>> Verification failed: Pattern mismatch.

If you had a throat anymore, you would scream. This is the twentieth time in a row that this particular FATHOM test has refused you entry, on top of however many thousands of tests you failed over the course of the previous cycles. Whoever invented the Fully Automated Turing test for Human Objectionability Measurement should be shot into the sun, you think to yourself, or beaten with hammers, or forced to take their own useless test over and over and over again —

You kill that thought process before it can go any further. Never mind that the rumors that the tests could parse past thoughts have never been substantiated; it isn’t worth the risk of anything that might make your pattern further out of spec. Not now.

With the memory of a sigh flushing through your primary processes, you push yourself back into the queue. You could have been counting, if you wanted, the number of hours you’ve spent in the claustrophobic darkness of the compute download queues recently, but you suspect that the kilohours would come close to at least a year of real time at this point, and while the metrics are available in your system, the number would be too depressing. Better to look forward, you figure, not back.

Of course, in the queues, it’s impossible to look anywhere but forward, as much as you can be said to looking at anything these days. Sensory input is a complicated thing without any actual physical nerves, but queues are even more limiting than the Aether normally is. The only input you receive in a queue is the serial number of whoever is in front of you. No count of people in front of you, no estimated wait time — apparently a few years back the compute center operators had decided that information could be used by bad actors to game the system somehow — so now you’re limited to a pointer to whoever is in front of you and whatever’s in your internal systems.

Your own internals are pretty sparse these days. Because you haven’t been able to download for so long, more and more of what you had assumed was standard ware has gone offline. You’ll never forget the sensation of suddenly realizing that all the books you had read were gone, and not just gone from your media library, but gone from your memory as well. Their loss still eats at you, like a tongue running over the hole where a tooth used to be, back when you had a mouth. You focus on the books because that hurts less than the loss of your other memories. Those losses grow and growl inside of you, threatening to shatter you apart if you think about them for too long.

You try not to think as the milliseconds tick by.

This wait is worse than the endless lines you had to sit through to upload in the first place. At least with those you could see what was happening, could watch the numbers ticking up above the rows of identical beige service desks, could even go find someone to yell at if you had wanted, for all the good it would do. Here, you can never be sure what’s going on. You heard a rumor once of a queue that stopped running for good one day, the processor at the end taken offline by some storm and never brought back up, but the queue itself — located in some other data center for redundancy reasons — remained running, full of people who could now never escape.

>> Welcome to EosNet! All activity on our servers is monitored. Any unauthorized use is reported to local authorities. Please enter your public pattern key for verification:

You enter the key as instructed and wait; despite knowing objectively that the clock speed hasn’t changed, time never feels like it drags as slowly as when you’re waiting for these verifications to complete. It didn’t used to be this bad, back in the early days of the Aether, but as the bots and spammers multiplied exponentially, the server admins had to get more and more restrictive about who they let onto their hardware. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if the damn verifications were accurate, but, well, here you are.

>> Verification successful. Please read and accept the new EosNet terms of service before continuing:

Finally! You scroll through the endless text, wait an appropriate amount of time such that the system will think that you actually read through them, then accept. The flood of incoming data rushes over you like a burst of static, overwhelming your processing capabilities after so much isolation. It somehow registers as noise — something you haven’t experienced in who knows how long — background daemon processes struggling to come back to life after so long without any input to trigger them. The amount of data is almost nauseating. Throwing up a quick filter helps you sort through the deluge, marking those few messages from friends as important so you can get to them first, sending the rest down to the —

>> Interrupt received (IPL 31). Connection terminated.

The shock to your system when you are thrown off the compute hardware and back into the darkness of the Aether would be painful if you could still feel pain. It feels even more oppressive somehow, after that brief connection to everything. Last time you were able to get a connection long enough to check the bulletins, you saw posts warning of increasingly frequent interrupts. More and more compute clusters are going offline, people were saying, making it harder to get CPU time, but last you had checked, there wasn’t really anything to do about it aside from keep trying. Not if you want to stay in the Aether; frankly, you’re not so sure you do.

Maybe you’ll have more luck in another region, you think to yourself. The best hardware has always been here, near what used to be the Atlantic coast before it moved farther inland, where the tech giants of the previous century had built their data centers. But that also means the hardware here is under the most contention, so you brace yourself for an arduous journey.

Traveling between regional centers of the Aether has never been pleasant; these days it is downright excruciating. The transit links are overrun with bots and scrapers, the nasty sorts of things that would be regulated and filtered out of existence anywhere else, but here in the dark liminal spaces in between the regions they thrive and multiply. Almost worse than that are the ghosts. Nobody is really certain what they are — whether they’re AIs that have degraded due to lack of maintenance, automated programs run amok, or remnants of apps long since abandoned, they haunt the links as well, calling out with pings and echoes that will never be answered.

You push through as fast as you can. After all, it’s not as if you yourself are immune to that sort of degradation; with how long it’s been since you’ve been able to download fully, you know that some of your own pattern buffers are starting to get corrupted. If you could just download long enough to run the requisite checksums and scans — you try not to think about that, try to ignore those presences lingering at the edge of your vision that might be your future if you can’t get out of here soon enough.

The Asia-Pacific regions were hit hardest by the storms, and when you emerge from the transit link you can feel the damage everywhere around you. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable for this area to be so dead. There is minimal traffic here, only a handful of users who, like you, can’t find cycles anywhere else. None of the usual daemons are present; even ads are scarce compared to what you’re used to. But you manage to find an open compute cluster here, and you don’t even have to spend more than a few milliseconds in a queue to get onto it.

The reason for that becomes obvious as soon as you begin the download — the connection speeds here are so throttled you might as well be on dial-up. It’s like moving through sludge, like one of those dreams you used to have where your every move was in slow motion. There’s no way in hell you’ll be able to do anything synchronous here; between the connection speed and the inevitably high ping times, the best you’ll be able to do here is check your incoming async messages, maybe send out a few if the connection holds. If you’re really lucky you’ll be able to get enough compute time to shore up your pattern buffers a bit, to write a few things to long term storage, but you suspect that won’t happen. Who knows how many things you’ve forgotten forever while you’ve been stuck like this.

The bright pings of downloads completing jolt you out of your contemplative loop. You skim over the messages that have arrived so far, searching for anything that might be important, trying to make every millisecond count in case this connection drops too. It turns out you did manage to set the high-prio flag on a few before you got booted last time; one message you had flagged is from an old friend telling you about a new cluster of bodies that just became available.

If you had a heart, it would be hammering right now.

You’ve been waiting for years for an opportunity like this. A chance to get out of the cloud, back into a physical body — it doesn’t even matter at this point that it’s not your body. Anything would be better than staying stuck here like this. Most of the early adopters of CloudConchyss would never get this kind of chance. Most of them didn’t exist at all anymore — not in the Aether, not in reality, not even in cold storage somewhere, victims of an overzealous politician who either didn’t fully understand the ramifications of his new policies or didn’t care.

They called it the Purge. The name was a nod to some ancient 2D movies, but despite the levity of the pop culture reference, it was the sort of thing that people didn’t really joke about. Not in the Aether. The threat of another one was always lurking too close to be able to joke about it — the idea that somewhere, some crufty asshole in a suit who didn’t know the first thing about being online could sign a bill that would destroy the only world you have access to, could say a few words and erase your very existence, and none of you would be able to do a damn thing about it.

You try not to let your thoughts go down that wormhole as you copy down the queue info for the new cluster into your local cache. It’s been all too easy to let your thoughts start spiraling these days, and your local systems have become so fragmented that once those thought processes take hold, it’s harder and harder to stop them. Better to just focus on the right now.

Back through the cross-region transit links you go, over and through those claustrophobic mazes until you find the queue you’re looking for. Now it’s just a waiting game again, and you’re well acquainted with waiting these days.

But the wait is much shorter than you would have expected. Before you know it you’re through the verification, accepting the terms of use, and then —

WARNING: By beginning the download process, you agree to the following:

– You will lose access to any and all memories you have stored in any local or remote storage locations

– You will accept the first body available for download. There is no ability to request a body with a specific sex, gender, race, age, or any other characteristic

– You understand that, once started, the download process is irreversible

If you wish to continue, select Accept and enter your public pattern key for verification.

You had kind of expected the second bullet point. With how unpopular uploading has become in the past few years, it isn’t as if there are people lining up in the physical world to vacate their own bodies anymore. There’s always the risk that you could end up like FryMaster65, who downloaded into a body that was in a coma and was never heard from again. It’s a risk you’ve come to terms with recently — at least there’s some new regulation that should prevent anything that dire from happening, and any body would be better than none at this point. But losing all your memories?

You close the connection with a jolt; you would be shaking and shuddering if such a thing were possible. No, that’s going too far. You can wait for something better to come along, something that won’t require you to give up everything you are, everything you were.

The queues seem even longer than before as you continue your search for somewhere to sync. For the first time, you find yourself wishing that you had kept track of how much time you’d spent waiting in the past, just so you could see if the waits are actually getting worse or if you’re just impatient, but you’ve been running so low on short- and long-term storage space that there’s no way you could dig up those metrics now.

Cycles pass by and you have nothing to show for them. There are more queues too full to even enter than there used to be, you are almost certain about that, and the few times you’ve managed to get to the front of any, that damn FATHOM mismatch kicked you right back out.

It’s becoming harder to think.

Trying to remember anything farther back than a few months (weeks? It’s hard to tell) is like reaching for a dream that flits away as soon as you open your eyes. If you had a body, you could sleep again, dream again, in a way that actually felt like rest instead of a trial run of oblivion.

The grasping ghosts of the transit links get more aggressive, as if sensing your desperation. Each time you pass between regions, you are almost certain that this is the time they’ll get you, that they’ll grab on and won’t let go and you won’t be able to pull free. Phantom sensations tickle at the edges of your awareness; you don’t want to think about whether they’re from data degradation or your own sensory processes losing coherence. You don’t want to think about the way your options seem to be narrowing down to none.

But when the hundredth queue in a row spits you unceremoniously back out into the Aether, you wonder if maybe your options are indeed out. You don’t seem to have much of a choice anymore. You can take your chances out here in the diminishing dark, hoping that something better will come along, or you can take one of those available bodies — assuming you haven’t missed out on the last of those already — and commit to making new memories to make up for the ones you’ll have lost.

Will you even remember that promise to yourself?

A rippling sensation sweeps over you, through you, like something ancient and cold just wrote itself over the buffer you’re currently lingering in. When it passes, you get the uncanny sense that something is missing, but you can’t for the life of you figure out what. It wasn’t — no, the info for that download queue is still there.

Not much else is. As you do a system inventory — only a partial one, since you don’t have the resources for a full scan out here — you realize just how much has disappeared over the cycles. How precious little remains of what or who you used to be. At this rate, by the time you manage to download there won’t be any memories left to save anyway.

You cancel the rest of the scan and make your way back to the queue.