Dr. Radcliffe was, well, he was really awkward. He was also a brilliant scientist and the first person I had met in this world who wanted to be more aggressive than I was. "Yes, I read your paper on the risks, but consider the rewards! We could move humanity into a bright future overnight, just one intelligent program."

"Or plunge it into everlasting darkness," I said, stepping out of the car. "I'm happy to be working with you on these questions and providing you funding," he had been painfully underutilized in his previous role at an agrochemical company, "but under no circumstances are you to invent an AI. This is the one, sole condition of your funding. AI are dangerous, we don't know how to produce a safe one, therefore we will not build one."

"What if we created a kind of nursery for AI. Put them in black box environments and see if they pop up crazy or not."

"Dr. Radcliffe, putting aside the probability of creating stable people inside a box without egress, there's also the massive issue of creating people as thralls to our will. Deciding if they get to live or die on the basis of how useful they are. Don't you see the problem with that?"

Radcliffe hesitated and then shook his head, "No, you're right. Slavery is wrong. But that's no reason to give up. We just need to come up with the right idea."

"Let me know of any ideas you come up with before you implement them. Actually, before you make the design."

A generic-looking woman walked up in simple dress. "Hello, Dolly," I said politely. "Who's piloting you today?"

"Oh, it's me," Dolly let out a little laugh. Then she scrunched up her face in a way that gave away that it was Stacey, "Right, the audio isn't correlated. It's me, Stacey. You know Mike, you need to fix that."

We had hauled the old Life Model Decoy program out of storage - The program itself had ultimately proved ineffective, the models were fairly ineffective, but the models looked like people and could ambulate, so they had made a good base on which to overcoat sensory interpretation hardware. "Stacey, a correlated speaking voice takes hundreds of hours of data with our present software. Do you have hundreds of hours of your voice to give it?" I took out a stick of gum and held it under Dolly's nose.

"Cinnamon," she said, identifying it correctly. "No, I don't."

"That's right, we've had Jacobs recording full time for weeks, all kinds of voices." Technically, as a Hydra agent on the list for upload, Jacobs had recorded most of his tapes years in advance and only provided us with a set of 'update tapes' so he wouldn't have vocal dysmorphia, but Stacey didn't need to know that. "Alright, let's go see our patient."

We walked into the smooth looking comfortable euthanasia clinic. I am not, and have never been, a proponent of euthanasia, but it served my purposes to use this one today. Hydra had used it for most of these procedures previously. After all, if anything went wrong, it was genuine euthanasia. Unlike my predecessors, I wasn't going to abandon my subject in agony. As to the possibility of his death, I honestly didn't care. If he died, one less fossil from the before times of technology suppression. If he lived, he would belong to me.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Mr. Jacobs," I said with a warm smile as he walked up to us, the picture of health. "How are you feeling?"

"This is working excellently," he said amiably, giving me a smile and a wave to demonstrate.

"This is the guy we're here to upload? He looks fine."

I smirked to Radcliffe and held up the gum to his nose.

"Cinnamon," he said. The LMD wasn't as impressive of an imitation of human skin for me as it was for other people, not really enough loose hairs or little scars, the wrinkles were a little too even, but it would work fine for people without super-senses.

"Excellent, no prohibitive smell deterioration after two weeks of use. Olfactory replacement would have been extremely tedious and hard on our budget."

"That's amazing," Radcliffe said. "Why does he look so old? Couldn't you have made the drone younger

"We're trying to minimize any kind of dysmorphia," I said. We would also lose contacts if we lost Mr. Jacobs and since what I was doing today was definitely illegal, we had to keep it on the download. We headed back toward Mr. Jacobs' room. He was laying on a hospital bed, his eyes closed and his body emaciated by the cancer treatment. He looked much better in the LMD. The room was soft tones and easy on the eyes, at least.

"Hello Tina," I said, greeting her with a cheerful wave. She paused for a moment and waved back hesitantly, one hand gripping her staff hard.

"I don't like doing this," she said as I let go of her. No doubt, her mind was going back to all the sacrifices. We hadn't asked anything like that of any of the PRIDE members since.

"Tina, you aren't doing anything except confirming results." I said calmly, holding her hands. "Mr. Jacobs, Dr. Radcliffe, and I will set up the machine and it is Mr. Jacobs voice command that will throw the switch." And that was true. The rules of the upload required it.

"You brought it?" Mr. Jacobs asked and I held up the small box and unshrunk it. It was about the size of fridge laying on the ground, black as the devil's suit, and slightly rounded.

I gestured to Radcliffe and we both checked over the box, carefully looking it over with specialized monitoring. "Any problems you can see?" I asked Radcliffe.

"None," he confirmed. I would die of embarrassment if this didn't work because of a test flaw. Jacobs' LMD looked it over, seemed to feel satisfied that it was still in working order, and nodded to me. So I hooked in the hard drive onto which we would be copying Mr. Jacobs' mind and, hopefully, his immortal soul

"Are you ready Mr. Jacobs?" I asked solemnly.

"I am," the LMD said. I walked over and unhooked him carefully, keeping my mind on my medical knowledge. He immediately let out a groan when I took out the sensor visor.

"Argh," he grumbled. "This body is so awful."

"That's why we're taking you out of it, Mr. Jacobs." I said reassuringly, nodding Dr. Radcliffe over to help me lower Mr. Jacobs into the box. Radcliffe came over and helped me put him in. We hooked up the equipment to his skull, closed the box, and waited.

"Arnold Jacobs," we heard in a muffled and hoarse voice from inside the box. "Code phrase Embalming. Confirmed as a volunteer."

There was a sickening sucking sound for several seconds and then I watched the destructive extraction take place in just under a minute on the box's interface. The hard-drive took in the data and I handed it to Tina.

She spoke a few words and nodded her head. "Oh thank god. He's really in there. His soul, I mean."

In one sense, that was good. We wanted his soul to be in there. But from a purely advantageous point of view, it was probably the less effective outcome. Souls couldn't be copied, as Tina had insisted over and over again, so that meant a copy might develop a unique personality or might not work at all. I walked over to the LMD, rolled his shirt up off the insertion point in his back, slid the hard drive in between his plastic skin until I felt it hook into place, barely visible. I pressed the skin relatively closed, we could cover it later, and I waited.

It took a few seconds but then Jacobs started to move. "I can feel, I can move," he said. "I'm alive!" He looked over at Tina, "Am I, you know," he jerked his head towards the box, "Him?"

"Yes, Mr. Jacobs," she said with a smile that could've outshone the sun. "Your soul is still intact. You're alive."

It wasn't exactly the correct phrasing, but goddamn if I didn't live in a world of miracles.