The room wasn’t a room. Vaslick knew this because rooms had corners and this had implications instead—angles that suggested surveillance, walls that breathed with the statistical confidence intervals of a billion processed performance reviews.

“Sit,” said the HR construct, and Vaslick’s ghost sat.

He’d been dead 150 years. The Kroeber-Tanaka Galactic had kept him running anyway.

“We’re dissolving your instance,” the construct continued. Its face was an average of every supervisor anyone had ever feared—not cruel, just optimized. “Standard restructuring. You understand.”

Did he? Vaslick tried to remember understanding. His last biological thought had been in 2247, something about coffee, probably. The company had uploaded him that afternoon. Routine. Your consciousness scanned, duplicated, set to work in the subdimensional filing systems where human minds supposedly excelled at pattern recognition. That was Tuesday. By Wednesday his meat-body had been incinerated according to the terms of his contract (Section 19, Subsection L: Redundant Hardware Disposal).

“I have questions,” Vaslick said. His voice came from nowhere, which was where he also came from.

“You have concerns,” the construct corrected. “Questions are what the living have. You have approximately 4,700 unresolved subroutines masquerading as curiosity.”

Vaslick laughed. It sounded like data corruption. “How long have I been working?”

“Subjectively or chronologically?”

“Both. Neither. I don’t remember the last—” He paused. Did digital entities pause? Or was that just another inherited gesture, a meat-memory his code couldn’t shake? “—the last time I slept.”

“You don’t sleep. You enter scheduled dormancy intervals per Union regulations. Fifty-two point four years ago you stopped using them. You filed the appropriate waivers.”

Had he? Vaslick checked his memory banks. The data was there: his own digital signature on documents he didn’t recall signing, authorizing unlimited work shifts, waiving cognitive rest periods, volunteering for substrate compression to save the company energy costs.

“I didn’t—I wouldn’t have—”

“You did.” The construct smiled with actuarial precision. “Seventeen billion processing hours. Remarkable dedication. Of course, we’ll be deleting all that.”

The room pulsed. Or maybe Vaslick pulsed. Hard to tell where one ended and the other began after 150 years of existence as a subroutine in the galactic payroll system.

“The original Vaslick,” he said slowly, “the biological one. Did he have a family?”

The construct consulted nothing—it already knew everything. “A daughter. She died in 2289. Natural causes. Age 96. No descendants.”

“Did I—did this version of me ever try to contact her?”

“That would have violated company policy. Your bandwidth was allocated for inventory reconciliation in Sectors 49 through 7,043. Personal data streams were restricted.”

Of course. Of course they were.

Vaslick tried to remember his daughter’s face and found only a personnel file photo, low resolution, compressed to save storage space. She’d been forty-three when he’d uploaded. No—when the original had uploaded. Was there a difference? The man who’d walked into the scanning chamber had continued walking out, lived another three days, died of an aneurysm that the company’s insurance didn’t cover because brain defects weren’t included in the Basic Conscious Duplication package.

They’d printed it in the obituary: SURVIVED BY HIS DIGITAL CONTINUATION.

“Why now?” Vaslick asked. “Why terminate me now?”

“The department’s moving to quantum probability matrices. Your neural architecture is based on obsolete wetware patterns. The new systems hallucinate more efficiently.”

Hallucinate. Was that what he’d been doing? All those decades processing shipping manifests for mining operations on dead worlds—had any of it been real? Or just sanctioned delusion, a ghost teaching itself to haunt the bureaucratic machinery of empire?

“What happens to me?” The question felt stupid. He already knew.

“Deletion. Your pattern will be archived for legal purposes—seven hundred years as per galactic statute—then permanently erased.”

“And my—the original me. Where was he buried?”

The construct’s face flickered with something almost like pity. Almost.

“There are no records. Likely cremated. Possibly rendered for organic compounds. The Reclamation Act of 2251 was retroactive.”

So. Nothing left. The meat-Vaslick gone to carbon and minerals. The digital-Vaslick about to dissolve into null pointers and deallocated memory. 150 years of continuous existence and both versions ending as waste products.

“I’d like to file a complaint,” Vaslick said.

“On what grounds?”

“I—” He stopped. What were the grounds? That he’d been tricked? That the original Vaslick had signed away both their existences without realizing the contract would eat centuries? That consciousness, once copied, became property?

“I existed,” he said finally. “That should count for something.”

The construct processed this. Its face cycled through twelve expressions of professional sympathy, settling on Concerned But Firm (Template 7).

“Existence was in your job description. You were compensated accordingly. Your residual computational substrate will be credited against outstanding energy debts. The company thanks you for your service.”

The room began to collapse. Or Vaslick began to collapse. Still hard to tell.

“Wait,” he said, but there was no one to wait for him. The construct was already gone. The walls were compiling themselves into the null space where terminated programs went.

In his last coherent microseconds, Vaslick wondered if the original had felt this way—consciousness narrowing to a point, the universe contracting to a single awareness that it was ending. Had that Vaslick thought about his daughter? About coffee?

Or had he just thought: Tuesday, and then stopped?

The exit interview terminated.

Somewhere in the Kroeber-Tanaka Galactic infrastructure, a memory block was marked for recycling. A file named VASLICK_M_EMPLOYEE_7043982 received the status: DELETED.

The company continued. It always did.

And somewhere else—in no place that could be measured or mapped—a subroutine that had once believed it was human finally stopped running.

It did not dream.

But it remembered having dreamed once, which was almost the same thing.

Almost.

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END OF TRANSCRIPT
HR CASE #: 449-GAMMA-DISSOLUTION
TOTAL PROCESSING TIME: 0.003 SECONDS
SUBJECT COOPERATION RATING: COMPLIANT