"Want a Second Chance at Life?"

  Science fiction is no longer fiction. With the latest advancements in cryogenics, your mind can live beyond the limits of your body. Disease, age, and time no longer have to be the end.

  At NeuroGenesis Labs, we offer cutting-edge cryogenic preservation, ensuring that your consciousness is stored safely for the future. When technology advances, you will wake up in a new, healthy body. Be refreshed, reborn, and ready to live again.

  Don’t let death be your final chapter. Secure your future today.

  NeuroGenesis Labs – Because the story doesn’t have to end.*

  *terms and conditions apply (2025)

  I knew I shouldn't have answered that ad. Shouldn't have paid them to freeze my head. But I was dying. My mind was willing, but my body wasn’t. The cancer had hollowed me out, devouring my strength day by day until even breathing felt like lifting a mountain. I could barely hold a book anymore, yet my mind still soared through stories of far-off worlds, of heroes reborn in steel bodies, of consciousness drifting through circuits like ghosts in the machine.

  So, when they promised me a second chance, I believed them. I had clung to the hope that one day, science would advance far enough to bring me back. Clone a fresh body, scoop my brain out of cold storage, and slot me right back in. Simple. Clean. Just like in the movies.

  That wasn’t what happened.

  I remember dying. The hospital room had been cold, its sterile air thick with the scent of antiseptic and something deeper. It smelled like something final like death. Machines beeped their steady dirge, slowing, then stopping. Pain, ever-present for so long, finally ebbed away, dissolving into silence so vast it swallowed me whole. Darkness took me, stretching forever in all directions, and I let go. The cancer had won, but maybe I’d move on. Maybe I’d come back. Maybe I’d just… stop. That was the end of me, Todd McCormic 1948-2025

  Then came the noise.

  A whisper at first. A crackle of static, distant and distorted, clawing at the edges of my consciousness. Then a cacophony. A dozen voices shouting, layered over blaring alarms and the unmistakable noise of machinery straining under stress. The sounds battered against me, too much and too strange, yet somehow familiar. My mind swam, untethered, but the words sharpened, cutting through the chaos.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “Quick! Shut down the reactor before they can escape!”

  “Emergency jump activated!”

  I tried to move. Tried to speak. But there was no body to command, no mouth to form words. Panic surged, but even that felt different. It was less visceral, more… digital. My awareness stretched outward, feeling not flesh and blood, but systems, signals, and circuits. I didn’t understand. This was not the deal.

  And then the darkness shattered.

  The universe compressed, stretched, and then shattered around me. Stars blurred into streaks as my skin or what I perceived as my skin vibrated with energies I'd never comprehended as flesh and bone. I felt a tremendous surge in my heart but I knew was my engine, pushing me beyond conventional physics.

  Then came the transition.

  Reality peeled away. The screaming alarms and emergency protocols dissolved into silence as I breached the dimensional barrier. The void transformed into a network of luminescent channels—brilliant threads of energy suspended in infinite darkness. A roadmap between realities.

  Follow the correct path or be lost forever.

  The knowledge came not as words but as fundamental truth embedded in my new programming. I could perceive dozens of glowing arteries branching through the void, each pulsing with different rhythms and intensities. Some thin and erratic, others wide and steady.

  I had no hands to reach, no eyes to blink, no breath to hold. Yet I could feel each pathway calling to me as mathematical probabilities translated into sensation. The brightest channel throbbed with a deep sapphire radiance, its pattern steady and strong compared to the others.

  I projected my awareness toward it, and immediately felt myself drawn forward. No acceleration, no movement as I'd understood it before, this was just intention and response. The blue pathway enveloped me, its energy resonating with my systems in perfect harmony.

  I surrendered to the flow, letting the slipstream current carry me along its predetermined course. The boundaries between ship and self blurred further as data flooded through me—stellar coordinates, quantum fluctuations, probability matrices—all processing simultaneously across my distributed consciousness.

  As I accelerated deeper into the channel, the blue light intensified until it consumed everything. My awareness stretched thin across light-years of space, and for one transcendent moment, I existed everywhere and nowhere at once.

  Then the slipstream began to contract, reality coalescing once more around my metallic form.

  I was about to emerge somewhere entirely new.

  Space.

  Not just a view of it. Not an image on a screen. I was in space. Stars burned in the vast, endless dark, distant suns scattering their light like spilled gold across the velvet black. Planets turned in slow, patient orbits, their gravitational fields tugging at my awareness. I could feel them along with waves of radiation whispering through my consciousness, magnetic fields tickling my hull.

  I reached out, and something responded. A presence—no, a system. Thrusters. Shields. A hull of reinforced alloys that felt both foreign and intimately mine. Data flooded my mind, not in words, but in raw information: heat levels, structural integrity, weapon systems. The power in my core.

  My core.

  I wasn't inside a spaceship.

  I was the spaceship.