"A Kidnapping" is a science-fiction short story by Australian writer Greg Egan, first published in the collection Axiomatic in 1995.
[1][2] A man is contacted by hackers, who hold a digital copy of his wife's brain hostage.
The husband, who did already have his brain scanned, but doesn't want to spend eternity without his wife, finally pays the hackers a ransom if they agree to halt the simulation and hand it over to him after his death.
[3] The short story was translated into Hungarian by Erno Nemes (1998), Czech by Petr Kotrle, Romanian by Mihai-Dan Pavelescu, Japanese (1999), Russian (1999), Italian (2003), Spanish (2006), French by Francis Lustman & Quarante-Deux (2006), Danish by Niels Dalgaard, Chinese and Korean.
[1][2] Karen Burnham wrote in Greg Egan (Masters of Modern Science Fiction), that "as in 'Closer', we can never truly know what it is like to be someone else, we must always rely on the models of other people who live in our heads.