by Tommy Blanchard
Subject: Urgent, Read Immediately
From: Cadet Kai Renner
<Warning: Abnormally Large Data Packet Attached>
I need your help. My life is literally in your hands—or rather, in your inbox.
As you know, I was on a scientific mission to the Betelgeuse system aboard the Aeon Pioneer. The truth is, this was more than an astronomy expedition. We were testing prototype Omega Class sensors.
We knew almost immediately upon entering the system something was wrong. Our military escort, Stalwart V, failed to initiate contact. I don’t love admitting this, but it’s important you understand: at that first sign of trouble, I was terrified. I’m not a military officer, I’m a scientist. We were alone in space and something was wrong. It stirred a primal fear in me.
The feeling let up as Captain Jax commanded the helm to take us out of the system. The lack of acknowledgement from Stalwart V was a significant enough break in protocol to scuttle the mission.
I heard the familiar hum of the warp drives coming online to take us to safety. Abruptly, the sound stopped and the ship went dark. A split-second later, emergency lights came on and warnings blared about various systems being offline. A barrage of long-range EMPs had hit us.
I knew then what had happened to Stalwart V. It was the Uldari. The primal fear returned with a vengeance.
Everything that followed was a blur. The captain barked orders. The crew frantically ran around the bridge. We all knew if the Uldari had taken out Stalwart V, we stood no chance. We were a science vessel with a small crew and minimal weapons.
“Should we get to the escape pods?” My voice broke partway through the question.
Without looking at me, the captain responded, projecting his voice as if addressing the entire crew. “If we launched all the escape pods, they’d detect and capture us.”
The answer shocked me. Launching the escape pods was a gamble, but staying aboard was a death sentence. Our engines were disabled, our arsenal was laughable, and our only advanced system was the prototype sensors.
But the sensors—suddenly, a speculation I had while I’d read their specifications was relevant: their resolution was so precise that at close range, they could image any physical system perfectly, down to the elementary particles. Scanning a biological system—like, say, a human—you would have the data needed to recreate the entire organism in a digital simulation. From that data you could create an emulation of their brain, effectively uploading their mind.
I couldn’t tell if I was just desperately seeking an escape, but I found myself shouting the idea to the captain. I tried to articulate that we could create digital replicas of the entire crew and send those back to Earth, turning our communication streams into virtual escape pods.
The captain glared at me. “Enough. Our priority isn’t to escape, it’s to keep the ship out of Uldari hands. Remember your role here.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. Didn’t he understand we could die here? Or worse, be captured by the Uldari with their notorious torture techniques.
The enemy vessel closed in enough for us to get a visual. It was an Uldari War Cruiser. The weapons officer fired our meager weapons. There was no effect on the massive Cruiser, except to provoke another volley of EMP blasts that took out our weapons and shields.
“Collision course, full impulse,” growled the captain.
My heart thumped in my chest. This was suicide. A direct collision would cause minor damage to the enemy vessel while destroying us.
In my panic, I gained sudden clarity: the captain wanted to prevent our scanner tech from being captured by the Uldari. With it, they could scan a human ship. With their computational sophistication, no doubt they would know how to emulate the entire crew in a virtual environment, extracting whatever intelligence they needed without boarding. This method of gleaning our strategic intelligence would decisively shift the war in their favor.
Central Command knew this. Suddenly, the secrecy around the mission made perfect sense. These scanners weren’t for scientific purposes. They were a tool of war.
The Cruiser grew in our central viewport. Heart pounding, I desperately tried to think of another way out. I wasn’t ready to die.
Another volley of EMP cut out our engines. The Uldari ship maintained distance and launched a boarding shuttle.
The captain shouted orders to the Security and Engineering officers. I froze up. I had no idea what a science officer was supposed to do in this situation. The captain locked eyes with me.
“Get down to the engine core. If they gain control of the ship, trigger manual self-destruction.”
In a daze, I ran down to the engineer core. I activated the terminal and opened a view of the rest of the ship.
Within minutes, an Uldari boarding party punctured a hole in the hull and invaded the bridge. I watched as stun grenades erupted on the deck, taking out most of our crew. The captain put up a fight, but took a Disruptor blast to the face, knocking him out cold. The Uldari flooded in.
Just like that, it was over. We had lost. The ship was under enemy control, and I was the only crew member remaining. My duty was pretty obvious: activate self-destruct, destroying our ship to keep the sensors out of Uldari hands.
That familiar primal fear took hold. My mouth went dry. There had to be a way out. I wasn’t ready to die.
My mind went back to the sensors. Nothing was stopping me from making a scan of myself. I could open a direct line to the sensors, scan myself, transmit the data, then self-destruct. My body would be destroyed, but a perfect representation of my brain would be transmitted. From my perspective, it would be just like being instantly transported—assuming someone who received the data ran the mind emulation.
I initiated the scan, keeping one eye on the video feed of the Uldari boarding crew. The scan completed, but a thought occurred to me before I transmitted the data. With the Uldari ship nearby, they were sure to detect the message. If they knew enough to intercept our ship deep in our territory, they must have known about the scanners and their capabilities. If they got a scan of a crew member—me—they would probably know what it is and how to use it to create an emulation. They would have a virtual copy of me that they could interrogate—and torture, in an environment they had complete control over.
I stopped what I was doing to think things through.
As I paused, an alert popped up on the computer. Someone had accessed the data in the scanner’s buffer. My heart pounded as I checked the logs. The Uldari had noticed the new data file and made a copy.
An icy dread spread across my body, freezing me in place. They had a virtual copy of my brain that they could at this moment be getting ready to emulate on their ship’s computer. They also knew someone had used the scanners.
The Uldari knew I was on the ship. My mind raced, knowing I had limited time to act. I considered transmitting the scan file back home. If the Uldari already had the file, there was no risk in transmitting it. From the perspective of the consciousness captured in the scan, it would mean a chance to wake up at home instead of awakening to the torture of the Uldari. A 50:50 chance.
But would it really be 50:50? The Uldari were known for their cruelty—if they could make as many copies as they wanted of a human consciousness, would they stop at torturing just one? What if they emulated many, but only one was emulated back home—the proportion of emulated versions of me being tortured could be thousands to one. If I was transmitted back, should I demand they run as many emulations as they can to even things out? That kind of post hoc attempt to maximize my chances of waking up in the right place seemed ridiculous, but my adrenaline-riddled mind couldn’t sort out why.
For all I knew, the Uldari had already started emulating my scan. But if I couldn’t say for sure if my scan was already being tortured, was it really me? Did transmitting the file back home even help me? I would still be stuck on this ship. Sending a data file back wouldn’t change that.
What I had to do was take another scan. Scan, transmit, and self-destruct. There was no delay between executing a manual self-destruct and the engine core exploding, so self-destruction had to come last.
I brought up the controls for scanning and ship self-destruction. As I was hitting the button to scan, I had one small troubling thought. Transmitting isn’t instant. No matter how quickly I hit the self-destruct button after the transmission completed, there would be a gap between when I took the scan and when the ship would self-destruct. As troubling as that thought was, my finger had already made contact, and the scan initiated.
There was an abrupt, dizzying change—I went from standing in front of the computer to looking out from it, my perspective shifting to that of the camera embedded in the terminal. Even more disorienting, I was looking at my own face. I listened to my own voice as he—I?—explained.
I was an emulation, being run on the engineering computer from the scan I remembered just initiating. Immediately after taking the scan, the flesh-and-blood me decided against self-destructing. The time gap between scanning and destruction was enough, he felt, to mean that whatever was transmitted could not be the same brainstate as whoever executed the self-destruction. He instructed me to self-destruct the ship in five minutes, giving him enough time to reach the escape pod. Even if it was a slim chance, he felt it was better odds than the certainty of dying due to destroying the ship. He told me I could transmit my data if I wanted, but we both knew destroying the ship was necessary to keep the scanning technology out of Uldari hands.
Without waiting for a response, flesh-and-blood me ran off, leaving me in the exact same position he’d just been in. Without self-destructing, the war effort was doomed. But if I transmitted my scan file and then executed self-destruction, there would be a gap in time between the scan file I sent and the emulation that executed self-destruction. Whoever executed self-destruction could not live on.
Perhaps it isn’t surprising given the decision my flesh-and-blood self made, but I am taking the same way out. I have booted up another emulation from the same scan file and have instructed that version to self-destruct the ship after I transmit myself. That emulation will be in the same position I am in now. Perhaps they will make the same choice I do, in which case you’ll soon receive a similar message from them.
No matter how many times we do this, any file transmitted can’t be from after executing self-destruction, in which case, can the one who is brave enough to do it really be said to live on? I can only hope that this next version, through some random variation or slight change in external circumstances, finds the courage to self-destruct instead of creating another version and sending another copy of the file to you.
<157,803 similar messages with similarly large data files received. Attachments could not be retained due to bandwidth constraints>
~
Bio:
Tommy Blanchard holds a PhD in neuroscience as well as degrees in computer science and philosophy. He is interested in philosophy of mind, science, and science fiction, and writes about these topics in his publication, Cognitive Wonderland. By day, he works as a data scientist in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife, two sons, and two mischievous rabbits.
Philosophy Note:
What makes you, you? If you were going to die, but you could have your brain scanned and a perfect emulation of it created, that would share all your thoughts and memories and act exactly the way your physical brain would, would it be you? What if you were scanned but you wouldn’t die until an hour after the scan, would it still be “you” being uploaded? What if the gap was a day? A year? A second? A nanosecond? By playing with these scenarios, we can test the edges of our concept of self.
Suggested reading:
“Where Am I” by Daniel Dennett (a philosopher’s attempt at raising similar questions in fiction): https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/daniel-dennett-where-am-i/
“Reasons and Persons” by Derek Parfit discusses philosophical theories of the continuation of the self.
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