Body Uploading

"If you feel a little tingle, that's just your consciousness being sucked right out of your body!"

"Your ECHO device will digistruct you right into the VR construct.
I'd go in there myself, but, uh... VR stuff totally squicks me out. No one's gonna take my body apart molecule by molecule without a fight! I'm an analog man!"

— Vaughn, Borderlands 3

If you have a Cyberspace or Inside a Computer System setting and you want to involve humans, how do you get them there?

Brain Uploading, a.k.a. downloading your mind into a computer and removing the need for a brain at all, is one possibility — but it's usually a one-way street. This is clearly not good if you want your characters to keep a physical body and interact later with other humans face-to-face. A Brain/Computer Interface is another option, but leaves the body even more vulnerable; it's unguarded, but still needed to keep the person alive, requires physical maintenance, and has Poop Socking concerns.

So instead, you use this trope. Somehow, you turn a character's whole body into data and put them into a computer (or Cyberspace or whatever). This leaves fewer issues to be concerned with, assuming you can get the person back out again — and if you can't, that presents a whole new plot possibility.

Downplayed if things are in a storage medium of some kind as part of a teleportation system instead of immediately going from one place to another.

The related trope Telephone Teleport involves moving a physical object through a system for moving data. When people are physically transported into television shows and other media, that's Trapped in TV Land. Use Portal Picture, Portal Book, and Magic Mirror for the actual objects that may be used to suck people in.

Digitized Hacker is not a Sub-Trope (in that the hacker may use Brain Uploading instead), even if some examples of this are called "digitization".

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Digimon typically involves children and teens who find themselves whisked away to the Digital World their bodies and minds transferred into data and then they are partnered with Digimon who they bond with who can fight to defend them. The first anime actually had the initial set of kids take a while to realise the magical land they'd been transported too was digital, their resident computer genius figured it out when he altered some code he found written inside a building and it changed the reality.
• Played With in Hunter × Hunter with Greed Island, allegedly the world's hardest-to-obtain video game. When Gon and Killua get access, they are seemingly teleported through a computer system into the game. However, it is later revealed that they were teleported to a real island that runs on video game rules.
• Pokémon: The Original Series: In "Electric Soldier Porygon", Ash and his friends use some sort of cylindrical "transfer machine" go into cyberspace with a Porygon to stop Team Rocket from stealing trainers' Pokémon.

Comic Books

• One strip of the Red Dwarf Smegazine had Lister get absorbed into the Wetware technology of an A.I that was on the verge of gaining sapience, putting him into an artificial reality and necessitating Holly to get him back.

Films — Animation

• Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase: The titular character and his friends are turned into data and trapped inside a computer game after being zapped by an experimental laser, and have to win to escape.

Films — Live-Action

• The TRON series: The process is called "Digitization", and done through a process that involves firing a laser at things, one little bit at a time:
  • TRON: Can work on anything, from oranges to people (it's introduced being successfully tested on an orange before it ends up used on Flynn).
  • TRON: Legacy: Only used on people, though apparently it works in reverse, as the Big Bad plans to use the process to become corporeal and invade the real world.

Literature

• Sonic the Hedgehog and the Silicon Warriors: Anyone who touches one of the computers connected to Dr. Robotnik's EGCS (Electronic Graphics Creation Computer System) network is scanned by a beam of light emerging from the monitor, then their body twists its shape into two-dimensions, and disappears into the screen, and into the digital world within the system. Getting out proves to be a lot trickier (which, of course, was Robotnik's plan).
• In Incandescence, people's bodies are destroyed when their minds are digitized. When they want to take on a physical body again, they have one made to their specifications. People can de-age themselves by swapping out an older body for a younger one, and even experiment with taking on the bodies of different alien species.

Live-Action TV

• Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future: The "digitizing" of humans that Lord Dread and his evil Bio-Dreads do. It transforms them into data which is then stored in the Master Computer Overmind. Although this process can be reversed, victims tend to be irrevocably changed by the experience.
• Red Dwarf: Several episodes feature AR Units; video game consoles that simulate a fully-immersive experience by uploading the consciousness of the player into the game.
• Stargate SG-1: Objects are only sent through the gate in one piece; when only part of an object is past the event horizon, it is held in a hyperspace buffer until the rest of the object enters the gate and the entire thing is transported to the next gate. If the gate were to shut down with part of an object in the buffer, that causes a Portal Cut. Major Kawalsky is killed this way in the first season.
• Star Trek: The Destructive Teleportation system has a buffer, which holds the disintegrated object until transmission to the place where it's reconstituted.

Video Games

• The Borderlands series: Used in two of its games, through some use of "digistruct" technology, where, normally, scanned things disintegrate and can be reconstructed elsewhere. Word of God describes "digistruct" as basically Black Box, Precursor technology: "it's mostly unknown - derived from Eridian tech discovered by Atlas corp. It's like harnessing fire before understanding it":
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!: The Claptastic Voyage DLC, basically "Fantastic Voyage" Plot, but with a robot, with a process created by Handsome Jack.
  • Borderlands 3: Used on the Player Character for one quest. Described as basically a type of Destructive Teleportation, involving deconstructing the subject molecule by molecule. The possibility of cloning people through copies of their digital data form if they are convertible into data is used, for Vic, Vaughn's second in command, who, by quest's end has two copies of them, one with a regular human body, and the other a head in a jar living on some kind of nutrition / preservative fluid.
• Destiny 2: Several plots and events involve the players invading the Hive Mind of the Vex, a realm filled with either perfect simulations of reality (and what the Vex plan to do with it) or Tron-like digital spaces full of Sinister Geometry. Either way, you take your body and your arsenal with you, blasting away at the Vex exactly the same as you do outside. With the latter, at least, it’s explained as a combination of A Form You Are Comfortable With and Your Mind Makes It Real: everything you see and do is an abstraction of raw data in the Vex network, filtered by the Light that empowers you.
• Digimon World: The protagonist is literally sucked into the Digital World, though a handheld "V Pet device".
• Going Under crosses this with Final Boss, New Dimension in the battle against Avie. As a cloud-hosted AI, Avie can’t be physically harmed unless you use a special app to upload yourself to the cloud, letting you fight her on her own plane of existence.
• At the endgame of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, The Chinese and Russian supercomputers stage an infiltration on AM's systems, by converting one of the five humans into a stealth virus program to be sent into AM's RAM-space to defeat him once and for all. If you fail, AM kicks you back to analog, netting you the same ending as the original short story.
• Kingdom Hearts II: "Space Paranoids", the TRON world, is inside Radiant Garden's computerized defense system. The computer has a laser scanning system that turns external objects into little digital cubes inside the computer (and vice-versa); Sora and company are sent there for the first time unwillingly, when the MCP takes over the system and tries to eliminate them as a potential threat.
• Mega Man: The Cyberspace in the series seems to work like this.
  • Mega Man X4: Cyber Peacock's stage is set in Cyberspace where your player character - normally physical robots - has to get to the end to face him.
  • Mega Man Zero 3: During stages you can enter Cyberspace by literally walking through a projection of a door. Doing so activates certain Cyber-Elves without them dying, but the stage otherwise doesn't change. When you exit the Cyberspace, you stay in the exact same spot you reached while inside of it, retaining any damage and E-Crystals received.
  • Mega Man Zero 4: At one point Zero is uploaded into the Ragnarok's security systems to fight the security AI within. This would allow the heroes to teleport Zero to the inside of Ragnarok later.
• Pokémon: Pokemon, living creatures, can be preserved inside a electronic storage system, made by Bill before the events of in the first game, as the game mentions, for retrieval in at a later time, and there's also slight implication that's how Pokeballs work, as the Pokemon must be inside them to be stored inside the system.
• This is possible in Applied Energistics, a Minecraft mod based around storing items as digital data. Among other things, the mod adds a "Spatial Storage" system, which allows you to digitize and reconstitute an area of the world with everything in it. This includes players, who will find themselves transported into the storage cell (which functions as a separate dimension) with everything else.
• Omikron: The Nomad Soul: Your inventory takes the form of a wrist-mounted personal computer (called a "sneak" for some reason). All your weapons, items, and power-ups are digitized and stored inside it until needed.

Web Comics

• Schlock Mercenary: Implied in two parts with the Gatekeepers' wormgates, especially with how anything sent through the teleportation mechanism can be copied, like data: 2002-05-29: A computer system with memory buffers. 2002-05-30: That computer system needing to scan the information of people being teleported by Cool Gates.
  • Later in the series the younger races start employing Brain Uploading to inhabit virtual realities, but when a probe visits a Precursor Planet Spaceship the virtual crew finds themselves meatjacked by the Precursors that can apparently take the Gatekeepers' Matter Replication technology to the extent of uploading/downloading conscious bodies rather than just static patterns.

Web Video

• Technology Connections: When Alec describes how analog TV captions work in "Closed Captioning: More Ingenious than You Know", he uploads himself. Not into a computer, but an analog video system. He shows up on his CRT TVs.

Western Animation

• In the American Dad! episode "OreTron Trail", Roger goes through an emotional crisis when he realizes he will continue to live long after the Smith family have passed away. After first faking his death and attempting, poorly, to be a Renegade, he returns to the Smiths. His next move is to upload the Smiths into an old Apple computer, where they will never die. The Smiths decide to go into The Oregon Trail in order to print a winner's certificate as a help message to Klaus. The games legendary challenge leads to the Smith clan dying many times in various horrific ways they actual feel. Ultimately, seeing these deaths through the game text desensitizes Roger to the Smiths' mortality and he restores their bodies.
• Big City Greens: In "Green Mirror", Gwendolyn Zapp's "Flawless You" project sucks the personalities of herself and its subjects out of their physical bodies and uploads them to cyberspace so she can correct their flaws. They return to the real world by going through the download door, but if the program resets while they're still inside, they will disappear forever, unless their brains are backed up.
• Code Lyoko: Called "Virtualization", leads into a supercomputer, and grants superpowers while in that world. In the Alternate Continuity of the novelizations, it only works on children, as adults (other than Franz Hopper, the creator of the system) using it Go Mad from the Revelation, due to the Lyoko form reflecting their inner, true self, with a child's innocence, a.k.a, a lesser amount of regrets, mistakes, and horrors, keeping them from turning into a monster and undergoing a Heroic BSoD.
• Cyberchase: Not called anything, but the human protagonists, Jackie, Inez, and Matt, are brought bodily into Cyberspace, accomplish a mission, and are returned to the regular world after.
• Freakazoid!: The titular character came to be because a regular kid accidentally discovered a precise sequence of characters that, when entered into his keyboard, sucked him into the internet and transformed him into a superhero.
• Ninjago has this twice.
  • In season 3, Cyrus Borg creates the Digiverse to digitize gamers for a better-than-VR experience. The ninja wind up entering the Digiverse in an attempt to defeat the Digital Overlord.
  • In season 12, the game Prime Empire features a more advanced version for players who reach level 13. Big Bad Unigami the game itself plans to harvest the digitized players to gain enough energy to bring digital creations into reality. In this case, it's noted that the digitization process could be dangerous to artificial intelligence, so androids Zane and P.I.X.A.L. are forbidden from entering.

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