In 2058 mankind made a shocking discovery that, in retrospect, seemed almost too obvious to the average bystander. The discovery, the confirmation, of the soul threw religions into an uproar and science threw out the book. Everything changed, but nothing was different. Confusing, I know.

I guess I should introduce myself, huh? Call me Davis. I’m seventeen years old, and I currently attend the local university. I can’t tell you much past that except I live in Colorado and work in a lab studying Soul Tracing. To make it clear as mud, Soul Tracing or ST is the process of converting data from the soul to computer data. Essentially, the end plan is to be able to enter the cyber “world” with the soul and retain the information we pull when we return to our bodies.

The current year is 2070, and we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do. Years ago we could barely remember dreams when we woke up, now we’re able to control the information filtering in from them. We even managed to figure out what caused that feeling of having met someone even when there was no way you could have. Believe it or not, that was your soul mingling with others. That déjà vu you felt from something you know you’ve never done, also your soul. The afterlife though… that’s something we haven’t pinned down yet.

What we do know is that everyone is connected by the “collective unconscious,” which acts as a tie across all humanity. Meeting people’s souls across human history often brought on dreams of intense and vivid situations, the kind that you wake up from and forget all of five minutes later unless you write that stuff down. You know those one, where the alarm goes off at the best part? Or the ones where you just suddenly wake up for no reason at all. Well, guess what? One person sharing a dream waking up suddenly wakes everyone else up, so blame your sleep partners… wait, that came out wrong.

Anyway! We’ve been working on tying this research to our other major breakthrough, CyberTech networks. They’re like the internet mixed with an augmented reality overlay powered by human electro-magnetics, and they’re the most amazing way to share information and entertainment. Everyone is fitted with a device at birth; most get a necklace or an earpiece, if you’re unlucky and still wear glasses, you can get yours swapped out with your frames and have AR lenses that adjust as you get older. Oddly, a lot of people still go for glasses instead of fixing their vision… and some people buy them just to look cool.

So here we are, the most connected we’ve ever been, and yet we’re still working on fixing the problems plaguing our species. War still happens, poverty is almost completely gone now that we have synthesis machines, and crime has gone almost completely digital, but overall we humans are working toward a better life. Which brings me to Soul Tracing, actually.

Children back at the dawn of CyberTech began to have more powerful interactions in their sleep than adults could imagine. Somehow, children could move about and do things in their sleep that sounded at first like folly. Children hundreds of miles away from one another talking and playing while asleep, spreading information and messages and events before the adults would ever hear about them. It wasn’t until the first of them hit puberty that anyone put two and two together; the CyberTech allowed the children to move freely in their souls while unconscious… at a cost. One in every thousand would be trapped, comatose, because they died in their dreams.

This actually brings me to my work as a SoulTech. I was the first “hacker” to design a safeguard for the CyberTech, spreading that patch to my friends and then to their friends caused a dramatic shift in safety. I was eight when the people from CyCor showed up to ask me about the patch I had made, and a year later I was fast tracked through school by the company. I entered the university at eleven, paid in full by CyCor, and was offered a position as a researcher for them in my local area… provided I also offered to do repairs and upgrades for the locals.

I spend my time conducting “dive” research; the process of inducing a coma-like state and taking the data from the CyberTech device to recreate an artificial “soul” with all the memories of the person “diving” in our experiments. Pretty soon, we’re hoping to be able to bring coma patients back by infusing a new “soul” into their gear and wake them up. But there’s a cool alternate feature to this research that the suits plan to monetize; instant learned skills. Think like picking up a skill book or magic scroll in a game and suddenly you have that ability, but in real life. Soldiers could be trained to use brand new weaponry in seconds, gain years of combat experience in seconds, pass on generations of ability to the next set of soldiers to win greater wars. Or you could learn how to fluently speak a language and pick locks like a pro to impress your gender of choice.

Me, personally, I just think it would be cool to learn self defence without getting my butt kicked three days a week at the local studio. Or maybe learn to draw. You never know, could be fun.

“Hey, Davis! We’re about to start the next trial! Get in here!”

That was my lab partner Suresh; tall, olive complexion, and striking blue eyes. Suresh is a complicated person to deal with; identifying as a female, but looking/sounding/acting like a male, it’s hard to figure out if he… sorry, she… is playing with us or if there’s an underlying issue with hi- I mean, with her family and she’s acting out. Needless to say, she provides a balance to my lab… which brings me to my other lab partner, Nina.

Nina (spritely, lithe, and green eyed as Jealousy) is our designated diver, local loudmouth, and generally a fun time to be around. Some days she’s a she, some days she claims to be an attack helicopter. I know she does this to mess with Suresh, but she doesn’t mean any harm by it. Though I have had to hold Suresh back from laying into Nina after a few late nights and a couple of strong drinks.

“Alright girls,” I said as I slowly walked into the lab, “how are we looking?”

Suresh turned to the monitor and threw me a thumbs up. Nina peeled herself out of her lab coat, revealing the one piece swimsuit she used for diving and threw the coat at my head. I could hear her bare feet slapping on the cold tile floor and a splash before I could get the coat out of my face. I saw her slinging a re-breather over her head as she got herself situated in the semi-gelatinous liquid we used for our test tanks. Eventually, we plan to get a mix that allows breathing in the gel while submerged, but that’s for after another test group to work on.

“She’s not mad at you, she found Lexi sleeping with Horace over in genetics. The issue with being a monogamous lesbian dating a bisexual with a high libido, you know?” Suresh said as she focused on getting the machinery synced to Nina’s CyberTech.

I moved over to my terminal and popped my newest capture program into the system to run one last debug before having Nina run it in her system. The debug came back with one bug, caused by a lack of human connection, so I was both sceptical and curious to see how things would go. I packaged and signed the data, threw it over to Nina’s test gear, and cleared my throat.

“Alright, here’s the play. The new program should prevent he device from shorting on us again, but it’s going to eat battery like nobody’s business. There’s an emergency shut off button coded in, which Nina just needs to say the safe word to activate, and it will bring her back to us. The test time limit is thirty minutes, you’ll be forcibly recalled at the end of that. Starting count down.” I said.

“Ten.”

“Nine”

“Wait-“

“Eight.”

“Seven.”

“What’s the safe word?”

“Two.”

“Hasselhoff.”

“Test start!”