Tom knew that abandoning everything he had now and transferring his consciousness to the backup clones he had previously hidden would result in losses far beyond just the many starships in his massive fleet and the intelligent AIs running in countless supercomputers, which were the culmination of immense training data and his own hard work, and not just the large scientific facilities, among other things.
The true loss would be much greater than that.
Tom knew that as the primary consciousness, his ability to retain so much scientific knowledge, experience, and skills was actually achieved through numerous clones.
That is, these memories did not exist independently. Instead, in this mode, the clones' brains became the "hard drives" for Tom's primary consciousness to store knowledge and memories.
That knowledge and those memories were stored in the clones' brains.
