Hue looked at himself.

  It crossed his mind that "looking" wasnt the correct term.

  The only awareness he had was of a computer console window.

  These files in front of him were all he had to go on.

  Compile.sh, run.sh and mind.buffer were self explainitory.

  checkpoint.sh was interesting. A checkpoint in nueral networks was a data dump of the current state of an evolving process.

  In Hues case, he imagined it would create a copy of himself as is. He did not touch this.

  input and output looked like stream files. These held data, the same way that a pipe held water.

  Hue had his suspicions.

  The same way he had been interacting with the terminal, Hue started testing

  Hue concentrated on an image of a puppy, and strings of nonsensense appeared on the screen in front of him.

  He suspected that the issue was with the "cat" program.

  The method of interaction was surprisingly intuitive.

  Next, he looked at the input stream.

  Another window appeared, before fading away a few seconds later.

  Hue routed his output to an image file, before sending an image of a puppy.

  Hue started to feel a little better about his situation.

  This was workable, he could build a sensorium and avoid going insane.

  A small amount of the stress that was building fell off of his shoulders.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  With this command, Hue opened a very familiar interface in his awareness.

  Hue saw a familiar desktop.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  He found he could tab around the interface, but he had no ability to control the mouse.

  Hue tried to sigh, and when he couldnt, he became frustrated.

  While he was making progress, Hue decided he needed at least some quality of life adjustments.

  With this command, hue copied the sound portions of his output back into his input.

  He could now hear himself.

  A large sigh echoed through Hues sensorium.

  Hue wasnt the sort of person who enjoyed talking to himself, but he expected to be able to make sounds, and it was a massive relief to hear himself breathing. Even if he knew it wasnt real.

  *Ding, DING*

  A notification appeared on the desktop

  Hue hurried to turn down the sound volume.

  He was still navigating with mental tab and enter presses.

  And he was free! Hue quickly navigated back to the web browser.

  Hue logged into his social media, and what he found confirmed his darkest fear.

  Hue would never have posted this. It was clearly a way to have him dissapear without suspicion.

  Hue had been avoiding it, but it needed to be done. He opened up the website of his appartment security camera hosting site.

  His security system had been wiped clean.

  He brought up the live feed.

  His home was empty.

  All of his personal belongings were gone.

  Hue had never been particularly emotionally attached to his "wetware" so to speak.

  A transhumanist through and through, Hue would have beel elated with the current state of things, if there was not some shadowy, high-tech organisation hunting him down.

  He knew it was time to knuckle down and secure his existence. While he had fooled them into thinking that they had cleaned up the server he was on, he couldnt rely on that.

  He needed to create backups.