Entity 128 | ✔️

29/Ascertain

29/Ascertain: to learn or find out something such as information or the truth

Flipping through countless numbers of files, Koda was trying to find a specific one in particular, doing his best to ignore his girlfriend hugging him from behind. Meanwhile, River waited with Isobel in another room, not exactly eager to discover his true identity, minutes feeling like centuries to both of them. A thick looking file was long awaited for opening.

His surname was Steiner, or at least when he was still a human around two hundred and twenty years ago give or take. At some point in the 1980's, an American military project was started in hopes of creating a new weapon. Research was based on a theory proposed by Dr. George Martin at the University of Washington in 1971.

"In theory, if the information and process of the mind can be disassociated from the biological body, they are no longer tied to the individual limits and lifespan of that body."

Eventually, this was known as mind transfer, and those who were to undergo it were people in the army's intelligence. This handful of around 130 people shared the same neurological properties, or had the same brain structure, something crucial for this project to be a success.

However, most of these people hadn't given their consent to such an abstract way of living. Most of them were pulled away from their own lives after having been picked to go through this. Simply put, they didn't have another choice; their only options were evolve to kill or be killed.

The bulk of the subjects were brought to laboratories and tortured until they complied, all while being told that if they struggled to run away or tried to hurt a scientist, they'd be tortured even more. One at a time, their brains found their place on the Cloud, each subject showing the same painful death-like symptoms while having their brains mapped: convulsions, hyperventilation, an increased heart rate, pure agony shown through screams... Hell, the process itself was torture. And to top it all off, their memories were erased as their minds were uploaded, removing any kind of link they had with their first life. 

Their birth certificates, along with their passports and any official document that proved they existed in society were burned; they were too valuable to the CIA, and so they were forced to adopt a fake identity. But is a fake identity it really fake when you're not aware of it?

Doctor Martin on the other hand was using his profits to purchase homes for each one of his subjects, thus assigning each 'entity' to a country and giving them a place to live, bringing back their humanity with minimal effort, resolving a moral dilemma with money. 

However, this whole mind transfer project of his became a failed CIA experiment once it stopped being funded by the government, and so it was put aside and never mentioned again. The military-weapons-to-be were stuck, unable to return to the human world, forced to live together in a bland virtual reality.

Luckily, it wasn't long before some of them started piecing information together in hopes of figuring out the logistics of the project. In a nutshell, everything happened in the microchips. The information was constantly synchronizing, and once a session needed to be terminated, an upload had to be forced.

If one were to die while in a body, the chip would force an automatic upload as soon as the surge of endorphins the brain lets out when a body is dying was recognized. If one wanted to upload before they died, a website on the deep web would have to be accessed, their 'model number' would have to be selected and 'upload' would have to be clicked. In that case, they had approximately a minute before they went brain dead since the brain didn't have a consciousness anymore.

Along with this sudden information, a short anonymous entry from some sort of virtual journal was found in River's file, dating to a week or two after the project was terminated.

After having spoken with Steiner, or should I say 128, I realized that these humanoids are still partially human, and taking their lives away from them only to replace them with fake ones wasn't. I wanted to give him back a piece of himself, and I knew there were some things that just couldn't be forgotten, no matter how much you tried. Steiner made me realize that what we were doing was wrong. Natural cycles isn't something we should mess with. Humans are mortal beings; they're meant to die and stay dead.