As usual, they assembled in the throne room. It was a team of the best scientists working in many fields. Doctors, geneticists, cyberneticists, nanotechnologists, and numerous specialists of a few fields that have not yet been officially named. They all had a single common task: making emperor Justod I immortal. No matter what. Money, ethics, faith or morality were irrelevant. The emperor wished for an eternal life and he shall get it.
Until now, the most promising way to achieve this goal was cloning. Secret imperial factories were already producing dozens of the emperor’s clones. The clones were becoming better and better. Thanks to new artificial uteri the scientists managed to reduce the time required for the development from an embryonic stage into a mature body to less than a year. There was only one problem left that needed a solution - copying the emperor’s mind into a new body.
Terrence Ebodiah, whose name was to go down in history, a geneticist who originally assisted the work on synchronizing the artificial uterus’s code with the clone, had a theory of his own. He was trying to convince the others to accept it. He thought that better compatibility between the clone and the original could be achieved if the clone possessed only female genetic code, because the transfer of personality on cellular level would be much simpler. In the previous meeting he presented the results of his experiments to the emperor. They were stunning indeed, however, all of them concerned the transfer of a female-pattern mind. Cyberneticists and specialists of digital storage of mind records agreed with Terrence. Today, they were supposed to present new solutions for the neural crown.
Emperor Justod I appeared as usual - in the form of a holoprojection sitting on the throne. His real body was a few hundred floors below in the Bedroom. It was the most heavily guarded room in all of the empire. Without exception, anyone who had access to the Bedroom had remotely detonated explosive charges implanted in their spinal cord. The device could be triggered by the emperor or the head of security of the Bedroom. What was the precautionary measure taken towards the head of security? Nobody knew that apart from the emperor himself.
- Get to the fucking point, gentlemen - Justod I began unceremoniously.
- I have a recording of the first successful transfer. I used the new project created by my colleagues cyberneticists, who deserve praise for that - Terrence stepped forward quickly and pressed a button on a remote for a pocket projector. A projection of a recording of the experiment appeared in front of the throne.
First, there was a man reciting dozens of random words and numbers from memory. A screen invisible to him was showing that everything he said was consistent with the pattern. Then the image changed and the same man was lying down immobilized and there were dozens of electrodes and wires connected to his body. The camera zoomed in on his head, or in fact, what was left of it. The upper part of the man’s face was gone and the skull ended below the eye sockets. A module of the new neural crown was hanging above it. Hundreds of microlazers in the crown were cutting out pieces of the brain, while other robotic arms, which were moving so fast that they were only noticeable when they were undergoing the process of cleaning from the bloody jelly, were reading what was cut away from the tissue.
- By lowering the body’s temperature and administering the new blood substitute - said Terrence - we were able to shorten the reading process to 12 minutes.
- I want the specifics, Mr. Ebodiah. I already saw the chopped up brain - the emperor’s voice was piercing the air like a laser knife cuts through butter.
Terrence didn’t say another word, he just forwarded to the next scene. A naked woman was lying tied down to a table in a lab. The neural crown’s output module was moving up from above her head.
- Name, last name, prisoner number, sequence! - The voice from outside the frame belonged to Terrence.
- Stevo Ronnah, 72S0220LS - said the woman and she started reciting. An image of the screen with the record of the pattern reappeared. The woman repeated a series of random words in the correct order. When she finished the recording stopped.
-Full transfer - Terrence spoke again. - Excluding the clone’s gender, of course. We conducted a series of tests later. Memory compliance at 100 percent six hours before cryogenic treatment, which is a one time damaging operation carried out before the reading of the brain. Afterwards, we noted a few voids in short term memory but until 15 minutes before cryo treatment the memory was compatible at over 80 percent. At the moment, we’re testing the influence of gender change on personality but the biochemical section, encouraged by my success, is working on synchronizing with male clones.
- Very well, Mr. Ebodiah - the face of Justod I’s image smiled for the first time. - What else do you need to speed up the process?
- I could use another team to accelerate the production of clones and one guarded lab in a calm place - Terrence Ebodiah knew exactly what he wanted to ask the emperor for.
- Please wait for the information regarding the lab and as far as the team you can pick it yourself - the emperor made an automatic gesture to end the connection but he refrained at the last moment. - One more thing, can you do something about the reading process so it doesn’t turn the brain into such a mash every time?
-I’m afraid it’s impossible. The clones have genetically designed input ports implemented at the embryonic stage, which are used to upload new consciousness. However, not a single human born from a woman has this. We have to take apart the brain and the spinal cord to get to the memory and consciousness.
Besides - Terrence didn’t say it out loud, he just thought it - I want to see how those fucking machines scoop out your brain, piece by piece, you old prick, after I substitute the anesthetic liquid with something special. I’ll do this not only because of what your reign has done to all those people we killed for your immortality, but also because of what your every fucking whim led to. Most of all, it’s payback for what you did to my little stepsister. It doesn’t matter if you did it in person or hired goons that you call your guards. You see, you old prick, I know something that nobody suspects. I know how to get to the Bedroom, to your real body conjoined to dozens of pieces of other people’s bodies. People who were so unlucky that they were cut up into pieces that became your lungs, heart, intestines and other organs essential to keep your fucking brain alive. People like Ellen. It won’t be easy to get there. But on the day of the reading an exception will be made for the empire’s head geneticist that’s supervising the work on the neural crown.
So Terrence Ebodiah, whose name was going to go down in history, smiled at the emperor and the emperor Justod I smiled back at Terrence Ebodiah.