Creepypasta Stories

Digital Immortality

In the first quarter of 2012, a scientist named Alexander Stuart Khaimov discovered a technological means to immortality. That is to say, Dr. Khaimov fulfilled one of the longest running pursuits of the human race - the desire to defeat death.

Though many of his notes remain in the possession of the Russian security forces, and many more were wiped from his hard drives or burned in the oil drums behind his lonely research station, enough remains to piece together a little of this man's life, and the thought process which led to what some consider the finest (and most unknown) scientific achievement of this generation, and what others claim to be the greatest abomination that the thinking world has inflicted upon man since the atom bomb. He called his magnum opus 'Project Veelox'.

We know, for example, that Khaimov's obsession with immortality may have begun at a young age. When he was five years old, his parents were involved in a terrible road accident near the border of the Autonomous Jewish Oblast. The collision left both comatose - a condition which surviving medical notes assumed would result in their deaths within a month. Instead, both lingered on the edge of life for ten years. During this period, they were relocated to a specialist facility in St. Petersberg, and the young, Jewish demi-orphan, Alexander, trailed in their wake. Less than a year after their arrival, however, both perished during a power-cut, and Khaimov was left utterly alone.

Despite the trauma of his young life - perhaps even enhanced by it - Alexander excelled in his schooling. At the age of just sixteen, he was offered a place at Moscow State University, where he read Neuroscience and Robotics. By the second year, however, he had dropped out of both, and was taking classes in Philosophy. He had no friends - he was a distant and aloof boy in a sea of young men and women - but former classmates note that he obsessed over Descartes - a philosopher who famously declared human consciousness (who we really 'are') to be entirely separate to physical existence. One roommate recalls walking in on Khaimov frantically tearing pages from philosophy textbooks and pasting them to the walls and ceiling above his bed. Still others recall how he would build strange contraptions out of dubiously-acquired computer parts, and second hand hospital equipment, which would emit a dull humming drone, even at night.

Noise complaints eventually resulted in Khaimov being evicted from his dorm-room, and his equipment confiscated. Distraught, he dropped-out of university altogether and disappeared from official records for almost twenty five years - appearing occasionally on employment rotas for the kitchens of backwoods bars, or the maintenance crews at hospitals. He spoke to few people and had no friends. He bounced across the northernmost territories of western Russia. He bought cigarettes with his parents' savings, until they finally ran out in 2004. He applied for library cards in dozens of municipalities, most of which were revoked when he failed to return the texts he borrowed - books and magazines on all aspects of science, medicine, and computing.

According to scholarly estimates - the information on the human brain can be measured in data-storage terms - weighing in at around 2,500 Terabytes in size (slightly more, according to Khaimov's estimate). Khaimov read studies regarding the digitization of the human mind with more than a casual interest. He wrote numerous articles for the New Scientist, and two for Time Magazine, between 2001 and 2009, postulating that not only was the transfer of a human consciousness from a body to an electronic brain within the bounds of contemporary science - but that it was even possible to create an artificial "afterlife", where these consciousnesses could be together. Of course, I'm paraphrasing here, but Khaimov was adamant, in his writings, that what he referred to as "the preservation" of a human mind, post-mortem was entirely feasible.

...and then, shortly before the end of 2011, a curious advertisement began to circulate the local papers of St. Petersberg and other, northerly towns and cities. It read: "Умираете? Хотите жить вечно? Требуются волонтеры." Roughly translated to; "Are you dying? Do you want to live forever? Volunteers wanted."