The furthest particle that once belonged to you will reach the stars while the closest one is still where you ended. The ambition to go anywhere, to see and know everything is within your grasp. It cost nothing, except everything you were.
The first voice speaks:
"Contrary to common belief, conquering death did not change the world in any noticeable ways, because we eventually realized there is only so much to do and see in life, much of which was already familiar to humanity. Time wasn't relevant to us in the way it had been, and centuries now passed without anyone noticing. Time, as powerful as it once had been, loosened its grip on us."
You sit and wait for your turn. This is what completes you.
"Our cells were forced to renew themselves at a much higher rate than before, making old age a thing of the past. However, we were still physically vulnerable, even though fatal accidents were uncommon. Science next set out to make our physical bodies tougher and enable us to experience our planet like we couldn't before. Many wanted to test these new limits by exploring inhospitable environments alone and unprotected. The first of us to dive into the depths of the Mariana Trench spent a hundred years in pressures that in the past couldn't sustain life for a minute. That made us realize that the real problem to conquering our universe lies in the limits that physics sets us. Fear of dying had never stopped us from venturing into the dark unknown, but to reach the farthest edges of our universe, we needed to overcome the simple constraints of space and time. While we could survive in any environment without so much as a scrap of clothing or a morsel of food, we couldn't escape the boundaries our bodies set to our minds."
The moment of your deliverance is drawing closer. You had forgotten what a complicated emotion anticipation could be: the anxiety of waiting finally eclipsed by the fulfillment of hopes that so long dictated your every action.
"The level of desperation that overcame us would be incomprehensible today. We naively thought there was nothing more for us to do in this universe. We became so bored with ourselves that we willingly resigned all cognitive functions, which raised the question of what to do with our bodies afterwards. In gratitude of everything that had been given to us, we wanted to give ourselves back to the world, so to speak, and some of us even believed it would expand our consciousness exponentially as our atoms eventually spread throughout space: we buried ourselves into the ground and waited for the earth to slowly digest us. Others figured a more natural approach was to be absorbed into the biomass of a more apex being and hoped that the natural cycle would take care of the rest. We sought out alien species, near extinct beasts, and laid our bodies in front of the animal until it consumed them, which took a while longer than we initially expected. Our enhanced regenerative abilities made their feast last for years."
"Of course, when looked at from a scientific perspective, these ideas were preposterous. But even though humanity had shed every one of the shackles that once bound us, emotions still prescribed our fate. We were baffled by how creative and absurd the things we came up with were. Those eventually led us to think how we could separate our mind from the body that imprisoned it. We began exploring possibilities of how to preserve consciousness in a network of cellular matter, independent of any one physical entity. After that, none of us would want to be held back by our bodies anymore."
What constitutes a person? What makes you you? Your memories, your lived experiences, your pains and your pleasures. What can you shed and still be you? These questions are stifled by the countless possibilities that lie ahead of you. You step into the chamber and the walls close all around you; your life begins.
"We quickly concluded that if a person's first cells were imbued with a consciousness in vitro, they couldn't make sense of what was happening to them and quickly retorted by attacking anything they felt threatened by. After learning from these mistakes, we built the simulator where we could grow into humans. We figured that first we needed to understand how and why we should avoid dying in the first place. The simulator was built around the lived experiences of the first of us who went through the process of coding our consciousness into our cells. The benefit of teaching general ideas about life and the world was that none of us who came after had any ideas of our own. We could pick and choose what we wanted to teach ourselves, and it worked. We as subjects promoted how emancipating the experience was and many more wanted what we offered."
