Bartek’s InSoul3 Upload

Bartek’s InSoul3 Upload begins not with a finished copy but with a machine being brought back into use: Bartek and Rytka assemble neglected scanning equipment, check its configuration, and start a scan of Bartek’s mind. The scene makes that act depend on the technology’s commercial failure and its improvised afterlife among hobbyists, while stopping at the moment the scan begins rather than showing its result.

A technology abandoned and repurposed

InSoul3 had been promoted as a new feature for Xbox and PC, with companies pouring hundreds of millions into the technology. Its commercial promise met resistance from religious, political, and medical movements, as well as consumer-rights groups. Companies expected to develop applications and games withdrew; most of the equipment went unused. The system’s history thus moves from ambitious investment to public opposition and retreat, leaving expensive devices available for uses their original commercial backers had not sustained.

The leak of InSoul3’s source code enabled a different kind of development. Hobbyists tinkered with the system, adding unauthorized modifications, among them “mind copy and paste” functions intended to make avatar bots behave as faithfully as possible. These modifications are the immediate technical context for Bartek’s scan: the hardware was not simply a dormant consumer product, but a platform whose capabilities were being extended by people working outside the original companies’ plans. The passage does not specify exactly which modification Bartek and Rytka use, or what the scan will ultimately do with its data.

The equipment they retrieve had been bought in the most expensive industrial version available, designed for clinics and universities and offering the highest-resolution scan then available. After a scandal involving leaks to competitors, the Chief had considered using IS3 as an in-house universal lie detector. Lawyers intervened, and he abandoned the plan. The unused units remained boxed in a neglected corner of the company’s IT basement, then began to be auctioned on Allegro, where self-taught neurosoft artists bought them at half price. The system’s past therefore includes institutional uses that were proposed but never carried out, as well as a resale route that put advanced equipment into hobbyists’ hands.

Retrieving and configuring the scanner

Bartek tears open the wrapping and takes out the units. The setup is materially cumbersome: a rubber skullcap is placed over the head, while multiple cards, thicker than the latest 3D graphics cards and fitted with dedicated processors, must be installed in a computer. Even the cooling systems weigh a pound. These details give the scan a physical scale at odds with any idea of mind copying as an effortless, purely virtual operation. Before anything can be copied, people must unpack the apparatus, connect its components, and make its hardware work.

Rytka reads the instructions while Bartek struggles with the setup. When it is time to proceed, the two choose Tatar’s machine because Tatar has quite likely drowned himself in the can. Bartek crawls under the metalwork to reconnect ports and check cables; Rytka downloads amateur InSoul3 applications from forums, wikis, and torrent categories devoted to the neurosoft. While they work, the transfer rate drops by the minute. The scene gives the operation both a specific improvised workstation and a pressure of diminishing transfer speed, without specifying what causes the slowdown or whether it threatens the scan.

Two hours later, configuration is complete. Diagnostics give the RAM and processors the green light. Big Bird watches from the wall, already high on reefer, and says he has played the system, calling it heavy stuff. His brief reaction places the hardware within a culture of use and experimentation, but offers no technical explanation of the procedure. The equipment’s readiness is established instead by the diagnostics and the actions of Bartek and Rytka.

Starting Bartek’s scan

Rytka takes the keyboard while Bartek selects an IS3 scanner. Big Bird offers the Chief a joint, reduced to a microscopic roach; the boss spits it away, his teeth chattering as he cracks his knuckles. The contrast keeps the moment from becoming a clean laboratory procedure: a bodily, apparently tense preparation unfolds alongside the salvaged computer equipment and the casual presence of the onlooker. The passage does not explain Bartek’s reaction or state why he is being scanned.

Bartek puts on the skullcap and Rytka calibrates the scan. He removes it, and they check the configuration again; the status is still green. Asked how long the full scan will take, Rytka says she does not know. The add-on takes over and continues scanning until it has extracted everything it needs from his head. The process is therefore presented as open-ended: the operators can confirm that the system is ready, but they cannot give a duration, and the software determines when enough information has been gathered.

Bartek asks Rytka to proceed, puts the skullcap on once more, and Rytka presses ENTER. The machine starts. The distinction between preparation and outcome is decisive: the passage establishes that the scan has been launched, not that it has finished, that a usable mind copy exists, or that an avatar bot has been created. The narrative moves directly from this threshold to the epigraph “All that lives must die, passing through steel to eternity” and the 1K PostApoc heading, leaving the result outside the scene.

Significance of the threshold

The episode joins two histories of the same technology. InSoul3 was first the object of massive corporate investment, then of organized protest and commercial withdrawal; its abandoned units became secondhand tools for hobbyists who altered the system beyond its authorized applications. Bartek’s scan depends on that reversal: a device once considered for clinical, university, and corporate use is now assembled from stored equipment, amateur software, downloaded applications, and an improvised computer setup.

The act also places a human head in direct contact with a process whose endpoint its operators cannot predict in time. Bartek’s skullcap, the processors, the falling transfer rate, and Rytka’s final keystroke make the operation concrete, while the add-on’s continued scanning leaves the boundary of “everything it needs” undefined. The final press of ENTER is consequently both a practical action and a narrative cutoff. It marks the start of the extraction, but the passage withholds what that extraction preserves, changes, or makes possible.