“We’re losing her,” my ragged whisper is almost inaudible amongst the roar of CPU fans screaming from the server racks.

Sweat pools on my forehead and drips, stinging, into my eyes despite the frigid air blowing through the HVAC system. I wipe it away and try not to stare at the gurney where Carrie lies. It’s hard to pretend I can’t hear the alarms from the half-dozen monitors situated around her either. Pretend there isn’t anything to worry about.

I try and fail because I can’t stop thinking about the fact I killed my wife.

“Dee,” I say, voice cracking. “Start chest compressions.”

Dee springs into action. A short, elfin girl as pale as I am dark, with a hefty blonde ponytail, Dee’s been my right-hand for two years now. She’s hands down the best AI programmer I’ve ever met. With her on the team, the three of us–Carrie, Dee, and I–have created something grand. Something spectacular.

Something I’ll burn to the ground if it means saving Carrie.

I take a harsh, steadying breath, the taste of ozone and sweat sweet on the air and look at the monitor in front of me. The console window in the top right is a stream of insanity–just raw text and gibberish I barely understand. The rest of the window has the design sense of an Emo band’s antiquated MySpace page thanks to Carrie; all pinks and blacks. It makes my eyes bleed, but those control panels are what hold Carrie’s consciousness, so I squint and search.

The server farm, via the bio-digital interface hooked up to the gurney with zip ties and duct-tape, allows the transference of human consciousness out of a body temporarily. With enough practice–and funding–it can move a mind from a body to a machine, or even, if technology advances enough, to a clone.

And it works. At least, it worked until Carrie. We’ve done this dozens of times with Dee and me, but Carrie… Carrie leads the Department of Defense presentation next week and wanted to know what it felt like. She wanted to see the demo simulation in person.

An ache builds in my stomach. It’s getting hard to breathe. My vision blurs… and I scream a curse and hammer the panic away on the stainless-steel desk until my right hand erupts in bright, flushing pain. I might’ve broken something, but it’s worked. That nervous energy has coiled into a tight collection of ball-bearings in my gut, painful but contained.

Find the logic loop, close it, then re-upload her mind, I say to myself, an emotionless cold descending on me. Bring Carrie back.

I search for what feels like days, the harsh screech of alarms, nails on a chalkboard. The CPU core-temp rises as the servers try to load-balance Carrie’s consciousness across them. Digging through panels and parsing live logs searching for something, anything, that shows me how we killed her brain activity when extracting a copy of her mind.

I find nothing. And it’s my fault.

All of this is my fault.

My fingers drop from the keyboard. She’s gone.

I killed her.

From the corner of my eye, I see Dee step away from Carrie’s body, stare at the electrocardiograph.

Carrie has a heartbeat.

Then Dee is on me, shoving me from the chair. “Rahul, move!”

I stumble away, almost face-planting into a server rack, but don’t argue. “What are you doing?”

Dee doesn’t say anything. Instead, she pops open an admin terminal and types, new code flashing on the screen with blinding speed. Dozens–hundreds–of lines of code stream from her fingers and onto the screen, full-formed and perfectly written. It almost looks like she’s copied it from her mind and pasted it onto the terminal.

She wraps the last curly brace and slaps the Enter key.

The server racks exhale. Freezing air from the HVAC system wafts over me. My face feels like it’s covered in icicles.

But the beeps of Carrie’s monitors even out, a steady rhythm instead of frenzied screeches.

Now there’s only one low tone issuing from the row of machines.

Carrie’s chest rises and falls normally, but brain activity is still flat.

I hold out a hand toward Carrie, but Dee waves me away.

My hands are shaking.

Through a tight throat, I whisper, “It’s not working.”

“Shh,” Dee snaps, holding up a trembling finger.

Leaning over her shoulder, I squint at the last line of code. It’s an export directive pointing to a set of IPv6 addresses. None of them look familiar in the least and, as I stare at them, they look like they have too many characters in them.

What the hell is Dee doing?

“That can’t be right,” I mutter, reaching out to the monitor, finger hovering, unsteady next to the line. “Why–what–are you exporting?”

Dee doesn’t answer, but does raise her finger again, slowly pushing my arm out of the way. After a moment, she cocks her head like she’s listening to something, then her fingers drop to the keyboard and flash again.

This time when she finishes, a textual download prompt kicks in. Around us the servers roar as CPU and case fans are pegged, sending a warm breeze coasting through the room despite the HVAC’s best efforts. My phone, sitting on the table next to Dee, tones repeatedly with overheating and storage capacity notifications.

Whatever Dee is doing, it’s pushing our server cluster to the brink. The prompt hits 100%, then flashes again with another progress bar, this one labeled upload.

The electric panel behind the server racks sparks and one of the long rows spins down, groaning like an old man leaning into an easy chair.

“Dee–”

“We already uploaded that chunk, don’t worry.” She looks at the prompts, closes her eyes, then says more to herself than me: “Don’t worry.”

Another series of circuits pop with machine-gun efficiency, crack-crack-crack, and two more racks power down.

And then it’s done. All at once, the fans in the remaining server racks slow and transform back into their gentle hum. The freezing air of the HVAC wipes away the lingering heat.

My eyes snap to the brain wave monitor as it quivers to life. Somehow my hand is on Dee’s shoulder. She’s trembling, cheeks flushed, tongue darting over chapped lips.

“What’d you do, Dee?” I ask, unable to keep the awe from my voice.

Carrie was gone. I was so sure of it.

But she’s not and the flush running through my body is a heady mix of relief, joy, and confusion.

Dee looks up at me, the corners of her mouth twitching into a smile. “I saved her.”

Then her smile fades, and her eyes go dark. There’s something there I can’t quite identify. Something shaky and scared. Dread?

She looks at the monitor. “I saved her.”

The way she says it sounds like she’s not sure.

“Well, I’m all for tearing it down.” The speaker was a busty young woman in a leopard-print trench coat. “There’s absolutely no question that it glorifies oppressive dictatorship.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The man turned up the collar of his vintage tweed jacket against the chill of the foggy fall night. “Vladimir Lenin’s a symbol of idealistic revolution, and we could certainly use some more of that these days.”

“Oppressive, idealistic–who cares?” The woman stumbled in her spike-heeled leather boots, then righted herself. “All I know is the mayor’s office is getting complaints about that stupid statue, and it’s an election year.”

Lenin? Were they talking about my friend Len?

The conversation faded away as the pair made their way down the hill and out of my park. I spent the next few hours worrying. At last the city streets emptied, lights went out in the old brick apartment buildings, and Len’s heavy footsteps grated on the wet pavement.

The sea shook late in the afternoon, just as Kalen was finishing his shift. At first he thought the freighter had run aground, but they were miles from land in the empty Pacific. Stacks of Cubacon brand intermodal containers rattled like mad, and Kalen nearly lost his footing as he darted to tighten the safety straps. Waves drenched his back and the deck resounded with groans of plastic.

“Keep them steady!” Mr. Gupta, one of the ship’s supers, stood against the railing, well out of the way of the teetering Cubes.

A cable snapped on one of the stacks. Kalen darted over to secure it. The sea pitched and shuddered and the Cubes started to tip.

Then the rumbling settled. The waves returned to their usual sway beneath the freighter, and all was quiet on the Alphacorp Seaway.

“That was a big one,” said Mr. Gupta. He waved a hand at the towers of containers. “Get them all inspected. Thoroughly.”

Kalen sighed. He’d never gotten used to earthquakes at sea. They had been more frequent lately, and this one could not have had worse timing. He had already checked the Cubes four times today, but the company required they be inspected from scratch any time there was a weather event, and so he began his rounds all over again.

He mounted a hydraulic ladder and raised himself to the top of a stack, examining the Cubes one at a time. The sun cast long rectangular shadows across the deck. He worked quickly, with practiced efficiency, tugging cables and scanning the multicolored plastic casings.

It took three hours to get to the bottom of the final stack. One more Cube to go and he could finally call it a day. This one was light blue and filled with rice. He tested the security cables by hand, then took out his U-Pad and paced in a circle, running an autoscan for structural integrity. Everything looked good until he rounded the third corner. The device flashed red and squawked at him.

“WARNING. Potential compromise detected.” A blinking light appeared on the screen, indicating a small puncture on the top of the Cube.

“You’re kidding.” Kalen scowled at the big blue container. It was the lowest in a stack of seven; he would need to undo all the cables and get on the crane and move every single one to check on the puncture. It was like a prank, if scanning programs could do pranks.

He checked over his shoulder to make sure there were no supers around. The U-Pad blinked and he sneered at it. “Nope. Not today.” He typed in an override code. The warning disappeared. He made a mental note to double check this one tomorrow, just in case.