The Quantum Path to Immortality

Elias Vance forgot his own name for an entire hour that morning.

It came back, of course—along with a headache and the vague shame of needing to check his own ID tag like he was a guest star in his own life.

He didn't panic. Panic was for amateurs.

Instead, he ran a full cognitive diagnostic, reviewed the biometric logs, and confirmed what he'd already suspected.

"Yep," he muttered. "Brain's going sideways again."

Another measurable drop in neural cohesion. The data showed it plain as day: memories were still present, but they were playing musical chairs with his awareness. Some arrived late. Some overlapped. Some had the nerve to remix themselves entirely.

Last Tuesday, he'd woken up thinking it was his twelfth birthday.

Spent twenty minutes looking for his dead goldfish before realizing something was… off.

Now, standing barefoot in the center of Lamina Station—his private orbital research lab—the most decorated scientist on Earth let out a long, tired sigh.

The station was silent except for the low hum of life support and the occasional beep from a drifting terminal. Earth rotated quietly beneath him, too far away to care.

"I built most of modern space travel," Elias mumbled, rubbing his face. "And my brain is turning into a jazz solo."

The diagnosis had been unofficial, mostly because he hadn't told anyone. Not his foundation board. Not the Nobel committee. Not even the station's AI. (Okay, technically he had told the AI, but only during a fever dream while duct-taping a quantum lens back together.)

The real term for his condition was somewhere between temporal-lobe cascade and nonlinear consciousness degradation, but Elias preferred to think of it as:

"System Error: Genius.exe is corrupt."

He could still think, mostly.

Still solve problems.

Still rewire a gravitational stabilizer with nothing but a spoon and sheer spite.

But the moments in between—the seams of thought—were unraveling.

No pain. No dizziness. Just… static.

A low, ever-present buzz at the edge of cognition.

The kind of thing most people wouldn't notice until their keys were in the fridge and they were brushing their teeth with a screwdriver.

A chime rang overhead.

Incoming transmission: Nobel Committee. Category – Communications Systems. Live Call in 00:44.

Elias stared at the prompt. Blinking slowly. Then hit [Decline].

"Not now, Sweden."

This would be his sixth Nobel Prize. This time for inventing the first zero-lag interstellar communication system. It worked on entangled field-pair collapse—flip a switch here, the state flipped there. No delay. No loss. Just clean, synchronous change.

The rest of the world called it instantaneous cosmic communication.

Elias called it "finally shutting up the speed-of-light crowd."

They'd want a speech. A standing ovation.

Maybe a cute quote for the science magazines.

But Elias hadn't built the system to win awards.

He'd built it because space was slow, and he was dying, and he needed something faster than both.

"You ignored them again," said the voice overhead.

The station AI was calm, clipped, and judgmental in the way only artificial intelligence with no mouth could be.

"I'm working," Elias said.

"They're calling it the greatest advancement in communication theory since Marconi."

"Marconi didn't have to deal with temporal bleed."

"You still haven't told them about the degradation."

"Because they'd try to fix me."

"You could try. Regenerative scaffolding. Full cortex mapping. Bio-printing—"

"None of that works. It just preserves the casing."

He wandered to the far end of the station. A transparent capsule sat suspended above a glowing coil chamber—Project ECHO. His last, desperate Hail Mary.

Inside, the rig shimmered with quantum instability. Controlled, but twitchy. Like a cat made of lightning.

"You're not planning to test that today… are you?" the AI asked, a little too flatly.

"Absolutely not," Elias said.

Then he stepped inside the capsule.

The walls sealed with a hiss. Screens flickered to life. Bio-monitors ran like ants along the side panels.

The project had taken him two years and nearly half his personal fortune.

Not because the theory was complicated.

Because no one sane enough would sign off on it.

"It's not uploading," Elias had explained, months ago. "I'm not scanning myself into a server. That's amateur hour."

He wasn't backing himself up.

He was sending himself.

Or rather—sending the pattern of himself.

The waveform of his thought.

The informational structure of his identity—transmitted like a signal, into any compatible substrate.

Somewhere in the universe, there had to be something that could catch it.

Something his mind could land in.

Something that wouldn't dissolve like a corrupted ZIP file.

Now, standing in the capsule, staring at the final sequence, he let out a slow breath.

"Alright, old man," he whispered. "Time to turn yourself into very expensive static."

He pressed the ignition key.

The chamber lit up. Quantum stabilizers locked in.

He felt nothing at first. Then—

Disassembly.

Not pain. Just light. And pressure.

And then directionless falling, like someone had unplugged gravity.

His memories began to fuzz. But he didn't resist.

His last thought was a simple one.

"Please land somewhere interesting."