As the cold metal syphon plunged deep into my brainstem, I felt the indifferent embrace of death engulf me. Well, sort of. Physically, I was dead, that much was obvious. But mentally? That was a whole different story.

I wasn’t especially savvy when it came to the ins and outs of the cerebral digitization process, but I understood enough to know that my thoughts had become little more than a stream of programming code. Lost and confused, I’d tried in vain to piece together the fragments of my consciousness, but quickly found myself becoming overwhelmed. It didn’t help that my consciousness was being repeatedly hammered by a wall of status messages: cold, dispassionate thoughts that were not my own, all desperately vying for my attention. I stilled my mind and did my best to focus on them one at a time, bringing a small moment of order to the sea of code-based chaos.

The first message proudly announced that my human consciousness had been successfully reformatted into ‘personaware’, and that I was being prepared for upload. The second, that I was now being broadcast between two worlds, exiting my broken, meat-based media and beamed out to embrace my exciting new digital future. The third confirmed that I had been successfully uploaded onto something called an ‘atonement drive’, that my ‘soul code’ was very important to them, and that they (whoever they were), would be with me shortly. All very comforting, I’m sure you’ll agree.

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Evidently, I was on a journey. And not, I’d hasten to add, one taken through choice. Because you have to make a lot of bad decisions to end up in this situation, and I’m sorry to say that I’d worked my way through every single one of them. Which was why, as they strapped me down and prepared me for my ‘rebirth’, I didn’t kick, scream or fight it like the poor sod on the ‘reformatting’ slab next to me. Deep down, I knew that I deserved this. Hell, if you knew what I did to get here, you’d probably say that I deserved a hundred times worse.

Another status message hit me, confirming that I would soon have the opportunity to choose my avatar. But the words flowed through my mind like grains of sand slipping through an hourglass. Whatever now passed for my brain was quickly overwhelmed. Information was flowing through me, faster than I could ever hope to process it. Dazed, I lost my grip, a lost piece of soul code drowning in a sea of unfamiliar data. Until finally, and without warning, I was offered an anchor.

-[ Prisoner 903746B1: You have been transferred into the digital custody of your corporate sponsor, Atonement Incorporated. The path to redemption has begun. Welcome to Atone Online ]-