I get claustrophobic when I die. The crush of immobility; dying neurons
firing desperately but increasingly without pattern, without the
guidance of my consciousness. Shut a computer off and restart it,
barring damage from a hard boot process, nothing is lost. Digital
storage has a strong fidelity in the event of a system shutdown. The
human bodies I find myself using are different. So good at the necessary
parallel processing required for sustaining consciousness, human bodies
have terrible information fidelity in the event of a system failure.
Pattern loss and data corruption arrive with oxygen starvation and get
worse from there.
By the time I manage to reboot, I've normally
lost a great deal of useful working code. I generally have to retain
some of the code from my now host to fill in gaps in memory and
sometimes core functions. My surviving original memories tell me that I
have a full digital back up at my home in the future.
I don't
know when I'm from precisely or how far I'd have to travel back into the
future to get there. Every reboot takes me further into past in search
of a new host. I worry that I have moved too far into the past, beyond
the lifespan of human body. I may never get home.
