The State Found a Way to Live Forever… It’s Worse Than Death

"Porn, ne, garney, like a star, it's my taste base."

"You're my... it's all right, right?" "Yeah, exactly."

“"Like a star, it's like a star, who just understands it.”

A girl at the studio, a job or a home at the end." "Cras, I don't feel like a star." "Stay on her, you're right." "Safe." "With like a star." "I've arrived in select injections."

"A sadistic killer whose murder was inspired by the hit TV show, Dexter." "These are just a couple of the dark, true crime stories you'll hear each week on the crime hub, podcast."

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"Be sure to click follow to get notified every time a new episode is released." "Dr. Naysley." "I don't know, Shelby. Seems like it's kind of a waste." "How's it a waste?" "It's what do they call it, recycling?"

"Yeah, recycling."

"Getting rid of the old stuff and getting something new."

"A waste would be just throwing the whole thing out." "Brain and all." "Like a bad case of NutriTuna." "Ramend role desires and focused for a moment on swallowing the beer in his mouth." "She'll be watched him as he struggled to swallow the brownish greyish liquid."

"From dripping from the corners of his lips, not that he could blame him." "This month's batch of alcohol rations had been got awful and...

“"had had not been the only thing they could afford. They wouldn't have even drunk it all."”

"Regaining his composure as the bitter acidic liquid fizzed its way down his throat." "Ramend wiped his eyes." "He tossed the cheaply made tin can into the trash with disgust." "And shook his head." "I'm just seeing there's not a whole lot you can do without a body shall be."

"I'm not one of those fancy doctors the states got." "But even I can tell you that you're better off with arms and legs." "I mean really. They're going to just pop your brains out of your skull. "Graft it to some wires and presto. You live forever? Sounds foolish if you ask me." "Please, it's not like that. It's a... well... it's..."

"She'll be racked his poor, fume-choked mind for the right description." "He rubbed his perpetually dirty hands on his ragged blue jump suit and exasperation." "All right. I don't know how they do it down to the science." "But it sure is how it doesn't like you how you describe it." "I know that it's a lot cleaner and more he may than just hooking wires into my head."

"A Shelby spoke. He took the trash bag. I'll ready over flying with waste." "Crushed beer cans discarded rash intends a fake tuna and pro-team slurry." "And other stinking bio-engineered pseudo foods now decayed into semi-solids and liquids." "And tossed it out the kitchen window." "He watched as the bulging, dripping bag, sailed about four stories down."

"Crushed off a mountain of compacted refuse that filled the already over-stuffed dumpster and then spilled its contents out into the grimy, puddle stained alley between the apartment blocks." "A few bousers buy on the choked street, huddle, like long shadows in the cold winter sun." "Watched with bored, disinterest as the bag spilled its rotten contents into the street before shuffling off through the packed, slush stained sidewalk." "I wish you wouldn't do that." "Ramen scald as he sat on his worn, tattered mattress."

"Why can't you just carry it down yourself? It makes a mess when you do that." "It's easier this way." "Shell be shrugged, closing the window to keep what little heat ran through the apartment from escaping." "You're so high, it's already a mess down there anyway."

“"No were else to put our trash than the alley. If anything, you should blame the sanitation department."”

"They've been late picking up our block for a month now." "Well, it doesn't help to make things worse." "Sooner later, we'll have rats, and they'll nod our way in here sooner or later." "It's crammed enough in here as it is, and I'd sooner take a ticket to work in super Asia and the mines than deal with any more vermin." "Indeed, the living space the two men shared wasn't exactly generous."

"It was only above 300 square feet by handful of inches, with a largest space being a single common area, which demonstrated all the practical efficiency of a state-planned residential block." "In the right corner, a small kitchenette with a two burner stove and a tall, floor-mounted refrigerator with a shimmering electronic screen, through which usually played a variety of bleeding, droning advertisements for luxuries like toothpaste and wool socks." "Ordinarily, it would have been impossible to turn off, but the audio on it went out last month, and they both relished the quiet too much to get it fixed."

"There frames made from cheap pig iron, and adorned with mattresses stuffed with a pink crumbling foam that peaked through deep gashes in the inexpensive fabric."

“"Like other housing units on the block, there was a common shower and bathroom only three doors down from their apartment."”

"Though problems with the automated water regulator, and its inability to self-monitor the temperature had made showers risky as of late." "And this wasn't to mention the issue of the plumbing, having to handle 700 people in this block alone." "If I did transform myself," snorted Shelby, picking up the pamphlet that he had read nearly a dozen times today. "I probably have a lot more room than this. I could have a pen house."

"Or a lake house. I've never even seen a lake before. Did you know that?"

"It probably looked beautiful, just like my great-grandfather used to see." "But what ain't matter? You know it wouldn't be real anyway."

“"Ramen took the pamphlet and I did in suspicion, noting the clean, overly soft forms of rounded rectangles, meant to represent the average citizen on the cover."”

"Each person dressed and their trademark blue jumpsuit, and their skin tones various colors of whites, browns and yellows, stood in a beautiful pastoral meadow. Their hands locked together to form a cultural rainbow against a clear blue sky. Beneath the meadow, a series of happy-looking men and women eagerly toyed with and monitored flashing screens and enormous oblong machines lined with pastel-colored buttons and lights. The text was in bright, disarmingly cute letters, and they read, transferring, a digital solution to physical problems.

Neither Raymond nor Shelby needed a cute seat pamphlet to tell them what transferring was all about.

In fact, it came as a surprise that a pamphlet even needed to be published in the first place, considering how widespread it had become in the last few decades.

Probably to sue the fears of skeptics and worry warts like Raymond, who had the unreasonable concern of having your mind digitally scanned and uplinked into a gargantuan data server. It started right before the second Euro-Asian War in 2021-29, and then kicked into a frenzy starting after the whole nuclear debacle and what was once Eastern Europe, just three years back. Once the state came in and gathered what was left of the Western Hemisphere, transferring had become a wildly popular method of easing most of the supernations was.

Overpopulation, an enormous problem near what had once been South America and parts of the Eastern cities, post-war trauma, hyper-anxiety, and overall depression had been reported as being as low as they had been, 21-24. And it seemed that everywhere you'd go, there was someone who knew someone who had transferred themselves. The benefits were hard to argue with. Transferring ensured immortality, freedom from hunger, pain, or disease, and could be customized to fit whatever desired their participant wished to spend eternity in.

Someone in the Arctic states could spend the rest of their lives in a warm, tropical paradise, free from the pollution that had solid the ones pristine ice. A woman in the big three super cities out in the Midwest could be as young and as beautiful as she wanted in her own private playland. There was one report of an entire family out in the lower cities who, through the endless mercy of the state, had transferred together following the death of the patriarch from cancer. It was no wonder people, whether they were young, old, richer poor, would choose to live in a digital fantasy than they would in the packed, teeming cityscapes that stretched from coast to coast like a hungry grey monolith.

But they've made it 99% accurate, give or take a margin of air, if you were to put into a computer without knowing it, and everything looked, felt, tasted and smelled exactly the same, if not better.

“Would you even be able to tell the difference really?”

Raymond attempted to make his mattress as comfortable as he could, before giving up. Instead focusing on attempting to get the electronic heater to work. Yeah, but you're in there forever, it's a one-way street. So shall be shrugged, as if the statement posed was so ridiculous he could barely understand his friend's logic. Are you telling me you wouldn't want to live forever, or even have someone you love live forever?

No, well, yes, but... Raymond struggled to read the numbers on the heater's cracked screen, flicking a dial back and forth in an attempt to get hot air to blow through its vents. You know what I mean, I'd love to live forever, but I'd rather do it where I have my freedom. A prison doesn't have the luxury of letting you be able to do whatever you want. If it were a prison, 65% of the global population from here to the Afghan Shai Confederacy wouldn't have signed up for it.

If it were truly a prison, wouldn't the state use it for?

If you ask me, so long as they get to say in their cell, people would love prison.

She'll be rolled to size and sat down on the bed. He knew Raymond could be a bit of a cynic, and he appreciated that in most cases, being a realist himself. But being a cynic in Shelby's eyes was different than being a pessimist, and Raymond often had a terrible habit of confusing the two terms. Wouldn't it kill you to have a little faith, Ray?

“I mean, do you remember God? The stories they used to tell about him before he was proved a myth back in 2020?”

The sound of a sonic jumbo. Its engines roaring for the winter gray rattled the apartment. The baby upstairs started to whale, and the lights flickered three times in disturbed confusion.

Raymond nodded sardonically.

Yeah, my grandfather used to read about him. Why? If there's no God, no, big golden castle up in the sky. Don't you think people would want to make a place that could at least mimic it? Shelby pulled from beneath the mattress, a crumpled carton of poorly rolled cigarettes. It's not like they'd have anything to look forward to down here after all.

Pulling out a cigarette, he lit it before gesturing to the enormous sprawling city outside. The gray and glass towers lined with concrete and steel, like slender knives, spread endlessly across all cardinal directions. Apartment blocks, tenements, interwoven with the elevated tracks upon which rattled bulky smoke spewing trams, stretched as far as the eye could see in a single, unmoving plateau. This had all been hill country long ago.

Back when there used to be a united states, and back when the sun still came through the ash and soot. In 2101, they had flattened it all down into perfect uniformity, filled in the great lakes with concrete, and paved the swamps and marshes into glistening asphalt and sand. All was one and nothing left out of place. The only actual colors left now were from the building spanning hollow billboards.

They adorned every corner and every avenue in a barrage of canned electronic music, false voices of pre-bottled, cheering is so thick it was mocking, and photos of cigarettes, magazines, and the occasional war footage. Starting something new can be exciting, but it can also be terrifying.

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The largest of the buildings resembling gigantic black boxes more than anything designed for habitable use, where the server centers, and these massive structures that huddled together like nervous birds, and from which ran back and forth thick wires that formed a buzzing canopy over the sunless streets, sat the enormous computers. The things that ran the city, about eight electric behemoths, about 30 or so blocks in size and height,

that sat locked away, calculating the automated trains, or managing the electricity rations, or judging the air quality. Once upon a time computers were small. Things you might have carried around in a pack, or even in your pocket, made of glass and silicon. But computers were massive things, loud and beeping and hissing with noise and sensors. They took entire rooms, and in their hypercooled chambers of circuitry and magnetic tapes, men would scurry about like ants,

endlessly tinkering and repairing the constantly stressed machinery. The state had indeed proven God a falsehood long ago, but the way the city hummed and breathed in tune with the computer's rhythms and numbers,

“how men feverishly slaved in its tight corners and dark, sparking inwards to appease these ceaseless life-givers?”

Man had built its own God, and they served it without rest. Shelby drew on a cigarette, and exhaled a sour gray smoke. Could you imagine what it would be like to live in a place where we have space? Maybe even some place like a, a jungle. Palm trees, birds, legumes, just like what they used to advertise.

Shelby gave a dreamy sad smile. Imagine spending a winter like this in the tropics, toes in the sand, those two canaries or whatever they were called flying overhead.

He threw up his arms, swore, and then went to pull the heaviest polyplastic blanket off the bed.

“Real wool was a luxury, but polyplastic, as itchy as it was, worked better than nothing.”

For a moment, the idea of being in a warm place sounded appealing. The last tropical islands in the Pacific were terraformed 25 years ago to make room for that big population explosion in the east. And most places south of the equator served as a gigantic factory town, spitting smog and ash into the air. Two cans had gone the way of the dodo two years before that. And whatever was left of the Amazon that hadn't been dried up was kept as precious drinking water by those pan-American folks.

How could they even build something like that? If no one even knows what any of those things are. Asked Raymond as he pulled the cheap, silvery blanket over his shoulders. You don't even know what a jungle actually looks like. They have special programs for it.

Like how they build TV sets, I guess.

The people who run the things are really smart, so I'm sure it's as accurate as it can get.

Shelby fell back on the bed and let the cigarette dangle from his lips. He looked around the room as if to fully appreciate just how cramped and bare it was before closing his eyes. Even if it wasn't, it still be a hell of a lot better than this. Raymond knew how Shelby could get. Ever since he had lost his job at the plant, during that economic blowback in the fall,

Shelby had become prone to fits of his scapeysam. He seemed to be in a sort of malaise, drearyly huddled up in his cold, sparse bed, pouring over what little books or advertisements he could afford. A book about treasure hunters in the Mojave Desert.

Back when there was a desert and not a gigantic crater drained of all mineral use. An advertisement about traveling to New York City when there was once a place called New York and a time when even the buildings held aesthetic pleasantness in their design. He even tried learning a new language, some version of either French or Persian, or was it Parisian, before the two languages blended into a single tongue.

Now his newest obsession was transferring. Raymond could see why he wanted to do it, make no mistake. The prospect of getting to live forever in your own fantasy world was sure as all hell and appealing promise. But really, would uploading himself into a computer saw of any of his issues?

Shelby could get so damn flighty sometimes. How can you even be so sure that it's safe anyway?

“Do you remember what they said happened to the first people they did transfers on?”

The stories? Back when transferring was still in its infancy.

The first few people to have undergone the procedure were prisoners on loan

from the state correctional facilities. As people were understandably concerned about undertaking something that would remove them from their physical bodies. These volunteers were rented on the condition that they would be granted full-partens should they survive the procedure.

History, as the state would tell it, would proudly claim that it was Peter Orson, a former convict facing a life sentence who became the first successful transfer to human-to-machine interface. While that might have been true, it conveniently left out the other dozens of nameless, less fortunate volunteers who came before him.

What exactly had happened to these subjects? So great was the state's ability to cover up even the slightest unpleasantness should it desire to was still a mystery for the ages. Stories abounded of men fused into walls of wires. Their organs grafted into thick cables where fiber optics were placed muscle and skin

was now a translucent plastic sheet. One rumor, particularly popular, was that one inmate had suffered a massive heart attack that was forced through the transfer and became nothing more than a spazzing, twitching vegetable, with dull, lightless eyes gazing from a paralyzed face that could do little more than scream and moan and confused agony.

And there was another story that, if it was to be believed, involved one man actually waking up part way through the transfer and running, screaming out of the operation room. As the story went, the man shouted something about forever, before throwing himself through a window ten stories to his death.

He, of course, had suffered extensive brain damage from waking up during the procedure. So whatever he did say was most likely the result of that anyway. Look, I'll admit there were some people who didn't fare out so good with it. She'll be nodded in modest defeat. But that was years ago.

Back when no one had any idea what to expect. I'm sure it's different now. It has to be different, with so many people doing it. It's got to be as good as they say.

“Well, I think people ought to fix things if it's miserable.”

Everyone who goes whining about how bad they have it, she just at least tried to do something about it. Raymond bummed to cigarette and lit it. Greatful for the warmth the nicotine rush provided.

Is everyone too big a toddler to actually do anything themselves?

“They got to run off and play pretend in some big computer and in digital land?”

And how should people fix things, Ray? She'll be looked over incredulously.

There's 22 billion people on this planet as of last year.

It seems to me, like none of them have any idea on how to keep the world going without it choking to death on its own garbage. There's a food crisis in the east. The Indians and them new Israelites are killing each other over oil. And there's 2 million people in the city alone tearing each other apart

just to have a chance to work. These aren't exactly things you can fix by holding hands and singing songs. I... At this, Rayman trailed off. As if hearing the question he had just posed clearly.

I... I don't know. I have no idea, alright? But there has to be some way somehow that people can improve things

“that they can actually make a living in the 22nd century a viable option”

instead of just treating it like it was a mistake to be born here to be born alive. Ray, look around. She'll be set up. His voice, gentler now, almost mournful.

You can't possibly expect anyone. Not born in person. Not even a million people to fix what's going on. Pollution, famine, war.

These things are always going to happen.

And they're always going to get worse. You can have optimism for a world that's on hospice care on a good day. But you blow off an actual real chance to experience something new. Something that gives you even the slightest chance of getting to live a life that you... ...everyone deserves.

That sounds more like faith and actual confident Shelby. People believe in God for hundreds of years. And they were only old books as proof.

“The two men sat in silence for a few minutes.”

The sound of the world continued around them unabated. The stomping of footsteps from outside as the afternoon rush of people stormed out of the freezing cold and into the relative warmth of the tenement. The distant blaring of advertisements loud and grating in a desperate attempt to capture the average working man's dulled senses. Echoing from behind the paper thin walls and from out of the clogged streets.

The rattle of elevated trains and the grinding backfire of sleek, filthy cars rolling through the narrow streets. On occasion, music might have been heard. But whatever melody or rhythm it offered was swallowed up by the clanging of pipes and the shrill beeping of the tenement's automated systems. All right, all right. I know it's not glamorous living here in the real world.

I get it. I do. Raymond slapped both palms on his knees.

You don't think I wouldn't love the chance to wake up in a world where it's always sunshine.

And I don't have to go to work at the crack of dawn standing in front of a conveyor belt all day. I'd give anything anything just to be able to wake up in my own home. Miles away from this overcrowded dump and just be able to live for once in my life. Raymond blew smoke, shivering at the taste of the synthetic nicotine. But I know that it wouldn't be real.

The sunshine, the country, even the air I breathe, all of it's someone's idea of it. Programmed to treat me. It'd be no different from just putting me to sleep like a sick dog. But they can make it real. 100 years ago, the idea of even scanning someone's mind into what computer was impossible.

Now they can do it in under an hour. Shelby, you're a smart guy. You just caught up in this. This escapist crap you've been hooked on ever since you got fired. Raymond dashed his cigarette,

and watched the grayish brown flecks fall into the plastic ash tray. Here, let me show you something. How would you describe the cigarette smoking? Shelby took the now-run-sized cigarette from his lips and looked it over. I'd say a taste-like garbage.

It burns awful. The paper isn't real paper. And the tobacco tastes like someone's idea of tobacco. After you explained it to them like they were four years old. I haven't tasted it a real once since I was 17.

See? If they can't even make a cigarette taste like a cigarette, how could you be so sure whatever kind of fantasy world they pour you into is going to be better? You've probably going there and the birds would probably swim,

and the people would be two foot dwarves with three eyes and no legs. There's no way in hell people who can't even make a cigarette taste halfway decent can make a believable paradise. Do you understand what you're saying? I mean, take a moment and just think about what you're implying you, Ray.

Shelby struck the side of his mattress with a fist. Little pink balls of cheap foam flying out from the gouges. If it's been proven there's no God, not even any after life. And you aren't telling me there's no way anyone could even come close to making something close to it. Then you're basically saying this is all one big joke.

Shelby through his head back and laughed directly.

Is that what you're getting at?

“That all of this is all that we get in this dirty, polluted city”

we can't sleep at night because it's too cold and everyone is either out of a job or works like a slave as all we got left. That's insane. I'd almost believe there were some kind of supreme creator who made this all as some kind of ironic joke. No, no, I'm not saying that at all.

It's just... Rayman searched for the right words to say. It's not right to expect that you can just wish away all the world's problems without having to do anything yourself.

If everyone even just 5% of the people who transferred themselves put even just the tiny spit of effort into making the world around them a better place.

Rayman jestered outside, pointing to the afternoon throng of middleing people floors below. There wouldn't be any talk about transferring it all.

“But what do you suppose everyone does then?”

Shelby shook his head, tossing the finished cigarette towards the empty trash receptacle. It missed and fell behind it, nestling into a pile of dirt. Look around you. I... Or sitting in a red hole smoking synthetic cigarettes because there's too much round pollution to grow real tobacco.

Try not to freeze because our piece of garbage automated department is too damn stupid to turn the heat on.

I and 500 other poor bastards just lost our jobs.

And half of us don't even have enough money to afford the chemical bullshit they serve war prisoners. And you expect everyone to go hold hands and do a little bit of spring cleaning that we should all pitch in. Put on our best jumpsuits and plant a big community garden. You've telling me that transferring is a scam that the smartest minds in the world can't even make a realistic simulation of somewhere actually clean and good and pure. Put your only solution is to hope everyone just decides to kiss and be under best behavior.

Shelby threw himself on the bed, rubbing the sides of his head with his filthy fingers. He felt a sudden migraine coming on, intense pressure on the sides of his temples like vices, squeezing blood vessels until they burst. Raymond stood up, his gone body casting a monolithic shadow over his companion. Look Shelby, you're a smart guy. You know as well as I do that the only possible way things can get better in the future is unless something changes, something real, tangible.

There's nothing that's going to improve if you try to put yourself in someone else's dinosaur and bite your strawberry eyeballs. Rey, I'm telling you, I shall be felt the pain that knowing just beneath the surface of his crown intensify. His head shot up like a horse, hearing a starter pistol, his tired eyes gazing wide at his friend across from him. What? What did you just say? I said if you tried to put yourself in someone else's dinosaur and bite your strawberry eyeballs, Peter's sake Shelby.

You scraped the enamel off your toenails for one parsnip and you pushed your thumb into your sepsis, laying down brick, got buckets. Shelby gritted his teeth, the feeling in his head, like pressure shooting through his body starting at his toes, had bubbled up at the very top of his head. Underneath the wirey brown hair, he could feel something surging, pressing, as if to balloon in an invisible lump. The pain thropped, and he could feel the parts of his skull shifting and grinding against each other in a desperate attempt to escape.

Reyman looked over him, his face and possibly narrow, and his lips forming a wide o- shape in both confusion and distress.

“Chocolate eyelids going to start? Nothing under fungus?”

What are you doing? The technician looked up, seeing his younger coworker standing in the middle of the doorway. In the room filled with dozens of screens, walls of flickering lights and black and white, the man was almost obscured as a single dark shadow. He leaned back and stretched his back, wiping his eyes from the countless hours spent staring at the screens. Oh, I've just been going through the memory loops on some of these older brains.

The technician thumbed at the screen, on which two men in a rundown apartment becored over something petty. Checking for discrepancies, the state's been busting our asses over it since that little black out a few years ago. discrepancies? The younger technicians stared at the screens, examining the array of switches and dials on the enormous console before them. What do you mean?

I thought these loops were supposed to be perfect. They are in theory, but ever since they started demanding more processing power, the simulations tend to get a bit fuzzy. The brains start to lag, run on repeat, skip a few segments, blow around faces, look at the screen. The younger technician looked at the screen. The two men jerked and shook back and forth in the same familiar motions.

The face on the man sitting on the bed seemed to contort and warp. The tiny details slowly obscuring and pulling into each other as the skin color became flushed and transparent.

His tone always in the exact same cadence and pitch.

He didn't seem to notice the distortion around his companions face. Let alone the fact that the words he was saying had developed into incomprehensible gibberish. Ever since the discovery that human brains could serve, as a much more reliable and cost-efficient organic processor 100 years ago, it was no wonder that the state had put all its effort

and to getting the most out of these fallen tears. Just last year, there were 600 being processed in this facility alone, not counting the nameless brains that had been brought in from hospitals and popper's graves all across the city. Even then, it still wasn't enough to satisfy the constant,

ceaseless demands of the state's automated systems.

“How many tenements were there with automatic doors and regulated plumbing?”

How many driverless trains needed to be running at all times? There were surveillance cameras on every street whose footage required constant processing. As did the ever-growing list of birth records, data inputs from public and private computers and the economic market

with its fluctuating ups and downs caused by the recent war boom. See? The older technician said,

"What happens is when there's too much stress on the brain,

it loses focus on the simulation cycle we put it in." We filmed that. When removed from its body, the brain goes into this self-preservation mode. It runs a cycle of its own lifespan,

like recalling as much memory as it possibly can. It's like how a computer will try to run on its last available software without nothing else to take in. The brain locks itself in this loop, trying to get more information.

So, it recalls everything right up until the extraction, right? Yup. It runs from its earliest memory, right until the operation. As the older technician spoke,

the picture on the screen changed. The two men slowly faded into a soft, pulsing white light. Of course, with every time it does that, it cannibalizes a little bit of itself. It can only run through its memory so many times

before it starts to naturally fade into K.

With all the data the top brass shoves through these things, all the numbers and sequences and whatnot, this only worsens it.

“And what happens when the brain runs out of memory?”

The younger technician asked, struggling to remember if this had been mentioned during his training. It's still good, right? Sure, for a little while after. The older technician nodded,

making a few more adjustments on the console before writing a note down. Something about adjusting the cerebral gel inside this particular brain's tank. But even then, it could only do about 25% of what are recently transferred brain does. At that point,

it's easier to just toss the whole thing and start over. He yelled up a hand to prevent the younger man from asking another question. Up up! Don't ask me what they do with the brain's afterward.

My buddy's on the grafting team, and he says by the time they're done, hard wiring everything in there. It's like scraping neutral paste out of a septic tank. All I do is monitor the brains,

and check if there's still active enough to crunch numbers. On the screen, the simulation started again. This time, rather than two adult men,

they were now three children, each no older than four years old. They sat around a table, sloppy eating from plastic bowls of unidentifiable slops and mush.

A woman sat at the end, her hair faded and her eyes worn with a deep, indescribable exhaustion. There we go. The older technician said,

tapping his pen on the monitor.

“It faded out in the middle of that time,”

so I had to manually reset it. It's been happening more frequently, so this one might be next up on the block to go. How long has it been here? So's here it's been running for about a decade now

on his intake report. The technician held up a faded, yellow piece of synthetic paper. Most of what had been written were merely status updates.

Clinical things like status of the cerebrum, modifications done to the hippocampus sensor graft, and the natural decay and shrinkage of the gray matter. There was a name at the top. Shelly or Sheldon.

Neither name could make out anything else, but that didn't matter in the end. Whatever the name was, whoever it had belonged to, had been erased,

and it was now organic process unit number V900 CO8. One in almost a million. There was a silence for a moment. How do you think they get them to do this? Ask the younger technician.

Do what? You know, how do you think you get someone to willingly walk in and agree to live out the rest of their lives as a brain inside a tank?

That doesn't sound like anything I do? I don't know. The older man shrugged. I hear the states got a pretty good public relations department,

so they probably have a good way to convince folks to do it. Besides, with what's been going on lately, I think for a lot of people, it's just a youth and Asia.

Is that how you say it?

In there, I mean.

“They wouldn't know what's happening, would they?”

Pelify now.

I'm sure that if they are,

they're probably just living life like they normally would. The technician stopped to correct himself. Or at least, as far as their memories will allow. The two men looked at the wall of monitors.

Each one broadcasting a different memory loop

“where a different brain from somewhere within the enormous facility.”

Somewhere in round cylinders,

sets someone's brain, mashed and shaped and grafted with wires, sensors, coils and electrodes, floating in a bloodied stew of gels, designed to preserve it for as long as possible.

Some might have been here for years. Like number V900, CO8 was. Others, more recent transfers,

their brains still fresh and malleable.

Come on,

“Sir the older technician, standing up to stretch his sleeping legs.”

He gestured to the other man pointing toward the door. Let's grab some lunch. Not like we'll be missing anything worthwhile anyway. The younger technician quickly agreed. Perhaps eager to avoid looking at this flickering wall of decaying memories.

He was still new, so the morbidity of the situation was still fresh to him. The older man decided it was best to let him absorb this on his own, rather than scaring a life out of him all at once.

The state sent them younger and younger every time. The two technicians now discussing options for lunch left. On the screen, the one that broadcasted what was left of the man once known as Shelby's memories. A young boy smiled into an empty room.

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