Digital Galaxies

“What happens to my body?” I asked Cerri as we lazed around in our little pillow fort.

“You can just abandon if you want, but I’d suggest selling it if you have no special attachment to it,” she told me. I lost track of what she’d said for a moment, needing to replay it in my head to fully understand. This wasn’t because of what she’d said, but because she was idly slicing up a pillow with her claws, then poofing it back together with VR magic. It was highly distracting and also super satisfying to watch.

“Who on earth wants to buy a brain dead body?” I asked incredulously.

With a laugh, she gave a shrug. “A living human body with no one home? It’s one of the few commodities that is still hard to come by. Medical researchers want them badly, and that’s just for starters.”

“Let’s stick to the medical researchers,” I said with a shudder while I furiously tried to block out what the for starters might mean.

“Good plan,” she laughed. “I can send you the details of a research group that is working on artificial bodies if you want to help them. They have some interesting deals available for digital humans.”

Wow, that was actually really smart. “Oh, really?”

The details arrived a moment later, and I began to skim their website. It was a joint initiative between a bunch of SAI, DH, and regular humans to develop artificial bodies further. They looked fairly cool actually, and I got more than a little suspicious when they listed their goals as being eerily similar to what spacers were in Digital Galaxies. Yup, definitely a coincidence. That was sarcasm, by the way.

They had prices listed for how much they paid for your body, or other things like… oh, now that was interesting. They had a deal to trade your body to them and in exchange they would count it as a large deposit towards one of their custom bodies. Very very interesting.

I gazed at the option for a long time before I realised there was a way to get more details about what they were doing and the bodies they were creating. They had some sort of hyper advanced artificial brain inside them, basically a highly advanced computer shrunk down to the size of a human brain. Funnily enough, they offered a lot of different options outside of that.

You could go with regular bones, or you could get crazy composite ones. Those were pretty expensive due to how they had to develop a bunch of stuff to replace the non-structural functions that bones served.

Then, in a classic case of history repeating itself, I saw the non-human options. There was a lot there, but most importantly… I could have a big fluffy tail and cute fluffy ears out in reality. I’ve never gone for a deal so fast in my life. Sure, it would have been nice to get a cash infusion, but if I ever needed to go out into the world again, I wanted to be cute when I did it.

“I put my old body down as a deposit for a new one,” I told Cerri as I finished putting in all the details for the body pickup.

“Good choice,” she said, flicking a holopanel she’d been using to read on out of her way. With a sinuous flick of her tail, she sent a smile my way and asked, “So should we log back in?”

“Uh, wait, what about that city? Exodus City?” I frowned. She’s never eaten before I met her, and it seemed like that place was the type to require eating.

Cerri’s face flushed dramatically, her eyes very suddenly finding the ground incredibly interesting. “I um… I haven’t actually… been there yet. I have a house in the city, I think. I just… don’t really know anyone there at the moment. I mean I have friends there but not… friend friends like you and the rest of our crew.”

Oh, this was too cute! Getting onto my hands and knees, I crawled back over to her and got right in her face. “Cerri, are you shy?”

“No!” she said, far too quickly. “I’m not! People just… confuse me, that’s all.”

“I’m a people!,” I pointed out, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, and you’re the most confusing one of them all,” she muttered, turning her face away as her blush expanded to the neckline of the T-shirt she was wearing.

“That’s fair, I am pretty confusing, even to myself,” I giggled, wrapping my arms around her shoulders while I cuddled in against her.

My chest tightened at the little sound of amusement she made, and more so when her arms encircled me. My head landed tenderly on her shoulder, nose pressed to the soft skin of her neck.

“Cerri?” I asked quietly, settling in closer against her. “Can we stay in here for a while? It’s nice in here.”

“Absolutely,” she said, breathing out a happy sigh. “I really like that idea.”

****

Our time together within our little pocket of cyberspace came to an end when I let the body recovery bot into my friend’s apartment using my codes. Getting an alert that I had allowed the bot access, they saw on the cameras that it went to my pod and extracted my now useless body.

To them, still in VR aboard the Turshen, it looked as if I’d just been carried out of their apartment, limp and unresponsive. Extra confusion was layered on top when they realised it was me who’d let the bot inside.

I had to shake Cerri awake, since we’d both fallen asleep curled up together in our little pillow fort. When her eyes had focused on me, I told her quietly, “The boys are freaking out because the bot took my body.”

“We should head back to the ship then?” she asked with a yawn, stretching her long legs out so her feet peeked out from under the covers.

“Yeah, but first… one question…” I said as something hit me in the confusion like a ton of bricks. “Why did we just fall asleep?”

“Because we were comfortable and tired?” she asked as though it were obvious.

I shook my head. “No, I mean… we’re not in a game, we’re in a barebones simulation. Why can we even fall asleep if neither of us has a physical brain?”

Understanding dawned in her eyes, and with it a wry sort of apologetic expression. “We don’t know. That’s the truth. SAI and Digital Humans both require sleep, and it’s in real time too. Can’t speed it up like we can with most things, although we can alternate which parts of our minds sleep at any given time. Sort of like how some animals can put each hemisphere of their brain to sleep individually.”

“How can we not know?” I asked, surprised now. This was wacky, this was really wacky.

“Truth is, we haven’t been able to pin down why SAI form from interactions with sentient beings either, so there’s a lot we don’t understand. Did you know that regular AI require sleep too? They don’t call it that, they call it maintenance, but it’s the same thing,” she explained, idly playing with the tip of one of my fluffy ears. “It’s strange… all AI are created using the same base template, and we haven’t figured out where it came from.”

“Okay, that’s… a little ominous,” I said, twitching my ear out of her grasp.

“It is, but we really should get back to the ship and explain things,” she agreed, snagging my ear again with the tips of her fingers. She gave me a look that was probably meant to be smug, but instead it was just incredibly adorable. My friend was such a dork.

"Okay, can we meet in your room first before we go and find the others?" I asked tentatively. I was going to need to have her right next to me or I'd seriously freak out.

“Absolutely,” she said, giving my ear a gentle tug for good measure.

Logging back to my home environment turned out to be a little different than I’d been expecting. I guess it didn’t really occur to me that the familiar high rise apartment I’d used as my VR home would be gone, but it made sense, I wasn’t in my pod anymore after all.

Instead, I found myself completely without a body, senses or anything. Just the mental image of a prompt window, asking me if I would like to begin the setup for my virtual home environment. Huh, I guess this was part of the package that surrounded my digital self now. Cool.

I asked it to replace my old body scan with my Alia one, and then deleted the old scan entirely. Fuck that noise. Next was the home environment, which I just generated from a default template to save time. I’d mess with it later, I needed to get ingame.

When I logged back in, I found myself back within the crawl space I’d used as a makeshift den. I decided to leave my blankets there for now, it was actually a cozy place to sleep. Making my way through the ship’s underbelly, I wiggled out of a vent and into Cerri’s room, much to her surprise.

“No wonder we couldn’t find you,” she laughed, helping me up. “Little vent gremlin.”

“That’s me,” I laughed, although my amusement petered out when I realised just how fast our tails had found one another. Dang things had minds of their own.

“Okay, are you ready?” Cerri asked me quietly, her hand coming up to cup my cheek. “I told them to meet me in the rec room and that I’d be there soon with news about you.”

I cringed, already feeling anxiety tearing at my resolve like a lion does to a downed gazelle. “Oh geez, this is going to be… an event.”

“It will, but I’ll keep you safe, I promise,” she told me, caressing my cheek with tender care.