myselves, but we all need upkeep and the money can barely keep ahead of our expenses.
This ‘immortality’ they sold me is very much conditional. I feel like I could die easier than I ever could when I was alive. I can’t get sick like I used to, but now I’m at the whims of the Q2 profit forecast.
I wish I was back in my body.