In Jason’s virtual office, multiple error messages were hanging above his head like a grey cloud of confusion. ”What do you mean, Unknown error?” he mumbled to himself as he read through a dozen lines of messages. Louder, he commanded, “Display the debug log of events immediately before this error.”

“Jason?!?” Aleah’s face appeared in this still active communication window. “Can you hear me?” she practically yelled.

“Yeah, I can; no need to yell. There seems to be a bug in the logout sequence. Could you activate the hardwired emergency logout?”

He saw the multiple distinct shades Aleah’s face passed through as it reached an ashen color. “I already did. I already... “ She turned slowly to the capsule and the body and visibly swallowed. “Jason, your head is a foot away from the receivers, right now.”

A sigh of relief escaped him, even as his gut twisted tighter. “Well, that would cause some problems. Move me back, and I’m going to try to logout again.

Still pale-faced, she moved to follow his instructions, but whispered to herself, “it’s impossible. Either way, this is impossible.”

Sliding the rolling pad, and Jason’s body, back into the receiver was a ten-second process. “You’re back in. Logout now,” she pleaded, though she wasn’t sure to whom. It had to work, and they could deal with the technological ramifications later when everyone was safe.

Aleah’s nimble fingers entered the commands onto her screen that would allow her to see what Jason did. Her heart stayed firmly lodged in her throat as she saw what Jason stared at, numbly.

“Logout Not Possible. Target unavailable. Error code: 91077.”

---

It took time for an increasingly frantic Jason, Aleah, and every developer currently under Jason’s supervision to cobble together a partial picture of where things stood. His pounding heart, at another time, would have caused him to smile and appreciate the realistically-simulated stress response. He pushed the thought aside. “Tell me again. Walk me through the whole thing.”

The video streams of his team members hovered over the virtual desk before him. James, another developer who Jason was sure was a rising star in the company, cleared his throat. After his eyes nervously flicked around the other faces, he began. “The power outage started all this. That much is obvious. The car took down our power lines, which triggered the backup generator, as it should have. The uninterruptible power supply of your capsule took over the load.”

Janice, a new hire, spoke up. “The UPS sent a signal to our server banks, informing them of the situation. I verified that much.”

“Jason,” Rick broke in, “as you know, our server cluster is hooked up to multiple redundant power systems. Battery backups and generators are both independently able to run those things if something like this happens. Those servers are also capable of handling our building’s security systems, communication, pretty much anything we have here on site. And so they have instructions to onboard all vital processes in the event of an outage.

Aleah, quiet until this point, finally spoke up. “To the point we’re all getting at - active simulations are apparently marked as a vital process, and the server cluster uploaded all vital processes to itself to prevent interruption. That apparently includes your biological neural network.”

“Which isn’t possible,” Rick stated firmly. “At least, I don’t see how it could be. At best, the digital copy,” he emphasized, “we’ve been keeping was flagged as the primary entity by the server, and since that point, we’ve been having a conversation with a predictive neural network.” The glare from Aleah prompted him to add, “Sorry, man. I just don’t see any other possibility.”

“I feel real enough,” Jason emphasized, “and if I’m not me, why am I not walking around with the rest of you right now? My body, I mean? Aleah, I’m still physically unresponsive, right? Even after the emergency logout?”

Her nod confirmed his thoughts.

Janice raised her hand but began to speak immediately. “I also saw that there was a 90 terabyte data transfer from the capsule to the server. That’s at least enough for a differential transfer of Jason’s consciousness.”

“Maybe,” Rick’s admission was laced with doubt. “And I’ll even admit that if we’re simply talking to a copy, I have no idea why Jason’s actual body isn’t conscious. Either way - did we create the world’s first true, self-aware, artificial intelligence?”

The silence lingered until Aleah commented, “Well, he’s more like an extreme cyborg. 100% machine body with a human consciousness. But we’re going to get Jason reunited with his body, right?”

More silence followed, and since no other comments were forthcoming, Jason himself spoke up. “Since none of us are sure what happened to me physically, we’re going to need to call in the doctors who might be able to figure it out. One of my calls will be to my boss - in the rush to get me out of here,” he said, waving expansively to his digital environment, “it didn’t even cross my mind to let him know. Don’t go anywhere, and don’t go spreading this around just yet.

“Aleah, can I speak with you privately after this?”

“Sure thing, boss.” She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. Her increasingly worried look had a firm hold, now.

---

Jason pinched the bridge of his nose and took slow, deep breaths. Eyes closed, he spoke to Aleah, who was alone in his office and still communicating via her tablet. “This is bad. I don’t even know how bad it is. It could be either the best thing that ever happened to Razor or the worst. This is certainly innovative,” he opened his eyes and straightened up, “and it has never been done before.

“Or,” he paused, as he considered a darker scenario, “It could be construed as a sim gone wrong, killing someone. Am I legally dead? Something tells me that my life insurance isn’t going to want to pay out for this,” he said with a dry harumph that didn’t fully qualify as a laugh. “I don’t know how the higher-ups are going to react.

“And Sarah? Oh, Sarah… and the kids…”

Aleah could only watch as Jason visibly tried to calm himself.

“I trust you, Aleah. Take care of my family if I don’t make it through this. Tell them I love them…” he trailed off.

“But I am going to make it through this.” Jason set his jaw firmly. “I’m going to get this insane mess fixed. And to do that, I’ve got to make a few calls. I’ll talk to you later.”

Jason’s first call rang a telephone in the inner office of Rand and Sons, the law firm he and Sarah had gone to for help in drawing up their will. The receptionist informed him that Richard Rand was, in fact, available for his emergency, and yes, he could call Jason using video right away.

Thirty seconds later, a familiar face appeared in front of Jason. Richard’s eyebrows raised at the grim look on Jason’s face, but as Jason’s story spilled out, the quizzical expression was soon replaced by shock on Richard’s normally stoic face, which was then replaced by a mask of professionalism as he only interrupted his client to ask brief, clarifying questions.

At the end of fifteen minutes, Richard set down his old-fashioned pen on the legal pad that was now crowded with quickly scrawled notes. “If I understand this right, we need to rush to do a few things. First, we need to be absolutely sure they don’t shut you down. I wouldn’t expect they would, but panicking people can do illogical things.

“Two - we need to get you the best medical help money can buy. Preferably on the company’s dime, but either way, fast. Neither you nor I know if there’s a time limit on reuniting your consciousness with your body, but it would be foolish to take a second longer than needed.” He paused to look up from his pad. “You do wish to be reunited with your body, right?”

“Uh… yeah.” The question caught him off guard. He hadn’t even considered that there might be a choice in the matter.

“Just checking,” Richard continued. “Three - and this is more long-term than the first two - we need to make sure your rights as a person, employee, citizen, or whatever, are recognized. From what I understand of the virtual environments you work on, you could theoretically continue work there without interruption. In fact, you probably would be even more valuable to them today than you were yesterday. You’re a treasure trove of research potential if nothing else, but that value does make me a little nervous.”

Richard took a breath as he thought about various options. “I think we can make it clear to them that if they try to claim that they own ‘digital you’” to which he added air quotes, “then they’re opening the door to their own negligence and a huge wrongful death lawsuit. If you are, instead, still Jason, and alive and well, they’ve got to negotiate with you as they would any other living, breathing employee.

“We’ve got to find the balance between you being valuable enough to have them pay all your medical bills and have them work with you, but not demand so much that someone is tempted to fight us on this. And we’d better have that conversation soon.”

---

Tanya, the VP of Simulation at Razor, was not happy to learn that one of her project managers had called an emergency meeting with her at the last minute. She was even less happy to see an unknown third party in that meeting and to learn that it was her employee’s lawyer. As she learned about the incident, she quickly conferenced her HR team in, who brought in the CEO and Razor’s own external legal counsel a few minutes later. It’s going to be a long day, Tanya knew, and that gave her yet another reason to curse her rotten luck quietly.

It didn’t take many cycles of short discussions, interspersed by breaks so each party could privately confer between themselves, for Razor to agree that the Jason they were talking to was still alive, and an employee, and someone they very much wanted to continue to work with. While various companies had been able to write programs that were very life-like and could even pass the Turing test, they all lacked a certain humanity.

It was hard to precisely define what was missing from their attempts at AI, but these “bots” didn’t have the ingenuity, or originality, or creative spark that humans intuitively sought out in their companions. Society was still divided on where these creations lay on the spectrum of program versus intelligence. There was no doubt in anyone’s minds, though, that a digitized human consciousness was a unique case, something new, a singular world-changing event.

Jason wasn’t sure that everyone on the call was convinced he was actually alive in his current form. Aleah, he knew, believed in him, and he was pretty sure Richard did too. Where the rest of the participants landed was anyone’s guess, but if it allowed them to study him, they’d at least play along.

It took some heated negotiation, but in exchange for full access to Jason’s medical results, and the chance to study his digital consciousness for a limited time, Jason and Richard squeezed out every concession they thought they could get. Jason got to keep his current pay, for starters. He was also profoundly uncomfortable with not owning the servers his consciousness was housed in and was granted ownership of the cluster that was currently his host. Razor would also pay for his medical bills as he still hoped he could be reunited with his body.

They had successfully convinced the management team that Jason would be a better test subject with some hope for a future of his own. There had to be a motivation that would drive Jason to excel in the world he would be entering. Any person can push themselves to work hard for a limited time on sheer willpower. To turn that drive into a habit that lasts months and years requires a more compelling reason. Jason had a huge amount of potential value, so it was in everyone’s best interest to see him very incentivized. If he was willing to work to provide data on both his artificial brain-state and time compression, Razor had a very unique opportunity.

The team was convinced that without a physical brain slowing the connection, they had the ability to achieve significant perceived time compression. The limitation was no longer raw processing bandwidth, of which they would devote much to the project. Trillions of actions could be performed in parallel each second. However, each individual calculation still took a minimum amount of time, placing an upper limit on the amount of time compression possible. In addition to his consciousness being accelerated, the simulation of the world surrounding him would also need to be processed at the same rate. A 50:1 time compression ratio was probably as much as they could hope for.

“10 years in the sim,” Tanya drawled. “It’s not a bad deal, really. You’ll only lose two and a half months in the real world.

“I know, I know,” she hurriedly added as Jason opened his mouth. “It will feel like a long time to you. But the $750,000 you’re getting at the end of those years is very generous. How many other people do you know who can earn three-quarters of a million dollars in under three months?”

“How many people do you know of in my situation?” Jason shot back. “And from my time-dilated perspective, I’ll be earning less per year than I do now.”

“Point taken,” she continued. “Still, it’s not an insignificant amount. And here’s what you can do to earn it even faster.” She paused to make sure she had Jason’s full attention.

“For this simulation to be the most valuable for us, we need to push you to your limits. You need to feel emotions - joy in your successes, hope in the future, frustration when things don’t work out. Yes, even the negative emotions,” she headed off Jason as he started to comment again.

“We won’t tip the scales against you, but it won’t be easy, either. You can’t sit in a cabin in the woods as a hermit for a decade. Here’s why we think you won’t: if you reach these scenario victory conditions before the ten simulated years are up, we’ll consider your contract completed immediately.”

Tanya paused a moment to look at her notes.

“You’ll be in a non-fantasy human world, as we expect that to be the most useful to our study. It will be as realistic as possible, and pretty much anything you can create in the real world, you’ll be able to create there. To the best of our ability to simulate it, of course. And since the modern world is infinitely more difficult for us to simulate than a more primitive era, you’ll be in something resembling Europe’s early middle ages.

“I’d personally recommend inventing something better than the chamber pot and outhouse,” Tanya sniggered. “But either way, here are your objectives: Either stay alive for ten years,” she looked up from her pages, “That’s the boring option, in case you couldn’t tell.” She glanced back down. “Or, starting as the ruler of a small village, you find a way to grow your kingdom to include at least 200,000 people. Hold on to it for at least six months in the sim, and you win.

“How you get there, I don’t care. But I’m sure that the experience in running a successful kingdom will look great on your resume.” The winning smile that filled her face wasn’t meant to be endearing. It was predatory, and it made Jason pause.

Hmm. Jason thought to himself. Is that her play? Turn me into a dangerous dictator? He sighed audibly. Not many people would be comfortable hiring someone with “I used to be a power-hungry crazy dictator, and now I’m practically an artificial intelligence” on their resume. No, the way I win will probably receive more scrutiny than whether I actually succeed or not. I can’t treat this like a game entirely - I’ve got to live it like life. I can’t just jump straight to assassinations or psychopathic shortcuts.

I should probably even have Richard hire a psychologist to confirm my sanity throughout the process independently. I’d hate to have Razor declare me insane and take the opportunity to found the world’s first digital insane asylum with me as the primary resident and lab rat. Tanya, you have a devious, devious mind. Or, maybe I’m just paranoid. He almost groaned out loud but managed to hold it back. This is not a good start for my sanity. And just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.

Jason looked over at Richard, who gave a slight shrug of his shoulders. “I will agree to all that, on two more conditions. First, you turn off religion in the scenario. I don’t want to be burned at the stake for my modern protestant views or be the target of a witch hunt.” After a shrug from Tanya, he continued. “Secondly, I want you all to use your connections to get my family and me tickets to the Mars colony, and pay for the transfer of all our stuff.”

The Mars colony had been founded three decades earlier, not long after fully reusable spacecraft had begun their flights. Governments had participated in the effort, but no single state was in charge. Private corporations and nonprofits had played a much more significant role in the development of the red planet than had been expected, mainly due to the world superpowers threatening each other should the Outer Space Treaty be broken.

An uneasy detente followed those threats, and the colony grew each year under its own independent flag. It’s residents, for the most part, remained official citizens of their country of origin, with a sort of unofficial dual citizenship assumed.

Most of the 120,000 colonists in the martian city of Hope were involved in the manufactories. Even with everyone forced to live in habitats with cramped quarters, there was a plethora of scientists and researchers on the waiting lists for the colony. Quite a few of those intellectuals’ applications had been accepted, but research took a back seat to physical development on the new planet. New habitat domes were built continuously. People and their automated robotic assistants mined ice and minerals, and hydroponics maintained to provide consistent air and food. Exploration, continual invention, and growth were pursued by a long waitlist of willing participants in this grand interplanetary adventure.

A project manager with a time compression ability could be handy, if the capability lives up to the theory, Jason thought. Maybe I could start some sort of business or consultancy there. More than a job, though, he saw an opportunity to distance himself from companies that would want to get their grubby hands on him. He just hoped Sarah would be as interested in the idea as she had been a year or two ago when they had wistfully talked about emigrating.

“After this simulation, you’ll have years worth of data to study, and I’ll need a break. Away from the reporters that I imagine will find out about this.”

One curt nod from the CEO later, and Tanya agreed. “I’m sure we’ll keep in touch with you, even on another planet.”

As she stacked her papers, drawing the meeting to a close, she added, “You have about three days before we’ll be finished pulling together all the components of your simulation.”

Jason, always the project manager, frowned. “That seems a little optimistic to me.”

“We’ve already informed everyone relevant that they’ll be working twelve-hour days at double overtime pay. We want our simulation recordings as soon as possible, and you want all the amazing things we just promised you. It’s a win-win.”

And this has nothing to do with the fact that you want me to not give too many interviews about the dangers of the technology, or how this happened to me, right? Jason mused. Wow, I do sound paranoid. But again, just because you’re paranoid…

“Alright.” he agreed. “I’ve got a few calls of my own to make, and I’ll take the next couple of days off since I presume you won’t want my help on the scenario.”

Tanya’s smile appeared more genuine this time. “I can’t have you adding in cheat codes. We do need you to come into the office two days from now to test the time compression.”

“Of course.” Jason’s smile matched hers. “Richard, before you all work on writing this contract up, can I have a word?”

The other participants dropped off the call one by one until Jason was alone with his lawyer. “I need you to hire someone to monitor my sim and keep them honest. I need you to make sure the doctors and neuro specialists look at how to get me back in that body, not just study what happened. Cash-out my 401(k) if needed to pay for it. I’m feeling rather vulnerable here.”

Jason took a slow breath. “I haven’t wanted to say this, even to myself, but I suspect that there is no going back for me. I don’t know…” his words trailed away. “I just don’t know if they’ll be able to do it. Or what if they’re able to wake my body from its current vegetative state, without restoring this version to it?” Jason gestured at his digital, simulated body.

“I just don’t know how it will turn out. So I’ve got to make sure I’m ready for this” another gesture at himself emphasized his current state, “to be it. I’d hate to squander what appears to be functional immortality. Or end up a digital slave to some corporation.”

“I will soon own the servers I’m using, but I’ll need more, and I’m still way too dependent on Razor’s infrastructure, power, and internet. Here’s what I’m going to need you to buy for me in the next two months...”