Transferred 1 (Patreon)

@ArcadeDragon made a fascinating suggestion this month that involves Sarsuk not getting his head stolen by pirates and re-animated in Liotec. I won't spoil the fun, so continue reading...

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Sarsuk waited impatiently in the holding cell—his wrists in cuffs, the chain running through a massive bolt sunk to the concrete floor. He looked around. As prison cells went, this one was a huge upgrade over his usual cell—mostly because it was private. From here, he couldn’t see, hear, or even smell the other inmates. There were no guards strolling the corridors and threatening to hurt him.

He could almost relax here. Almost.

The lock on the door buzzed. It opened, and a small female entered. She was old and her black scales had lost their luster, but she still moved with purpose. She shut the door behind her, took up a seat across from Sarsuk, and pulled out the communicator she wore from a chain on her neck.

“Sarsuk,” she said with a smile as she skimmed his file, “looks like you’ve been very naughty.”

He glared at her. “I was framed.”

“Oh, I believe you. With my clearance, I was able to read the transcripts from the trial…” At the word “trial”, she barely maintained her composure, barely managed to stifle a laugh. “Yeah, you got screwed. The prosecutor hardly had any evidence at all. A good attorney should have gotten you off easily.”

The yellow krakun frowned. “He was the best I could afford.”

“Yeah, well, you get what you pay for, as they say.”

His eyes opened a little wider. “Does that mean you think you can get my conviction overturned?” Hesitant optimism filled his voice.

“Pfft. No way!” she laughed. “They’re chopping your head off in three days. No two ways about that.”

Sarsuk glared at her some more, his lower lip curled up beneath his upper. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

“Who I am isn’t important,” she said with a smile. “But what I want is to discuss a super-secret, classified project with you.”

The yellow lizard rolled his eyes. “I’m being executed for treason, and you want to give me classified information? How stupid are you?”

She continued to smile. “I’m smart enough to know that you’ll die in three days anyhow, that no one would believe you if you blabbed, and that I’ve got a guard who’s agreed to beat you slowly to death with a length of chain if you do. But you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

Trembling, Sarsuk laid down on the floor and rested chin on the backs of his claws. “No, I won’t.” He raised his chin slightly. “And I never did spill any classified information in the first place! I got set up.”

“Of course,” she said. Then, she explained, “For most of my career, I’ve been researching how to transfer someone’s consciousness into a cloned body.”

He blinked. “You’re going to make a clone of me … and transfer my mind into it?”

“No,” she laughed. “You’re a criminal! If anyone recognized your cloned body, there would be … difficult questions.”

“Ah,” he sighed, setting his chin back down. “Whose body then?”

“No one you know,” said the older krakun. “I have a variety of bodies—cloned and ready on life support, just waiting for me to 3D-print a brain into their empty skulls.”

Sarsuk opened his mouth, but she talked over him before he got a chance to utter a word, “No, you don’t get to choose.” Then, she smiled. “But all the bodies are healthy and developed to young-adult stage.”

“Impossible,” he said. “It’s not possible to decode someone’s brain and then recode that into another one.”

“Oh,” she said, drawing the sound out. “I’ve worked on this project for six thousand years, and in the full minute you’ve thought about it, you already know more than I do?”

His eyes turned down, and his lower lip stuck out farther. “Okay, sure, but you wouldn’t be transferring my consciousness. You’re preying on my fear of dying, hoping I’ll be your lab experiment or something, but you can’t actually deliver that, can you? The best you could really do is that a clone of me would continue to live while I died. Well, I don’t care about a clone’s life. I don’t want to die!”

“Good!” she said, pointing at his face. “You’re more clever than they made you out to be. But in this case, you’re wrong. I would actually be transferring your consciousness.”

“How?”

“I’m not authorized to divulge the specifics, and you wouldn’t understand them if I did,” she said, sitting up on her haunches.

His eyes followed her, but he remained on the floor. “You’ll have to divulge something or forget it. I’m never gonna agree to whatever it is you’re proposing.”

“All right. I can put it in terms you’d understand without going into details,” she said. She mimed closing a book and holding it upright, so the spine rested in her palm. With her other claw, she gestured above the imaginary book. “Pretend that I sprinkled a bunch of nanomachines onto the edge of a book. They wriggle their way between the pages and look at what’s written on them without ever opening the book to any page.”

“Sure, and then they transmit what they read to a data relay that sends it to your 3D printer,” he finished for her. “Like I said, making a copy. Death of the original.”

“Not so fast,” she said with a grin. “That would have been the crown jewels in our field, but after pursuing it for a few thousand years, we decided that it just isn’t possible.”

Sarsuk frowned. “Okay, so what is possible?”

“Back to my book analogy,” she said. “We don’t want to open the book because that would kill the patient, but the nanobots can tear the pages into microscopic bits and examine them as they go.”

He tried to sit up and back away, but the chain on his cuffs clanged loudly against the bolt, holding him in place. “Chewing up my brain!” gasped Sarsuk.

“Sure, but it happens slowly—over the course of a couple days,” she said with a reptilian smile. “When they’re finished, your personality won’t be there anymore. You’ll just be a shambling hulk, following orders and walking up onto the executioner’s stage. It won’t be you. It’ll be little more than a meat puppet, a zombie.”

“But—” he whimpered.

“But as your mind is unraveled from one location, it will be woven back together in another,” she said. “I haven’t experienced this personally, mind you, but our research shows that you will perceive a gradual transition from one location to another. From your perspective, it will still be you. You will continue to exist. You, not a copy of you.”

His mouth hung open. “Really?”

The black krakun shrugged. “In theory,” she said. “We’ve done it on slaves with mixed success, and the ethics committee won’t let us try it on krakun … but you’re scheduled to die anyhow…”

“And if it doesn’t work… I’d have been dead anyhow.”

She nodded.

His mind reeling, he stared at her.

“Anyhow, that’s my pitch,” she said. “If you don’t take the deal, they’ll execute you in three days. If you do, then you’ll just be a mush brain when they kill your body. It won’t be scary at all. But if it works, three days from now, you and I will be kicked back in my laboratory, drinking tea and laughing about how you cheated death.”

“And then?”

“And then, a few days of data collection to gauge how well the process worked,” said the black krakun. “Then, I’ve already got a job and new identity lined up for you. It’s nothing thrilling or important—much like your old job, I suspect—but at least you’ll work for someone important this time.”

“If it works,” he said solemnly.

“If it works,” she agreed.

“How long do I get to think about this?”

“Not long,” she admitted. “Download could take up to three days, and that’s all the time you’ve got left. Decide now. Also, if you don’t want it, remember what I said about my buddy with the chain, and take this conversation to the recycler.”

“Okay, fine,” the former commissioner said. “I’ll take the deal. What do I do?”

She smiled. With the tips of her talons, she pried her communicator open and extracted a black, rectangular object from within. “The data relay,” she said, handing it to him. “It needs to stay within twenty meters of your brain at all times so none of the collected data will be lost.”

Sarsuk frowned. “They’ll confiscate this from me before I get back to my cell.”

“That’s why you’ll need to swallow it,” she said.

His eyes opened wide. “It’s too big to swallow!”

“You’ll need to find a way,” she said. “It’ll probably hurt like crazy to swallow. Also, it should be too wide to leave your stomach, so you’ll probably get terrible cramps, but after a day or so, most of your consciousness will be in my laboratory, so it’ll be happening to ‘someone else’ from your perspective.”

Sarsuk nodded and after spending a minute to get up the nerve, he put the device in his mouth and forced it down. It scratched his throat the whole down and he banged his fist against the concrete until most of the pain had subsided.

When the tears had finally cleared from his eyes, he looked up and saw that the black krakun had reassembled her communicator and was preparing to leave the cell. She pointed to the little white envelope before him. “In that packet, you’ll find nanobots. Snort the powder as far back into your sinuses as you’re able. Then, swallow the empty envelope before the guards come in and find it.”

He reached out to pick the little white square up, but she was already yelling at him. “No no no! Those nanobots digest brain matter,” she reminded him. “Kindly let me put some distance between us before you tear it open.”

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tmkRVXy6KTxQc9FcFncj1Ar4_8a9hQDNQvZ--4RPYn8/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?