The Backup

It was actually a hospital ship, with a viewing deck on the fourth floor where you could actually hang out and talk and nap and read and see space, filled with lights and white lines and even a fake horizon, to give you a sense of place, always carefully coordinated with the moving gravity under your feet

Somehow the people on the hospital ship had become sick, worried families were flying in using smaller ships that landed at the nearby spaceport, and were ferried over, the technology was current, but M noted it wasn't working, the monitors were all blinking, endings that hadn’t taken place for millennia were occurring.

Hadn't these problems been solved centuries before, back when we lived on the planets, he wondered, or was this some kind of drill, or cybergame? It had been so long ago, before DNA was altered for eternal life, and human memory was backed up on storage drives in case a body was destroyed, so long since someone died. In fact, for over 400 years a game was being played to see who could give a name to the humans who once passed away, probably open for another 400 years as eternals had so little competitive drive.

And then, accidentally walking into a corridor, he saw what the experiment was. Every measuring machine for every force in this part of the universe was pointed in their direction. They wanted to know if there really was a change, if some force left the body at the end, so they were letting the changes happen and taking measurements “M,” he heard someone whisper in his ear just as he started to get angry. “Don’t worry, we can get them back off the memory drives.”