Blankrofl - The Citron CLoud

The Citron Cloud by Blankrofl

	The Citron Cloud was revered by all as the “Savior of Humanity”, it was a system implemented in the year 2034 by three engineers named James Kray, Dalton Skivorski, and Edwin Sevcenko. Everyone knew of the Citron Cloud and the general purpose it served, but few knew how it worked, what it felt like to be synced with it, or why it was particularly called the citron cloud. Initial concepts for the system were no more than an empty idea swapped between the three engineers while on a break from their desk jobs. They talked about the concept a few times, jokingly taking it seriously, even developing schematics and doing the math behind such a system. None of them knew when it became more than an interesting joke, but the first prototype was certainly a wake-up call to all of them that this extraordinary piece of electrical nonsense had actually come into existence. Edwin volunteered to be the first human to be synced with the Citron Cloud. With a literal pasta strainer covered in wires and other technical bits strapped onto his skull, James threw the switch (which was completely impractical and unnecessary for the machine, but James had a thing for large mechanical switches and dramatic electrical sparks). The whole process took only seconds as the machine stored Edwin’s particular brain configuration into its large database. It took nearly 300 terabytes of highly efficient hard drive memory, nearly $12000 worth of hardware at the time. Edwin’s particular brain pattern was stored with no redundancy on the drives, any writing error or hard drive damage could have incapacitated or destroyed Edwin’s mind, no one was really sure at the time.
	The original intent of the system was to store and retrieve all information from someone’s brain. In essence it was a SATA cable for the mind, which is basically a squishy hard drive. Eventual concepts involved a global network connected to the machine to sync people the instant they died, in order to preserve human life until it could be resurrected out of the machine when someone figured out how. Whether out of carelessness for how unlikely the machine was to function, or simply via human error, it was never calculated how the human brain would react having information read from and written to it from an external source. Turns out, reading information from the brain at the speeds necessary to store its data the instant before death simply burnt the brain out. Edwin’s head started smoking and smelt of burning flesh moments after the process ended, he was effectively dead, but his essence was preserved in the hard drive banks of the machine. As the purpose of the first test was simply to copy the brain onto the machine, without the ability to write data back to the brain, Edwin was trapped. Whether they liked it or not, James and Dalton had no choice but to continue developing the machine in order to save their friend Edwin and to avoid the charges of murder when someone eventually found out what happened to him.
	Thankfully, Edwin being the future thinker he was wrote a letter stating that he was aware of the risks involved with the experiment, somehow the authorities believed the letter; they simply treated it as a weird case of suicide and moved on. However, retrieving Edwin from his electrical prison was still of huge concern for James and Dalton. Being engineers with PhDs in engineering fields and what-not, they consumed only 12 years of their lives building and perfecting the structure of this complicated system. They were able to construct a simulated world within the machine. It was a robust system designed to care for and entertain the people within the system as they waited for the technological ability for their revival to appear, a problem for future engineers. After the simulated world was created and prepared for inhabitance, James ran Edwin’s program in the world, and attempted to communicate with him. The communication was a success, and Edwin being an engineer, immediately started to document his experience with James and Dalton. Edwin described being synced as an ever increasing vibration in every atom of the body, and at the point the individual felt as if they would shake apart, sensation quickly numbed from every part of the body, and the mind was filled with bright white light. Mental capacity drained quickly, as if the process made the user so intoxicated that they died. The last experience Edwin described was the strangest. He described a very strong scent of Citron fruit for 3 minutes and 12 seconds exactly after being synced into the machine. None of the trio could explain how the smell was procured after Edwin was technically dead, or why it lasted such a strange amount of time. But it made for a great name for their invention.
	Edwin was pleased with the simulated world, it could provide for any want or desire within the confines of its own simulation. With Edwin’s capacity for long term thought, he suggested that it was best to keep the existence of the simulated world a secret, as death would no longer be motivation for survival, should the world find out they could have their every dream met by simply dying. The Citron Cloud was tested by select individuals who volunteered to sign up with the system, as they were close to death for medical reasons. The system was hastily implemented for the entire world just days after the last tests were completed. One could simply register themselves into the system’s database by getting an implant that tracked their exact physical condition, and synced them with the cloud the moment death occurred. Things went great for years; the system supported millions of individuals in its simulation. There were some issues though. If the death was particularly swift or caused by electrical shock, the brain’s pattern was synced to the Citron Cloud corrupted, resulting in insane individuals in the simulation. It was decided that the system needed to store individuals as soon as death was detected to occur, before the traumatizing experience could take place, and memories were lost.
	Results seemed positive with the newest implementation, no one would ever have to experience the pain of death, and no more insane individuals were to be synced with the system. It is still unknown why the Citron Cloud malfunctioned, as well as how it was able to support nearly 9 billion individuals when the malfunction caused it to think every human being was dying. Technically the machine was correct, we all die a little every day, no one is immortal and the machine knew that. It did what it was told to do, and protected us from our bodies by syncing 8.7 billion people 3 minutes and 12 seconds exactly after the changes were uploaded to the machine’s programming.