I wrote a short story! I occasionally get little ideas for stories but have never tried to write one down. So I figured I would give it a shot. I doubt I am any good at it but see what you think.

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“In that?” Jank asked, looking anxiously over at Ziff for confirmation.

“Yep, it’s nearly ready. Just a few more adjustments to make,” Ziff said, briefly looking up from the workstation she was busy stabbing keys on.

Jank looked at the artificial being on the table. He couldn’t believe that it had come to this. The planet was dying and as a last resort they were attempting to upload their consciousness into an artificial machine and then launch the machine to a new home.

Ziff stopped madly punching at the keys on her workstation long enough to notice that Jank was wistfully gazing down at the construct on the table. Ziff stood up and walked over to him.

“Look,” she began “you know that our limited tests have been successful. When we have replaced one small part of our biological brain with an artificial bit that does the same job no one notices at all.”

“I know, I know, I had the test done while I was listening to my favorite music and eating my favorite dessert and I couldn’t notice anything when they replaced my taste areas with artificial bits. But it’s just so mechanical looking! And why didn’t we make it look more like we do?”

Jank looked down at the creature. It had two limbs that it could balance on, two limbs that it could use to manually grasp things in the environment, and on top a command station of sorts that served as its head. The “head” of the construct had two orbs for detecting electromagnetic energy in the environment, two chemical entryways for detecting chemical concentrations in the air as well in potential energy sources. There were also two entryways for sound waves, of all things, to enter. Then inside the “head” was all of the machinery for processing this information. They had modeled this machinery on their own biological brains but they had made it from another material altogether. Some had said that it would never work and that only the material we ourselves were composed of could instantiate consciousness and intelligence.

But the critics were wrong. We had figured out not only how to build constructs but also how to get those strange energy sources to result in the kind of conscious experience we have from our own senses. And just in time too. No one had heeded the warnings about our abuse of the environment and now we were being forced to upload our minds into these machines and flee our own planet.

Jank looked up and realized that Ziff had been answering the question he had asked. She was in the middle of explaining that the planet they had found that was in the habitable zone and close enough to get to in our ships had a different atmosphere than our home planet. The constructs had been designed to function on that strange new world.

Jank had already zoned out and was thinking about the long voyage to this new home. First he would have to upload his consciousness into the construct. In the process his current body would be destroyed. Maybe if they had enough time they could get a non-destructive form of uploading but they had to act now. Then the constructs would be loaded on the ships and launched to the new world. It would take very long time to reach the new world and the constructs would only be activated once they arrived. In addition to the constructs that were built to house our minds, we also built a host of other intelligent machines that would be used to sustain the livability of the new planet. This new planet was relatively young as planets go and had all of the conditions for life, though a form of life that was different from ours. These machines would enforce a cycle that would eventually be self-sustaining.

Jank snapped back and realized that Ziff had stopped talking and was looking at him expectantly. Jank ignored the look and instead asked, “is it true that the new planet only has one star that it orbits?”

Ziff was used to these sudden darts of attention and so she just said, “yes that is true. It also emits light in a different part of the spectrum. That is why we had to design the constructs in the way that we did. We had to not only think about how to preserve our conscious minds but also how the constructs could emulate our biological behavior. We want our species to survive!”

Ziff was well known for her passionate defense of the idea that this would count as a continuation of our species. Others were skeptical. They argued that once we uploaded into the constructs it would be questionable whether we were the same species or not. Once you add to that that these constructs were built in such a way that they could emulate childbirth -Jank suppressed a shudder. He couldn’t quite bring himself to think of it as childbirth.

The constructs had been designed so that they could produce new constructs. We had decided to emulate nature and had given the constructs a kind of code that could be passed on and which carried instructions for constructing a new construct from the materials provided by the host construct. A lot of debate had gone into how to make this work. Without it our species would perish after these construct bodies wore out. They lasted a long time by our standards but on the new world they would last at most a few hundred years. We were the only conscious, intelligent life form in the universe as far as we knew. We could not let our own carelessness with our home world deprive the universe of life. We needed to be able to make new people.

Once you bought the original idea that you could be uploaded into these constructs it wasn’t that far of a leap to think that the new constructs would be new people. They would be ‘born’ and have a ‘childhood’ etc. Since these construct bodies are so strange they will need time to adjust to controlling it in a new atmosphere, one that our minds were not designed to be in. Would Jank’s construct ‘offspring’ be members of our own species? Ziff firmly believed this. These ‘children’ will never really know that they are in a constructed body after all.

Jank on the other hand did not believe this. He suddenly stood up and said “I don’t think I can do it!”

Ziff had been expecting this and was ready for it.

“Do what?” she asked

“This!” shouted Jank pointing at the construct. “I may as well stay here with those who think that uploading is suicide. If they are right then what is the difference anyway? I will die if I stay here but I will die if I am uploaded into that horrible squishy thing!”

Ziff waited until the outburst had subsided. Then she began to try to calm him down. “It is true that some people think you don’t survive uploading. It is also true that some people think you don’t survive sleep,” Ziff smiled and Jank seemed to relax a little so she continued.

“Questions about the self are deep and to be honest I am not sure whether it will really be me when I upload. But I do think that it will at least be someone closely related to me and who I can now care about in a way similar to how I care about my own future self. I want her to achieve her goals because they are my goals! So even if it isn’t me I can think of it as saving my child, or twin or something”

Jank had calmed down now and was sitting looking out the window off into the distance. Only two of the suns were visible. He tried to imagine what it would look like to ‘see’ with these artificial ‘eyes’ an alien sun. He snorted quietly to himself when he realized that they had designed the constructs so that it would pretty much look like things normally did -minus a few suns. Ziff had come over and was sitting next to Jank.

“We had to make these constructs out of an element that was sustainable on the new world. The chemistry of that world severely limited our choices and so we had to use carbon. We tried to use other elements to base the constructs on but they just did not survive our simulations of the conditions on the New World. We had to build the body and the ‘brain’ of the constructs from carbon. It is a miracle that we figured out how to reproduce the functionality of our biological brain using artificial carbon-based cells that depended on sodium and potassium ions to generate electrical signals which were then converted to chemical signals and back again to electrical signals.”

Ziff smiled ruefully and trailed off waiting for Jank’s response.

Jank was marveling at the stupidity of the whole thing. Carbon? Really? 86 billion artificial carbon-based cells to hold my conscious mind on an alien world? Piloting a strange squishy carbon-based space-suit-slash-rover built for an environment our species was never meant to exist in. Was it really any more ridiculous than the way it actually worked for our species on our own world?

“You’re right,” he said as he stood up, “I’m ready”

“Great!” shouted Ziff as she jumped up, “let’s save our species”

Jank grinned as he stepped towards the uploader saying, “Or at least a species that will descend from ours! I hope they do better there”