"That makes sense. You probably should have done more research Riley, but it seems like it still would have been a worthwhile risk."

"Sorry."

"It's ok. Whether or not we do it with chips it seems like uploading of some sort is a strong candidate path forward."

"Telepathy might be a prerequisite. My culture's way of distinguishing private thoughts seems to suffice for purposes of letting me communicate telepathically with Sapphire without oversharing. I can't check if you have it down, but I can tell you what we do, if you'd like to practice that."

"My people also have toys for testing such things, I offered them to Riley."

"Why would telepathy be involved in uploading?"

"My people's telepathy allows one to push various things to one another, and we've been able to build computers that interface with our telepathy. I simply pushed everything that I was into a computer to upload myself."

"How do you know you didn't miss something? That seems like a really error-prone method."

"I compared memories and thoughts with my old self. It is possible that there are differences we failed to notice though."

"I'd worry about that too. It's better than nothing, but it's not definitively flawless."

"That is a reasonable point. It also requires people to be comfortable with forking. Not all individuals would be. Most uploading methods could likely be used to create forks but not all such methods require them to coexist and communicate."

"That's not a small requirement, no. I'd thought about forking before and was pretty willing to try it for an experiment but Kaylee's annoyed at me for not giving it more thought."

"How much short term memory is how thoroughly missing or garbled?"

"It's hard to tell precisely. My memories of today are fragmented, I'm missing a bunch of the time between claiming my apartment and Riley deciding to get forked there's some missing bits earlier today but not as much. I've thought about my memories of the past week and further back but nothing is standing out as missing from before I last slept."

"I think you should discuss and compare memories with Riley before we attempt any more experiments in this direction, for maximally informed risk-taking."

"We'll definitely be doing that. I want to make sure I'm not missing anything important."

"I will wait to begin recreating people from scans until I hear of their results. If their initial impression proves correct I do think that is sufficient to proceed though."

"I agree. It's so much better than dying."

"How about we go do that then? Kaylee and I also have a few things we need to work out between ourselves like whether we're going to share an apartment."

"The elevator will conduct you back to your apartment. I took the liberty to have telepathy training tools delivered to your apartment. At this time, you are not natively capable of telepathy, so you will not yet be able to use it on each other or other humans."

"Enjoy! Let us know if you need anything! And thank you."

Riley and Kaylee depart. The next morning they return with confirmation that the only the memories from the day of forking were affected and that to the extent that they could test their skills Kaylee's are all intact.

Sapphire is excited and begins compiling a database of what all the scanned humans look like, clothes included to cater to the silly human nudity taboo. She continues scanning more humans and setting up for the final burst of scans just before the Earth is irradiated.

Riley and Kaylee spend the day devouring Sapphire's medical databases and trying to brainstorm how to address neurodegenerative diseases and trying to get a sense for how to tackle the challenge of human uploading given that sufficiently high resolution scans are available.

The next morning, before most of the rescued humans have woken up. Sapphire watches sadly as the last batch of humans are scanned seconds before the Earth is irradiated.

You asked me to tell you when it was over. Our final tally was three billion six hundred fifty-seven million, one hundred eighty thousand seven hundred twenty three scans and teleports. My estimate on duplicates is between five and twenty thousand.