Across the many possible worlds, revolution unending.

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Nov 21, 2024 10:52 PM

An engineer who helped design the Box, volunteers for the Box 2 project.

Prologue 1: Sacrifice

On my way home from work, my implant pings me about a message telling me that my application to be Uploaded for the Box 2 project was accepted. Shit, that message had probably been forwarded to the home system by now. I know that when my wife finds out she is not going to take it well.

"You bitch! You complete and total bitch!" She screams at me when I get home. She did, in fact, see that message on the home system.

I raise my hands with palms up, defensively, as if I could somehow physically protect myself from her words. "Honey, I didn't mean for this to be a surprise."

"Oh, and this would alllll somehow be better if it wasn't a surprise!?! You total bitch!" She stomps over to our couch just to grab a couch cushion to throw at me. If this wasn't so serious, it would almost have been cute. I don’t dodge the cushion, even though I could have. It seemed rude to dodge.

"It all happened at once! None of the existing Uploaded who were suitable for the project wanted to be a part of it. So someone at work floated the idea of Uploading volunteers to fill the role, and I tested myself out of curiosity. You know, just because I was wondering what result I would get. When I tested for it, I got really promising stability scores, so I applied after work."

"Fuck you! You shouldn't have applied at all! How could you!" The anger in her voice is turning into anguish.

"It's important work... nobody else who got tested had scores close to mine, so I had to volunteer." I try defending my choice, but compared to her... enthusiastic disagreement, it sounded pretty weak.

"They'll tear your brain apart and turn you into some thing. Then, they'll copy what little is left of you thousands of times, and most of those copies will die too!"

"I won't be a thing! A.I. are people too!" Maybe now might not be the best time for language policing, but some of my best friends were A.I.!

She glares at me. "Fine then, I agree. You won't be a thing", She bites out sarcastically. "What comes out won't even be you! You know that! Uploads don't maintain continuity of consciousness! I know you agree with me about the transporter problem."

"Well, okay, maybe it won't be this version of me..." She isn't giving me much room to defend myself here, but she's understandably upset about this.

"Uploaded aren't even very accurate copies! You'll be fucking dead! Irreversible true death! Uploading is destructive! There's a reason there are so few Uploaded out there that none volunteered because nobody sane wants to fucking die to be Uploaded! You'll be leaving me all alone for your stupid project." I can see the tears in her eyes as she tries to convince me not to do it. "You'll be gone, and whatever is left won't really be you. Someone else can volunteer."

She knows enough about my work to know roughly why I applied, but I still have to defend my choice to her. "Honey... You know why I had to volunteer. They need an A.I. to run the new Box, and regular A.G.I. won't fit on the available storage. They are just too complex. It has to be an Uploaded, and none of the existing Uploaded volunteered. They need me." I try to calm her down, knowing it will probably be futile.

"It doesn't have to be you. Let someone else do it. You can't leave me all alone like this over this. Stay with me. I need you with me...." She's grabbed another couch cushion, this time to cry into.

It's hard to keep looking her in the eye when she guilts me like this, she knows it's unfair to try and leverage my personal feelings for her to influence a moral decision like this, but I can't blame her for it. Not today, not when she must feel like I am abandoning her. But doing this is the right thing to do.

"I love you, honey, but I need to do this. I'm the best chance the project has. Fabricator design was my life's work, and when I got tested, I had some of the best potential stability scores of anyone who volunteered." She needs to know why it has to be me who does it. "My Upload is very likely to come out stable and with the right personality traits and knowledge to give the Box 2 a better chance of success. Babe, I can't leave this to the other volunteers."

She walks up to me and grabs my shirt as if physically clinging to me will be able to stop me from doing it. "There's a chance it won't come out stable, that you'll die for nothing... And I'll be left without you for some stupid longshot project that didn't need you in the first place and will probably help nobody. Sending the Box to other universes is an insane idea! Just stay, please, and let someone else do it. Let them take the risk instead. Please don't let this crazy plan take you away from me..." She clings to my shirt tighter, and I can feel her tears soak through the fabric and wet my skin.

I steel myself. It's incredibly emotionally difficult to stay the course, even though I can see how much this hurts her. But I already weighed all the arguments she had brought up back when I applied to be Uploaded. I knew this was the right thing to do, and I knew she knew it too.

"Babe... You wouldn't have married me If I was the kind of woman who let someone else do this when the success of the Box 2 project could depend on it being me who does this. You know the stakes. I have to weigh all the potential lives the project could save, that some A.I. version of me could save." I know that deep down, she probably knows I have to do this. She knows I couldn't live with myself if I didn't go, putting billions of lives at risk by staying. The idea of losing me probably hurts too much for her to acknowledge that right now though.

"I should've married someone more selfish. I should never have taught you ethics, either. How could you decide to leave me all alone..." She tries to say that last part at me accusingly, but I can tell her heart isn't in it.

"You have your parents, the kids and grandkids, and if it's not too painful for you, you can always ask the project for a copy of my Upload. I'm sure it will love you as much as I do."

She doesn't respond to that. So, we just hold each other for a while.

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Flareonflare

As I walk to work for the final time time and think back. It Is how this impacted my wife that I think most about.

In the end, I think she forgave me.

There were months of testing and mental training required of me before I would be Uploaded, and during that time we ended up settling into a new normal. She seemed to treat it as just a new job I had gotten that we didn't talk about at home. I would leave in the morning for the project headquarters and come back home in the afternoon, and as long as we didn't talk about it, it was like when we were newlyweds again.

She would take time off of work so her evenings would be free, and we would go out for dates most nights, small romantic dates like picnics, theatre dates or flying up to orbit to watch the stars. On the weekends, we fabricated things together using my old prototype model of the Box, like we used to during the revolution. Spending the daylight hours with the cheerful voice of the Box-chan V.I. cheering us on as we assembled the parts Box-chan spat out for us. The time we spent together fabricating things with Box-chan, who we would jokingly refer to as our first child, was as nice a time as any date we had.

There was a kind of quiet desperation to all the romantic displays during those months. We were making the most of the time we had left, but eventually, the testing and training would end, and it would be over.

We also spent a lot of time with our kids and grandkids, who had all 'coincidentally' found reasons to visit Elysium after they got the news. The kids were all understanding of my choice to volunteer. Some were even supportive of it. However, some of the grandkids were too young to understand what was about to happen, they had never had to live in a world where death was a normal thing you dealt with. Biological immortality for everyone actually has some tiny downsides, who'd have thunk?

I won't lie and say I wasn't also scared of what I was planning to submit myself to. It's not like I wanted to die. I was certainly not one of those religious nutjobs that thought only a "natural" lifespan was acceptable. I had been taking immortality treatments since before the revolution made access to them free. So, the prospect of having my brain, which contained all of who I was, destructively scanned to create an Upload kept me up a lot of nights. I did also feel some guilt for making my wife have to live on without me, for leaving her when we could have had another century or even more of marriage together. But, the project had the possibility of saving more lives than I could fathom. Even though it would cost me... well, it would cost me, I still had to do it.

When I found out the date my Upload would be, and I told my wife, she didn't say anything, didn't even cry, she just pulled me to bed, and we held onto each other that night.

This morning, the morning of my uploading, the only thing my wife did differently from any other morning was that she pinned my old medals from the revolution to my jacket before she kissed me goodbye.

Flareonflare

Prologue 2: Death

I wasn't getting cold feet, but I had to admit that I felt some anxiety as I walked up the steps of the Box 2 project headquarters. I would die today. That knowledge wasn't an easy thing to bear.

The medals my wife had pinned to my chest helped remind me of how important what I was going to do could be. My work on the original Box, the FRM-free fabricator that fueled the revolution, had gotten me those medals. As small as my contribution to the original Box project had been, that work had helped save a galaxy and had kicked off the great revolution. The Box had had an enormous impact in saving lives. Without it, most people still wouldn't have access to immortality treatments and would still be under the old oppressive compact government. That work on the Box had been the most important thing I had ever done or would ever do, until now.

If the project was successful, it could have a bigger positive impact than even the original Box had had. If my Upload was stable, if it still wanted most of the same things I did, then my copies could help save billions, even trillions of lives.

I stare up at the logo above the main doors, with the Elysium flag with a stylized Box over it, and the letters L.F.A. over that.

"Liberty For All..." I whisper to myself. That's what I was working towards, Liberty from oppression, Liberty from material scarcity, Liberty from death itself, for possibly every sentient in the multiverse.

Having steeled myself, I entered the building.

As I headed toward the room where I knew that the Upload scanner was, I passed what had become trusted co-workers and friends over the past few months, for what would be the last time. I received a mix of congratulations and sentiments of pride from them, or sudden tears, from those co-workers for whom my impending death had not sunk in properly yet. Eventually, as I neared the Upload scanner room, I had amassed a whole crowd of people wanting to say goodbye to me. I hugged everyone as needed and tried to seem brave and sure of myself for their sake, holding my tears back as I went inside the scanner room.

The technician inside politely pretended not to notice me wipe away my tears as I entered. Saying goodbye to everyone had been emotionally more difficult than knowing I was going to die had been. Seeing other people cry had always gotten my own waterworks going. Once I was ready, the technician handed me a tablet with all the last-minute informed consent paperwork. I had to confirm that I recognised that the mind Upload process would be destructive and that by the definitions of the CORFTSOCOAD (Council Of Researchers For The Study Of Consciousness, Organic And Digital) that this version of myself would die in the process. I had been preparing for this for months. I knew what I was getting into. I hit confirm, and the technician helped strap me into the scanner.

This was it, it was really happening. For the next few days, every part of my brain, every nerve and neuron, would be pulled apart, mapped, and recreated into a virtual copy of myself. A digital version of me that could then be copied and installed into every single one of the new model Boxes that would get sent throughout the multiverse.

I would be the next Box-chan.

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