Sum (7 page)

Even with the aid of our modern deductive skills, it is impossible to imagine our own death. It is not because we lack insight, but because the concept of death is made up. There is no such thing. This will become clear to you at some point, when you get into a situation that you think should kill you—say, a severe car crash. You’ll be surprised to realize that it didn’t hurt. The witnesses around you will laugh and help you up and brush off the glass and explain the situation.

The situation is that the people around you are Actors. Your interactions with other people were almost entirely scripted from their point of view. Your “afterlife,” if you want to call it that, is your initiation to the game.

We realize this moment of disclosure will be hard on you.
For God’s sake
, you will think as you pick yourself up from the car wreck,
what about my lover?
What was our relationship based on? Were all the
nighttime whispers fabrications? Rehearsed lines? And
all my friends: Actors? My parents: pretending?

Don’t despair. It’s not as bad as you think. If you think you were the only uninitiated one while all the rest were Actors, you’re not quite correct. About half the people are Actors, and the rest, like you until moments ago, are the Beneficiaries. So it is equally likely that your lover was in the same naive boat you were—and now it is your responsibility to become an Actor for her, so that she detects no change in the relationship. You will become like an adulterous spouse striving to force normal behavior. You may have to be an Actor for other Beneficiaries as well: your boss, your cabdriver, your waitress.

As an Actor, you get to see the backs of things. When you finish a conversation with a Beneficiary and exit the room, you find yourself in a backstage waiting area, where slanted two-by-fours hold up the unfinished backs of walls. There are couches here, and you can get snacks from vending machines. You make small talk with other Actors while you wait for your next appearance. Your next appearance will be, say, at 12:53 p.m. for what appears to be a coincidental run-in with someone on the subway.

Before each appearance, you are given a small script on a note card. Generally the instructions are vague. For example, you may be instructed to feign surprise when you run into the Beneficiary; perhaps you will also be instructed to pretend you have just bought a dog or, alternatively, to act as though work is weighing on your mind. Other times the instructions include something quite specific: you are to mention somewhere in the conversation the title of a new book, or drop the name of a mutual friend. Presumably, other Actors during the week will have similar assignments, so the Beneficiary will be guided toward a new idea or meeting.

So you memorize your brief script, and when you walk back through the door you will be wherever you are next needed: the restaurant bathroom, or the museum gift shop where your friend is waiting to meet you, or perhaps a bustling sidewalk where you are to be spotted arm in arm with another Actor. For the Beneficiaries, the back sides of all doors are constructed just before they enter; for the Actors, all the doors of the world are our portal into and out of this waiting room. We don’t know how the Directors dynamically construct the world, much less for what purpose. We are only told that our obligation here as Actors will eventually end, and then we will move on to a better place.

You may decide you’re not willing to uphold this continuous lie to the Beneficiaries. You may yell into the Directors’ intercom that you won’t be their deceitful stool pigeon. This is a typical reaction. But very quickly you will relent and play your part earnestly. We don’t know much about the Directors, only that they are clever enough to get us to do something we don’t want to do.

Why do we play our parts so earnestly? Why don’t we go on strike and blow the cover of the truth? One factor is the sincerity in the face of your lover: her life of unexpected reactive emotion, her heartfelt belief in chance and spontaneity. You’re slave to that gorgeous earnestness in her eyes, her engagement with a world of possibility.

But in truth there is a deeper reason you play your part so convincingly. If you play your part well, you can more quickly leave this acting job. Those with the best behavior are rewarded with ignorance: they are reincarnated as an uninitiated Beneficiary. You could permanently blow the cover, but the Directors are confident that you won’t; they know you will sink to any depth of infidelity to preserve the lie for your eventual return to it.

There is no afterlife, but a version of us lives on nonetheless.

At the beginning of the computer era, people died with passwords in their heads and no one could access their files. When access to these files was critical, companies could grind to a halt. That’s when programmers invented death switches.

With a death switch, the computer prompts you for your password once a week to make sure you are still alive. When you don’t enter your password for some period of time, the computer deduces you are dead, and your password is automatically emailed to the second-in-command. Individuals began to use death switches to reveal Swiss bank account numbers to their heirs, to get the last word in an argument, and to confess secrets that were unspeakable during their lifetime.

It soon became appreciated that death switches provided a good opportunity to say good-bye electronically. Instead of sending out passwords, people began programming their computers to send emails to their friends announcing their own death. “It appears I’m dead now,” the email would begin. “I’ll take this as an opportunity to tell you things I’ve always wanted to express … ”

Soon enough, people realized they could program messages to be delivered on dates in the future: “Happy 87th birthday. It’s been twenty-two years since my death. I hope your life is proceeding delightfully.”

With time, people began to push death switches further. Instead of confessing their death in the emails, they pretended they were not dead at all. Using auto-responder algorithms that cleverly analyzed incoming messages, a death switch could generate apologetic excuses to turn down invitations, to send congratulations on a life event, and to claim to be looking forward to a chance to see someone again soon.

Today, building a death switch to pretend you are not dead has become an art form. Death switches are programmed to send a fax occasionally, make a transfer between bank accounts, or make an online purchase of the latest novel. The most sophisticated switches reminisce about shared adventures, exchange memories about a good escapade, swap inside jokes, brag about past feats, and summon up lifetimes of experience.

In this way, death switches have established themselves as a cosmic joke on mortality. Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.

This began as a good-spirited revolution against the grave’s silence. The problem for those of us still living, however, is the increasing difficulty in determining who’s dead and who’s alive. Computers operate around the clock, sending out the social intercourse of the dead: greetings, condolences, invitations, flirtations, excuses, small talk, inside jokes—codes between people who know each other well. And it is clear now where this society is going. Most people have died off, and we are some of the few remaining. By the time we die and our death switches are triggered, there will be nothing left but a sophisticated network of transactions with no one to read them: a society of emails zipping back and forth under silent satellites orbiting a soundless planet.

So an afterlife does not exist for us per se, but instead an afterlife occurs for that which exists between us. When an alien civilization eventually bumps into Earth, they will immediately be able to understand what humans were about, because what will remain is the network of relationships: who loved whom, who competed, who cheated, who laughed together over road trips and holiday dinners. Each person’s ties to bosses, brothers, and lovers are etched into the electronic communiqués. The death switches simulate the society so completely that the entire social network is reconstructable. The planet’s memories survive in zeros and ones.

This situation allows us indefinitely to revisit shared jokes, remedy lost opportunities for a kind word, and recall stories about delightful Earthly experiences that can no longer be felt. Memories now live on their own; no one forgets them or grows tired of telling them. We are quite satisfied with this arrangement, because reminiscing about our glory days of existence is perhaps all that would have happened in an afterlife anyway.

Although the concept of the afterlife is quite old, its full-scale implementation has only gotten into swing in the last century. The afterlife existed before then, but only barely.

To understand this, you need to be aware that your Creators are talented at just that—creation—but they’re not involved with the observation and judgment of our actions, as we had previously supposed them to be. The Creators watch none of the details as our lives unfold. They could not care less. Only afterward do they become interested again, when they have the opportunity to do what they do best: create. At this second stage, they are called Re-Creators, and their goal is to find all available records of your life and create a simulation of you, reconstructing all your days. They take it as their challenge to see if they can recover a good likeness of you from the piles of evidence you’ve left behind.

They begin by tracking down your birth, marriage, and death records. For most people, the afterlife started only a few hundred years ago, when record keeping began. They then take account of the phone company records: every call you made and to whom. Every credit card purchase is retrieved and analyzed for time, location, and purchase. The Re-Creators analyze every existing frame of video footage on the planet for your every appearance: buying coffee at a convenience store, standing in front of an ATM withdrawing money, clutching a diploma, walking unwittingly in the background of other people’s home videos, eating a hot dog in the bleachers during a basketball game.

They’re artists of information, and each data point adds a bit more pigment to their accumulating portrait of you. Each detail is marked with a confidence rating for the source and cructured hecked for consistency against the other data points. Millions of facts are gathered, facts so richly stand interconnected that they constitute a hard shell that retains your shape when you disappear from the middle of it.

From school records, the Re-Creators closely approximate what pieces of knowledge you had at a particular moment in your life. This information is neatly dovetailed with detailed historical records. They re-create what you were likely to have seen around you each day and, by examining your newspaper subscriptions, they model the world events that would have affected you.

From deep within this jungle of data they can deduce the exact dates of your various relationships: when they began, when they ended, and whether they overlapped. The Re-Creators come to understand you from every form you filled out, every word you typed on the Internet, the mail you received from others: why people thank you, who chastises you, what advice your lovers seek, what favors your friends ask. Which mailing lists you’re on. Your tax returns.

In previous generations, when you awoke in the afterlife, it was easy to tell that you were merely a simulation, because your details were so sparse. The feeling of emptiness on most days allowed you to know that you were a cheap reproduction of your former self. But with today’s rich data, the Re-Creators can reconstruct you so seamlessly that your afterlife is essentially a perfect replica of the original. It feels so much like the real thing that in the afterlife you only rarely wonder whether you’ve lived all this before, haunted occasionally by déjà vu, holding a book in your hand and not knowing whether this is the first time or a replay from aeons past.