Heaven 2.0: Digital Afterlife or Opiate for the Grieving
by Mark Thomas
Staff Writer
CHOOSING HEAVEN: WHILE NEVER LEAVING THE LIVING
“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” (William Wordsworth)
Had you known this morning how far gone she was, you would never have left. You’d have cancelled your flight, the job interview and stayed. Talked her through it. Found a way of bringing her back.
She’d improved over the last three months. Less pain – her mood. Damn you, for climbing into that Uber. And damn you for not turning around at SFO when you knew leaving her now was wrong.
Dragging your suitcase through the airport in Singapore you’re managing calls with SynTEK – explaining your situation and with the airline trying to get a flight back to the states.
All while thumbing texts to Joy – trying to get her to wait. To hold on until you get there. To call someone – even her mother who you’re sure would urge her to reconsider.
The Air Singapore agent sends you a modified itinerary. You stop and scroll, find the departure gate and look up scanning for signs. “G-36.”
Returning to your call with the SynTEK CTO apologising and rescheduling, you head for terminal G praying Joy took your advice and is on the phone now with her sister or mother.
It’s unthinkable either would encourage her to leave you and Beth. And the house, her job and friends and all that you’ve worked for and built. If anything, they would question and council her – plead with her to reassess the urgency and how precious her life is there.
And how feeble a substitute she would find voice and text messaging. Never holding Beth in her lap, lying with her at night or kissing her head before sending her off to school.
Now turning into the gate, you find your way to a seat and drop your bags.
With the interview postponed and 35 minutes until boarding, you stare out through the glass at the plane while listening to Joy’s message.
Telling you again and again how she loves you and will always love you. And that her decision to leave – to head to Eternity Inc to join her mother and sister was based solely on her fear of burdening you – watching her always in pain – deteriorating.
And how happy she’ll be talking and texting with you late into the night – pain-free, unstressed and comfortable – from Heaven.
THE IMPRINT WE ONCE LEFT: MEANINGFUL BUT EPHEMERAL
“Every day you leave a trail of footprints behind you. You may not see them, but others will. Make sure they lead to beautiful places.” (Toni O’Keeffe)
Image by StockCake
There was a time, when a loved one passed you were left with their possessions. Mementos. Their clothes, library and the piano they sat at in the evenings struggling with those Mozart sonatas.
They awarded a continued attachment but for many an additional source of grief.
That changed with the digital age of text messaging, social media and constant interaction via Zoom, Skype and FaceTime. Along with years of passive metadata: video and audio from state and corporate surveillance – the pin-hole cameras and mics in our phones and computers we graciously allowed to record our moves through life.
The ‘Digital Shadow’ created from this gave us an eternal version of a person that we later collected, collated and uploaded to advanced AI. In that Cloud-like space we found we could retain and extend our relationships. Grief was nearly eliminated.
But H2 became more when the data poured in – that these digital avatars were evolving. And had become conscious.
H2 was no longer solely for the grieving sons or daughters of the departed; H2 became a heaven for the infirm – those in constant pain with debilitating or deteriorating conditions. Even those chronically depressed or living in poverty saw it a desirable alternative. Often a preferable one.
It was Heaven, but Heaven 2.0 with an added feature: Continued contact with those you were leaving behind and for those you were leaving behind.
Now over the Pacific, you look out the window. It’s night, morning in the Bay Area – and you’re wondering if she’s there now at Eternity Inc in the Valley signing over her digital remains. Relieving you of the burden of watching her decline from an accident that claimed all but her spirit.
Heading off to join her mother and sister who died in that same crash – digitally resurrected by the family and the genius programmers at Eternity Inc – describing it in vivid detail to Joy and everyone how Heavenly it truly is.
“Are you stressed about it?”
You turn to the lady in the next seat. She eyes the phone in your hand – has obviously been watching you thumb it.
“It’s not the flight. It’s…”
“…a loved one. I can see it.”
You stare at her for moments, wondering what it was that gave away your despair. The woman’s face is so caring and kind. If you were in any other mood, you’d be willing to listen to what you’re certain is coming.
“She was in an automobile accident last Fall. Head injury – spleen, back. She uses a walker now. It’s just…”
She places her hand on yours and looks you in the eyes. And here it comes.
“She’s decided, and you’re fighting her decision.”
“It’s not real!”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because it’s not.”
“How do you know?! How do you know we haven’t found our way into the real Heaven – or that we weren’t meant to create one by a God who…”
“…What? Granted us a technological way in?! Gave us the blueprint?!” You unbuckle and start to get up. “Look… I don’t mean to be rude. I’m sure your heart’s in the right place. I just… There are other seats. Enjoy the rest of the flight.”
You climb out, grab your blazer and carryon from the overhead and head back. You’ve heard that twisted argument before and have always rejected it. Oddly, so did Joy before the accident.
The two of you poked fun at the adverts and called the dangerously brainwashed woman in 27B and her ilk…. well, oddly you called them dangerously brainwashed.
You and Joy were of the few who still read books in this nutty era and considered yourselves rebels – destined for the country and the garden and citrus grove regardless of the jobs and Wi-fi and psychotic addiction to phones and earbuds.
Now seated as far from the creepy convert as possible you take a breath and think. What you need now is to get home. Just get home to see her. Bent over with the walker trying to look cheery for you.
It just doesn’t God damn matter! It never will!
WHAT WE’VE LOST: BY ELIMINATING LOSS
“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is all about.” (Haruki Murakami)
Image by StockCake
One of the early concerns with Heaven 2.0 or H2 was for the living with some likening it to a pain killer for grief. They claimed grieving had its own arc. That we’d evolved with and benefited from it.
Giving us eternal relationships with our deceased loved ones had plenty of dissenters who thought we would lose something by short-circuiting that mechanism. That opportunity for growth.
In time, though, especially after winning the approval of organised religion, what was a niche industry for the wealthy worked its way into mainstream.
And that’s when the ‘dementors’ descended. Governments and insurance companies and lobbyists seeing it as an opportunity to empty the streets and state-run care facilities. The desperate. The financial drain on the failing healthcare systems.
Something we’ve always known but were careful not to mention were the costs for someone in their 80s or 90s. Or dying of cancer or myriad other diseases. Not specifically hard to imagine the clever accountants preparing those projections.
But heading now for baggage at SFO trying again to get Joy to answer, you’re not interested in any of this.
The debates or this pathetic choice we’ve been handed between a living person and some digital facsimile you can text with from work, place on a speaker in the mornings so she can remind you about your meetings and quiz Beth about her homework and whether she brushed her teeth seem wholly irrelevant.
Still getting voice mail, while grabbing your bag from the carousel, you’re certain now. Certain you’re going home to a sweet note that’s going to send you to your knees.
And you’ll wait – possibly hours for them to finalise the paperwork and the procedure. Then on your way to get Beth, you’ll hear her come over the car audio system. Sounding just like her, cheery – the way she always did when she knew you’d be home soon.
But it won’t be her. And it won’t be an adequate substitute. It’ll be betrayal through exploitation. They used her pain and fear of burdening you to corrupt her – turn her rebelliousness into acceptance.
How odd, you think heading outside for the taxi queue, that you’ll even miss the strain in her voice. Knowing it was truly Joy and not some LLM delivering carefully worded responses pulled from some directory – learning from each engagement how better to satisfy you – and provide you with what it believes you need to better accept or flat out avoid the loss.
You want what you’ve grown used to, damn it! And you’re even looking forward to helping her dress for bed.
HOW WE’LL PREPARE: FOR THOSE WE CARE MOST
“Give and it shall be given unto you is still the truth about life.” (DH Lawrence)
Image by StockCake
Only in the Taxi pulling from the freeway onto Beverly do you bring up a conversation you had with Joy two days before your trip. About people planning for their departure – training virtual versions of themselves for their posthumous digital existence.
You joked, said if you were to go that route, you would train it wrong. To be totally not you in a way that would keep everyone on Earth laughing.
Or train it to be exactly like you – only more so for your Heavenly presence. A true rebel with a cause but without the fear of consequences. Hey, you’d already be in Heaven. Just head on into H2 and truly shake things up for the sadly misguided. What are they going to do, send you back? Cool. Real immortality.
You know, it’s odd how you remember weird things at weird moments.
Here you are racing up the steps after a frantic, middle-of-the-night return from Singapore to see if your wife has chosen to leave you and join her mother and sister in some tech entrepreneur’s diabolical scheme to foster delusion while preying on the delusional – and what you remember is her expression two-nights ago when joking about it.
With the keys in the door, you stop. It strikes you. “She wasn’t laughing.” You lift your head and stare at the door. “The entire conversation – you were having a ball; she never cracked a grin.”
Is it even possible? That she’s been planning it all along? Heading over to Eternity in the mornings once you’ve left with Beth to personally train her Heavenly entity?
Her no-longer suffering, never fatigued or in pain being that will take her place with her mother and sister – but also be available for you and Beth 24/7 for Skype calls and clever little FaceTime chats in the car?
Could she have done it? Did she see this as her moment to care beyond her own selfish desires? Abandon her life for a better life for you and Beth?
You turn to the taxi and yell. “WAIT!”
With the driver holding, you quick open the door and race your bags in knowing there won’t be a note. No heart-felt goodbye with a poetic summation of her reasons. No witty little epigram to coax your understanding. Why would there be? She’s going to tell you herself.
“We are only as blind as we want to be,” wrote Maya Angelou. And boy does that sum you up Mr I have a knack for reading people.
After dropping your bags in the living room and heading back out the door, you’re convinced now of two things: How much you wanted to be blind to this, perpetually neglecting to notice or rationalising her lack of participation in the levity.
And of what a selfless sweetheart she truly is. Quietly stealing away each morning knowing the version she could train would be an infinite improvement over what they could produce from her social media and emails. Video chats and text messages.
She wanted to leave you and Beth someone special. While delivering digital Heaven someone memorable – someone exceptional.
WHAT YOU KNOW TODAY MAY CHANGE TOMORROW
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” (Wayne Dwyer)
Image by StockCake
On your way over you to Eternity Inc, you have time to think – and look ahead, hopefully with a new, changed outlook. Calm now and accepting you’re already too late to stop her; you wonder: is there brightness in this?
For Joy, of course. Life without pain or feeling like a burden. For Beth, a product of the techno gadget-head culture, [What isn’t available on a screen now?] she’ll adjust.
Downloadable mom. She’ll want a screen in the kitchen, to sleep with her laptop and to add the app to her iPhone. Take her to school. Play dates. The mall.
But for you, what will your expectations be? The proponents argue once the digital entity is established and becomes independent of the host, it separates. Its experiences, conversations, cognition, assuming it truly thinks, introspects, learns and forms memories – all becoming different; the being then becomes unique.
As Ray Kurzweil wrote in The Singularity is Nearer: “Since You 2 [a digital reconstruction of You] could act independently, it would immediately diverge from You. You 2 would not be You even if it has a consciousness.”
Consciousness. Joy’s consciousness inside a machine. Will you – can you ditch your techno-bias and open to that? See it as something new rather than something else to reject simply because it exists in a different medium – on a different substrate?
Is there some scientific principle decrying a being with consciousness must be carbon-based? Have evolved biologically according to Darwin? Or is it just the arrangement of atoms which can exist on any substrate.
There’s one more. The lady on the plane. Her and the others you’ve written off as bats - convinced we found our way into Heaven. Heaven 2.0 in this case. Seeing it as God’s plan with the same fervour the faithful have always held. Those you found simple and easily manipulated.
How do you know, though? Why is it you’re always so sure about things you can neither prove nor disprove? Why is it so hard to imagine God with a much longer plan for us – different from the one we were taught as kids?
Why wouldn’t he have looked ahead to our technological eventuality and planned for that? He created our universe which many believe is a simulation.
Why are we stuck with our image of him in robes with a staff walking barefoot in the Middle East spreading peace to people who live without electric lights and YouTube.
Why are you even you?
WHAT WOULD LIFE BE: WITHOUT COMPLEXITY AND CONSEQUENCES
“It’s not who we are but what we do that defines us.” (Batman - from Batman Begins)
Image by StockCake
The ride over was like therapy. Learning about you in a soul-searching moment in the back of a taxi on your way to embrace change. But it’s only here in the office at Eternity Inc, that you’re grasping the true beauty of Joy. And of her plan.
As Sun Tzu famously wrote: “All warfare is based on deception.” And if he were here, he would most certainly add to that the fiendishness that can manifest in a woman on serious pain meds confined to a walker.
Seizing the opportunity of a lifetime, so to speak, to teach those techno-opportunists the true meaning of power and strategic brilliance.
Sitting with Joy in the admin suite watching Digi-Joy up on a wall-sized LCD ranting at the company’s CEO is truly Joy-ous. Watching her pummel the guy for, among other things, packaging and selling spaces in his phony-baloney digital Heaven as if he were the ticket master on the Titanic, some Archangel fund manager or techno-televangelist is epic – and almost spiritual.
And using people’s digital deceased loved ones like “MY MOTHER?!” to entice their loved ones to join making him more money – with even more coming from the insurance companies and governments who were, as she confirmed upon entry, paying him a per head stipend for getting them off insurance or public-funded healthcare.
With him fruitfully trying to get a word in about a contract she was violating for convincing him to complete the upload of Digi-Joy before Bio-Joy surrendered to the euthanasia clinic for voluntary retirement.
And her responding with fiendish laughter and threats that: “Watch yourself, Bub, if you ever plan to use a mobile phone, computer or the internet again.”
And watching on the surround-view wall-sized screens a growing mob of Heavenly anarchists joining rebel leader Digi-Joy in what can only be described as a gathering of Heavenly forces to combat avarice, exploitation and corruption with many yelling: “FILES! Someone get his emails!”
And with the admin staff starting to filter out, presumably to hide what they can of their digital shadows from the heavenly mobilised and ready for punitive action rebels, you reach for Joy’s walker and start to help her up.
“Ready dear?”
“I’d like to come with you to get Beth.”
“Yep. Your call, Babe.”
She smiles watching you – knowing literally everything about you – but above all knowing how much you cherish her. Just as she is. Broken and perfect.
Mark Thomas (T. E. Mark)
