“Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
-Vladimir Nabokov
As the burgeoning social media landscape has increasingly expanded into daily routine, humanity shares exuberance for an unprecedented, if not over-extended, communion with each other. People discuss, argue, and share their lifestyles, thoughts, and other miscellany, with colleagues and strangers alike. Even more, they, literally, have begun to share themselves as thousands submit biological samples directly to genealogy websites and online health-related companies. This in turn leads to another notion: what if someone’s consciousness could be shareable? Photographs and videos will be insufficient to push the boundaries of this revolutionary form of artificial intelligence and virtual reality combination.
Looking beyond leisurely activities, practical applications are suggestible as well. Minds ravaged by various ailments can be salvaged from the devastating effects, while those with intact faculties can thwart its occurrence altogether. Acceptance and normalization of euthanasia as an individual choice makes this idea less taboo, no longer carrying the stigma of previous generations. Of course, this is deemed merely a fanciful thought exercise until technology is developed for such procedures. Then, everything starts off harmless with no indication of the impending consequences; even those initially opposed, arguing the dire folly, eventually concede to its usefulness.
No more cemeteries to encase the deceased for eternity and beyond. Crematories no longer function as alternatives for those wishing not to endure the circumstance of slow decay. No mourning for the lost, in the sense of an existence forever gone. There exist only mausoleums of the living, preserved as taunting reminders of what is past rather than invoke dread or terror of what is to come. Humanity now resides as the perpetual living dead.
Dead in any physical embodiment, hauntingly alive in digitized form. Our invocations and shrieks inaudible to even those most closely connected to us. Categorized, indexed, and archived as both documentation of and memorial to our existence, yet no longer confined by the limits of historical constructs for similar preservation. A collective of individuals that once existed, and technically still do, but not in any politically or socially apt context. Nothing more than digital fossils - not dissimilar to bygone interstellar archival ambassadors, Voyagers I and II - perhaps for another civilization to discover.
This is our fate both by circumstance and choice, and it is ours for eternity and beyond.
©2018 Steve Sagarra