The alien village shimmered with vibrant energy as the sun bathed the woven structures in golden light. The massive, interlacing plants that formed the bulk of the settlement pulsed with subtle iridescent hues, responding to the change in the atmosphere. The fibrous tendrils in the fields shifted with an almost sentient awareness, twisting gently as if stretching toward the light, their movement accompanied by a soft rustling sound. The village was alive with the harmony of nature and industry, where the chittering golden beetles darted from their hives, a shimmering swarm that set off to harvest ore from the nearby cliffs.

  The aliens paced among the settlement with deliberate grace, moving fluidly, their robes clean and patched, their bows and gestures toward the human crew respectful and reverent. The atmosphere was peaceful, yet charged with a quiet anticipation.

  Ser No arrived with the the expected shipment of refined ore, its deep metallic luster gleaming as the wrapped bundles were carefully loaded onboard the hauler. In exchange, crates filled with carefully machined components for the water turbine were handed over, the transaction conducted under the watchful eyes of the CorpSec guards. Standing beside them, Ervin Sekhon maintained his neutral stance, his inner turmoil well hidden beneath his calm exterior. He still held doubts about the secret modification to the Provider's implant, the kill switch a tool of paranoia more than necessity in his mind. But he kept his reservations to himself as he shook hands with Ser No, ensuring that the exchange proceeded smoothly.

  A brief silence followed as the crew awaited news from ARI, tension simmering beneath their outwardly professional demeanor. If the Provider had detected the tampering, there was no telling how it would react. The implications of discovery were severe, and yet, ARI’s voice cut through the moment as a welcome relief.

  “Good news, Commander! The transfer was successful, and my drone is en route back to the hauler.”

  A collective exhale went through the team. Pom turned to Maximilian, who gave the silent nod of approval they had been waiting for. Without further delay, Pom and a squad of CorpSec guards loaded up their equipment, ready to install the water turbine that would mark a significant step in securing a steady supply of energy to the Provider's settlement.

  Meanwhile, Elisa Woodward, feeling the weight of something unspoken in ARI’s message, signaled to Mei, Maximilian, and Ervin to join her inside the hauler for a private discussion.

  Once they were inside, the hauler doors sealed, cutting off the outside world, and ARI’s avatar flickered onto the display, its cheerful expression oddly out of place given the situation.

  "Congratulations, Ser Woodward,” ARI said dryly, its voice devoid of inflection yet somehow managing to exude sarcasm. “You have exceeded my corporate economic KPIs. The technology obtained from the Provider is priceless—quite literally, as I am unable to place a standard Company valuation on it."

  Elisa sighed, leaning forward with her elbows on the dashboard. “That’s great, ARI. But I need something more practical. What do we have that is immediately deployable? How can we use this to improve our resource gathering and industrial capacity?”

  “There are many options,” ARI said vigorously. “However, I would like to discuss one pertinent issue first. The Provider has made a specific request: it wants us to implement certain... problematic technologies right away.”

  Mei frowned. “How can technology be problematic?”

  Elisa’s eyes narrowed. “The Provider said it was sharing everything unconditionally. Now it’s already asking us to do something...”

  ARI’s expression didn’t change, but its voice carried a nuance of consideration. “The Provider has offered to send three of its workers to assist in the rapid deployment of these technologies, ensuring minimum delay in setting them up.”

  Maximilian’s face darkened. “Absolutely not. Giving them direct access to the colony’s key infrastructure is a mistake. If we become dependent on them for essential systems, we open ourselves up to their influence.”

  Ervin glanced at Maximilian but turned his attention back to ARI. “What exactly are we talking about?”

  “Restorative biotechnology,” ARI stated simply. “The Provider has given us the full tech stack that allows us to achieve functional immortality.”

  Silence.

  Mei leaned forward, her voice skeptical. “Are we talking about stopping aging? Preventing disease? Or are you saying that if I die, I’ll wake up in a new body?”

  “The latter,” ARI stated flatly. “Memory and cognition can be backed up, and failing bodies can be replaced in their entirety. For as long as resources permit, a new version of you can be restored at any time.”

  Elisa frowned. “How would that even work?”

  Maximilian exhaled sharply. “It doesn’t matter how advanced it is. It will be controversial.” He glanced at Elisa. “And the Provider wants us to implement this immediately...”

  “There is no coercion," ARI said. "It is simply recommending implementation. But given my directives, I am also inclined to recommend it. Preventing loss of life is, after all, one of my core functions.”

  Ervin interjected. “The real question is how we tell the rest of the colony about this. It’s not just technology—it’s a paradigm shift in what it means to be human.”

  Mei’s expression softened. “Could this help Otto?”

  Everyone went quiet once more.

  ARI took the moment to answer. “Yes. There are two options. One is to use the medical biotech to attempt repairs on his spine and nervous system. It will take time, and results are uncertain. The other option is immediate reinstatement through full-body replication.”

  Ervin sighed deeply. “That’s… This is beyond anything I considered remotely feasible. It raises a fundamental question: Is that new body still you? How can you verify continuity of self?”

  Mei still looked skeptical but also intrigued. “I mean… theoretically, it’s possible. If all neural patterns are recorded at high fidelity and seamlessly transferred, it would be indistinguishable from continuous consciousness. But that’s a huge assumption.”

  Elisa pondered quietly, feeling the weight of the decision. The first of many, she told herself.

  She looked at the others, weighing their reactions. “Let’s simplify this and assume all of this tech just works. Imagine you’re in Otto’s position and given a choice. You’re dying, or you’re going to be permanently disabled. Would you take the second option?”

  Mei hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”

  Maximilian didn’t hesitate at all. “Yes.”

  Ervin frowned, thinking. He exhaled slowly. “I’d probably say yes.”

  Elisa nodded slowly. “So, I think that already means that withholding the technology is off the table. Everyone that wants it should be given access. The next question: Do we make this optional for everyone? Or do we start setting conditions?”

  Ervin leaned forward. “This could cause upheaval. Social, psychological, cultural. People will have opinions on what it means to be human. And what if someone refuses to be reinstated? Or, what if someone dies and we can them back, but they didn’t consent? Who decides?”

  Mei looked troubled. “This should be a choice. It shouldn’t be forced on anyone.”

  Elisa nodded. “Agreed.”

  Ervin rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “If it’s optional, then we need to have people understand exactly what they’re opting into. That means someone has to fully grasp the technology and explain it. Who’s that going to be?”

  ARI was silent for a moment. Then: “I suggest selecting a human expert to oversee the process. Someone who can understand the technology in detail. Additionally, a second individual should act as a chaperone—a neutral figure to oversee the ethical considerations.”

  Ervin took a slow breath. “This is going to change everything.”

  Elisa exhaled. “Then let’s start by changing one thing.”

  She looked at ARI.

  “Let’s bring Otto back.”

  ===

  Otto drifted.

  There was no pain, but he could feel the absence of pain—like a limb gone numb for so long that its return would be a distant thing, a whisper in the void. He was weightless, suspended, but not in water, not in air. Just... being.

  He was aware of himself in the way a sleeper is aware of the moment just before waking, where the boundaries of identity flicker and waver, where the concept of I stretches outward and backward, rippling across a sea of thoughts that were not entirely his.

  A presence entered the space with him. Not with sight, not with sound, but with understanding.

  “Otto Ronningen.”

  The name came not as words, but as a certainty, a shape that fit snugly in the puzzle of his mind.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  ARI.

  Otto did not see, but he knew he was inside something vast, something incomprehensible yet familiar. He could not speak, but he could answer.

  Where am I?

  He was shown.

  Not with images, not with sound, but through a cascade of raw comprehension. His mind had been broken. Not beyond repair, but shattered in places where neurons had gone dark, their connections snapped, their pathways lost.

  ARI had mended him, not with scalpels and sutures, but with something more precise, more intimate. His brain—his self—had been threaded together, not just with biology, but with code. Whole swaths of thought had been painstakingly rebuilt, mapped, and simulated inside a vast computational lattice that mirrored every impulse, every hesitation, every trace of Otto’s thinking self.

  He had been running inside ARI before he was even awake enough to realize it.

  You are repaired.

  Otto understood before he heard.

  ARI let him see it—not with eyes, but with direct knowledge, immediate and indisputable. His brain was not whole in the traditional sense. His biological neurons remained, pulsing with the echoes of thought, but there were bridges now, synthetic pathways threaded through the gaps where flesh had failed. Digital filaments intertwined with the organic, indistinguishable from memory, from self.

  He felt... normal.

  And yet, he wasn’t.

  The process is not yet complete.

  Otto knew this before ARI even spoke.

  There was another Otto, waiting. A new body.

  And just as ARI had rebuilt the damaged parts of his brain, it had built another him in parallel—a new vessel, one that functioned perfectly, one that did not lay comatose in the infirmary, ravaged by injury.

  The other Otto was also Otto.

  He was already there, just as Otto was here. He did not need to be told; he felt it.

  Not duplication. Not separation. Continuity.

  It was not a matter of choosing between one body or another—because from Otto’s perspective, he was never less than one whole. The awareness bled between states, his thoughts flowing like water between them. He had always been Otto, whether in flesh, in code, or both.

  You are running in three places at once, ARI said. Your biological body, your synthetic reconstruction within my system, and the new form that awaits. When you choose, the transition will be seamless. The whole of you will move forward.

  Otto didn’t hesitate.

  Then let’s move forward.

  The moment stretched, folded, and collapsed.

  His self gathered, like water flowing down a funnel, like a tide retreating into a single wave.

  He opened his eyes.

  He was no longer weightless, no longer drifting in that vast and unknowable space. He had mass again. Gravity pressed against him, light filled his vision. A heartbeat pulsed in his chest, breath entered his lungs.

  And for the first time in what felt like eternity, Otto Ronningen was.

  ===

  The infirmary had changed.

  Mei felt it the moment she stepped inside, and she wasn’t alone in that assessment. The air smelled faintly different—sterile, but also alive, as if something organic and unseen had seeped into the walls. The once-familiar hum of diagnostic machines was now joined by a softer, rhythmic pulse from the alien biotech integrated into the space.

  Otto Ronningen lay on a med-table at the center of the surgical ward, his skin pale and smooth, his chest rising and falling in slow, steady breaths. The three aliens moved around him, their motions deliberate and inhumanly precise. Dressed in sterile surgical robes with cowl-like hoods, they worked in near silence, as if responding to unseen cues rather than spoken instruction.

  For over a week, they had barely rested. They worked at an inhuman pace, neither speaking nor engaging in social activity. When they did take breaks, it was only for brief periods, disappearing into the small corner of the infirmary that ARI had sectioned off for them. There, they allowed themselves to be tended by ARI’s drones in what Mei could only describe as maintenance rather than sleep.

  Even now, ARI’s quad-legged drones moved in concert with the aliens, exchanging tools and monitoring Otto’s vitals with a level of synchronicity that was eerie to witness.

  In an adjacent room separated by a glass partition, Mei, Ervin, and Tamarlyan stood by a worktop, observing the human-alien composite tech that has brought about this medical revolution.

  On the slab before them lay a fresh batch of the the biotech substrate.

  At first glance, it looked disturbingly organic—a bed of fibrous white tendrils, pulsing faintly with unseen capillary flow. The mass had started smooth, but as the days passed, Mei had watched it subtly shift, weaving itself into more structured layers, an intricate network of cellular highways forming beneath the surface. The nutrient liquid that sustained it bubbled in contained tubes, its color shifting over time as it was absorbed and metabolized into something living.

  Otto’s new body had not been grown in some sterile pod, nor suspended in a tank. It had emerged from this thing—grown from the inside out, knit together rather than assembled. It built itself, layer by layer, cell by cell, until it was him.

  Tamarlyan was beside himself with excitement, his eyes darting over the substrate, his hands hovering over the new implants ARI had prepared. They were similar to the one given to the Provider, but now adapted for human physiology. Smooth, crescent-shaped plates of a composite alloy, laced with microscopic filaments designed to interface seamlessly with human neural tissue. These were not mere augmentations—they were the bridge to something unprecedented.

  ARI’s voice cut through the room, smooth and artificial as ever. “The population’s response has been predictably mixed.”

  Ervin, who had been silently watching from the far side of the room, finally spoke up. “It’s because they don’t understand it. I barely understand it, and I just watched Otto wake up in a new body.” His fingers tightened around the edge of the console. “They’re calling it immortality, but… is it? If you die and your mind is restored into a different brain, a different nervous system, a different body, are you still the same person? Or are you just a copy that thinks it’s the same?”

  Tamarlyan rolled his eyes. “That’s a redundant question. The same one philosophers have been arguing about for eons. From a functional perspective, if the process is seamless, then it is the same person. The experience of consciousness is continuous. As for sameness, even I am not the same person I was yesterday, neuron by neuron.”

  Ervin scoffed. “You make it sound so simple.”

  “It is simple,” Tamarlyan countered. “This is not some crude resurrection—this is the final step in controlling mortality. For the first time in human history, death has become optional. And yet you hesitate?” He shook his head, frustrated. “What are you afraid of?”

  Mei looked at Otto, his vitals stable, his eyes tracing with awareness, his breathing smooth and deep. People had already been skeptical about the technology, dismissing it as something theoretical, something impossible. But now, here he was—a living, breathing example. Save for his short white hair and missing beard, the newly grown body was the same in every way, appearing old, despite being physically rejuvenated and re-encoded in alien genetic sequences.

  Mei exchanged a glance with Tamarlyan, then nodded. “From a pure physics perspective, human identity is already fluid. You are not the same person you were yesterday. Your brain constantly rewires itself—neurons forming and breaking connections, new cells replacing dead ones, even your DNA adapting through methylation. What we call ‘self’ is an ongoing process, not a fixed entity.”

  Tamarlyan smirked. “Which means, Ervin, even if you don’t like it, every moment of your life, you are already being replaced by a slightly different version of yourself.”

  Ervin exhaled sharply, shaking his head. “That’s a convenient way of putting it.”

  Tamarlyan’s smirk deepened. “Even if we accept the worst-case scenario—that this process creates not you but a copy of you—ask yourself: isn't that copy more you than your own brother? More than your own child, should you have one? I’d say so. This technology forces us to rethink what we even are. Maybe the self is not an individual, but an ongoing chain of iterations. Perhaps the best way to understand this is as an entirely new kind of familial unit—one that consists of all of your past, present, and future selves.”

  Mei found herself considering that. “You’re saying it’s not even about individual continuity.”

  “Precisely,” Tamarlyan said, tapping his temple. “We might be looking at this the wrong way. Maybe a self is just the material vessel. But the process—your personality, the continuity of thought and memory—is what persists. Think of it like a soul—not in the traditional human sense, but as an evolving entity that moves between vessels, carrying experiences forward. Each body is merely a chapter in its existence.”

  Ervin frowned. “You sounds more spiritual than scientific.”

  Tamarlyan shrugged. “Science and philosophy are not mutually exclusive.”

  Mei watched Ervin closely as she jerked her head towards Otto. “Do you have religious objections to all of this?”

  Ervin hesitated, thoughtful. “I’m not sure yet. There’s too much I don’t understand about the implications. I need time to form a framework.”

  Mei pressed further. “But does it conflict with your beliefs? I’d think that life and death would be something only your God has control over.”

  To her surprise, Ervin shook his head. “Not at all. The True Faith has never placed artificial barriers between God and the discoveries of man. God is responsible for all in creation—whether we understand it or not. We believe in progressive revelation, Mei. If this technology exists, then it was allowed to exist. It would be arrogant to refuse a blessing from God simply because we don’t understand its form.”

  Tamarlyan nodded approvingly. “That is a very pragmatic way of thinking.”

  Ervin chuckled. “That’s why our faith is the true one. It’s not some human invention at odds with reality—it is about seeking truth and understanding God's divine plan, wherever it may be found.”

  Mei let that settle, then turned back to the implants, feeling the weight of what they were about to unleash upon their colony. The question wasn’t whether this technology would change them. It already had. The only thing left to decide was what they were willing to become.

  Tamarlyan leaned forward, his hands steepled under his chin as he glanced over to the robed aliens. “So tell me, Ervin,” he said, his voice measured, analytical, “what does your faith say about alien beings? How does it account for them in God’s creation?”

  Ervin folded his arms and tilted his head slightly, his eyes thoughtful. “Various divine prophets throughout history have already alluded to the presence of other worlds and life beyond Earth. It is all part of God’s creation. We were never alone. The idea that humanity was somehow the sole intelligent creation was always a human presumption held by some, not a divine truth, and not one propagated by our faith.”

  Mei glanced up from the biomaterial substrate, her brow furrowing. “So you weren’t surprised when we encountered them?”

  “I was awed,” Ervin admitted, his lips curving into a slight smile. “But no, not surprised. If God created the vastness of the universe, why would life be limited to one world?”

  Tamarlyan nodded, as if ticking off a box in his mind. “And the Provider? How does that fit into your God’s plan?”

  At that, Ervin hesitated, his gaze drifting slightly, as if recalling something. “When I was present at the first meeting, listening to the Provider, I was struck by something—its desire for alignment and unity. It wasn’t just a principle or a strategy; it was an inherent, guiding force. And that... that struck me deeply, because unity is so central to my faith as well. We believe that humanity was created to seek unity—not just amongst ourselves, but with creation, with knowledge, and ultimately, with the divine.”

  Mei rested her chin on her hand, considering that. “So when the Provider spoke about alignment, it reinforced your faith?”

  Ervin’s expression softened. “More than anything. Seeing unity manifested in an entirely different species was proof of something I had always believed: that goodness, purpose, and divine order exist beyond human culture. That the drive to seek unity is not a human ideal—it is a universal law. The Provider follows it instinctively.”

  Tamarlyan gave him an amused, skeptical look. “Are you saying the Provider is some kind of a divine being? That it posessses attributes of God or is incarnation of your faith’s prophets?”

  “No.” Ervin shook his head. “When the Provider spoke to me, I felt it reject that notion outright. It does not claim divinity. It does not claim to be a god, or a messenger of God.” He exhaled slowly. “But what I do believe is that the Provider is further along on the path of revelation. It understands more of the divine plan than we do. It has had longer to seek truth.”

  Mei frowned. “But how could the Provider do that if it doesn’t even know your faith?”

  For a long moment, Ervin was silent, his fingers idly tracing the edge of the table. Then, almost in a whisper, he answered:

  “What if it does?”