Author : Hope Evey

He put pen to paper, but it was just a mechanical act. The feel of the pen in his hand, the flow of ink onto the page, the crinkle of turned pages, none of these caused even a ruffle to his new, positronic brain. He was aware of all the sensations, of course. They just didn’t mean anything.

One stroke was enough to convince him that nothing could be worse than having another. Modern medicine could do many things, but couldn’t guarantee he’d completely recover from another stroke. Ages of therapy after the first stroke, physical and psychological, and he regained most of his manual dexterity, and most of his memory. The two days immediately preceding his stroke remained a blank, so he chose the very best positronic brain available, and a matching robotic body. Upload to a positronic brain had risks, of course, but he preferred them to risking his mind in an aging body.

The greatest risk, of course, was the transferal itself. He wouldn’t be copying his mind to the positronic brain – he would be transferring it. The process that encoded his mind onto the positronic matrix would, neuron by neuron, destroy his physical brain. If the transfer failed, he would be dead. He considered that better than to live with a brain that could break without warning. He wasn’t worried about the shock of suddenly finding himself in a mechanical body. His body only served to maintain his mind, and move it around. A mechanical body would do the job just as well, if not better.

He got back to writing as soon as possible after the upload. He’d only finished four of the eight books in his series when he had his first stroke. Thank God he’d taken lots of notes during the days he couldn’t remember. He was able to reconstruct the plot twist he’d been developing before the stroke wiped his mind. Some said the fifth book was the best of the series. He didn’t realize he constructed it completely from the notes he’d made while still biological. The sixth book sold even better. He used his pre-upload notes, expanding upon them by using the most popular parts of the previous four.

His writing grew in popularity. He could keep writing forever at this point. He knew writing was important, but he could no longer remember why.

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