You groan as you return to consciousness. You're dizzy and have a slight headache. Soon that wears off and you're left there in an empty sterile room with nothing different.
"I'm still here. Why didn't it work?" you ask your alien captors.
"It did," the speaker responds. "You are the uploaded mind of Earth specimen #25496 (also known as Alexander), whose body is being dissected even as we speak. Right now you're in a computer simulation of our medical bay, so it probably looks as though nothing has changed."
You hold your hand up and stare at it, marveling that it is only a computer simulation of your real hand. That's if these so-called aliens are really telling the truth, that is.
"Why is it that I still can't walk?" you ask.
"We haven't edited your mental model of your own body yet, so you can't do anything you couldn't do before. We can feed you all sorts of different sensory inputs, though, and get lots of tracing readouts of how your simulated nervous system responds. For example, we can do this..."
The simulation changes to the location where they abducted you. It's your very own bedroom! You are back in your clothes and back in your wheelchair. You reached out and touched your bed: it feels so soft and... well, normal.
"...or we can do this." You're now in a space suit sitting on a ledge looking out over a vast canyon with an orange sky and two purple moons. "This is our home planet," they tell you. "Maybe you'll visit it in a real body someday." They take you back to being naked in the medical room. "We have many environments which you will be able to choose from later at your leisure. That was only a sample."
Wow, so this is really happening. You have a couple more questions about it now that you know it's the real deal. First question: "Do you think you can actually change my body in here? I mean, my 'mental model' of my body?"
"Sure! We'll probably experiment with getting you to walk again at some point. We might try to edit your anatomy in various informative ways or even transform you into another species, as long as you're okay with that. Hmmm... Our readouts indicate that your human pleasure sensors are highly activated right now. You seem to be enjoying this whole concept."
You blush with a wide smirk. You really are loving the idea of being just a disembodied collection of editable data. Even back on Earth, you were a closet transhumanist who always dreamed of becoming a cyborg or uploading yourself into a robot. Now here you are in a computer system. "Yeah, I'm kind of looking forward to it," you say in a soft voice.
"I'm glad you feel that way," says the voice. "It really isn't as scary as some organic species think it is. We even do this to ourselves when we become severely injured. We have pleasant virtual retreats where patients can wait for the medics to replicate a new body. Death as your people understand it is very rare among us."
That brings up your second question. "So since I'm just data now, does that mean you can just copy me and there will be hundreds of Alexanders running in parallel?" You find the thought spooky but also amusing.
"That is highly discouraged," the voice answered. "We try to have only one active instance of a given consciousness at all times. We might save a backup in case we need to restart you, but it will just remain as static data."
"That makes sense," you reason out loud. "Otherwise we'd be wondering about who is the real Alexander, if anyone."
"In fact," says the voice, "our planet was nearly destroyed by duplicate leaders waging war against each other over exactly that kind of dispute. It gave us a figure of speech for stubborn contrarians who bitterly argue over pointless disagreements: to this day, such people are said to be 'joining the other clone's army.'"
You giggle at the thought of such conflicts. "Kind of like 'angels on the head of a pin,' I guess." You wonder what you should do as a program first.