Transition Dreams

"Transition Dreams" is a science-fiction short story by Australian writer Greg Egan, first published in Interzone #76 in October 1993. The short story was included in the collections Our Lady of Chernobyl in 1995 and Luminous in 1998. The short story is set in the same universe as Egan's novel Diaspora.
Plot
The protagonist pays the Gleisner corporation to scan his consciousness and transfer it in a Gleisner robot. Caroline Bausch tells him about a side effect called transition dream, which will be experienced by his consciousness during the scanning process but forgotten again. The protagonist is confused about the unnecessary information, but Caroline Bausch argues that to determine how a consciousness experiences a phenomenon, it has to be created and do so in the process. The protagonist later learns that the transition dreams are actually experienced by the packages of data of a consciousness saved and deleted again on different servers while sending it to another place. When learning that the transaction to the Gleisner corporation for the process has never really been made, the protagonist realizes to be in a transition dream and therefore the necessity to soon greet death.
Translation
The short story was translated into French by Sylvie Denis and Francis Valéry (1996 & 2007), Italian (2001), Japanese by Makoto Yamagishi (2003), Spanish by Carlos Pavón (2010). Czech by Petr Kotrle (2011), Chinese (2022) and Korean by Kim Sang-hoon (2024).
Reception
Jonathan Cowie, writing on concatenation.org, states that "this story has Philip Dick elements but unlike any Dick story I have read its elements did not seem to quite fit."

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