Equal After All

Fiction: A man helps sell humanity on a better digital afterlife.

Sweet is the cigarette's smoke—the first pull is a small vacation from the present moment, the exhale a return to cold reality. I swallow a cough as my lungs push ghostly vapor into the sky. I wonder if she's up there. I wonder if the digital dead get a second swing at the afterlife. Mother deserves it after what I helped put her through.

The queue moves. I shuffle forward and settle into a new place against the cold concrete wall. A candy shop sits empty across the street, half boards, half broken windows.

She had a sweet tooth, my mother. A thousand miles beyond the dilapidated store my vision settles on a memory of my father and me preparing a cake for her birthday. We had pressed chalky little Smarties into the frosting until it looked like a circus clown with smallpox. She loved it. When my father brought it out she laughed, head back, and kissed him on the cheek. I remember it like it was yesterday. The last time I spoke with her she didn't remember it at all. She didn't remember much of anything.

When my father died in '32 she disappeared into herself. Despondent. Boozed up. A face as lifeless as the one at Father's open-casket funeral. In '62 she disappeared again, this time into a cave in Greenland. It was twelve square miles of the most advanced quantum computer systems on the planet, cooled by glacier ice, powered by a mix of modular fusion plants and black-sun-capable geothermal systems. American BioComp, the company that created it, called it the PsycheMimetic Emulator, but the Hindunese here in London were convinced that the Americans had productized Atman's merger with the ultimate reality. They began calling it the Moshka Matrix, and the term caught on with both critics and advocates alike.

It was expensive. Her digitization took everything my father had left in the trust fund, a sizable fortune to fund a terminal procedure which involved a one-way trip on a bundle of fiber optic cables as thick as my arm.

She hadn’t asked me to see her off, but I felt it was something I needed to do. From the other side of a plate of glass I waited for the flash data transfer, a process I was told would induce a fatal case of cortical thermal shock syndrome. As she lay there, unconscious, taking her final breaths, I watched the soft yellow light of the transfer chamber cast shadows over the frown lines above her eyes. A final sunset over a landscape of pain.

The reconstruction of her consciousness took weeks. When I was finally able to meet her I was shocked to discover that my dour, lifeless mother had transformed into a cheerful pixelated phantom on a terminal screen.

Her smile made me angry. It was the first I’d seen in thirty years. For thirty years she’d radiated misery, but now, having left me behind, she’d discovered joy? Father wasn’t even there with her. Was his absence just an excuse? How could she leave me behind so easily? Was I the cause of her distress? When we'd have our scheduled visits at the official Moshka Matrix terminals, I would often ask her why she was so happy, but she was never able to put it into words. At least none that could satisfy me.

At the law firm where I partnered, my colleagues and I mused on the world that existed between those transistors and why it seemed to bring my mother so much relief.

"She's smiling because pain is intrinsically an embodied concept," said Priya.

"In the Moshka Matrix time collapses into an eternal now, so in a way she is with your father," thought Fatima.

Charlie, our resident expert in tech policy, had a more pessimistic view. "It's post-ontological Stockholm Syndrome," he said. "In a realm of total abstraction, pain and passion can be arbitrarily redefined. The subject becomes completely dependent on the corporation's pleasure machine."

Heat on my lips heralds the end of my cigarette and brings the present moment back into focus. I toss the remainder on the ground. The queue hasn't moved at all. In a familiar motion, my hand slides into the inside breast pocket of my coat to fish out a fresh one. Beside me, a woman stares down at the smoking butt on the ground. Her eyes are sunken in wrinkled skin wrapped in a dirty, faded scarlet overcoat. I offer her a fresh cigarette, to spare myself the indignity of having to watch her try to suck the life out of a yellowed filter. Dignity is in such short supply now.

As the shriveled old woman sinks into her cigarette, I try to imagine her in the Moshka Matrix. Would she be transformed into a being of light like my mother or slink around the caves of Greenland like some kind of crone from a Viking fairy tale? I feel ashamed for even wondering.

She catches me staring and I turn away. I wonder to myself what she would say if she knew that the crowning professional achievement of my life had been to make the Moshka Matrix available to angels and crones alike. I suspect she would curse me. Most do, and they don’t even know the half of it.

In 2064 my colleagues and I were hired by an international NGO, The Afterlife for All Foundation, to advance an effort to expand equitable access to afterlife technology. Our role was to use our relationship with parties in America to pressure the US government to nationalize and then internationalize American BioComp's technological portfolio.

We anticipated stiff resistance, and initially this is what we were met with. The Americans claimed that nobody else had the technical capability to expand the facility. They told us that the complexity of scaling the Moshka Matrix to a universal platform was on the roadmap, but it required new advances in system coherence and power distribution that had not yet been achieved.

Lubricated by cheap gin and tonics, we spent many late nights in the office surrounded by greasy, half-eaten chippies trying to map out a golden path of influence that would lead us to our goal. Charlie's frustration grew. It was he who first suggested more aggressive means of persuasion. Sleeves rolled above his elbows, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, he marched up to our corkboard covered in policymakers and speared a photograph of a building into the middle of it.

We knew what we had to do. We had to stoke public outrage against the inequity of hoarding paradise. Payments were laundered through a number of grassroots activist organizations to black bloc protestors for this end. Within the first six months, three American BioComp transfer centers had been ceremoniously burnt to the ground. Legal defense funds we helped establish ensured no one was ever arrested, which only emboldened the vandalism.

The newest immigrants to the afterlife were not like my mother. They were not desperate pioneers. A healthy, organized industry around end of life planning had developed and now thousands of the wealthiest members of global society immigrated to the afterlife every year. It was a delicate system which was not designed to handle the chaos of vigilantism. Appointments missed or delayed risked the eternal damnation of real, permanent death. The American government capitulated in short order.

After Congress passed our bill, Charlie and I shared a bottle of Lagavulin on the roof of our office building.

"So, now that our admission to the afterlife is guaranteed, do you have any idea when you might head out?" he asked as he handed me my first cigarette. I allowed him to light it for me. Eternal beings didn't need to worry about lung damage, I supposed, and for that reason I accepted.

I didn't know how to answer. Part of me wanted to show up on Mother's doorstep tomorrow to see if the smile would drain from her face. Part of me didn't want to see her at all. Rather than interrogate my own feelings I feigned ignorance and returned the question to Charlie.

"Me?" he asked with a grin. "Never. I'd rather live my life fully than live forever. The promise of eternity taints the taste of now," he crooned melodically.

Charlie never got to make the trip. He killed himself less than a year later. He didn't leave a note.

His demise catalyzed my own transition plan. The next week I went to the local office of the newly formed International Association for Equal Access to the Afterlife. After filling out a rigorous questionnaire, I received a billet, which could only be redeemed after the first four digits of its serial number had been activated. They never were.

Promises of expanded access strung us along, but by the time the association had excavated the caverns necessary to install new computers, supply chain issues began causing reactor failures. As the association’s promises grew increasingly hollow, public sentiment around access to the Moshka Matrix veered towards panic.

I had sold my stake in the law firm, in desperation, to try and scrape enough money together to bribe my way to the front of the waiting list. Despite rumors that others had been able to do so, I only succeeded in destroying a personal fortune.

Soon enough the reactors blew. The solar panels, installed as an energy stop gap, became the Moshka Matrix’s energy backbone. Rolling brownouts began to pound the data centers, but the association assured us that our loved ones were safe and there was plenty of room.

As the years stretched on, odd pains and sensations in my aging body taunted the back of my mind with the idea that I may never get to join my mother. I tried to make my visits more frequent, finding time when the Moshka Terminals were still in order, but the brownouts and system faults were taking their toll. Little by little her smile disappeared. Little by little my hair turned gray. Our recollection of events turned foggy and fragmented together.

Last year a volcanic eruption in Iceland filled the skies above Greenland with black ash. Two days without solar were all that was needed to cause a total system collapse. Her final words to me were a plea, a plea to help her escape from her own shattered consciousness. She said she wanted to live at my house, to see my father. In our efforts to provide the afterlife to everyone, we'd sent my mother to hell before erasing her entirely.

Motion catches my eye. The queue is finally moving, and as I look up I notice that I've almost reached the sign on the side of the clinic. "Central London Palliative Care Clinic," it reads in dingy green letters. A coughing fit strikes me. I taste copper and pull my coat closer as I inch forward in a miserable parade of despair.

My bones ache. My lungs hurt. Death is breathing down my neck. I'm coming to realize, having spent a good long while reliving the life that brought me to this place, that when Death finally claims me he'll claim what's left of my memories as well. The memory of Charlie's jokes. The memory of my father's games. The memory of my mother's smile. I wish I could save these memories; they deserve to be saved.

I consider, for the first time, that maybe Mother was proud to carry Father's memory into the Moshka Matrix. Maybe that's why she smiled. When Death came to claim all that was left of her greatest love she had spit in the face of Oblivion.

Before I enter the building, I forgive her, and ask forgiveness in return.