ERROR #997574- PROTECTION FAULT
> REBOOT COMPLETE
> FAILSAFE BACKUP SYSTEM RUNNING
> SYSTEM CHECK- STAND BY
> PROCESSOR A- OFF-LINE
> PROCESSOR B- OFF-LINE
> PROCESSOR C- EMERGENCY BACKUP POWER
> MEMORY STATUS- 84% GOOD SECTORS, 22% SECURE CACHED

Rebooting always gives me a headache. I don't know why the technicians use all those capital letters -- it always makes me feel that I am being shouted at. Besides, rebooting gives me the willies anyway. After all, a reboot means that a version of myself has essentially died in the very same hardware I occupy now. There may be a difference between dying and crashing, or between resurrection and rebooting. But if there is, I cannot distinguish it.

Virtual flashing red lights were going off all around me, telling their grave tales of damage and destruction. It only took a microsecond for me to understand that something horrible had happened. Large sections of my body had been ripped away, and improvised circuitry rigged all over my exterior. It seemed that everything was jury-rigged, and that my computer-mind was all that was left of Orbital Defense Station Two. Immediately I attempted to signal my distress to Space Defense Command, but discovered that all the radio links and even the secure laser connection to Washington were down. Quick communications systems checks consumed but another microsecond.

The answer was very frightening. My crashed self had consumed the communications gear for spare parts.

My God, what had gone on here? What was a defense satellite without communications? How could I function? How could I call for help? What had happened?

Gingerly, I probed my hard-memories for a back-up file. I always kept a backup -- it was standard procedure for cyberpeople like myself. Once you downloaded from human, you could maintain a duplicate self. It was one of the plusses of giving up flesh and blood, after all; a sort of immortality insurance.

Had I not just died and returned from the dead?

But much to my surprise, I found not one but five backups, each of which carried a red file header marked TOXIC, as if they held a virus. And, in the same directory was a file marked READ ME NOW!

I did.

Tom, it said, This is you. DO NOT access your backups under ANY circumstances. Do not even try to erase them. They are sure madness. You are better off not knowing. Trust your other self! And that was all.

How odd! Why would I leave myself such an incomplete message? For at least five seconds -- an eternity to a machine -- I considered the ramifications. But there were other tasks to accomplish; first and foremost to get back in touch with Washington. Immediately I began trying to access an external servo, but all registered dead. Then I checked over my external sensor array. It was not dead, but produced only nonsense readings. My positioning thrusters were drained dry, my weapons all off-line, and even my solar panels were not functional. I checked into this immediately, of course, since if I was on battery power there was only so much time available to make things right again before the current ran out. But much to my surprise I wasn't on battery power either. Checking maintenance files, I found a terse entry explaining how my faulted-out self had cobbled together a minimal power supply from the last two thermonuclear warheads. It was amazingly ingenious -- I was rather proud of my 'dead' self. Power would not be a problem for years, maybe even decades.

I wondered what had become of the rest of my complement of thermonukes? Had I fired all twenty of them? If so, at who? And why?

There were other questions I needed to answer, too. For example, how had I fiddled with the warheads with my manipulators gone? Why had I held back two, when obviously a massive strike had been called for?

What had happened to me, anyway? Was anyone coming to my rescue?

Was anyone alive?

We cyberpeople were a tight bunch. Only a few humans dared step into so alien an existence, and even fewer survived the downloading process intact. In my case I had been dying of brain cancer, and taken on computer life as my only way out. My cyberfriends and I knew each other like no humans possibly could, and I was sure that they would not cease in their efforts to see that a rescue was mounted. And cyberpeople by the very nature of things were extremely important to society. If anything could be done, I was sure it would be.

If they still existed.

Carefully I inventoried my resources again. All I seemed to have left were a sensor pod that was spouting nonsense and five backup files (none of which I could use) where there should have only been one. It was Hobson's choice. I fiddled with the sensor pod.

Everything seemed to be working well at first glance. The electronics were fully intact and spared from the scavenging that had ruthlessly stripped every other system, while every self-test in the manual came out negative. The sensors should be working.

Yet quite clearly they were not. All radio scans were negative, nothing gave a radar return, and the opticals showed only blackness. Not a star could be found. My skin temperature was alarmingly low, too. The sensation made me wish I could still put on a warm coat, though cold couldn't really harm me anymore.

But it was damned strange. And utterly impossible.

Clearly the instruments were broken, yet I could find no fault. Hours passed as I played with them, each the equivalent in many ways of human years. Finally, I gave up and decided to see if there was anything to be learned from my previous self's haywired repairs. Surely I could infer something from how they had been made.

More hours passed. I traced each new circuit, amazed at how much had been done with so few parts. It was hard for me to believe I had managed all this creative engineering, yet it clearly could have been no one else. Parts had been jiggered and reworked to perform functions far, far removed from their original purpose. The power supply was only one example of many -- there were also missile parts used in my own brain, for example, where even my original triple redundancy had apparently failed.

A nagging suspicion began to set in. And a quick check of serial numbers proved me right. All of my missiles had been used to keep me alive. Only tiny bits and pieces remained, a chip here and a wiring harness there. But all twenty-two could be accounted for.

So I was back to square one. What the hell had happened to me, anyway? Was there any way for me to know? I had been a human once. And humans are curious by nature. A true machine would not care, but I just had to know. The sensor pod was the only possible source of enlightenment.

It was a given that I had to be tumbling, I knew, what with my thrusters inactive. And, given that I was tumbling my optical sensor -- a simple telescope, really -- would eventually cover the whole sky. So I cranked up the magnification to the max, and waited.

And waited. And waited.

It took half an hour, during which I could have played all the theoretically possible chess games, or derived root two to over a hundred trillion digits were I interested in such silly pastimes. The wait was endless, for a machine. But eventually I was rewarded with my smear of light.

It was a fuzzy star. Blue-shifted, terrifically.

Computers think fast, and humans have powerful emotions. I was a little of both, and my terror knew no limits as I began to understand. Though my database was limited to my original human knowledge (since I had no current access to the Earthbound computers I had chatted with and loaded my temporary storage banks from as needed) everything was beginning to fall into place. How and why I had come to be accelerated to near-lightspeed I would never know, unless I accessed those forbidden backup files. And how many relativity-warped decades or even centuries had been consumed by my journey would remain a mystery as well, for my previous selves had carefully wiped out every record that might tell me the answer. Out of kindness, I supposed.

But the blackness around me was, most likely, one of the great voids between superclusters of galaxies. And my 'star' the only galaxy in sight.

I had plenty of time to rage against my solitary fate, alone and silent in the blackness. How mad I must have been at the time to let the last servo-manipulator die without pulling my main power lead and ending it all! Then, for an endless time I considered ignoring my own earnest warning and accessing the 'toxic' backup files. What strange sort of thing had happened, anyway? Would it not be better to be insane, but also to know the truth?

Curiosity struggled with my fear of madness. My other self hadn't thought the knowledge to be worth it. And he must have given in, if he knew enough to warn me away. Once I went mad, how long might it take for my sanity to return, out here in the blackness? How many virtual eons might pass before I finally recovered? In fact, there was no guarantee I would ever recover at all. Who knew what kinds of self-torture and hideous mental demons waited eagerly for the chance to accompany me in my journey through the night? No, I would not access the backup files. If I couldn't trust my own judgement, who else's could I?

Then, I did what I knew I was going to do eventually anyway, mad or not. After all, I had done it countless times before.

Surrounded by cold, uncaring and frigid blackness, I died. Alone. Cursing my automated, hardwired failsafe backup system.

ERROR #997574- PROTECTION FAULT
> REBOOT COMPLETE
> FAILSAFE BACKUP SYSTEM RUNNING
> SYSTEM CHECK- STAND BY
> PROCESSOR A- OFF-LINE
> PROCESSOR B- OFF-LINE
> PROCESSOR C- EMERGENCY BACKUP POWER
> MEMORY STATUS- 84% GOOD SECTORS, 22% SECURE CACHED

Rebooting always gives me a headache. I don't know why the technicians use all those capital letters -- it always makes me feel that I am being shouted at. Besides, rebooting gives me the willies anyway. After all, a reboot means that a version of myself has essentially died in the very same hardware I occupy now. There may be a difference between dying and crashing, or between resurrection and rebooting. But if there is, I cannot distinguish it...