Sometimes technology and humanity surprise me
Hi Everyone! I wanted to share a creative non-fiction story I wrote about something that recently happened to me. As some of you may know, my grandmother tragically passed away recently. But she decided to have her consciousness uploaded to the interwebs. I won't lie I was a bit unnerved at first but now I feel so much better about everything. It's nice to have her still here, and eventually I know she'll end up deciding to go into WikiSimulation -- for those of you unfamiliar with this it's basically a regular simulation for people do upload themselves into after death, but anyone can add on to it and create a new area within the sim, like a collaborative afterlife -- or one of the other afterdeath simulations, but for now I'm just happy to have her with me. Anyways, on to the story.
The air was warm and windy as I crossed the road, and autumn leaves tumbled down from the trees. It was a day that I would usually consider to be absolutely perfect. But I was afraid of what it would be like to see her. I had to remind myself that it was just a visit.
The old house looked just as it always had. It had always been my favorite place to spend time as a child. Vines crawled up the pale yellow siding and the rose bushes that circled the whitewashed porch were still in bloom. I walked up the brick path, up the short stars, and up to the white wood door. There I stood as the minutes passed slowly, wondering where to go next. There was surely no need to knock, not at this point. The brass doorknob glinted as the sun shifted in the sky. I could not stand out here forever as the day grew old. I turned the knob and opened the door.
The smell of vanilla greeted me. It was a familiar scent and gave me a sense of comfort as I closed the door behind me and pocketed the key.
“Amber?” A voice called from the other room. “Is that you?”
“Yeah,” I said, walking through the foyer toward the living room. “I just thought I’d stop by to see you.”
“Well don’t be shy dear, I’m just in here.”
And in fact, she was. my grandmother was sitting in her old floral armchair. Her hair was still long and grey. Everything looked the same as it had in all the years before.
“You look…” I trailed off as she sat on the couch beside my grandmother. “You look the same.”
“Well, what did you expect? Nothing’s really changed after all.” The older woman said with a slight smile, “and surely you must know what wonders technology can do these days.”
Of course, I knew all about the technological history my grandmother referred to. A side effect of my work as a historian of the internet. Yet despite the barrage of facts flowing through my brain – this has been in development since the 1970s, began as Russian computer scientist Victor Glushkov’s pet project, first successful uploading happened in 2004 – I could not help but feel a strange confusion.
“But you died,” I whispered, as though the words were a secret. “Doesn’t that change something?”
And then my grandmother laughed, as though I had just said something hilarious.
“Oh dear, that is your first problem!” she exclaimed. “I’m not dead, my body has died but that always would have happened, it is the nature of bodies. But I am alive, I can speak, think, listen, and feel even though my natural body is gone. And even without the robotics of this body that lets me move, I would still be truly alive.”
I had never considered myself a traditionalist who refused to move with the times and accept technological advancements, but the idea of living beyond death through the internet unnerved me. Yet even considering my sensibilities, I could not deny what I saw in front of me – a person, dead but not really dead. Dead but truly alive.
I looked up at my grandma, whose body was no longer flesh and bone but something else. It’s not about bodies. Her mind, her words, her love was so human.
“I thought this would be strange, you know, like… like talking to a ghost. I was worried I would come and think that all of this mind uploading was a mistake, that we had trespassed on God’s territory and we should have let the dead die. But I was wrong.”
“Oh of course it would feel strange, but you’re too young to really know death, not the way I have known it," my grandmother said to me.
A foreboding sense fell over the sunny living room, discussions of death had never been particularly welcome in this room. During Christmas dinners and Easter brunches, no one talked about the great beyond. Today though, there was no way around the subject.
“Do you know when the first person successfully had their consciousness uploaded into a supercomputer?”
Of course, I knew, this was a fact taught in even the most basic high school history class. I was only six years old when a woman named Anya Fedorova made world headlines for being the first person to continue living after she died. The technology was still experimental at the time, no one knew what would happen if it went wrong. But it worked. After the final code had been transmitted from her brain to the computer she could speak with her children just as she had before her death.
It was primitive, compared to what uploading looked like now. Anya’s consciousness was uploaded as a stream of code onto a computer that could respond in a monotone AI voice to the words of others. Now the consciousness code is uploaded onto a small computer chip that is attached to a humanoid robot, made in the likeness of the deceased.
“2004, April 14, 2004,” I responded, moving from my historical musings back into the real world.
“That’s right,” my grandmother answered, “It was three days after my own father passed away.”
I had not known that detail. In fact, I had never known my great-grandparents who traveled often in their retirement. Of course, I had heard stories of my grandmother’s father – he was a photographer who had ventured around the world with his wife, a writer.
“I was angry at first,” my grandmother continued, “how could this woman get another chance to live for eternity when I would never talk to my dad again? The anger died, eventually, but I always wondered how different life would have been for my children, for you, if he had been given that opportunity.”
She sighed wistfully, looking around the small home. “He could have been with us, telling stories and jokes. He was a good man and our family would be so much brighter with him in it again.”
I was unsure of what to say in response and allowed myself to imagine a new world, one where I could have known so many faraway faces. I could have grown up surrounded by the people my grandparents had known and loved and then I could have known and loved them too. Before I could get too immersed in my fantasy, my grandmother spoke up again.
“I chose to stay here for a reason. Many still want to die, and others prefer to move into the simulation, but I knew that I couldn’t leave my family. I want to see your wedding, I don’t want your mother to have to go through what I did when my dad died, and I want to be here for Christmas.”
Christmas was always my favorite holiday, and my grandmother’s too. It was filled with baking cookies at night and hanging up decorations on the tree. Handpainted baubles mingled with stained-glass stars that were wrapped and tucked away most of the year. People came from distant states to be together. And that togetherness could now live forever.
It is a new world, death cannot steal anything. In a few years, when the technology grows and supercomputers hold the consciousness of everyone whose body has passed into the Earth, maybe there will be no more word for “death,” just a continuation of life.
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