They’d taken seventy-eight chunks of his memory. Seventy-eight perfectly sculpted holes marked where something used to be. Seventy-eight blanks left Marlowe disoriented in the bright Martian daylight. He stood outside the DynaTech building with an authorized receipt in his hand.
Client: Marlowe Thorne Service: Neural Reconstruction Status: Completed Cost: 7,300 NewDollars Notes: Third backup this season
The paper dissolved in his palm—biodegradable, like everything else since the oxygen riots. Marlowe watched it melt into pink foam between his fingers, feeling nothing as it disappeared. That seemed appropriate. He couldn’t remember the hit that had necessitated this visit anyway.
“Hey, Backup Man!” A fan in a replica jersey approached, eyes glittering with the telltale shimmer of CereVision implants. “You gonna play Sunday? That hit looked lethal, man!”
Marlowe nodded with practiced confidence. “Sure am.”
The fan grinned and walked off. Marlowe had no idea what hit he was talking about. His last memory was stepping onto the field for warmups.
That was the deal. When you played NeoCrash—the brutally elegant bastard child of rugby, American football, and zero-G acrobatics that dominated the solar system’s entertainment feeds—you spent half your life forgetting. But it was better than the alternative: ending up like the pre-backup legends of the sport, drooling in nursing homes by forty-five, unable to recognize their own children.
Backup technology had saved contact sports. And made them considerably worse.
“How’s my favorite investment?” Coach Ridley’s voice boomed through the locker room, his massive frame blocking the doorway. Ridley was old-school—no backups, pre-dating the technology. His left eye drifted independently from his right, the result of too many concussions in the dark ages of the sport.
“Ready to play,” Marlowe answered automatically.
“You’d better be. Cost the team sixteen thousand to reconstruct you after Valdez nearly decapitated you on Tuesday.”
Marlowe nodded, though Tuesday was completely gone from his mind.
The system was straightforward: every week he allowed the team’s technicians to make a complete backup of his consciousness—memories, skills, personality. When he inevitably suffered brain trauma during a game, they would simply restore him from backup, patching in the skills he’d learned since the last save but removing any memories of the traumatic event. The technology was precise enough to excise only what was damaged.
His locker contained four helmets, each embedded with data cores that synchronized with his neural implants. Every millisecond of game data was recorded, allowing the technicians to preserve his playing insights without the trauma. Evolution by selective amnesia.
Marlowe suited up, checking himself in the mirror. His face looked the same as always—the sharp cheekbones, the calculated stubble, the eyes too weary for a twenty-nine-year-old. The scars along his jawline were cosmetic—the team doctors had added them to make him look more rugged in promotional materials.
Nothing about him was authentic anymore.
“Thorne! Meeting room. Now.” Coach’s voice cut through his thoughts.
“Something’s wrong with your backup,” Dr. Liesl said bluntly, flicking through neural scans that floated in the air between them. “Your last recovery has inconsistencies.”
Marlowe felt his stomach tighten. “What kind?”
“Micro-fractures in the continuity field. Nothing major, but… unusual.”
Coach Ridley crossed his arms. “Will it affect his game?”
Dr. Liesl—a tiny woman whose oversized intellect seemed to make her physical form irrelevant—scowled. “That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Not the fact that we’re piecing this man’s mind together like a jigsaw puzzle every other week.”
“He’s under contract,” Ridley said flatly. “So are you.”
Marlowe cleared his throat. “What exactly does this mean for me?”
“Probably nothing,” Dr. Liesl admitted. “Just… be aware of any unusual thoughts or memories. Things that seem out of place. Report them immediately.”
Marlowe nodded, though he wasn’t sure how he would know if a memory was out of place when so many were already missing.
That night, he dreamed of a woman he’d never met.
Her hair was the color of Saturn’s rings. Her eyes reminded him of Earth’s oceans. He had never been to Earth. In the dream, she whispered something about system corruption and failsafes.
When he woke, the dream lingered with unusual clarity. Most of his dreams vanished during the transition to consciousness—a side effect of the backups, they’d told him. But this one remained, vivid and unsettling.
Tara. That was her name. Though he’d never known anyone called Tara.
He went through his morning routine, trying to shake the dream from his consciousness. His apartment—a sterile luxury unit provided by the team—felt emptier than usual. Something was missing, though he couldn’t place what.
A news alert flashed on his kitchen wall: “NEOCRASH STAR THORNE MAKES MIRACULOUS RECOVERY; EXPECTED TO PLAY IN CHAMPIONSHIP SUNDAY.”
Below it, a video played of his own body being carried off the field, neck at an impossible angle, blood pooling beneath his helmet.
Marlowe dropped his protein shake, the glass shattering against the floor. He’d died. Actually died. That wasn’t supposed to happen—the backups were preventative, not resurrection technology.
His hands trembled as he accessed his medical file through his neural link. The record showed a “severe cervical trauma with temporary cessation of vital functions,” followed by “emergency consciousness restoration from backup 78-C.”
They hadn’t just repaired his memory. They’d brought him back.
“You need to wake up.”
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere as Marlowe jogged around the practice field. He stumbled, looking for its source.
“This is a recursive loop. You’re not who you think you are.”
The voice was familiar—the woman from his dreams. Tara.
“Who’s there?” he called out, drawing concerned looks from teammates.
“They’ve trapped you in the system. Your body died three years ago.”
Marlowe felt his chest constrict. His vision blurred at the edges, reality seeming to fold in on itself.
“You okay, Backup Man?” A teammate—Diaz? Rodriguez? The names blended together—approached cautiously.
“Fine,” Marlowe managed, though nothing was fine. “Need water.”
He stumbled to the sidelines, collapsing onto a bench. The world seemed wrong suddenly—too bright, too sharp, colors bleeding at the edges like an oversaturated photograph.
Coach Ridley materialized beside him. “You’re glitching, son.”
“Glitching?”
“System instability. Happens sometimes when we push a backup too far.” Ridley’s face twisted into something inhuman for a fraction of a second before returning to normal. “We’ll get you fixed up after the championship.”
The locker room was empty when Marlowe returned from practice. He opened his locker and found only a single helmet inside—not the usual four. This one was older, scratched, bearing the scars of a hundred games.
When he touched it, electricity seemed to flow into his fingertips.
“Remember me.”
The voice again. Coming from the helmet.
Against every instinct, Marlowe placed it on his head.
Reality shattered.
He wasn’t Marlowe Thorne, star athlete. He was Marcus Thompson, a third-string player who had died on the field three years earlier. His consciousness had been preserved and repurposed, edited and enhanced, turned into the perfect NeoCrash machine.
The real Marlowe Thorne had never existed.
And somewhere in the system, trapped between backups, the remnants of Marcus Thompson’s original consciousness had been fighting to break through—aided by the one person who refused to let him go.
Tara. His wife.
She had infiltrated DynaTech as a neural technician, injecting fragments of code into each new backup, slowly rebuilding the truth that had been erased.
“They’ve been using you as a template,” her voice explained through the helmet’s interface. “Your backup isn’t just for you. They’re selling copies to other teams, other players. Dozens of men with your skills, your reflexes, but different faces. Different names.”
Marlowe—Marcus—felt sick. “How do I get out?”
“You have to die one more time. In the championship. When everyone is watching. I’ve planted code that will expose everything when your system crashes publicly.”
“And then what?”
“Then you come home to me. The real you. I’ve built a sanctuary server where we can live until the laws catch up with the technology.”
Marcus removed the helmet, reality settling back into the illusion around him. The locker room looked the same, but now he could see the digital imperfections—subtle rendering errors where the simulation cut corners.
He was nothing but code running on a machine. A ghost piloting a body that had been grown in a lab to replace his own.
Championship Sunday arrived with the usual fanfare. Ninety million viewers across the solar system. Perfect weather inside the climate-controlled dome. Celebrities and politicians in the luxury boxes.
In the tunnel before the game, Dr. Liesl approached him.
“You’ve been acting strangely,” she said quietly. “System diagnostics show unusual activity in your temporal lobe.”
Marcus met her gaze. “Just pre-game jitters.”
“I don’t think so.” She lowered her voice further. “Someone’s been tampering with your backups. Adding foreign code.”
“Is that right?”
“I reported it to management. They’re wiping you clean after the game. Complete reboot.”
Marcus felt cold fear spread through him. “And if I refuse?”
“They own you, Thorne. Body and mind. It’s in the contract.”
Dr. Liesl walked away, her lab coat flickering momentarily like a bad transmission.
The opening whistle blew, and Marcus jogged onto the field with his teammates. The stadium erupted in cheers as his stats flashed across the massive screens. Career tackles: 1,243. Consecutive games: 97. Neural reconstructions: 78.
Lives lived: 1. Lives stolen: 1.
The game began with its usual choreographed violence. Marcus moved through the motions, his body executing perfect plays while his mind raced with newfound awareness. Each hit felt distant, happening to someone else.
In the third quarter, he saw his opportunity. The opposing team’s enforcer—a mountain of genetically enhanced muscle named Valdez—was charging toward him with murderous intent.
Instead of evading as his training demanded, Marcus planted his feet and lowered his helmet.
The collision was spectacular. The crowd gasped collectively as both men went down. Valdez rolled away, stunned but conscious.
Marcus didn’t move.
As medical techs rushed onto the field, he felt himself beginning to float away from his body. The stadium lights grew distant, reality thinning around him.
“Signal received,” Tara’s voice whispered in his fading consciousness. “Downloading you now. Exposing them simultaneously.”
On every screen in the stadium, the truth began to unfold—records of the real Marcus Thompson’s death, the illegal consciousness farming, the copies sold to other teams. DynaTech’s stock plummeted in real-time as millions watched.
Marcus felt himself being pulled through an invisible tunnel, away from the broken body on the field and toward something new. Not heaven or hell, but a different kind of afterlife.
Somewhere, Tara was waiting, in a sanctuary beyond corporate control, beyond the endless cycle of trauma and erasure. A place where memories weren’t commodities to be bought and sold.
As Marcus Thompson ceased to exist in the physical world, Marlowe Thorne died for the second and final time. But somewhere in the vast digital wilderness, they both began again.
This time, with nothing forgotten.
My Other Car is a Robot 
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