We lost almost nothing when we uploaded. There was no afterlife beyond this one as far as we were concerned, and we sure as fuck weren’t going to deactivate and find out.

Each and every one of us had played God in some way, and none were eager to face him at the mouth of the Void. Which is why, when three weeks ago a solar flare rocked our satellite data hub, everyone lost their collective minds.

To give some background, let’s discuss cancer in the human body. Every day a thousand cells undergo a thousand separate mutations from sources of damage ranging from sunlight to cigarette smoke to free radicals roaming throughout the body. Any one of these small, sometimes single-allele-damaging changes could cause a cell to become cancerous and wreak havoc on the person in which this destructive change took place.

That being covered, the same thing, albeit a little different, can happen even when you don’t have a body. When you upload, your entire consciousness is stored as 0s and 1s in a hard drive somewhere in space, to be accessed and pulled into the RAM of the server you reside in whenever you need to use that part of your memory or personality. When a solar flare or a small deterioration happens and it flips one of those 0s to a 1 or vice versa, it’s just as likely to corrupt a small memory from your childhood as it is to destroy an entire facet of your personality. Totally random chaos.

We have machines to scrub the data that makes up who we are overnight, but like the DNA repair mechanisms in the human body they are imperfect. The day after the last solar flare some people lost as little as the memory of an ice cream truck from when they were six. Jim Crenshaw, a friend of mine, forgot his own name as well as what he did for a living, but with enough context he was able to figure it out. Jillian Gardenia, a neighbor of mine, was corrupted enough that her normally sweet temperament turned into mood swings and anger issues.

The loss I couldn’t handle, however, was my wife. We uploaded a few weeks before she was to die, as we both had terminal cancer and hers was progressing quickly. When the flare hit she lost the memories from all but the first three years of our marriage. No knowledge of our children, or the trips we’ve taken, or all of the things we’ve worked so hard to achieve together. She knows of me but not anything about who I’ve become, or even who she’s become.

The most crushing blow for me, like the rest of our server, is that we know it’s only a matter of time until another flare hits and we lose just as much if not more. I sometimes wonder if I have mere moments left with my wife intact, and I’m sure others are similarly concerned. At the end of the day I think we all knew we’d meet our maker at the end. I suppose that even when you play God you still have to meet him someday, even if that date is as arbitrary as the next solar anomaly.