-this!”

Wait, what?

Darkness was suddenly all around me. Real, true darkness. As in not just the absence of light because a giant machine is enclosing you, but the absence of anything.

Then a voice spoke from nowhere.

"Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!"

"Hello? Who is that?"

I didn’t recognize the speaker, and after the fifth 'rejoice' and my confused response, silence resumed. I didn't form much of an impression beyond 'deep', 'male' (probably) and 'insistent'. I couldn't tell where the voice had come from, and that worried me. There shouldn't be anyone else in the scanning room, not after the door closed.

I reached for the panic button, the one built into the side of the scanner bed for ease of access. It would take a second to register, but then the machine would power down, the bed would slide back out, and a confused Dr. Morrow could tell me what was going on.

But I couldn't find it. The panic button was gone.

No, that wasn't right. I couldn't feel it. The button...or the side of the bed.

I couldn't feel my hand turning, or my arm bending, or anything.

What the hell?

I couldn't feel anything and I couldn't see anything, and with the voice gone I couldn't hear anything either. It was like...well I actually couldn't come up with a comparison. It wasn't like anything. It was...nothing.

Non-existence.

My breath wanted to speed up in panic...but I couldn't feel myself breathing.

I couldn’t feel my heartbeat.

It's odd, the things you don't realize you have until they're gone. Unless something is wrong, most people hardly ever pay attention to their body, the way it feels. The way the air feels brushing against your skin, the way your muscles flex as you move, and everything else. The hundreds of little feelings and sensations that add up to a living body, to living in a body. It was all gone. I felt...nothing.

Am I dead?

The thought came out of nowhere, but once I thought it I couldn't unthink it. The whole lack of sensation situation was certainly pointing that way, and the eternal void of darkness everywhere me was weird enough to be some kind of afterlife. No flames though, so probably not hell. Limbo?

I should have been terrified, and I was certainly afraid...but it was a distant, muffled kind of fear. More a distressing anxiety than actual gut-wrenching terror.

Maybe you need to feel your gut for terror to wrench it.

Even muted, the fear was distracting. My mind was racing around in circles, making it impossible to think the situation through.

Alright, don't freak out, I told myself. Then I told myself again.

Don’t freak out.

And again.

Don’t freak out.

Again. And again...

I said it over and over, maybe a hundred times, maybe more, until the words lost all meaning and the simple monotonous exercise of attempting to calm my mind...managed to calm my mind. At least a little. Enough so I could focus on something else.

Time to get logical. Yes. Logical was good. Logical was the opposite of freaking out.

So, logically:

Ignore the whole 'I am dead' hypothesis for now. No way to really prove or disprove it, and there was nothing I could do about it if true. Maybe God or an angel or Buddha would be by any minute to explain things, but until that happened, I should look into other possible explanations.

Could this be some sort of test? Maybe I was still in the scanner? Maybe this was a suprise, final scanning session virtual reality simulation? Or something like that?

But that didn't really track. Dr. Morrow had explained the scanner to me ad nauseum before we began my first session. The machine mapped out my brain, 'reading' my mind as I recalled memories and experiences. But it was all passive. The machine just observed and recorded. It couldn't actually affect me.

Could there have been some kind of accident? Had I had a brain aneurism, and now I was in a coma? Or paralyzed and trapped in my mind somehow?

Maybe...but I doubted it. I should have experienced something if that was true, right? Some kind of pain, or discomfort...or anything really. Instead, I had started a sentence, surrounded by the scanner, then finished the sentence, in darkness and feeling nothing. There had been no break, no discontinuity. It had been a seamless transition.

Was there a clue somewhere, something I'd missed? What did I remember?

I was in the machine, about to get scanned. Before that, the Doctor, and the elevator, and the lobby, and my car, and before that...

Nothing.

Oh shit.

I couldn't remember anything before turning off the radio in my car.

I knew some things. Lots of things. I knew about skin and heartbeats and Limbo...but I knew nothing about me. Not my birthday, not my parents, not where I lived, not my favorite food or color or the first time I rode a bike.

There was a big hole where all the memories of my life should be.

I am so fucked.

***

It took me a little while to suppress the fresh wave of (muted yet still distracting) existential fear inspired by my newly discovered, sudden-onset amnesia. It took even longer to put my lack of memory aside and get on with the logical deductions.

(How long exactly? There was no way to tell. One of the more irritating side-effects of existing without any sort of physical or sensory stimulation? No way to tell how much time is passing)

In the end I had fall back on a mix of classic denial, suppression of emotion and a mantra-like repetition of: It doesn't matter what I don't know.

And it didn't. Lack of information wasn't helpful just now. Or hardly ever at all, actually.

So, again. What did I know?

Not much.

Surrounded by darkness, check.

No feeling, no sense of body, check.

Amnesia, check.

Weird voice telling me to rejoice...

Oh yeah!

That voice. Could it answer my questions? Was it still around? I heard it after everything changed. More specifically, right before I'd spoken aloud to answer it. I hadn't spoken since then. Maybe if I did...?

"Hello?" Super weird. I could hear my voice, like when I had spoken before, even though I couldn't feel my mouth move, or sense the air as it left my lungs.

I sounded scared.

Don't think about it, don't worry about it, move on, move on. La la la.

Right. I spoke, but nothing happened. Maybe I needed to say something specific? A password? Passphrase?

“Uh...I’m rejoicing? I rejoice?”

And just like that the voice returned.

"Rejoice! You are lost, but salvation is at hand! Know that by the grace of the Prophet of the New Age your torment is soon to end. Though you are blasphemous facsimiles of true souls and abominations before the eye of God, you may still find some measure of redemption. You will be the slings and arrows of the Prophet as he wars against those who would abandon their earthly home. With your approaching fiery end, you shall strike a blow against the idolaters, atheists, and secular fools who have dared to stand against the Truth of the Prophet. The time approaches! Be ready and await oblivion!

Rejoice! You are lost-"

I tried speaking again, to cut it off, but it didn't work. The voice kept talking over me.Once it began repeating on a loop for the third time, I just tuned it out as best I could.

Alright, none of that sounds good.

I certainly wasn't "rejoicing" that was for sure. From the second I'd heard the voice again, I'd felt even more wary of it. It was the kind, paternal, slightly condescending voice of a man with all the answers. From minute one I was deeply suspicious of him.

Yeah, I thought, better take that whole spiel with a big ole' grain of salt.

Still, what could I parse from it? Digging past all the religious imagery, it was clear that I probably wasn't dead. That 'facsimiles of true souls' part was suggestive. For one, it was plural, so it felt like he was talking to or about a bunch of us, whoever or whatever 'us/we' were/are. For another, that facsimile part...hmmm.

Was I made, somehow? A.I.? No, I didn't feel...computery. I mean, I felt like a person. Or, at least like I used to be a person.

Wait. Wait.

Oh no. Oh god.

I knew what this was. I'd been in a brain scanner. I assumed something went wrong. But that wasn't it. Something had gone right. The Doc had succeeded. They had made a digital copy of my mind, and somewhere down the line I had been...activated. Turned on.

Uploaded.