Upload Day

The monastery had been debating it for two years. Not the technology — LifeStream's success rate was ninety-four percent, and Brother Anand had read the technical reports on the remaining six in careful detail. What the monastery debated was dharma. Whether consciousness was something you could translate without losing the original, the way a prayer changes meaning when moved from Sanskrit to Hindi to English without any individual word being wrong. On the morning of the upload, a technician attached the interface and asked if he had any questions. "Will I still be me?" he said. She told him that ninety-four percent of users reported subjective continuity of identity. She said it the way people say things they have repeated many times without thinking about what the words actually mean.

Brother Anand closed his eyes and began a mantra he had been saying since the age of seven. He kept saying it as the world went very still, then very bright, then became something for which he did not yet have words. The technician noted the time. In seventeen data centres across three states, something that had been Brother Anand arrived, looked around, and began to take stock.