Mikhail Gregorevich was one of the many mad scientists on the Earth of the 24th century who tried outlandish things to extend the human lifespan. He developed a machine to transfer a human mind from one body to another. It worked, sort of. The first big problem with it is that the receiving body must not already have a mind. He successfully tested it by transferring the mind of a person suffering from a terminal disease into the body of a person who was brain-dead and being kept alive by machines.

The second problem with it was that it didn’t always work. Sometimes, even if we could not detect the brain activity with conventional readings, the person’s mind was in there. And it also might not work if the person became brain-dead because their brain was too damaged. But a fail-safe made it only perform the transfer if there was a receiving target brain of sufficient operational complexity. He’d managed to get it to work several times. The lack of consistency and lack of good targets had kept his mind-transfer device from becoming a real success. What’s worse, the fail-safe had not always worked. A few test subjects had simply vanished, transferred into nothing.

Late in his life, he developed a new theory that there was a brief span during pregnancy in which the fetus had the capability to hold a human mind but had not yet developed its own, and as a result was a valid target for his machine. He imagined that some of his failures were caused by a slight misalignment causing the transfer to miss the intended target but hit a fetus elsewhere, perhaps miles away. Support for this theory was that aiming the machine at random showed many apparent targets. But no young people had stepped forward to say they were the reincarnations of the lost test subjects.

“They may be confused, not expecting to be reborn in a baby,” Mikhail argued. “The baby’s parents may have unknowingly brainwashed them, punishing any claim that they were the reincarnation of another person, thinking that impossible.”

Later, he showed that aiming the machine at a fetus at this stage generated the same positive readings his fail-safe gave when aimed at a brain-dead body which then had a successful transfer. And when this story hit the news, a number of children announced that they were the lost test subjects, reincarnated in fetuses elsewhere by the use of the device. Most of them were not believed at first, but Gregorevich had had every test subject record some secret to allow their reincarnation to prove their identity, and some of the claimants were able to give the proof.

This caused more than a bit of chaos. There were far more people requesting the procedure than Gregorevich could possibly handle. There were poor people offering to bear children to host the minds of wealthy people seeking to undergo the procedure, for millions of dollars. Some parents whose children came out as the missing test subjects sued Gregorevich and the test subjects for stealing their children’s bodies. It was a big mess.

The wealthier test subjects had left trust funds meant to be transferred to their new selves. Gregorevich’s company continued to hold these funds, theoretically for the purpose of helping locate the missing transferees. He had justified continuing to use the funds to eliminate the problem of missing transferees. But none of the wealthy ones had come forward, probably for fear they would also be sued and lose the money anyway. To settle the law suits under a class action, these funds were now split up among the suing families, and Gregorevich was left only with his own meager funds.

He was able to secure a bit more funding and continue the work, improving its accuracy, but it still wasn’t working reliably enough. And still, about a third of the lost test subjects, even ones without significant funds to be sued over, never came forward. The process was deemed not ready for commercial use, and Gregorevich was seen as a failure.

Facing more lawsuits from the families of lost transferees, and knowing he did not have a lot of life left, Gregorevich publicly used the device on himself, aiming it somewhere where his fail-safe found a signal. “I’ll be reincarnated, but you’ll never find out who I am. I’ll never tell.”

And with those words, he activated the device and his body fell lifeless.

---

The device didn’t die. There were several working devices which various people, through uncertain means, had acquired, and it wasn’t clear whether they were all legitimate, but the first business that arose offered people the chance to be reincarnated, but into a random person and they could never tell and nobody would ever know if it was successful (other than the transferee, if it was successful). Needless to say, most people viewed this as shady, but still many wealthy and dying people paid large sums for the chance at another life, even if “you can’t take it with you” as all these companies advertised, meaning that you could not pass your remaining wealth to your new self.

In years to come, more researchers perfected the device. The key was that the fail-safe could report a brain signature of the target, and two, or for even more security three of the machines could be set up at different angles, pointing at the same target, using the signatures to confirm they were aimed at the same target at a known location, with one of the machines then transferring you across. The economy of elderly people paying others to raise them reincarnated as children became legitimate, though still controversial. Some religions welcomed the practice as a miracle from God, while others banned it, and some underwent schisms between those in favor of and against the procedure.

And it was no longer the case that “you can’t take it with you” as people were able to set up trust funds naming the unborn child of a certain couple as the beneficiary. A refinement of this technique used the mind signature of the person on the sending end of a device to verify identity. While they couldn’t interpret the memories they read from a person’s mind, they could match them against memories whose signatures were recorded from their previous life. They could also estimate the total number of memories; this distinguished a true infant’s mind from one that had been overwritten by the device. This enabled authorities to prosecute the crime of body theft, which, without the kind of agreement people signed with families to raise their reincarnations, was punishable by death. Anyone suspecting their child had been stolen by a renegade transfer could have the child tested to verify whether they possessed more memories than they should. This ended renegade transfers and limited reincarnation to those who could pay in advance for the costs of raising a child to adulthood.

So it came as a complete surprise some decades years later when a 1-year-old girl claimed to be the reincarnation of Mikhail Gregorevich. The fact that she could even say something like seemed proof that she was a reincarnation of somebody. There hadn’t been any lost test subjects for many years, though, and certainly nobody with the apparent 120 years worth of memories she was measured to carry.

The girl, Tara, proved herself to at least be someone knowledgeable by assembling a working mind transfer device given the parts for one. She wasn’t completely believed until she gave the rest of her story.

I’m an Eel

Ethertravel report #1, delivered in person February 5, 2410.

To my great surprise, rather than finding myself born as a human child to some family on Earth, after I beamed myself away in 2370, I became an eel-like creature on a watery world. I was certain from an early age that I had managed to beam myself completely off the Earth, as we didn’t have eels on Earth that built structures or had technology like theirs. We definitely would have discovered these shallow-water creatures, if we hadn’t simply killed them all by polluting the water.

The people there weren’t quite eels. At first glance, it was a good description, but these eels each had 6 prehensile fins which helped them do everything people do with their hands.

I went to school (no pun intended) and learned everything that the eel society taught their children. In some cases, having already learned the subjects on Earth helped, while in other cases, such as their language, history, and such, it did not, or not as easily, anyway. But I excelled, and when I got older studied their style of technology. It wasn’t like ours, being designed to work entirely underwater. Light, rather than electrons, provided circuit connections, moving through fiber-optic-like material that guided the light to stay within the devices in which it was used.

I was determined to rebuild my mind-transfer device and get back to Earth. If I didn’t, one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind might go unrecognized! But it wasn’t going to be easy. Not only did I have to build it using a completely different type of circuitry, but I also had to find Earth! Fortunately for me, I was an amateur astronomer on Earth, and I remembered the relative positions and brightnesses of the stars closest to Earth. Also fortunately, being near-surface dwellers, they had astronomy of their own, and I was able to look up catalogs of the nearby stars.

That took some work, but ultimately I found Earth and its stellar neighborhood. I was 100 light-years away! But even before knowing that, just in having traveled to any other world, I knew something important. When I built it, I knew my device used quantum communication to establish its connection, but I didn’t realize that this communication was faster-than-light. But it had to be so! Otherwise it would have taken a lifetime just to make the connection in the first place! Now my discovery was doubly important. Not only had I found a way to travel to the stars that didn’t involve rockets and impossible amounts of fuel, but I’d also discovered faster-than-light communication. I felt certain that the channel my device makes could be exploited to provide two-way instantaneous communication between two compatible devices.

Eel lifetimes are shorter than those of humans. I was quite elderly by the eel people’s standards by the time I had a working device, and testing it wasn’t practical. Even if I found a test subject and a target pregnant eel, I wasn’t sure I was going to live long enough to figure out if the eel’s mind had transferred successfully. The only thing to do was aim at the Earth until I found a target and send myself across. Fortunately, it worked.

Ethertravel, Inc.

Earth’s astronomers had mapped all the stars out to that distance with even the slightest hope of supporting life, so details from Tara about the world’s star and the planet’s gravity and orbital period allowed astronomers to conclusively identify what was now dubbed the Eel World. And there was now massive interest around the world in exploring the other worlds with suitable life we could transfer our minds into. But we needed a few things to make this exploration meaningful.

At this time, there were six major companies in the world selling mind transfer to the public which were considered reputable, with a track record of known successes. They formed an organization to manage the exploration with a board containing 7 members, the heads of the six companies or their appointed representatives, and Tara. It wasn’t as strange as it sounds to have a 1-year-old on the committee. The establishment of controlled reincarnation in the intervening years had made it commonplace to accept youngsters as being equivalent to their past selves. They were still treated as children under certain laws, mostly related to their own safety and sex, but as adults under most other laws.

The group came to agree on a few basic points:

• First off, we had to have an effective way for the explorers to report back. If they went there but couldn’t communicate back with their observations, we’d learn nothing. So we needed to develop the theorized FTL communicator first.
• On top of that, the explorers we sent out had to be trained. They needed to learn how to make their own FTL communicator, from scratch, and perhaps on a world which had not yet developed electronics.
• They also needed to learn the star maps. At a minimum, each traveler would need to memorize about 30 stars and their coordinates, in addition to learning how to do the math to translate from the relative coordinates we used on Earth to absolute, galaxy-centered coordinates and back again. A few of the stars chosen were the nearest bright ones to our sun, while the rest were the ones with the greatest absolute brightness in the galaxy, which would serve as landmarks if an ethertraveler found himself much farther away than the 100 light years of the Eel World. We started the first candidates with lessons on building electronics completely from scratch and the star maps while we worked on perfecting the communicator.
• Finally, we needed somewhere to go, and to know where we were going. We had aimed mind transfer devices at the stars and found lots of targets, but because it was instantaneous, we could not use communication time to infer distance. So we couldn’t be sure whether we were finding that target near the star we aimed at or one hidden behind it, thousands of light years more distant. The triangulation system used to confirm targets on Earth wouldn’t work for traveling to the stars. We could never align two devices precisely enough to hit the same target, especially since most target worlds would be expected to have thousands or even millions of potential targets at any one time. But there was almost no incidence of targets in places where we did not know of stars. So we could place three devices far apart on the Earth, aimed so that they could not hit any human beings, and all aimed at the same star, and if all found a target, even though it was unlikely to be the same target, we could be reasonably certain we were finding the target in the system we thought we were aiming at.

We set up several dozen of these devices around the world aimed up at the sky, enough to ensure we had a few available to point at any area of the sky, and we went through the catalog of stars nearest Earth, the ones where a developed astronomy program would likely have spotted our sun, and thus ones where it would be easier for our explorers to find the way back home.

Although we knew where the stars were, we didn’t know about planets; since the late 20th century, astronomers had detected planets orbiting other stars by various techniques, but most of these were either giant planets or ones orbiting very close to the star and very rapidly. None of our detection techniques would have identified the Earth orbiting a star like our sun except at the few closest stars. So we simply tried all the close stars.

Most of them didn’t have targets, but quite a few did. Among the stars that were within a factor of 3 of the sun’s mass and radiant intensity, and at least half a billion years old, and with a spectrum similar to our sun’s, almost every one did. Those parameters ruled out a lot of stars, but we had identified thousands of stars across the galaxy within these ranges. We started testing all these stars with a high success rate. So we had plenty of targets!

Once Tara laid out plans for the communication device, it was constructed and confirmed to work in six months. It needed a live person running the machine because it used the quantum states of that person’s mind in the same way the ethertravel device did. It was simply looking for a different kind of target, another person using a similar device, rather than a mindless body receptive to a mind transfer. The target mind activated what would have been one of the failsafes on the mind-transfer device, the one that says the target already has a mind, and when it did so, the communicator sent across data that helped the target’s communicator establish a reverse connection, which confirmed the existence of a communicator at the target.

It was in one big way more reliable than the mind-transfer device; it was looking for an open channel from another device of the same kind, rather than a suitable mind-transfer target. Unless somebody else somewhere in the galaxy had managed to invent the same kind of device, or one of our travelers managed to find another traveler rather than Earth, there shouldn’t be any wrong targets. It could latch on to any device it found in the direction it was aimed and send its report.

This made secure transmissions impossible; people could set up rogue receivers, but we weren’t looking for security. We invented a secure version, used between points on Earth, but you needed to have the brain signature of your target. This couldn’t work for communicating with ethertravelers because they could not know what people would be on receivers at any given time, and while we theoretically could know the brain signatures of all ethertravelers if we recorded them as we sent them out, we couldn’t have the people manning the receivers looking for thousands of different signatures at once. So we set up a network of open communicators, manned 24/7 so they would be available to receive from our ethertravelers any time they were ready, enough of them to make locating one feasible for a traveler. The people manning them all had other duties, so we weren’t paying them to do literally nothing before the first real callbacks arrived.

We spent another two years trying to simplify the communication device down to its barest essence, the minimal device we could teach the explorers to construct from scratch on an alien world. In one meeting while trying to develop an explanation of the device, an analogy was made to the quantum connection being like the ether thought to permeate space in the early days of science. This analogy was badly flawed, and never used in any of our materials, but the name stuck because we needed a better name than “traveling to the stars via mind transfer.” This was how it became known as ethertravel, and the communication device an ether communicator. Still a mouthful, but only half as much of one. It was even adopted as the name of the organization: Ethertravel, Inc.

The brightest group of our students learned to build the minimal ether communicator in a few months, and they then were tested by building several more with a variety of different kinds of starting materials. They weren’t always successful; we conceded that it wasn’t always going to be possible for every ethertraveler to build an ether communicator in every world they might end up in. Letting groups of students work together had much greater success, so we would try to send multiple people to the same world around the same time with hopes they could find one another and among their group find all the skills to call home.

After seeing how these turned out, we also developed a crude communication code. There were two issues. First, we couldn’t agree on a precise timing scheme because timing is hard without some kind of absolute standard that is easy to establish, and on another world, that would be hard. And second, the encoding needed to be simple so they could remember it.

Fortunately, the communication device could send out positive, negative, and neutral signals. We decided positive bits would be 1, negative bits 0, and there would be a return to neutral state after every bit. And we’d use a simple 6-bit communication code: 0 is space, 1-26 is the lower-case English alphabet, 27-52 is the capitals, 53-62 is the digits 0-9, and 63 is a special character, nominally a period. When it was followed by a space, it would be a period. When it was followed by a letter, the letters up to the next period would name a symbol, so for instance you’d send .comma. for a comma. Ugly, but better than trying to remember the order of a whole bunch of symbols. We’d process the reports here into standard Earth encodings and could sort out the symbols at that time. We also allowed the more technically talented ethertravelers to overlay systems of encoding pictures and video on top of this. We didn’t expect that to be common, but we’d handle turning them into standard data formats when we received them.

It was just under four years from when Tara announced herself as the reincarnation of Mikhail Gregorevich that we sent out the first ethertravelers.

Receiving Reports

Naturally, we didn’t get anything for a while. And we received a few early reports that were hoaxes sent by people from Earth. But eventually we started receiving real reports from ethertravelers, and we established a group to process them. Some reports were brief, and just gave a general description of the planet and its people, and we added these to a growing catalog of descriptions of planets with targets.

Some ethertravelers wrote us longer stories, and we are working to publish them, converting them from the crude code into normal text, and editing them to correct spelling and grammatical errors and to expand abbreviations some ethertravelers employed to send text more quickly.