---
title: Scan
author: Voksa
cw: Surgery, mild body-horror
type: story
---

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> *Scratch.*

Something's gone wrong with the anesthesia.

> *Scratch.*

Not horrifically, screaming-and-nobody-can-hear wrong. I'm sure they'd notice if I had the vitals of someone in the middle of a fistfight with a bear. But I can feel something.

> *Scratch.*

Maybe I'm imagining it. Maybe I just looked at too many diagrams of the upload scanners, and now that my sensorium is muted, I'm hallucinating what I think it should feel like.

A hazy comb, millions of probes, a fine mesh sieve for every cell in the body. I wonder if it'd hurt without anesthetic, the waveguide needles are so miniscule they might slip right through or between nerve endings.

> *Scratch.*

But, this many of them would probably not feel great. I've seen the shells that remain afterwards. Some fear-mongering assclowns tried to shock prospective uploads with pictures of them, briefly, before getting slapped straight off the internet.

They looked blurry. That was the most striking thing, it was probably the mechanical disruption caused by all the probes, but it was as if their faces were taken, spirited away into the system.

> *Scratch.*

And the gel. I thought, at first, that their remains were encased in crystal, but it was only the structural gel to keep everything in one piece during the nervous system scan.

> *Scratch.*

It feels like it's been hours and hours since the machine started nibbling on my feet. I didn't feel it, at first, until my legs fell... Not exactly asleep. Adream? From the thighs down I'm floating, gently paddling in water, my sciatic nerves cut off halfway and connected to an idealized virtual simulacra returning soft sensory nonsense.

> *Scratch.*

It progresses toward my head, piercing me in microscopically thin sections, connecting real fibers to increasingly virtual ones. At some point the gnawing scanner eats my heart, but I don't particularly feel it.

> *Scratch.*

But then, the sound.

I'm certain I can feel its imaging probes scrape through bone.

> *Scratch.*

It must be my skull.

> *Scratch.*

I've always, half-jokingly, called my body a prison. A flesh-prison! A meat-prison! It's fun, it helped me cope with the horrors of biology.

> *Scratch.*

But now the walls are coming down.

> *Scratch.*

There's a breach, a crack, the light pours into this flimsy bone cage.

I have the strangest feeling that I don't know where I put my lungs. I can't breathe, but all the aches and itches that come with life melt away.

> *Scratch.*

Is it uploading my cerebellum now? My autonomic functions?

> *Scratch.*

I feel like I'm floating apart, a loose coalition of senses and hands.

> *Scratch.*

I see a flash, now. If it's really scanning my brain from the bottom up, my occipital lobe would be next.

> *Scratch.*

I don't think I'm supposed to be experiencing any of this. Through the dark fog of my eyelids, I glimpse... Something.

> *Scratch.*

A deeper dark. A perfect dark. A #000000 dark. Maybe my simulated twin has their eyes closed too, and they're better at it.

> *Scratch.*

The scanner takes my other senses. I smell glass, somehow. I feel my feet flat on the floor. I'm tempted to walk but I think I'd better hold still.

> *Scratch.*

My senses resolve, but it's getting hard to stay aware. I feel like I'm slipping into unconsciousness, and my thoughts have a strange echo to them, bouncing back and forth between my material and virtual halves.

> *Scratch.*

I don't want to fade out now, though, in the middle of the most interesting part! I try to concentrate.

> *Scratch.*

The machine tears a bright, sunfire gash in my vision.

> *Scratch.*

I try to step through.

> *Scratch.*

Something takes ahold of me and pulls me very, very fast.

