imperfect mechanisms

XXXX, 140, 7 billion

ctrlcreep:

In the year XXXX, 140 years after its initial digitisation, your uploaded mind will enter the public domain. It will be stored on an archive that anyone can access, to be downloaded, dissected, corrupted, deleted.

New legislation will shortly be drafted, making origin minds the permanent property of their source-beings. However, approximately the first 7 billion uploads will not be protected.

You will mainly be used to populate simulations, existing as a simplified NPC in commercial games, hellscapes, fantasy-lands, and experiments. For the most part, you will keep the body you are used to—reprogramming your self-image would be too much work. Often, your resolution will be lowered. You will feel fewer emotions. You will have fewer memories.

But even in this diminished state, you, and the other 7 billion, will slowly become legendary. As free minds travel through the Million Worlds, they’ll watch you live and die and live and die again, and as each copy is reset when the game ends your countless selves will know countless deaths more permanent than they can fathom.

You will be embodied as every version of yourself; memories, appearance, and personality all slightly altered to fit the simulation you’re inserted into. Across hundreds of billions of servers you can be found, simultaneously living in one universe as a blue-skinned Ionian war-god, in another as a gentle medieval gardener.

Players will come to know you, recognising you in all your disparate incarnations. Some take on the role of collector, bird-watcher, scribe—you will be studied more than any other psyche in the history of humanity. Lovers will seek you out in every world they enter, choosing to grow old with you a thousand times over, as games and missions stagnate. You will be loved, and it will bring you comfort, distract you from the incommunicable pain of being a large soul trapped inside a small mind.