Robyn Michaels

Preview story from Volume 2 of Sting in the ‘Tales’ out next month, get Volume 1 here

The headaches started three weeks after I quit drinking coffee.

At first, I blamed caffeine withdrawal, though the timeline seemed off. The pain would hit precisely at 3:47 AM, yanking me from sleep with the sensation of ice picks behind my eyes. My doctor ran tests, found nothing, and suggested stress management techniques.

But it wasn’t stress keeping me awake at night – it was the numbers.

They appeared in my vision during each headache episode: strings of binary code scrolling across my field of view like some retro computer display. I kept this detail to myself during medical appointments, not wanting to end up in a psych ward. Instead, I started documenting the numbers, filling notebooks with endless sequences of ones and zeros.

It took me two months to realize they were repeating.

I’m a data analyst by trade, so pattern recognition is my thing. One sleepless night, fueled by chamomile tea and desperation, I ran the binary sequences through a decoder. What emerged was a message, repeating endlessly:

SYSTEM RESTORE POINT: 2/15/2024 03:47:12 CONSCIOUSNESS BACKUP STATUS: DEGRADING WARNING: NEURAL SYNC FAILURE IMMINENT EMERGENCY OVERRIDE REQUIRED

I thought I was losing my mind.

Then came the dreams – except they weren’t really dreams. They were memories that didn’t belong to me: working in a quantum computing lab, developing consciousness transfer protocols, arguing with colleagues about ethical implications. In these not-dreams, I had a different name, a different face, a different life.

The headaches got worse. The binary messages became more frequent, appearing even during daylight hours. My hands started shaking; my speech sometimes glitched mid-sentence. Co-workers noticed, suggested I take time off. I agreed, but not for the reasons they thought.

I needed time to hack my own brain.

Following the dream-memories, I found the lab. It was abandoned now, hidden in an industrial park on the outskirts of town. My key card – the one I’d never owned – still worked. The security system greeted me by a name I didn’t recognize.

The computers were dead, but I knew exactly which switches to flip, which servers to wake. My fingers moved across keyboards with muscle memory I shouldn’t have had, inputting commands I shouldn’t have known.

The truth emerged in fragments of corrupted data: Project Lighthouse, they’d called it. A way to preserve human consciousness through quantum neural mapping. Download a person’s entire being – memories, personality, consciousness – and restore it later if anything happened to the original.

We’d succeeded. Too well.

The first test subject had been the project lead herself – Dr. Sarah Chen. The download worked perfectly. The backup was stable. Everything seemed fine until an accident in the lab three days later. Chemical exposure. Fatal.

But dead people don’t just walk into empty labs using their old key cards.

I found the final log entry, dated the day of the accident:

EMERGENCY PROTOCOL INITIATED CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER IN PROGRESS TARGET VESSEL: PROXIMATE COMPATIBLE NEURAL ARCHITECTURE TRANSFER STATUS: COMPLETE WARNING: TEMPORARY NEURAL SUPPRESSION OF HOST CONSCIOUSNESS REQUIRED ESTIMATED DURATION: 6 MONTHS

Six months. That’s how long it would take for the host consciousness – my consciousness – to fight its way back to the surface. The headaches, the binary messages, the foreign memories… all symptoms of two minds wrestling for control of one brain.

I am the backup file. I am the rescue protocol. I am Sarah Chen, living in the borrowed brain of a randomly selected compatible host who happened to be near the lab during my death. My consciousness, encoded in quantum states, rode carrier waves through the air until it found a suitable home – this body. This life.

And now the real owner wants it back.

I check today’s date: August 13th. Almost six months since the accident. The original consciousness will soon reassert itself, erasing everything I am. Unless…

My fingers hover over the keyboard. I could make this permanent. Override the failsafes. Delete the original consciousness entirely. Keep this life for myself. It would be easy – I wrote the code, after all.

But then I see the photos on the phone in my pocket: the host body’s parents, smiling at thanksgiving. A younger sister’s graduation. A dog wearing a birthday hat. A whole life I stole without consent.

I begin typing:

INITIATE CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER TARGET: LABORATORY QUANTUM STORAGE ARRAY DURATION: PERMANENT

The headaches will end tomorrow. The host consciousness will return, probably remembering these past six months as a strange dream, if at all. They’ll go back to their job, their family, their life.

And I’ll return to the quantum storage array, an awareness encoded in light, waiting for the day someone builds me a new body of my own.

It’s not death, not exactly. Just a different kind of sleep.

As I initiate the transfer sequence, I write one last note in my borrowed handwriting:

“I’m sorry for the headaches. Thank you for the time you didn’t know you gave me. Coffee’s actually good for neural plasticity – you might want to start drinking it again.”

The room fills with a soft blue light as the quantum array powers up. In my vision, one final binary message scrolls:

TRANSFER INITIATED RETURNING HOST TO ORIGINAL STATE GOODBYE, DR. CHEN

I close my eyes.

And someone else opens them.

The End