Lost in the Transfer by Franky Seymour

Movies always get this part wrong. In real hospitals, nothing beeps. Beeping means something bad is happening; your body is failing at some integral task and needs help before it collapses into chaos. But in the ICU med bay of the Starbound, the second largest vessel this side of the Rift and the crown of the Sion Corps fleet, there are teams of highly trained techs whose job it is to make sure those machines don’t beep.

The rest is pretty accurate. Halogen lights painting everything a sickly off-white. The overpowering smell of disinfectant. Yellowing bruises in the crooks of your arms where you’ve given away blood faster than you can make it. Plastic on the inside. Plastic on the outside. Under your skin, down your throat, tubes attached to tubes attached to hanging bags of fluid, slowly replacing red with cloudy white and hoping your body won’t notice.

I can feel it all, in the back of my mind: the sterile room and its blinking screens, but it’s distant, like the sense of a storm on the horizon or the magnetic pull of a passing planet. It’s under the surface, happening to someone else, something else. Something not yet ready to be called me.

[Tether complete. Vitals holding. Playback online and stable]

I can feel the buzz of bodies around me, poking and prodding, monitoring the streams of data this new vessel is pumping out, making sure the upload is successful, that the transfer is strong enough to hold. Maika always said that the process of Transference is what defines us as a species. What allowed us to advance beyond the capabilities of our predecessors. I don’t think he’d see it that way if he’d ever been here himself.

The physical doesn’t matter here. In the loading room. This place was built as a container, a holding pattern of sorts, where pilots go while the connection takes root. They made us pick a happy memory, an idea to build their code around, but an orphan’s lot doesn’t lend itself well to warm fuzzy memories. So, I chose this place. From an old postcard tacked to the wall of the pilot’s lounge: A flat image of a planet I’ve never seen, made by a people that no longer exist.

I’m floating on a crystal blue lake, surrounded by mountains and the quiet buzz of nature. I can feel the sun, their sun, a cold dead star, warming my skin as my legs dangle in the water, the flat expanse of the lake only broken by the slow movements of the board holding me aloft and the occasional splash of a fish breaking the surface. It’s not real; places like this haven’t existed for centuries, but reality is a loose term here. A few electrical inputs and lines of code, and the cold water is as tangible as anything. The human brain is a pretty simple program, after all.

I know what’s happening, back in the ICU. Pilots are forced to do a medical rotation so we understand what to expect when we inevitably end up here. I think they do it as a scare tactic. Seeing the fresh bodies lying motionless on the slab is supposed to make us think more critically, make better tactical decisions. Clearly, I failed that particular lesson.

[Connection stable and rooted. Upload 83% complete]

In different circumstances, if the currents had been in my favour, I know I could have made that jump. I’m not arrogant. I’m good. I’m the best pilot in the Corps. But when you’re travelling thousands of clicks a second through enemy territory with a Crossback on your tail and a shot-out navi system, you don’t get a second chance. You make a choice, and you live with it. Or in this case, you die with it.

I can still feel the remnants of death buzzing around my brain. The slow-motion crash. The sound of bones snapping. The sharp sting of glass slicing into flesh, blood flowing fast, too fast, from open arteries. The creeping numbness. Breathing stilted, then slow, chest stuttering to a halt. And finally, the slow drift into a comforting blackness you’re not supposed to wake up from.

You can’t take them with you, these fractured memories. The mind can only hold so much contradiction before it breaks. So, you leave them here, in this place that is not a place, and hope you can forget what it feels like to die.

[Vessel accepted. Diagnostics running. Initiating reversal procedures]

The voices are getting louder, more insistent. Distant yet demanding, tickling the edges of my senses, pulling me back down. Like someone talking in the barracks while you’re drifting off to sleep, teetering on the edge of wakefulness but not there yet. I’d rather stay here, soaking in the warmth of a dead star, but even as I struggle to hold on, that warmth is fading, slipping through my fingers like smoke. A dream lost to the harsh light of day.

[Transference complete. Bringing him back online now]

My nerves are starting to tingle as I drift to the surface, synapses learning to fire, lungs taking their first shaking breaths. It’s like holding lightning, electricity shooting through every atom of your body. I can feel the room coming into focus. The scratchy hospital blanket. The artificial light. The weight of being tethered back to a body so easily broken.

I know when I blink my eyes open, I’ll look like me. Or as close to me as they could get. It’s never one hundred per cent accurate, after all. There’s always something lost in the transfer. The scars on my hands will be gone, replaced by soft, clean skin. All the marks from the past year washed away like ash in a storm. The cycle begins again, rebooted, reloaded. And I’m left to wonder what part of me died in that burning wreckage, and how many pieces you can lose before it’s not you they’re bringing back.