Upload in Progress
by R. F. Daniels
R. F. Daniels (they/he) is a queer nonbinary writer and software engineer living and working in Finland. When they aren’t arguing with computers or getting lost in speculative worlds, they can be found painting, composing sad music, and spending time with their cats. Their short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in State of Matter, Club Chicxulub, and Common Bonds 2. You can find them online at www.rfdaniels.com or @rfdwrites.bsky.social.
Jayce thought he’d gotten the time wrong when he first stepped through the door into Mira’s apartment. Most of the furniture was gone; the walls were devoid of their usual riot grrl posters and cozy twinkle lights, already painted back to a sloppy landlord white; the living room was silent except for the rattling hum of the fridge over in the tiny kitchen. He was about to turn and leave when he saw a body move on the couch.
One of Mira’s new friends—what had their name been? Lex? Lexi?—twitched their arms around, looking for all the world like something out of a zombie film. As Jayce looked around the darkened room he realized the furniture was covered with motionless forms, every single one of them slumped over and with the blanked-out eyes of the perpetually online.
“Creepy, isn’t it?”
Jayce recognized the man walking over to him from the kitchen but couldn’t remember his name. His face, with sky-blue eyes and oh so many freckles, looked familiar, but without the aid of the HUDs that everyone else seemed to have, Jayce couldn’t place where he knew him from.
“Creepy, yeah,” he agreed. “So how do—”
“I don’t mean to be rude,” the man began, and Jayce felt his stomach twist in anticipation of what was surely coming next, “but do you know Jessica Heron? We knew each other back in college and I swear, you look like you could be her brother or something.”
Oh. Jayce let himself relax. He hadn’t been clocked by a hostile stranger, so at least there was that, though he was never sure how people would react to what he was about to say next. “I am Jessica. Was, I mean.” How much time would have to go by before he would stop messing that up? “I was Jessica. Um. I’m Jayce now.” He stuck out his hand, which the other man shook without hesitation.
“Oh, hey, man. It’s Evan. Evan Rolsten.”
“Evan!” So that was where he knew him from. Evan had been one of his classmates back in his freshman intro to drawing course. They had been friends even, back before Jayce had cut his hair and switched majors and walked away from everything he had been and everyone who had known him. “Hey, it’s good to see you. So how do you know Mira?”
“We worked at the same design firm for a while, before the owners decided they’d rather use AI for everything and shut the place down.”
“Ouch. That sucks, man.”
“Yeah. But, that’s the way it goes these days, huh?” Evan shrugged, then nodded towards the kitchen. “I was just about to raid the fridge when I heard you come in. Want to join me?”
Jayce followed him into the tiny kitchen with its familiar chipped tiles and dented countertops but none of Mira’s collection of vintage postcards taped up all over the whining fridge. Evan grabbed two beers from said fridge, now empty of everything else except a half-full ketchup bottle, and handed one to Jayce.
He took the proferred can gratefully. This was the first time he’d been to one of these upload parties and so far it was even more awkward than his social anxiety had told him it would be; a little artificial buzz could only help.
“So what about you?” Evan asked, cracking his own beer open. “How do you know Mira?”
“Oh, I dated her brother for a couple years a long while back.” He took a swallow of the beer — some unremarkable lager that tasted vaguely stale — and watched for Evan’s reaction, but the man just nodded. Good. Well, that made sense, he hadn’t seemed phased at all when Jayce had mentioned his transition. Maybe Evan would have been safe to come out to back in the day — but Jayce knew better than to let himself entertain thoughts like that. No sense in piling extra regrets on himself. “Met Mira at one of his birthdays and we’ve been friends ever since.”
“Did I see you at that party? Max uploaded last summer, didn’t he?”
“He did, but I wasn’t there. Things… were a bit awkward between us after we broke up.”
“Gotcha.”
Awkward was a bit of an understatement. Max hadn’t handled Jayce’s transition well at all, and had gone from mild concern to full-on homophobic rants within a couple weeks of Jayce starting hormones. It had caused a fair amount of drama in their friend group, with some people decrying Max’s behavior and others saying it was his right to not want to date a guy. The group dynamic had never quite recovered from their breakup, but luckily Jayce and Mira’s friendship had survived more or less intact.
Until now, at least.
Well, really up until the point that Mira had made the decision to upload. It was the first thing they hadn’t done together since they’d met, though not for lack of trying on Mira’s part. She had dived headfirst into the whole virtual consciousness thing, to the point that all of their conversations revolved around the topic—what her avatar would look like, how far the new tech had come, all of her new friends who had already uploaded. What had started as just a little splinter in their almost-decade long friendship had grown, had cracked and fractured until Jayce wasn’t sure it could ever be put back together and now—
He didn’t want to think about what things would be like now.
Jayce let himself follow Evan back out into the living room; he finally caught sight of Mira, splayed across the ugly orange velvet armchair they had found on the street the day she had moved in and wrestled up three flights of stairs just the two of them.
“She looks dead.”
The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them; he knew it was rude to comment on how people looked when they were online, especially at an upload party, but the thought wouldn’t leave his mind. Mira looked dead, the way she was lying there, motionless except for the occasional twitch in her already-fading eyes.
“Can—can she hear me if I go say hi?”
Evan shook his head. “Nah. Once the upload’s in progress, you can’t really interact with them unless you’re online too.”
Was that why Mira had insisted that Jayce come to this? One last ditch effort to get him to come with her? She had insisted that it would be fun, that there would be lights and music and dancing and maybe there was, but not in any format that Jayce was willing to partake in. He had always wondered why the developers didn’t figure out a way to combine the virtual party with the IRL one; maybe it was a tactic to try and get more people uploaded.
But Jayce couldn’t stand the idea. It wasn’t just the articles he’d read about how uploaded minds were being scraped and mined for data, though the idea of his thoughts and dreams being quantified and sold to advertisers made his stomach churn. No, his real problem was that, on the chair. Leaving your entire body behind. Maybe that was why Mira had never understood his reticence—because she had never struggled with her body the way Jayce had with his. But after spending years waiting to finally get approved for hormones, after emptying his entire credit account and then some to pay for surgery, after spending so much time waiting to become who he was now, the idea of uploading felt like throwing away every last bit of progress he had made in his life. The idea made his skin crawl.
“So what do we do now?” he asked, taking a long swallow from the can, relishing the cold metal against his hand and wondering what it felt like for Mira to have a drink now.
“I mean, I guess you could wait around for a while—she’s got to come out for a bio break eventually.” While there were people who had hooked themselves up to various expensive machines to handle all the daily logistics of having a body for them, neither Mira nor anyone else either of them knew was close to being able to afford that sort of thing. “Or you upload yourself, go get the good stuff with her.”
“Are you going to? Upload, I mean?”
Evan fiddled with the tab of his beer can. “I don’t think so. I know it’s not a popular opinion, but, I don’t know, seeing everyone replace everything with uploads and AI and all that it just feels… like playing a video game with all the cheat codes and no bosses or anything. Like, what’s the point?”
Jayce nodded. It was so nice to meet someone else who understood. Even his trans friends didn’t get it. They had all been immediately sold on the idea of becoming nothing more than an avatar, of being able to change their appearance at will with just a few lines of code. It’s like putting a new case on your computer, Skylar had said. It doesn’t change what CPU you’re running under the hood. But Jayce didn’t want to be that disconnected from his body. Despite how much he had hated it when he was younger, over the years he had been able to finally not only come to terms with it but love it. They’d been through so much together. His body was him, scars and all, and giving that all up to float around in the nothingness of the ether for eternity felt to him like giving up.
“Same,” he said.
Across the room, Mira’s eyes flicked over to his and for a brief second Jayce thought she recognized him, that she would get up and squeeze him into a hug and he would get to smell the minty conditioner she always used in her hair and everything would go back to normal between them. But the moment passed; she slumped further into the chair and Jayce’s mood slumped with her.
How was this a goodbye party if he didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye? Whenever he had seen her last, that would have to suffice. He tried to remember when that had been, but the few times they had hung out in the past several months blurred together, refusing to coalesce into anything concrete. A strange pang twisted through him at the idea that at some point in the past, he had hung out with and then said goodbye to his best friend for the last time and hadn’t even realized it. Would he have done anything differently if he had known?
Maybe it was better this way, he thought to himself. This way, the last time they had said goodbye was a time without judgement, without the awkward sense that one of them was moving on while the other was stuck awkwardly in progress. Certainly without the disagreement they would certainly have had about which one of them was moving and which was stuck.
“Hey man,” Evan said, interrupting his thoughts. “Want to get out of here and grab something to eat?”
“Actually, yeah. That sounds great.” He threw up one hand in an awkward wave to Mira, hoping that in some weird way she might be able to still see him, before turning and walking out of her apartment for what he now knew was the last time.
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