✅ Project SETI 2: The Daxut Plan

Part IV: Upload

         The whole experience inside the communications room struck Nova as a little weird and rushed. Beyond the first door was a relatively tiny square room that was lined on three sides with an elaborate console with many screens, holographic projectors, and an interface that had touchscreens and various buttons and switches. It was attended by three Daxut, one of which turned and stood up as soon as Nova and Jarah entered. He ushered them through the door on the only wall that wasn't covered.

         It led to a room with several stalls that each had a stool and a computer console inside. The other Daxut went in ahead of him and explained that he was 'preparing it'. Nova didn't like that—he'd grown increasingly worried that he wouldn't actually be able to contact anyone on Earth. But, much to his surprise, he was left alone inside the small comms room. And while he was able to reach the long-distance communicator device that was standard to most Earth dwellings these days at his family home, no one answered, and he was forced to leave it as a message they'd receive later.

         It was the fact that no one had picked up that struck him as odd, especially in combination with the Daxut going inside to 'prepare it'—the device within was slightly alien, but mostly in design and aesthetic. In function, it was as user-friendly and universal as any other transmission implement he'd used before. And, someone was always home. It was a very rare occurrence that no one would be there, and he found it a little too coincidental. Jarah hurried him away the moment he was done and tried to reassure him that the message he left had the unit's receiving code embedded into it, and that his family could hail for him using that. Jarah had told him this in that weirdly hypnotizing voice too, so he was placated by it at the time—but now that he was away from her, he felt uneasy and anxious about it.

         He was told to take a little while to shower, but was instructed not to eat in preparation for the procedures to follow. And while the water and odd-smelling alien soap had been refreshing, the sense of anticipation and nervousness that usually preceded medical appointments was potent to the point of being overpowering. Jarah had been deliberately vague about it—they were going to clone him, but that's all he understood.

         Upon closer inspection, the clothes in the closet resembled scrubs. There were shapeless pull-string trousers and equally shapeless short-sleeved crew-collared shirts in various muted colours and sizes. Barely a minute after he'd finished dressing himself, Jarah came back to fetch him.

         "It's a two-part procedure," the Daxut explained as she led him through the hallways again. "Your body is going to be thoroughly scanned so it can be replicated. That's the easy part, takes barely twenty minutes. All you need to do is lay there."

         "Alright," Nova nodded. "And the second part...?"

         "It's a bit of a longer process," Jarah purred in her sedating way, "you see... while making a perfect copy of a human body is relatively easy, it needs the mind to function. And not just any mind—it has to be yours, for reasons we still don't quite understand. So, your mind will be uploaded into an organic microprocessor, which will then be copied and implanted into the clone's brains."

         "Wow... that's really cool," Nova remarked as he took it all in.

         "Very much so. In essence, you will live on forever," she crooned mysteriously.

         He paused. That was something he hadn't considered yet, and he wasn't sure how to feel about it. Jarah continued to walk on in silence, almost as though she was deliberately letting him hang on the words.

         After a short but heavy silence, he spoke, "but... it's only for... this purpose in particular, right? You're not gonna... I don't know—"