It was the only thing I could do. The FLJ was a top-secret device that was worth millions. It would be financial malpractice to throw it away. The only thing I could do was to take Professor Wang’s suggestion and try to build a battlesuit around it. The unfortunate thing was the fact that I knew next to nothing about the device. It didn’t come with any notes or research data on how it worked. Building an advance machine like a battlesuit with a component I know nothing about? What could possibly go wrong? I cursed the professor once more.

“How am I going to do this?”

It was a great question that I didn’t have an answer to. Although I was in the room when the technology was announced to the world, I knew next to nothing about how Forever Life technology exactly works. This FLJ device was the same. To me, it was just a small rectangle piece of metal. I look over the device and noticed that there were several ports in it. I could attach wires to it, but then what? Knowing that no help would be forthcoming from the professor, I had to experiment.

The next week was consumed by this.

First, I read up on Forever Life. The papers the professor released during the conference were now widely available and I read through them. They didn’t offer me any real insights into the technology, but I got a basic understanding of how it works, and the research history of Forever Life. Surprisingly, the initial idea of Forever Life was very different from what it is now.

As the professor had implied during the speech, the human mind is really a big computer. Much like a computer, the brain processes data and sent messages to the body telling it what to do. What the professor didn’t say at the conference, and what the papers made clear, was that everyone’s brain process data differently. The professor believed that this difference was what makes each individual different from each other. This was the person’s consciousness.

The Forever Life machine he invented copy and stored the way a person’s brain processed data, thus storing his consciousness in the Forever Life supercomputer. The professor had originally envisioned this as a backup system of the individual. The initial idea was to store the consciousness of a person before his death and clone the dead person’s body using his DNA. After the successful cloning of the body, the Forever Life machine would then transfer the person’s consciousness into the cloned body. That was the initial idea. Forever Life was supposed to be a cog of a greater procedure. Somewhere down the line, the plan must have changed.

‘Why’ was a question many members of the public were currently asking. The professor was a cybernetic specialist and had no history in cloning or neuroscience. He must had been working with other people. For some reason, he decided to go solo. Why he decided to do this was a hot gossip tropic among talk show host and video bloggers. Numerous articles had already been written about it and people were speculating on who the professor was working with. Just a simple search on the Solar Web gave me tons of speculation, including some that were out there. Terrorists, aliens, and even gods! The last one got a chuckle out of me. The imagination of some people.

As entertaining as the speculation was, it didn’t help me. For that, I had to look for articles concerning the application of Forever Life. Luckily, there were some serious articles about it on the web.

Several prominent research centres had gone through the professor’s papers with a fine-tooth comb and came up with their own follow-up papers on his research. One month was a short time but Professor Wang would have given his papers to a few respected colleagues for peer review before releasing it to the general public. After reviewing the papers, these colleagues of his would have written their own papers on the research and released them after Professor Wang’s big reveal. This was a common practice in scientific circles.

Luckily for Professor Wang, almost everyone was enthusiastic about his work. Most scientists believe the research to be of high quality, which was not surprising considering who the research came from, but they also believe the potential of Forever Life to be astronomical. The knock-on effects of his research should not be underestimated. Reading through the articles, I could see why.

According to what I had read, Professor Wang had envisioned the Forever Life machine to be a life storage unit. Once the consciousness of a person has been stored in the unit, it would be kept there till the body had been cloned. Since research in the cloning of humans were still in their infancy, Professor Wand made his machine to be tough and hardy as no one knows how long it would take before the consciousness could be transfer. Cloning research had received a massive boost due to his research and plans are already been drawn up where to store these life storage units. We are talking about massive storage silos that could house thousands of these units. People were arguing whether to build these silos underground, in space, or on other planets. An important argument as the money involved in the construction will be in the billions.

However, there was a strange drawback to the Forever Life technology. The professor called the original body of the consciousness the ‘host’ and wrote that every time he transferred a consciousness to another body, the host would cease to function. This was true whether the host was a biological human, or another robot. It was the main reason why the professor called it a transfer, and not an upload or a copy. The reason for this drawback wasn’t made clear but most thought that this was a good thing. There were some people who are trying use this as an example that humans have souls, but it is the legal questions that interest me.

If a body could still function after the consciousness has been transferred to a Forever Life unit, wouldn’t there be two version of the same person? What would happen there were two or more version of the person? Which version would gain the person’s assets? Which version was the legally binding version of the person? These questions were just the tip of the iceberg and more than one people had voiced their hope that no one was stupid enough to try to find a way around this issue. I was not hopeful.