Robert watched the family walk down the hall and out of sight. They had dodged another bullet; his supervisor would be pleased.

He closed the door and sat in the still-warm seat at the terminal. The blinking cursor depressed him deeply. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

From all indications, the software was flawless, but every time someone was transferred in, the same thing happened. A huge spike in activity, over in nanoseconds, and then nothing. The coders were stumped. Diagnostics showed that the neural maps were being converted perfectly. The problem had to be elsewhere.

The base psychiatrists speculated that the subjects were effectively committing suicide. Simultaneous access to a lifetime’s worth of memories, lack of companionship, lack of sensory input…there were plenty of reasons to reject digital immortality.

Everyone was told that the glitch would be worked through in time. Until then, do whatever is necessary to keep the subjects’ families from suspecting anything.

You gotta stay funded.