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My mind was uploaded to meat body when the ship was entering orbit of Node 1545, an earth-like planet that had been terraformed to host one of our humanity-servers. I checked the scanners in my HUD, but as expected there were no signs of what caused the disruption, the planet was simply not there in the Connected Reality View. All I could see from the visual sensors from this distance was the uniform shape of the solar panels covering the surface, with pock marks here and there,presumably caused when the laser satellites that protected the Node from meteors fell down into the panels.


It was odd, seeing a planet like that in the real world, especially one so completely devoid of life. Our first simulation started so long ago, when humanity faced a threat that no longer seems important. We uploaded half a dozen minds of volunteers to servers that would run at twice the tick rate of the real world, they were tasked with developing a way for humanity to survive the threat. Months later a message emerged from the simulation with blueprints and instructions to build better servers that would house more minds at a faster speed, their analysis showed that they wouldn't have time to figure out a solution at the current state.


At some point the threat was eliminated, but then all of humanity was living inside the servers and the Earth was unrecognizable from what it was mere years later. Once our population limit was reached the obvious next step was to create more servers, so we transformed the moon. The rest of the planets in the solar planet soon followed, and when we reached other solar systems we had already simulations inside our simulations, which were connected with The Whole of Humanity when, and if, they reached certain development steps, and in all of our expansions we never found any other signs of life outside what used to populate the Earth.


We had conflicts, even wars, but they were mere games as nothing was really lost with enough control of the simulations. We knew that there was no threat big enough to threaten us, until now. The Nodes never failed entirely, they were built with so many safeties that the startelement caused by this vanishing was felt like a wave of real fear throughout the servers. We knew that this might not have been an accident, and we knew that if something was strong enough to shut down an entire node it could possibly have studied our servers by now to hack the connected worlds, and that would be unthinkable.


All of this was explained to me by The Monitors, of course, as the reason I was selected by the Higher Worlds was because my home simulation was still younger and closer to the zeroth reality, so I wouldn't have any difficulty with real space and time. So a nearby transport chip capable of generating a meat body was diverted to 1545, more would come soon. But as the pod reached the surface I felt the responsibility of being the first human to face this new threat and was enticed by the possible rewards that this mission could entail.


My pod had enough spare battery to power a nearby terminal so I could check the logs and I was shocked to realize the amount of unread reports, some of them from earlier than the vanishment but none of them were able to be sent out for some reason. The first ones were about unexpected malfunctioning in some sectors, signs of destruction with no apparent cause and weird sightings that couldn't be detected by the more advanced sensors. The last one finished recording just before the Node shutdown and it was footage of a battle in the Processing Hall, close to the planet's core. My legs failed me and I had to mentally check that I wasn't in some sort of fantastical simulation. Humans. Meat humans fighting a horde of patrol and combat robots in what seemed like a desperate battle for their survival. As I rushed deep inside the planet I understood that the Monitors had lied, and I was not sure it was only to this lowly human but I hoped I had enough time to find out.