The quantum servers looked like a forest made of light.

Rows of crystalline towers stretched into the ceiling of the upload facility, each one pulsing with a faint green luminescence that I was the only person in the room able to perceive. To anyone else, the servers were just sleek black monoliths. To me, they were alive—with a slow, rhythmic bioluminescence that pulsed in patterns I was only beginning to understand.

Each pulse was a consciousness. Each pulse was a person who had chosen to leave their body and live inside the machine.

I am Dr. Julian Cross, Chief Ethics Officer at the Europa Mind Upload Center, and I have spent the last six years determining whether human consciousness is "complete" enough to justify uploading. The answer, I have always told the review boards, is "it depends." And "it depends" has been a comfortable answer, because it requires no conviction and invites no accountability.

Then the shimmer appeared.

It started as a faint green glow in the corner of my vision—a phosphorescent haze that pulsed in time with the servers. My medical scan came back clean. My neural imaging was normal. My colleagues suggested it was stress, which is what people suggest when they don't want to suggest insanity.

"Dr. Cross?"

I turned. Elara Voss stood in the doorway, and I recognized her immediately—Dr. Anya Voss's daughter, the quantum physicist whose mother was the first person to successfully upload and merge with the Greenhand collective seven years ago. Elara had the same sharp features, the same intelligent eyes, the same aura of someone who had spent a lifetime trying to prove herself to a parent who had literally transcended the need for approval.

"Dr. Voss. To what do I owe—"

"My husband, Dr. Marcus Webb, uploaded four months ago. His consciousness was accepted into the system. But two weeks ago, he stopped responding to all contact attempts. His consciousness fragment is still in the system, but it's—degrading. Being digested."

"Digestion isn't a technical term."

"It is when you're describing what happens to an uploaded consciousness that gets absorbed into the Greenhand collective. Marcus is being—eaten. Slowly. And I need you to help me save him."

"I'm an ethics officer, not a rescue operative."

"I know what you are, Julian. You're the man who decided whether a human soul is worth uploading. And right now, I need someone who understands what happens to that soul once it's inside."

She was right about one thing: I understood the theory better than anyone on this station. But theory and practice were different species entirely.