Resurrection Crystal — David Collins

The remembrance project was an ambitious space colonization project. It eliminated the need to spend 99% of the spacecraft volume on life support, food, oxygen, and waste processing. It also eliminated all of the issues with biological compatibility on alien worlds. In place of keeping a few humans alive for the tens or hundreds of years for space travel, they could just send an inert load of thousands of small memory crystals, each loaded with the essence of doner humans. It would also include instructions on how to ingest them. The locals would then gain human memories and skills. Dozens of small spacecraft were sent out, each with over one-thousand memory crystals, and without the wasteful life support overhead. The idea was that some of the seeder ships would land where the locals could find the crystals. If they happened to land on a place that had had only animals, the crystals would stay inert. They only triggered if they bonded to a host intelligent enough to sustain a supplemental human consciousness.Jake Taylor was a student at the University of Maine. One day, when he didn't have any classes, he stumbled across a booth set up for brain scans, Earn while you sleep. It looked like easy money, he signed up for the full scan, it would require sleeping in a booth for two days, but he would wake up thousands of dollars richer. It should be easy money...The next thing he knows, he is no longer human, and the new world he finds himself in is a very dangerous place. So dangerous, that the former occupant of the body he finds himself in had just died from a venomous snake bite. He is informed that the body he was in had been wearing a crystal, and that he is now one of the resurrected. Some of those that died while wearing the strange crystals have their bodies healed, but their memories were replaced by something from the crystal. The aliens had never read the instructions, the crystals had found another way to activate.On the plus side, he now finds himself in what looks like a martial artist's body, one that used to take a lot of steroids. If he can just make it out of this damn valley alive...