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he knew the ground was down and the sky was up. For a few seconds the void of his identity was complete. Then, as if a pause instruction in the programming of his brain had completed and the rest of the program was resuming, a second realization filled the void. He knew in that instant he was a program downloaded into a human male's body, an experiment, a new kind of person, or maybe not a person at all, but at least a new kind of personlike thing in a person's body. He did not know the source of this data, whether the information about his origin was a gift or a slipup by some programmer he hoped he would never meet, but he knew. He suspected he was not the only one of his type, but that feeling remained only a suspicion. For some time now the television news shows, Web sites, and newspapers had regularly been running stories on the attempts in labs around the world to download human minds into computers. None of these attempts had succeeded, or so the media was reporting. The stories hinted, however, that once scientists could download a mind into a computer, it should not be a huge step to go the other way, to upload a program into a body. Keeping the first successful experiments secret might be necessary to protect those involved. He knew his body was real enough. He checked that right away: He cut his arm with a small penknife, and the cut bled and hurt. As soon as he could get a doctor appointment, he called in sick and had a complete physical. The doctor said he was fine. He saw his X-rays. They definitely showed a human body.
    The fake past he still remembered was as complete as his body. He could recall all sorts of things that had never happened. For the first few days he investigated his false history, but his searches were as fruitless as he knew they would be. The company where he had supposedly last worked had folded, employees scattered with no forwarding addresses when an NEC-Rockwell joint venture had bought its computer-modeling technology and disbanded the firm. Only two of the members of the computer science faculty at North Carolina State University remained from when he had earned his master's, and both were conveniently on long-term sabbaticals, e-mail addresses bouncing, unavailable for his questions. His high-school senior annual listed him, the words "Thomas Walters" in the senior index filling him with a moment of doubt tinged with hope, but the space next to his name was blank; he was not in any of the photographs. His parents were dead, killed in a plane that did not pull up in time to avoid the gully at the end of the main runway of the Pittsburgh airport. No search engine yielded anything more than his name, address, and high school. The credit records he requested showed no loans, no late bills, only a great rating with no history of misconduct—of any conduct—supporting it. With each investigation he turned up shredded paper traces and thin online data trails of a past, but never anything he could follow further. As he searched, the stories of download experiments continued to leap at him from the front pages of all his sources, each attempt seemingly closer to success than the others before it.
    He gave up his research quickly, afraid those who had created him would notice a change and decide to cancel the experiment. In the days he went to work and did his job and tried to stay inconspicuous, worried at first that someone would notice his essential falseness, and then later that anyone might be an observer sent to decide if the experiment was still working. He fixed bugs in the software that managed the interfaces between North Carolina Power's internal computer network and its substations, and he avoided people. He fixed more bugs than ever before, and his boss was happy. In the nights he read magazines and clipped photos and wondered what it was like to be human. For a few months this routine was enough, but Tom gradually grew desperate to have a past, a set of attachments to the world.