The shuttle accident had caused irreparable damage to his body. Fortunately, he had a clone waiting.
The Emergency Medical Personnel rushed his gasping body to the hospital. The EMPs frantically applied all their training to stretch Mr. Wheeler's life. Meanwhile, cortical recorders downloaded his memories into the ambulance's storage grid while simulanteously writing to his online backup. Without any serious screw-ups, he was going to make it.
Plus he'd have the added benefit of the clone's younger body. Jefferson Wheeler was not the kind of spendthrift who would go through the expense of cloning for merely cosmetic reasons. But his life insurance required him to maintain a clone.
The clone was force grown on Nevada IX at the new ElectroLife Lab satellite complex. It was in storage at Sinai Mass Bay Hospital across town. It was currently being rushed to Sisters of Ongoxspew from the opposite direction. With luck, the clone would arrive before Mr. Wheeler.
The surgeons were alerted of the inbound ambulance and were prepared to meet it at the docking clamp. Slipping Jefferson Wheeler into a stasis pod, they were able to make enough repairs to guarantee a complete memory download. It was never good to leave out the death in the memories. It significantly decreases the odds of clone rejection if you remember the death of your old body.
With the memory backup complete, the husk of Jefferson Wheeler was allowed to naturally expire. According to his Living Will, his former body was cremated and placed in an urn for later collection. The clone was successfully rehydrated and deglazed of freezer burn. The neurosurgeons began the memory implantation process.
...
All in all, it went very well. The brain's Executive Functions came through at 98% which had the doctors high-fiving later than night over drinks. It was a textbook clone migration.
...
Except that the memories of Mr. Jefferson Wheeler were somehow replaced by Chisriack Gloop's, a xenoGnome janitor from Pokeipski township. Poor Mr. Gloop had donated his body to science and apparently his memories were included. He was in hysterics for 3 hours after his revival. Apparently he made his donation 133 years ago so he had some trouble adjusting.
The Mother Superior of the Sisters of Ongoxspew Hospital ordered a complete audit of the entire neurosurgery department. All further clone migrations have been rerouted to other hospitals until someone is blamed for this terrible incident. In the end, it will likely be some low-level computer technician who will suffer. Scapegoats are always useful.
The investigation would find that a millisecond after the upload of Jefferson Wheeler's entire memory, the files were erased. A millisecond later, the memories of Chisriack Gloop uploaded. Strangely, the company paid to host Mr. Wheeler's backup had suffered a catastrophic server failure and lost his files too.
Jefferson Wheeler was truly, forever dead.
Needless to say, the lawyers are going to have a field day. Widow Wheeler is sure to hire an army of legal gunslingers to rain terrible e-subpoenas on the Sister's heads. The Sisters will fight back valiantly on the media holos. In the end the insurance company will take a hit and everyone will get on with tormenting other people.
That's how it works here in the Universe. Most people live their entire lives in peace, only being treated like an enemy by their government. And others, like Mr. Wheeler, make the terrible mistake of making powerful enemies.
And none could be worse than one of the Annointed.
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