All around her, in the improvised infirmary, people were dying, by choice.
So was Gage, if truth be told. All that would survive of her would be a copy, distinct from her.
The callosum sensor would download a copy of her consciousness in about eight hours. Gage returned to her cavern, lay on her back with a sigh, and fell asleep.
She opened her eyes.
She wasn't hurting anymore. She was in zero gee. It felt delicious, like swimming in candy floss. She was in the ice cave — no, a Virtual reconstruction of the cave; the walls and house-stalks were just a little too smooth and regular. No doubt the realism of detail would return as their minds worked at this shared world.
Moro approached her; he'd resumed the crude disembodied-head Virtual form Gage had first encountered. 'Hi.' He grinned.
'I just died.'
Moro shrugged. 'Tell me about it. We're all stored inside the shelter now.' This was a hardened radiation shelter they'd built hurriedly into the heart of the ice world; it contained a solid-state datastore to support their new Virtual existence, what was left of their vegetation, their precious clutch of human zygotes embedded in ice. 'Our bodies have been pulped, the raw material stored in a tank inside the shelter.'
-Vacuum Diagrams, "Pilot"