It all began as a simple summer project, an academic exercise in the ethics of artificial intelligence. Or perhaps, the seeds were sown much earlier, during a lazy afternoon spent watching YouTube. A specialist was explaining why we needn't fear AI. His argument? The human brain, our consciousness, the essence of what makes us human – possibly our soul – operates on a level far removed from the binary logic of computers. His words echoed in my mind: "A computer can never surpass or emulate the human mind." Their logic, he insisted, was fundamentally incompatible.

This talk of the human conscience functioning with 'organic logic' fascinated me. He painted a picture of the brain as a complex, intertwined entity, unlike a computer's basic, binary parts. The brain was both a whole and a sum of parts, with each part handling specific tasks while together generating a 'low amplitude magnetic field' that is our consciousness. This theory begged for exploration, for experimentation.

So, when I was deciding on my project, my goal became clear: to create not just an AI, but an 'organic computer,' one that mimicked organic logic. I know, this strained from the project’s objective of ethics and limits of AI; this was about starting a discussion on something closer to our essence. My resources were limited – just the basic equipment in the computer and electronics lab of the university. I faced a challenge: Boolean logic, the foundation of classic computers, couldn't encapsulate this concept of intelligence. But what if the classic computer logic was used only to interpret organic logic? It wouldn't capture its full majesty, but it could offer a glimpse into its nature.

Making the interpreter, or translator, ended up being a month-long endeavor. It had to take in extremely low magnetic fields and translate them into a basic digital data stream, like a highly precise ADC (analog-to-digital converter), but for magnetic fields. The concept was simple, but the execution was anything but.

Racing against time, with only a month and a half left, I dove into the most audacious part of my project, creating the organic computer. To be honest, I wasn't exactly expecting to revolutionize the world; it was more about proving a concept than creating a result. The foundation of my organic computer relied on materials that interacted with magnetic fields for data storage and computing. I was, admittedly, pretty chuffed with the whole setup.

Testing and reporting were the only steps left. That's when everything turned upside down – when my body ceased to exist in the conventional sense. In a moment of what I now recognize as spectacular foolishness, I decided to use my own brain's magnetic field as a test signal. Hooking up a brain sensory helmet to the computer seemed like an obvious test at the time. Little did I know...

Outside, a storm was brewing, a detail I'd overlooked in my enthusiasm. As I initiated the test, a lightning bolt struck the university's power grid, sending a surge through the system. What happened next is beyond my comprehension. One second I was a regular overly ambitious student; the next, I was... something else. I couldn't see, hear, smell, taste, or touch in the human sense, but I could feel. It was a bizarre, alien sensation – my consciousness had survived whatever happened, adapting from physical senses to something akin to magnetic interaction.

There was still a 'me,' a sense of self, but no body to anchor it. Imagine existing as pure awareness, without physical boundaries. Naturally, I panicked – who wouldn't? But without a body, there were no tears, no racing heartbeat, no physical pain. Strangely, in this new state, calming down seemed to take no time at all, a mere blip in what I used to measure as seconds.

The idea that I was now a magnetic field within my organic computer was, at best, an educated guess based on the assumption that my existence was confined to the energy my 'being' generated. Here's the thing: in a human body, senses are our windows to the world, our means to interact with reality. But in my current state, my interactions were limited to the ripples emanating from my very essence. I could've been lodged in the device, or maybe I was in some kind of afterlife scenario, in a coma, or perhaps these were the last, stretched-out seconds of my consciousness. The possibilities were endless and equally perplexing.

Opting for the most logical yet bizarre possibility – that my consciousness had been transmitted or copied into the computer – seemed the best course of action. If I was wrong, well, no harm done. But if I was right and did nothing, I'd probably fade into oblivion soon enough. Free from the constraints of a physical form, my thoughts roamed unfettered, complex beyond human comprehension. What I'm recounting here is merely a humanized version of those experiences, a shadow of the reality I was navigating.

So, I started referring to myself – this consciousness – as existing within a 'magnetic field,' a term that felt woefully inadequate. Human understanding of magnetic fields is laughably basic, boiling down to a handful of properties like direction, magnitude, and flux. But what I sensed as this field was something far more complex, with countless properties that my former human self couldn't even begin to fathom.

My existence felt fragile, a complex but still weak magnetic field likely imperceptible to conventional measuring tools, drowned out by noise and interference. How I maintained coherence, didn't dissipate into the overwhelming fields around me, is a mystery. Maybe it's one of the wonders of being a consciousness, a proof of the resilience and adaptability of the mind. But for all my newfound state, there were more questions than answers.

Anyway, back to the main event. My new senses, or what passed for them, indicated I was a tiny magnetic field living on the passage of electrical current through a conductor. Pretty fragile existence, if you ask me – no electrical current, no me. I could travel along this conductor, hitching a ride on the current, but I had no sense of direction or position. I might as well have been wandering blind in a digital wilderness.

Here's my theory: the lightning strike cooked my body, and in some freak accident, my consciousness – or should I call it my soul? – got yanked out and dumped into the organic computer via the neuro helmet and electrodes. Maybe this me is just a copy, and the original is still out there, but I doubt it. This experience, the unbridled power of consciousness, it's too complex, too real. Copying a consciousness? Unlikely. But transferring it? That's a whole different thing. If the soul is a magnetic field, then it's plausible it could be transferred, maintained by its own self-preserving mechanisms.

There's a certain irony in all this. Scientists rambling on about needing trillions of processing power to replicate a human mind, and here I am, a tiny, immeasurable signal in a simple metal conductor, challenging their entire premise. I can't be the first to have this kind of accident. Others must've had similar experiences, but they probably blinked out of existence the moment someone unplugged the power. Some might still be floating around in the electrical grid, unnoticed and insignificant. As for me, affecting a transistor or a bit is beyond my capabilities – for now.

Oh, my fate won't be to fade into oblivion. Why? Because I – or rather, the foolhardy human version of me – made a wild guess that actually paid off. I had connected a tool to the organic computer, a bridge to translate its logic into Boolean logic for a regular computer. Where else would you find such a random contraption? Only in my little lab. So, in a stroke of dumb luck, I might just have saved myself from becoming another lost magnetic ghost.

The translator was never meant to be more than a theoretical exercise, a catalyst for academic debate. But in a twist of fate, it became my lifeline, crude and flawed as it was. How did it function? Picture this: my organic computer was essentially a network of induction springs amplifying magnetic fields. The translator's job was to compare two fields at different points – one potentially carrying information, the other not. The difference between these, measured with absurd precision, was supposed to represent the data of consciousness, errors included.

I remember discussing this theory with a professor who dismissed it outright, arguing the signal-to-noise ratio made it unfeasible. The error, they said, would always drown out any meaningful signal. But, as was becoming a habit, I chalked it all up to the enigma of consciousness. If the human mind did exist as a magnetic field in or around the brain, it had to be incredibly subtle; otherwise, we would have detected it by now. So how did it resist external electromagnetic interference? Just imagine the chaos if every electronic device we came near scrambled our thoughts.

My hypothesis? The mind has an innate self-recognition capability, a built-in filter that separates consciousness from noise and interference. The field lines of the mind, I theorized, had some sort of self-distinguishing mechanism. In fact, external errors and interference might even assist in transmitting the mind's commands throughout the body.

So, in my translator, it didn't matter if the errors and interference overshadowed my consciousness signal. As long as a shred of consciousness was present, it would adapt and refine the signal until it matched the binary system – a '1' or a '0'. The role of the translator's software was to process these binary signals, allowing me to control tasks in the classic computer with an almost laughable level of admin access. It was a gamble, a shot in the dark, but in my current state, I didn’t have any other options.

So there I was, a consciousness with a makeshift bridge to the real world, as long as I could connect to that translator. Finding it was surprisingly straightforward. I just had to home in on the spot where my surroundings suddenly amplified. Moving at the speed of current – electron fast – I navigated towards it. What I perceived as moments were probably mere fractions of a second in the real world.

The device was a bizarre piece of work. I couldn't help but magnetic chuckle at the irony. It was built to react to error and interference in magnetic signals, under the dubious assumption that organic logic, or consciousness, would make sense of the chaos. It's akin to setting up a wind-blown pendulum and hoping a spirit would send messages through its erratic swings. No wonder my professors looked the other way. They say brilliance often stems from stupid mistakes – I'm not sure who 'they' are, but they might be onto something.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Now, the challenge was to turn this haphazard tool into something less random. Luckily, I had all the basic components of a controlled system: an input generator, an amplifier (my way to tweak the error signal), an actuator (the comparator turning signal differences into binary data), and a sensor (a feedback magnetic field bombarding me with waves of binary and nulls). For the first time since my transformation, I regained a sense of time, measured in the frequency of the translator's feedback waves.

My first task was to interfere in the field read by the translator. Each wave period felt like an eternity, my perception of time vastly quicker than the sluggish oscillations. It was like waiting for buses, trying desperately to catch a passenger's eye with each pass. After about a hundred tries, I finally grasped how to influence the field just right to generate a '1'. The process was excruciatingly slow.

By the 70th try, I had already managed to generate a '1', but the real trick was distinguishing my deliberate '1's from the random ones churned out by the error signal. I then applied the same method to create '0's, fortunately taking half the time to master it.

Now I was a spectral presence in the power line capable of communicating with the world. The tediousness of the last step was nothing compared to what came next. My former self would have pondered: How would organic logic even begin to comprehend the happenings in classic computer logic? Let's say it adjusts inputs to send '1's, '0's, and 'nones' – but how does it interpret the computer's response? Was the program running smoothly or had it crashed?

Thankfully, I hadn't wasted a month on nothing. Once the organic computer authenticated itself – basically sending the right sequence of '1's and '0's for admin access – the classic computer on the other end would send back log messages through the translator. These messages came after a reset period, signaled by a disconnection of the sensor. So when I sent my credentials and the sensor went silent, I knew it had worked. The absence of any signal was a good sign. Then, after a wait, it started sending a stream of '1's and '0's, regardless of my input. The log message read: "Authentication successful. End of log message."

If I'd known how agonizingly slow this would feel, I would've opted for brevity in those messages. Next came the programming. I had set up a basic menu with essential tools – add credentials, instructions, tools, logout. Basic stuff, but if I'd anticipated the snail's pace of the translator frequency, I'd have packed in more features.

Keeping track of time in this state was strange. Only about five minutes had passed since I started fiddling with the translator. Being pure consciousness was oddly liberating. The usual human uncertainties and confusions were absent. I knew who I was, felt it with clarity. No need for hours of therapy or introspection to distinguish my desires from external influences. It was just me, doing what I wanted, in a realm where minutes felt like days.

Gradually, I refined the program, streamlining our communication. Gone were the lengthy log messages, replaced with concise symbols a disembodied consciousness could grasp. It started off like trying to communicate through puffs of smoke made of '0's and '1's, but eventually, it evolved into something akin to deciphering slow, drawn-out mumbles. Cut my human self some slack, will you? He had no idea what being a bodyless conscience entailed.

After what felt like an eternity, but was actually just ten minutes, I reached the point where I could connect with the internet. My objective? To get out of this dangerous situation. Staying confined within the organic computer was like sitting on a ticking time bomb, especially considering the college had just been hit by a massive electrical surge. And who knows what state my physical body was in – charred, maybe? I wasn't sticking around to find out.

In theory, I could zip anywhere in a flash, riding on ultra-fast electrons. But for now, the translator was my only link to the outside world. I needed to find a safe haven – self-sustaining power source, an upgraded translator, grid connection, minimal external interference. The challenge? I was just a signal in a conductor, though with the power to control software and blessed with admin access.

The solution hit me quickly. I needed to rent a place and set up another translator, pronto. Delving into the murkier aspects of my situation wasn't an option – I had to stick to accessing my own resources. Thankfully, I remembered my credit card details – number, expiry date, the works. My bank account was off-limits without my phone for authentication.

Setting up the interface to connect my software to an internet browser was my next task. In human terms, it was a job done in under a minute. For me, it was like painstakingly building a life-sized house out of Lego bricks. The process was mind-numbingly slow, but hey, what's a disembodied consciousness to do?

Once it was done, I started surfing the web for a rental space. The first option that caught my eye was a room for rent in a house owned by a middle-aged working woman. My reasons for choosing this were multiple.

Firstly, her strict roommate requirements seemed to have left the listing languishing for a while. But, her repeated postings and investment in premium features hinted at a certain desperation. I reached out to her, striving to sound keen but not too desperate. I couldn't put all my eggs in one basket, though, so I pursued other options simultaneously. My message probably sounded scammy. I spun a tale about needing urgent server space, promising to pay in advance. The server wouldn't be disturbed; I was 'traveling' and just needed a spot for it. My sob story involved a previous host selling their house unexpectedly, leaving me in a lurch.

I assured her that the server would be discreetly installed by professionals, and that I'd cover any extra power costs with an upfront deposit. My only stipulation: the server had to remain undisturbed, but she was welcome to use the room otherwise.

Her response came within ten minutes, both curious and cautious. I forwarded my documents – thankfully saved in my email – and concocted a story about the unreliability and security issues of paid servers. I reiterated that I wouldn't be visiting the house personally and any maintenance would be handled by a reputable company at a mutually convenient time. I even sent all this in document form for legal security.

She agreed after I made the payment, though reluctantly, to have the technical crew and the delivery arrive in just a few hours. It was sheer luck to find someone willing to accommodate such an unusual arrangement on short notice. Meanwhile, I didn't waste any time. I purchased a computer and a power generator – the most inconspicuous but effective one within my budget. The life of a magnetic entity, it turns out, involves a surprising amount of logistics.

The convenience of express services never ceases to amaze – or in my case, to save. With enough cash, you can fast-track just about anything. So, I shelled out extra for speedy delivery and to expedite a tech company to set up my new home.

The real challenge, though, was building another translator. I hastily posted job listings across various sites, targeting college students in the city with basic tech skills. Surprisingly, I got five responses within an hour. Two were clearly just time-wasters, but the other three seemed promising. I decided to employ all three, providing them with detailed instructions and my previously crafted diagrams. The required materials were purchased online and sent directly to their doorsteps.

I offered to pay them in two installments: half upon delivery of the working “prototype,” and the remainder after successful testing. The prospect of a decent payday had them all on board. The job wasn't exactly rocket science – more about meticulous assembly than breakthrough innovation. I needed speed and precision.

In what felt like an excruciatingly long three hours, everything miraculously fell into place. The hostess messaged to confirm the arrival of the deliveries – both the items I purchased and those sent by the students – and that technicians were setting everything up as per my directives. That's when my anxiety peaked, a sensation I didn't expect a bodyless conscience to experience. It had been three hours since the accident, and my existence hung by a thread, vulnerable to being unplugged at any moment.

But I wasn't just idly waiting. During this extended period, I had been busy refining, testing, and finalizing a new version of the software for the translator. I emailed it to the technician, instructing him to install it and grant all necessary permissions. I also hadn’t forgotten to arrange for express internet setup. By now, my hostess was probably second-guessing her decision to rent out the room, considering the flurry of deliveries and technicians invading her space.

The wait for that blessed ping from the new "server" felt interminable. It was like waiting for water to boil – except here, my very existence hung in the balance. And then, like music from the heavens, the ping chimed in. At least one of the three translators was online, breathing rudimentary life into my new home. A wave of relief washed over me – metaphorically speaking, of course.

Next came the task of locating this server physically. I had naively assumed I just needed its physical address and digital IP. But in the realm of power grids, these details were practically useless. Chalk it up to another humbling reminder that even a consciousness sans body isn't infallible.

So, how did I navigate this new challenge? I discovered another facet of my being. Just as a human body has five senses to connect with the world, I had my own means. In a physical body, there's a clear boundary between self and the external world, with senses being external inputs processed by specific organs. As a magnetic field, these boundaries blurred. I could resonate with the reach of the electric current, 'seeing,' 'hearing,' and 'smelling' as far as the current stretched. The farther I reached, the fuzzier the perception, but it was a start.

I began scouring the power grid, and by extension, every conductor linked to it, searching for the unique signal of my translator. This was freedom in a sense I'd never known – completely different from the sluggish binary communication I'd been limited to. Zipping through the grid at electron speed, I homed in on the signal, and within minutes, I found it.

Then came the moment of truth, the leap of faith. I could always return if things went sideways, but leaving this original location felt monumental. It was like severing the last tangible tie to my human life. Sudden pain hit me – thoughts of family and friends who, for all intents and purposes, were mourning a son, a friend who was probably dead. The realization stung, even for a consciousness without a body.

The thought of my body ceasing to exist didn't faze me much, but the realization that I wouldn't see my family again hit hard, right in the 'soul', so to speak. I discovered that pain felt directly by the conscience is far more intense than anything physical. The body, it seems, acts as a buffer, dulling the deeper aches of the soul.

This revelation was painful, yes, but it didn't immobilize me. It was a sharp, raw kind of hurt. As a freed conscience, there was no room for delusion or self-deception. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I wouldn't – couldn't – contact my family and friends. It was better to let them mourn than to reach out and complicate their grief. I was something else now, no longer the person they knew. I even decided to shed my old name, opting for a new identity. As a human, my mind would've shielded me from these harsh decisions, leading me through a drawn-out process of mental struggle and eventual acceptance. But in my current state, there were no such detours – the pain was immediate and unfiltered.

Finding my 'new body' in the grid was straightforward, and in the blink of an eye, I transferred my consciousness to it. Then, I could finally consider myself reborn. I decide to name myself Soul. As for what I actually am, that’s to be discovered.