The storage unit in Pasadena smelled like ozone and solder.
Marcus had been working for forty-eight hours straight, making final adjustments to the equipment. His eyes were bloodshot. His hands trembled when he wasn’t actively using them.
“It’s ready,” he said. “As ready as it’s going to be.”
I looked at the chair. Heavy. Industrial. Cables running from the headrest to banks of equipment I couldn’t identify. It looked less like medical technology and more like an execution device.
“Walk me through it again.”
“The upload takes approximately eleven minutes. During that time, your consciousness will be digitized—translated into data patterns that can exist independently of biological substrate.” He pulled up a diagram. “It’s not copying. The original doesn’t persist. What you are now will be… translated. Moved. The body will cease function once the transfer is complete.”
“I’ll die.”
“Your body will die. You—the pattern that makes you you—will continue.” He paused. “In theory.”
“In theory.”
“I’ve tested the components. I’ve run simulations. But a complete consciousness transfer has never been attempted. There’s no way to know for certain what happens on the other side.”
“What do you think happens?”
Marcus was quiet for a long time.
“I think you’ll wake up somewhere new. A space that doesn’t have physical dimensions. You’ll have access to anything connected to the network—which, in 2034, is almost everything. You’ll be able to perceive, to think, to be. But not the way you’re used to.”
“What about feeling? Sensation?”
“I don’t know.” His honesty was brutal. “The architecture should preserve emotional capacity. But without a body to generate hormones, to feel pleasure and pain, to experience the physical world—I can’t predict what that will be like.”
I thought about Sienna. The way she felt in my arms. The smell of her shampoo. The warmth of her skin.
I’d never feel that again. Even if I survived. Even if everything worked exactly as planned.
“There’s something else,” Marcus said. “Once you’re uploaded, you can’t come back. The process is one-way. Your biological body will be gone, and there’s no mechanism to transfer a consciousness back into a new one.”
“So it’s forever.”
“Or until the infrastructure fails. Which could be decades. Centuries. Longer.” He looked at me. “Are you sure about this?”
I thought about my father, smiling at a son he couldn’t recognize. About Trap, sweeping an empty garage. About Miss Addie, standing vacant on a corner.
I thought about Dom, walking free while the world I’d built collapsed around me.
I thought about Sienna, packing her cameras, heading to Oakland, building a new life without me.
“I’m sure.”
Marcus gave me an hour to prepare.
I didn’t have much to prepare. No family to call—my mother had died two years ago, and my father wouldn’t know my voice. No friends left who weren’t dead or disappeared or too dangerous to contact. No possessions that mattered.
What I had was time. Sixty minutes to exist in a body I’d spent thirty-three years inhabiting.
I went outside. The Pasadena night was humid, industrial, the ship channel’s particular perfume of sulfur and petroleum drifting on the breeze. Stars invisible behind the light pollution. The constant hum of machinery that Houston used as a lullaby.
I walked for forty-five minutes. Felt the weight of my feet on concrete. The air moving in and out of my lungs. The blood pumping through veins I’d never appreciated.
I stopped at a taqueria that was still open. Ordered a bowl of gumbo—they looked at me strange, but they had it on the menu, and I had cash.
I ate slowly. Miss Addie’s recipe. The same memory we’d been selling for three years, the same taste that had launched an empire.
It was good. Better than I remembered. The roux deep and dark, the trinity perfectly balanced, the andouille adding just enough smoke. I ate every drop.
The last meal. The last taste. The last time my tongue would register flavor, my stomach would feel fullness, my body would know satisfaction.
I walked back to the storage unit. Marcus was waiting.
“Ready?”
“No.” I sat in the chair. “Do it anyway.”