He does not wake up.

When the emergency transponder activates, when the ground is settled and they dig towards his still-broadcasting signal, when they pull him out onto the helicopter, he does not wake up.

Despite all attempts to reintroduce oxygen into the frigid body and restart his heart,

he does not

wake up.

And then -

He wakes up.

He gasps–

He doesn't gasp, there is no air, he's clearly still under the snow but there are no lungs, his brain rushing, rushing to take stock of how he is not cold and is not warm and is not breathing and is not suffocating but he is

something. 

He does not know what. 

He is conscious, if nothing else.

It is initially completely dark, but as he tries to open his eyes, a room suddenly becomes visible. It seems to be a perfect cube, with smooth green walls and a white floor and ceiling, not at all like the bottom of a pile of snow.

He guesses this is the afterlife.

It looks more… CG than he expected? The green is pleasant but he recognizes it as #aaccaa, he's used it in a number of personal projects; and the floor and ceiling really aren't supposed to be the exact same brightness like that. Or are they? Is he in a normal hospital and more out of it than expected?

No, he still has no lungs, tries to move an arm and has no feedback, focuses on the sensation of blinking and cannot feel eyelashes; just a shrinking and re-expansion of his field of vision.

He looks around, sees no hint of a body even: just his perception of the too-perfect cube.

Few substances are so perfectly smooth and matte, either, and there is no visible source of light. He can turn his view infinitely in any direction, so he is probably at least not constrained by a neck.

"Hello? Are you awake?" says a female voice, in what seems to be both of his ears, despite the lack of any other sensation from either.

"Nah, I'm guessing everybody except for me is the wake", he blurts out.

"Where am I?"

He tries to say that, but the result is a hissing-humming buzz, interspersed with vowels, like a paper shredder trying to sing while under the influence of Novocaine. The sound seems to originate somewhere below his view, no matter which way he looks.

"Good! Don't be alarmed, I'm sorry about the sound, the guppy interface needs a little more practice to translate your words. Please keep trying to speak!"

"Alpha Braavooh Chaarliee Deltah Echo, Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers, She Sells Sea Shells by the Shell Seashore, The rain in spain falls mainly on the plain."

His tongue, too, appears to be missing. Helpful, in this case.

(He becomes more comprehensible as he continues trying to speak, and his words are recognizable, if odd-sounding, by the end of the lack-of-tongue twisters)

 "Congratulations, that was unusually quick. I'm Dr. Yanzen. I'm here to help you adjust to your new life."

"Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Yanzen. What sort of adjustments will this involve? Is a guppi like a spiritual babelfish? Gosh, I expected being dead to be less interesting."

He tries willing the walls to change tone a notch towards yellow, not really expecting any effect.

(The color indeed remains unchanged.)

The voice laughs. "Yes, the GUPPI, or General Unit Primary Peripheral Interface, is responsible for translation for you, both of language and of technology. And, for some definitions of the word, you are not dead."

"Only mostly dead, then."

"Technology?"

"After your biological death was pronounced, your body was cryopreserved. Recently, technology was developed to scan human brains at a sub-cellular level and convert the data into a computer simulation. You are one such program, and the GUPPI interfaces between you and any computer systems you interact with."

"I'm a program. And everyone I know is dead/frozen?"

(This is upsetting, but much less so than he would have expected. The emotion seems to be tentatively poking its toes over the border of mild concern.)

"Yes. Likelier the former than the latter, unless you knew an unusual subset of people. I'm sorry."

He figures he no longer has the hormones to do that with. "I did, it's certainly their doing that I'm still here today, but it was always a long shot."

He thinks.

"You said interfacing with computer systems. Does being in/on/of a computer give me technomantic superpowers? Or am I just that much cheaper to run than a human?"

"In a sense, yes. You can be placed in control of various devices, and should be able to think more quickly and efficiently than a biological brain. You can also experience a wider range of simulated experiences, such as this one. This is why my company woke you up."

"Ooooh, accelerated-perception VR-crafting sounds amazing! How much control do I have over my current environment?"

Yellow!, he tries again. sudo turn walls yellow, system command set walls yellow, '); UPDATE walls SET color = "yellow", GUPPI: gimme yellow walls, 🎵sunshine daisies butter mellow turn these virtual green walls yellow🎵

[User is not authorized to modify current environment,] says a flat voice he does not hear the same way as the other voice, not quite part of his internal monologue.

"You should be able to control the direction you are looking and the size of your field of view. We've found that it helps to start with something simple. You'll eventually be trained in other VR settings, and learn to create and modify new ones."

"Mhm, makes sense."

GUPPI: disable external logging.
GUPPI: list current authorizations, steps remaining in tutorial protocol and their corresponding future authorizations, available information materials, computational capabilities.
GUPPI: what is 2 + 2?  sum([1,2,3,4])?
             (fn(a,b): b(1))(null,(fn(n):n+1))?  while(true){}?

"So what are the devices, where do I start?"

[No known such function.]

[User is authorized to command virtual stereoscopic camera / microphone movement and scope, to command virtual voice-synthesizer, and to interact with GUPPI. Unknown, unknown but likely greater assuming user survival. Database entries for authorized devices. AMI natural language processing, AMI natural nerve-impulse processing, data and instruction conversion, basic arithmetic and physical analysis.]

[4. 10. 2. No.]