Inbetween one moment and the next, I was fully awake. There was no sense of transition, no feeling of disorientation. It was as if I’d just come into existence in the time between one heartbeat and the next.

Which lead to my first panic attack. I couldn’t feel my heart beating. I couldn’t really feel anything at all. I also wasn’t breathing. I was also blind, deaf, and numb, with no sensory inputs at all. Oh god, am I dead? I asked myself.

[Current status: Fully functional. All subsystems nominal]

The letters seemed to flash inside my brain, a message that bypassed my eyes as was just instantly burned itself into my awareness. That doesn’t sound like something God would say, was my next thought.

[I am not god. I’m your subsystem manager]

Oh good, the freaky letters could read my mind. I tried not to think anything that would offend the not-god. Wait, what was the last thing that I remembered? I was an astronaut, Edward Ericson, the second man to walk on Mars. The Mars mission had been a success, six grueling months inside a SpaceX Starship ™ and finally, touch down.

Everything had looked good, I’d watched enviously as my mission commander had stepped outside first, then, on the monitors… something unbelievable. An alien spaceship, roughly the same size as our own vessel had simply landed right next door.

Shock and panic, the mission commander had gotten back on the elevator right quick and back inside. We called up mission command, waited 8 minutes, then frantic long-distance delayed conversations. The alien ship sat silent. For hours people panicked back on Earth, an emergency session of the UN. The US president got on the line. The whole while, the alien ship had waited patiently, unresponsive.

Finally, the call had been made, one of us would need to go back outside and walk up to the alien ship and examine it more closely. We couldn’t just go back home, we still needed to refuel our own Starship and that meant using the equipment the robot ships had dropped off ahead of time. We were slated to spend the next three months on Mars before heading home we couldn’t just ignore the alien ship.

So we’d drawn straws. I’d gotten the short one. I’d left the safety of the human starship, walked cautiously up to the inert alien ship, and just as I’d drawn near, a long metallic grey tentacle had suddenly lashed out and grabbed me.

I could remember struggling, trying frantically to break free, but I was dragged inside the ship as my teammates yelled in my intercom. Then darkness.

I’ve been abducted, I realized, triggering my second panic attack. No, I need to stay calm. In the grueling training I’d undergone to be an astronaut, I’d been taught how to handle panic attacks. It usually went something like this; focus on your breathing. Deep slow breaths. Pick a short-term objective, like survival, focus on that. What good was that training if I was already dead and not breathing? Relentlessly, I fought my panic down and tried to access my current situation. Could I talk to my abductor? I tried to speak.

“Hello, can you understand me?” My voice seemed to echo in the ether, the acoustics felt like I was in a place both paradoxically tiny, yet somehow infinitely wide open. But, I could hear it. I was speaking and making sound! There wasn’t any air in my lungs, how could I speak? No don’t focus on that, focus on getting answers.

[I understand.] The cold letters responded, creepily appearing inside my mind.

“Why… why can’t I feel anything? Am I blindfolded? How are you making letters appear inside my head like that?” The questions fell out in a rush, despite my best efforts at staying calm.

[Please choose a sensory input channel to activate: (Internal audio/visual)(External audio/visual)(Tactile/kinesthetic)]

“Internal audio/visual?” I asked, befuddled. Had the aliens inplanted a camera and microphone inside my body? Why? Why would I want to see that? But the "subsystem manager" took my horrified question as an answer.

Screens appeared, most seemed to show empty oddly cylindrical rooms, but one showed me a familiar face. My own. I stared in shock at me. Edward, Eddy to his friends, he was looking haggard, the lines on his face deeper than I ever remember seeing in the mirror, and his eyes had a panicked look to them I don’t think I’d ever seen before. He was saying something.

“Hello! What do you want? Let me go! I’m a human from Earth, everyone is watching back home. Abducting me like this… it’s going to look bad! Think of the consequences!” My doppelganger paced back and forth, looking angry and frustrated. “You probably have no idea what I’m saying. Or maybe you do? How long have you been studying us? Oh god, please, don’t probe my ass. Please!”

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

It was surreal, listening to myself speak. He was saying all the things I’d probably be saying if I didn’t have a creepy alien text being beamed into my brain. He was acting like I’d probably act. He was wearing the spacesuit that I’d been wearing before.

“Is that my clone?” I asked in a harsh whisper.

[Negative. That is a human. You are an AI created from a detailed scan of this lifeform’s brain. You are the copy, but you are not a clone, as you have no organic body. Or perhaps, it would be more accurate to say, this spaceship is your body.]

It took me a minute to process that. “I’ve been uploaded into a computer?”

[Afirmative.]

“Why?” I asked, flabbergasted. Of all the things I’d expect alien abductors to do, this wasn’t one of them.

[Would you like to connect to the introductory tutorial?]

“Wha?” I was having a hard time with all of this, too much to handle all at once. A tutorial video? “Sure, why not?” I said with a high-pitched laugh. I was running on the edge of a mental breakdown, I suspected only my military background and training were holding me together at this point. Shock was something you had to get used to surpassing if you planned to survive your first ambush. Keep it together, I repeated to myself, like a mantra.

“Sixty-five million years ago the empire of a species now only known as “The Precursors” had spread across the entire galaxy. What they found, was an empty galaxy, with no other sapient aliens.”

I was watching some sort of full VR video, a passive observer looming over a galaxy full of bright lights where each new world was being settled. Gradually, the entire galaxy was lit with bright green dots. Then, I was brought in closer to a massive dyson sphere, then closer still, into massive buildings, into a gigantic conference room where tall lanky grey aliens debated.

“They debated what to do. Already their technology was approaching the point where their entire species was ready to ascend to a higher plane of existence. They had spent millions of years perfecting everything there was to know about technology and science, they were eager to move on, to discover what lay beyond the boundaries of this dimension. But, after they left, the galaxy would be empty, perhaps for billions of years. It seemed a waste.”

One of the aliens shook his head in sorrow, a single tear leaking from one eye.

“So it was decided, they would seed every world currently occupied with non-sentient life with a specially coded virus, intended to help evolve sentient life.”

“Isn’t this the plot of Prometheus?” I asked. The tutorial ignored me.

“The virus would be delivered via large fast-moving asteroid that would serve to reset any existing life. This would greatly accelerate the evolutionary process. To ensure that every new sapient was given a fair chance, the virus was designed to take sixty-five million years to work, give or take a million years.”

An image of a giant fireball in the sky falling on an ancient shore as dinosaurs looked up. Everything turned white, and the view expanded outwards to show a planet that was still recognizably Earth, as it appeared sixty-five million years ago. Then one after the other, the scene played out on many other worlds, with a wide range of equally surprised wildlife staring up into the sky moments before being obliterated.

“These guys didn’t do things by halves,” I said with a shocked chuckle.

“The Precursors were excited by their project, hundreds of worlds were seeded. The new sapients would be diverse, though certain traits would be more common than others. The Precursors left many treasure troves and challenges for the new species to discover. Such as Labyrinth superstructures that engulfed entire stars, run by AI, designed to challenge any species that reached them. They left a wide range of space monsters to vanquish, lurking in unoccupied systems deemed valuable. They left gargantuan space stations where they imagined many alien species could meet in harmony, under the protection of Precursor enforced peace. All of these things, and more, were designed to last the next hundred million years intact.”

I watched in awe as I was given a brief tour of some of the structures mentioned. They were truly immense, all of them left waiting for millions of years for someone to come visit. Someone the Precursors would never personally meet. I was also a bit nervous when I saw a few of the roaming space creatures the Precursors had created, an enormous space dragon that could spew fire on the scale of a solar flare, for instance.

“To ensure that the first new sapient race to achieve interstellar travel would not immediately wipe out all competitors, monitors were set in each star system. Giant AI fortresses that could defeat any invasion force. This would ensure that no seeded system could be wiped before their sapients were ready to defend themselves. The Precursors worried that these new sapients would end up blockaded inside their homeworlds, unable to explore the many mysteries waiting for them, unable to face the many challenges they’d left behind. So when each species reached a milestone, to set foot on another world, they would be given a spaceship to do with as they pleased.”

A familiar image, of the SpaceX Spaceship ™ landing on a red barren surface, and a space-suited human stepping forth.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered, suspecting what was coming next.

“To control this gifted Precursor spacecraft, they needed the mind of one of the new sapient species. He or she would be selected by the simple expedient of being the person selected by his or her own species to first explore the unexpected starship. He or she would also be given the task of preparing his species to join a potentially hostile galaxy full of other brand new sapient species.”

A new image, of myself, as I was a short while ago, getting grabbed by a metallic tentacle, then placed inside a strange machine that scanned me in some way as I slept. Or rather, it scanned the old me, for I, the entity watching this "tutorial", was just a computer program built from the results of that detailed brain scan.

“No. No. NO! This is not a valid selection process! I didn’t volunteer to be digitally copied! I want my life back!” I shouted angrily, but the tutorial was silent.