https://www.datapacrat.com/IO.SYS.html IO.SYS BY DATAPACRAT If this has all been a VR, I’d like to be connected to reality when I wake up, please. I lived around the turn of the twenty-first century, decided I didn’t want to die, and made the best arrangements I could. Then I died. The next section is the best I’ve been able to reconstruct, from the various resources I have available — a copy of an encyclopedia from a decade after I died, some internal project memos, and the like. Immediately after I died, my brain was preserved, using glue-like chemicals to lock its structure and neurochemistry in place at the cost of, well, locking everything in place, just about irreversibly, short of somebody figuring out how to rebuild it atom-by-atom. Then, to be on the safe side, it (along with the rest of my body) was frozen. A couple of decades later, according to my written wishes, when the technology was developed, it was carefully diced, scanned with a ridiculous level of detail, and reconstructed in a computer as an emulation. It seems very likely that copies were made of that initial brain-scan, and the emulated minds run, living their lives in VRs and interacting with reality in various ways. I don’t have any direct memories of anything they might have done; the thread of my own existence branched off from them as of their reconstruction. At the very least, they seem to have made enough of a good impression on various other people that the copy of the brain-scan I came from was archived. The archive in question appears to have been imported into some kind of public-private partnership, with the apparent goal of creating an “unhackable” digital library off of Earth. However, after some of the preliminary hardware had been launched into Earth orbit, some sort of infighting between the various organizations delayed the finalization of pl