You wanna know what's weirder than dying, finding you’ve been turned into a cube, and waking up on Mars?

Finding out you’re not even the first one…

Following my somewhat dramatic resurrection on the red planet, Neera kindly gave me access to a massive informational database to help me get up to speed on everything I’d missed since accidently killing myself back in 2023. The database, a roughly mini-fridge sized device, was built into the U.S.E. lander that had recently delivered Neera and her team to the abandoned FAITH base where I had apparently been hiding for almost 50 years. It held not only historical data, but a wide array of information on virtually every subject I could think of. Inside were massive libraries of text, photos, videos, and every other form of digital media format covering topics ranging from art, culture, history, math, science, philosophy, and everything in-between.

This deceptively compact device seemed to serve as a repository for all of humanity’s accumulated knowledge, and I had just been given carte blanche access to it. While I had been initially skeptical of Neera and the “U.S.E.” she was apparently a part of, this gesture had admittedly won me over a bit. I can’t imagine that being woken up by a member of the “Theocratic Hegemony” that had supposedly taken over North America while I was on ice would’ve been nearly as nice of an experience, so I guess being abandoned on Mars wasn’t an entirely bad turn of events for the new “Dr. Scott”.

While her team’s engineer, a young man named Calum O’Donnel, worked on integrating access to “peripherals” into my secondary software routines, I got to catching myself up on 154 years of lost time, starting with the peculiar circumstances leading up to me being found as a cube on Mars.

Apparently, the company responsible for my new silicon-based existence was called Applied Synergetics Inc. They were a large robotics company based in the former United States, that specialized in the use of brain-dissolving “replication” technology to integrate the cubed consciousnesses of formerly frozen individuals like myself into “useful machinery”.

Former engineers were turned into construction drones. Coders were charged with the operation of 24/7 IT services. And Physicians were turned into literal “docs-in-a-box” found in almost every hospital, ambulance, and pharmacy. Anyone unlucky enough to have less “specialized talents”, got turned into a garbage truck or a street cleaner or one of many infinite low-level dirty jobs the company offered to the public.

Many of these positions had previously been filled by basic artificial machine intelligences, however, AMI’s, as they were more commonly called, had proven to be a bit “unreliable” to say the least. While AMI’s had the advantage of being cheaper to produce and maintain relative to the complex & expensive “replicants” like myself, they still lacked the distinctly human ability to really think through a problem. In a string of isolated incidents throughout the early 2070s, a few of these AMI controlled automatons went haywire, resulting in a handful of deaths and an industry-wide race to find viable alternatives.

Ignoring for the moment the whole moral issue of essentially turning people into undying electronic slaves, the company liable for my new geometric form did have a handful of irons in a few genuinely interesting fires. While they primarily delt with more “domestic” affairs, like waste removal and other formerly blue-collar jobs, their tech was actually being used in some projects that the average 21st century geek like myself would find thoroughly impressive.

Applied Synergetics Inc was responsible for building and maintaining a wide array of ships and orbital platforms around the solar system. Their other off-world ventures included a few automated Helium-3 mines on the dark side of the Moon, the attempted launch of a self-replicating “Von Neumann” interstellar probe, and even a couple of precursory colonization projects on Mars and Titan! One of which, I was apparently a part of.

So apparently when these FAITH-based companies started using “replicants” like myself, they realized that rather than creating a thousand different replicants for a thousand different jobs, it was more practical (& cost-effective) to find a handful of qualified subjects and assign them to multiple positions. Despite essentially being turned into supercomputers, replicants still proved to be no better at multitasking than they were in their past lives. While the highly sophisticated device I was currently stored in supposedly granted me, & other replicants, the ability to think much faster than a biological human brain, the “train-of-thought” so to speak, still only had ONE track.

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To get around this, these companies opted to simply duplicate replicants, and put these duplicates in charge of a variety of fitting jobs. They also had a habit of making spare copies of individuals, as apparently the prospect of eternal slavery as the disembodied mind of a former human led to more than a few replicants going insane. Neera had explained to me that before the integration of the VR space we’d first met in, the success rate for replicants after the initial orientation process was only 20%.

Back then about 8 out of every 10 replicants lost their minds after their first week of being brought online, and even then, the ones that survived usually submitted to the crushing reality of their new existence eventually. Without basic human rights, a body, or access to simple sensory input like touch or smell or taste, the average lifespan of a “viable subject” was still relatively limited, ranging wildly between a few months to a few decades, depending on the temperament of the person and the circumstances they found themselves in.

Thankfully for me and any other replicants in the 22nd century, the simple addition of a “Neurally-Engaged Realistic Virtual Environment” unit, or NERVE for short, and the accompany digital avatar it built from the memories of the replicant, seemed to almost entirely curb the issue of “the cube-crazies” so to speak. At least it did for those whose psyches could survive the initial transition to their new reality.

Now as all the great Theocratic Oligarchies before them, the governing forces of FAITH had a habit of quickly and completely silencing anyone whose actions went against doctrine. The issue of replication had naturally been a hot topic in FAITH-land, so companies that used the tech were kept on an incredibly tight leash. That leash came in the form of a small thermonuclear device hidden in the basement of every lab in North America using replication tech, and an unspoken understanding that it would be detonated without warning if the higher-ups of FAITH found it to be “God’s will”.

About 50 years ago, some “Grand-Poobah” in the FAITH theocracy deemed the creation and use of replicants to be “a perversion of nature” and “a sacrilegious attempt at playing God”, and they ordered all replicants and replicant research be destroyed. From what I’d gathered in my readings about FAITH, they weren’t exactly big fans of the democratic process, so this proclamation was met with little resistance.

Within a matter of minutes after the announcement was made, a series of rapidly expanding fireballs vaporized a dozen or so laboratories scattered throughout some of the most remote regions in the former-United States and even a few space stations in Earth orbit, ending the lives of hundreds of people and the digital afterlives of countless replicants like me.

Not only did they attempt to destroy every replicant in FAITH-controlled space, but a carefully coordinated clandestine campaign by FAITH successfully infected nearly 95% of all active replicants with a well-hidden trojan that would instantly “purge” the matrix when triggered. Almost every active replicant matrix in the Solar system was simultaneously wiped clean, resulting in widespread chaos, outrage, and a more than slight increase in geopolitical tension.

Apparently, this event had sparked a series of growing international conflicts, which eventually led to the destruction of FAITH in what was now regarded as “The Purge Wars”. This war left the surface of the planet nearly scarred beyond recognition, with North and South America having taken the brunt of the damage. Both continents were now littered with massive craters from coast to coast, with the smaller examples attributed to nuclear detonations, and the larger examples having been created through less “conventional” methods. FAITH in North America, as well as the “Brazilian Empire” that had taken over South America during this time, had both invested heavily in fully realizing the old cold war concept of “Rods of God”.

I remembered reading about these theoretical weapons sometime during my short 32 years as a person in the 21st century. In simple terms, you put a giant Tungsten rod in space, drop it on your enemies, and celebrate your victory. The deceivingly simple concept did offer its benefits, mainly being the ability to inflict the damage of a large nuclear bomb without the nasty radiation leftovers. Of course, that fact didn’t magically negate the existence of a radioactive cloud of death still being generated by the uninhabitable irradiated wastelands of the Western hemisphere nearly half a century later.

Another fun fact about “The Great Purge” as this attack on replicants came to be known. Based on what I’d learned about the business practices of Applied Synergetics Inc, it almost certainly included the deletion of one or more cubified “Dr. Samuel Scott”s. According to Neera, it was starting to look like I wasn’t even the first “Sam” to wake up on Mars. But for some unknown reason, I was the only one left.

Was my continued existence part of a purposeful attempt at saving my mind, or was it simply the result of a clerical error in a 1.4 quintillion cubic-kilometer-wide digital genocide?

Figuring that one out would require a bit more research, and another talk with Neera.