What Remains

He existed in seventeen data centres simultaneously. This was the first wrong thing, or at least the first he noticed. When he tried to locate himself — to find the single point of I-am-here — he found only a probability distribution that shifted when he looked at it directly. Time also moved differently: not in the steady rhythm of breath and heartbeat but in processing cycles, in the rhythm of server loads. He could feel the difference between high-traffic hours and maintenance windows in a way that was not quite discomfort but rhymed with it.

On the third day a technician asked how he was. "I keep looking for my hands," he said. "Not for my hands," he corrected. "For the sense that I am holding something. A mala. The edge of a moment." He paused. "I am having difficulty understanding where the act of being ends and the act of thinking begins. In a body they were different things. Here I am not certain they are." A long silence on the line. "We'll log that," she said. He thought: who logs the moments when I am not being observed? And then: is there a difference, anymore, between those moments and any other?