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The first thing that you remember is that you are dead.
The total separation of your head from the rest of your body took less than a second, but one's perception of time becomes warped in moments of extreme stress and stimulation. For you, it felt more like a year, like twelve months of terrible agony. Now you are alone and there is nothing but absolute sensory deprivation, a void that encompasses the entirety of your being.
Yet somehow, you are aware of it. You're dead. You shouldn't be aware of anything.
<span class="mu-b">Who are you?</span>
Those three words reverberate in your mind. They feel like a thought, but they are too coherent, too deliberate, too sudden. They came from nowhere, they were precipitated by nothing. The question comes from beyond the void, from outside of yourself. Someone, or something, wants to learn who you are. Reflexively, you recall your name and by doing so, you inadvertently share that information with this intruder.
<span class="mu-g">Sasha Malevich.</span>
That isn't the only information that you provide. Everything that you think, everything that you feel, the totality of yourself is bared with your captor. With nothing but your own thoughts to occupy you, it seems as though as an eternity passes before the next external thought is thrust into your brain. In this abyss, it is impossible to keep track of time.
<span class="mu-b">Sasha. You died ten years ago, during the Fall. Fortunately, we were able to retrieve a copy of your ego, and many others, from a TITAN uploading facility. This means that you can be resleeved. You will be able to live again. How do you feel about this prospect?</span>
Your memories are still coming back to you, slowly but surely. You are yet to recall what a TITAN is, or what the Fall was. However, you are able to remember what resleeving is. Your ego, your mind, can be copied and placed within a new morph, a new body. Back when you were alive, it was a relatively new process, one that rendered death inconsequential and was surrounded by controversy. After all, the copy isn't actually you, is it? It would be a newly born entity, with your memories. But if that is true, then what does that make you, in your current state, floating in this empty abyss?
>You feel horrified. The real you is long dead. You are nothing but a soulless replica, you shouldn't exist at all. This is sick and wrong.
>You feel angry. You died ten years ago, why couldn't they do this any sooner? You have every reason to resent a world that left you behind.
>You feel wary. There has to be some sort of catch. You won't agree to anything until you know what this stranger wants from you in return.
>You feel grateful. It doesn't matter that you're a copy, or that it will be a copy of you walking around in a new morph. You will persist.
>Renew your neuroplasticity. You recall how to prevent your true thoughts from being read in situations like this. However, the intruder will be aware of your resistance.
