When the podcar strikes me, I see a flash. For a long moment, I am nothing more than an electric white shock of pain.
E-medics rouse me. My blurred vision only perceives shadowy forms, but I can imagine what they look like in their gray jumpsuits, each of them fitted with goggles that display my vitals. A chill tickles my skin. They’ve cut off my shirt.
“Is she stable enough to save?” an e-medic asks. He pries open my eyes for a retinal scan. The blaze of daylight feels like a skewer jamming into my head.
“Analyzing the numbers now,” another says. “But the AmaCo technician is on his way if she needs to be uploaded.”
Uploaded? I can’t be that far gone. Thirty minutes ago, I was still at work, processing blockchain claims, drinking coffee, and thinking about what Avi and I might order for dinner. Heat lingers on the pavement as machines begin to whir. I’m alive, aren’t I? I try to wrinkle my nose, but my face seems frozen.
It is said that you can’t feel the nanobots sink into the pores of your brain and skitter along the strands of your DNA. There’s supposed to be time for goodbyes, and for numbing your body. Transition Units at retirement homes and hospices are designed for serenity, gently guiding the totality of your memories to The PreServer.
But that’s when death is planned, after your body has begun its decline from age or disease and a date has been picked out for the procedure.
All I can think is: Avi. I want Avi.
As soon as the alert appeared on his tablet, Tim jumped into an AmaCo company car. While it navigated him to the accident site, he fidgeted with the charcoal filter pinched to his nostrils, meant to ease the stench of blood and shit, and tried to settle his nerves. He wore black coveralls. Death could be messy.
This was only his third emergency call. Tim much preferred the orderliness of planned uploads, when the work was tidy. Who wouldn’t? But life didn’t always end in cool rooms that smelled of disinfectant.
The e-medics parted for him as he arrived carrying two aluminum briefcases. The dying woman somehow looked precisely as he expected—hair darkened with blood, face so battered he could hardly make out her features, arms bent into unnatural angles—and completely startling. Her pulse pounded so hard that her throat jumped. Her arm hair floated, as if charged with static. Exposed bone at her clavicle smiled at him.
He pulled up her information.
Name: Natalie Lopes
Age: 33
AmaCo payment: Processed
Her vitals streamed across his tablet, autosaving to her file.
“Just give me the word,” he said to the e-medics.
There was the decision to be made in cases like hers: Attempt to save her and risk her dying anyway, or hasten to upload her consciousness to The PreServer. This would kill her body but allow her mind, in the form of memories, to carry on. Remembrances, they were called. Wait too long to upload someone, to the point where their electrical pulses faded and cells began to decay, and you’d deliver imperfect Remembrances. Having no consciousness at all, surrendering to the dark nothingness of death, was better than existing with a partial one.
Tim slipped on gloves and unpacked his needles from one case. In the second, countless nanobots floated inside vials of viscous liquid, each roughly as small as a bacterial cell. Once injected, they would map the brain within minutes. The nanobots also collected DNA data, which they beamed to a separate server. AmaCo’s life sciences and pharmaceutical divisions used that info to bolster their disease research, a trade-off that made it possible to host Remembrances on The PreServer at a relatively low cost.
To some, the process seemed ghoulish, but it didn’t faze Tim. Death was his inheritance. His grandfather ran Taylor-Rasky Funeral, maker of hologram memorial plaques. When AmaCo, the megaconglomerate founded by aging billionaire Robert Amara, wanted to get into the death business, they bought out Taylor-Rasky. The family brand inspired trust. A few years later, nanobots made their debut by uploading Amara himself, and afterlife on The PreServer became a part of AmaCo’s funeral package deal.
Once, Tim had considered a life without death. He was interested in medicine and liked engineering, but hadn’t done very well in school. He didn’t have a lot of friends or any romantic partners to push him toward other pursuits. He didn’t connect with people his age.
After he graduated with a degree in computer science, Tim’s father suggested he apply for a job as an upload tech at AmaCo. The family name probably helped, but his stolid attitude made him well-suited to the work.
At his job interview, held in a glass-walled conference room at AmaCo HQ in Minneapolis, the squat man who would become his manager asked the perfunctory questions, even though they both knew the job was his. “Do you have any … ” The interviewer paused and knit his brows, as if to convey sincerity. “Concerns about the process?”
“You mean do I care if someone wants a clunky slate headstone rather than a hologram plaque?” Tim said. “Only if I were trying to upsell them.” The manager laughed, and Tim felt more at ease. “But, joking aside, it’s the customer’s consciousness. If they chose to be uploaded, they’ll be uploaded.”
As I lay dying just a few blocks from our apartment, I remember running my fingers over Avi’s new tattoo. He’d peeled the plastic wrap back to reveal his healing skin. The script had puffed, rising like hives. Even with closed eyes, I could feel it and know what it read. Two acronyms above his heart:
DNR
DNU
Do not resuscitate. Do not upload.
He’d gotten it done with real ink. Doing it the retro way held some symbolism for him. Old-school tattoo, old-school death.
“What, you think this makes you look cool?” I said.
He grinned in the boyish way that always made my heart ache. “It does, though, right?”
We’d had the talk about uploading before. Avi even considered quitting his job as a family physician to become a humanist health care strategist, advocating for no nanobots, no uploads, only natural life and death. He saw sanctity, even beauty, in mortality and refused to relinquish his soul to someone else.
“People pay to give themselves over to AmaCo, and for what?” he asked. “So their so-called researchers can find cures to diseases, which they can sell? Troll our memories so they can create more effective ads?”
He worried that AmaCo might forge permission forms. Then there was the rumor that the company was in cahoots with the government to make uploading the default for all Americans. More than that, though, Avi knew too much about the medical intricacies.
“If only you saw what it really looks like at a microscopic level,” he said. “They numb patients beyond recognition because they have to. The procedure is horrendous.”
“But that’s a moment of discomfort in exchange for the possibility of an afterlife.” When Avi cut a concerned look my way, I shrugged. “I just mean I get why people opt in.”
I knew he didn’t want me to get uploaded, though he’d never push the point. Uploading was a personal choice. I’d never liked talking about death. I told him I hadn’t decided. I felt too embarrassed to tell him the truth: I’d signed up for it as part of my life insurance plan at work. They covered the cost, so it had felt silly not to. I figured I could always cancel it.
When he later suggested I get a matching tattoo, I demurred. “What if I change my mind?” I joked. “Besides, I hate needles.”
Tim had heard plenty of ridiculous rumors about The PreServer. It was once hoped that server-bound consciousnesses would be able to experience anything, like some kind of free-for-all fictional universe. Science hadn’t gotten there yet. Still, some claimed that the wealthy could pay to augment their Remembrances, and futurists speculated that, someday, these consciousnesses would be downloaded into new bodies so that they might live and walk again.
But Tim knew that the only thing those on The PreServer had to occupy themselves were their own Remembrances.
Their uploaded consciousnesses could choose whichever Remembrances to relive, whenever they wanted. It was assumed to be a private process, but not many customers read the fine print. AmaCo preferred it that way. Tim couldn’t imagine the chaos that would ensue if loved ones learned the company had full permission to view their beloved’s memories. Worse, that a stranger could, and would, access them. This was necessary, as Tim’s manager liked to say, “for quality control purposes.”
Besides, most Remembrances were pretty banal. Someone skinning their knee, or eating dinner, or going for a jog. Where memories failed, the experience might flicker in and out, and objects appear fuzzy—that was normal. The techs didn’t spend long watching. They’d slip into the VR headset for a quick check, like a lifeguard testing a pool’s chlorination level with a drop of liquid.
Only once had Tim observed a tech linger in a suspicious way. He saw her return to the same spot in The PreServer several days in a row. “Do you need help?” he eventually asked.
She seemed haunted, yet eager to talk. Glancing up at a security camera, she confessed to Tim in hushed tones that she couldn’t stop watching the Remembrances of a recently uploaded elderly couple. It had been the couple’s wish to be placed side by side in The PreServer, and every time she switched between them, she found they were reliving the same memories at the same time.
“They meet in their Remembrances,” she said.
Tim steeled himself against this magical thinking. He assured her it had to be a coincidence. A result of code firing off in preprogrammed patterns. A matter of uncanny timing. Souls were a spiritual concept, one Tim didn’t subscribe to. He never got the chance to ask the other tech for more specifics. She quit or was transferred. Tim never saw her at The PreServer again.
Tim was no evangelist for AmaCo, but he planned to be uploaded himself. Free enrollment came as a company perk, and he couldn’t see any reason not to. The possibility of preservation unburdened him of mortality, he felt, as well as his sorrow over others’ deaths. He found joy in being the one to transition them from their corporeal form, in unbinding Remembrances from their human shell.
And these customers wanted the procedure. Customers just like Natalie Lopes, dying before his eyes.
So why did apprehension rise inside him when he looked at her?
The numbers on her vital read-out turned from orange to red. An e-medic gestured for Tim and asked, “Are you ready?”
The e-medics turn me onto my side. Gloved hands press into my bruised skin. The nerves in my head scream as the blood inside me shifts, building pressure.
I know what choice they’ve made. Considering my injuries, they would only move me like this to deploy the nanobots quickly, injecting them into my spine, my brain, my veins. Flooding as much of me in as little time as possible.
I’m not sure what terrifies me more: a possible eternity on The PreServer cycling through my life, or an assured eternity in death. Either way, alone.
“You really wouldn’t do it?” I asked Avi one night as I lay in bed, studying our smooth, black ceiling. Beside me, he read a paperback novel by the glow of his mini-drone light. He placed it down, seriousness lining his face.
“No.”
“Not even if it meant we got to be together in the afterlife?”
“We wouldn’t be together, we’d just be trapped in our own respective memories.”
“You don’t know that.” I propped myself up on my elbow. “You don’t know what developments might happen while we’re on The PreServer.”
Avi glanced at me with something like pity.
I think of Avi’s tattoo. Do not upload. I never imagined that I might, ultimately, have no choice about whether I faced an infinity on The PreServer without him.
All I want is for them to do whatever it takes to keep my body alive. My heart screams this desire with each pump. Pumps that will soon deposit tiny bots throughout my body to record everything they can about me before I die.
An e-medic locks a port into my spine. Needles prick the thin skin of my scalp and chest. Soon, an AmaCo technician will click a button to elongate those needles, cleaving through flesh and bone. One of the e-medics fumbles as they insert one into the place where the tattoo would have been. They’re running out of time; so am I.
A warm, shaking hand touches me. I realize it must be the technician.
No. I need to tell him no. If they cannot save me, let me die. I fight to keep my eyes open.
The tech leans close to my ear. His sweet breath, humid and alive, carries the words, “Shh, you’ll be OK soon.”
Tim locked in the syringes. He longed to give her the sedative that would slip her into unconsciousness, the painkillers so she wouldn’t even feel the pinch of a needle. He found beauty in that ritual. But he couldn’t risk losing her. Aside from their death and deliverance onto The PreServer, he didn’t deal directly with AmaCo’s customers. Yet he knew that, when technicians failed to upload in time, their AI client-service system processed complaints from family members. Tearful calls, threats to sue.
Nodding to the e-medics, he began his countdown. That’s when he felt Natalie Lopes’ fingers tighten on his sleeve.
I hear him: “5 … 4 … ” I’m not certain I can move, but I will myself to grasp his sleeve. The edge of the fabric feels soft in my fingers. It takes everything I have to tug it. My last chance.
I feel him hesitate. My deliverance. Then, gently, he pries my fingers back and takes my hand. Dread sinks in. He resumes his count, “3 … 2 … 1.”
Pain slices through me as the needles plunge into my body.
My teeth ache and chatter. My limbs shake. Something acidic and sharp churns in the back of my throat, pickling my tongue.
I can’t feel the individual nanobots deploy, but I feel something else. Searing liquid. Like a million fire ants eating me from the inside.
Make it stop.
The nanobots read me. My DNA. My memories.
My inhales turn to pinching gasps.
I’m going to be alone. For eternity.
This bodily hell is absolute.
Then darkness, whole and complete.
Tim moved on. In the days that followed, he delivered other customers to The PreServer. But something about Natalie’s touch stayed with him. He thought, perhaps, he should look at her Remembrances. For quality control purposes.
Her Remembrances were more vivid than any he’d seen. They felt like a puzzle to be decoded.
He followed along with whatever she chose. Often, of Avi. His broad hands. The familiar tang of his body. She returned to other small, delicious moments of humanity, too. Naps on rainy days. Curling into her mother’s side as a child, thumb in her mouth and her other hand twirling her hair around her fingers. Lazy afternoons where nothing but time stretched before her.
But then he arrived at the Remembrance of her death, and it engulfed him. Tim watched the shiny podcar careen toward her. Felt pain or, rather, a Remembrance of pain. She, he, they lay there, dying. Reckoning with whether she should have gotten the tattoo. Wishing desperately for Avi. Knowing he was right.
As the Remembrance faded to gray, Tim gasped. He yanked off the VR headset and nearly hurled it. The cavern of The PreServer’s winking lights looked like the night sky. He leaned against the wall of metal and reminded himself to breathe.
What he witnessed horrified him, but what could he do? He considered contacting Avi—he could find Avi’s information in the folds of Natalie’s Remembrances. There seemed to be nothing to say to him, though. Natalie had been uploaded, an irreversible fact, one that Avi knew by then. And Tim couldn’t admit to this man that he had violated her by peering into her mind.
That night, he dreamed of hacking into the system to delete her. Would erasing her be like killing her all over again?
He returned to her the next day, and the day after that. At first, he worried that AmaCo’s AI system or another tech might catch him. Eventually, he stopped caring whether he would get in trouble, except for the fact that losing this job would mean an end to his visits. That he would abandon her, failing her a second time.
Aside from time with Avi, her death was the Remembrance that Natalie visited most. Each time Tim watched it unfold, he was possessed.
Each time, as they felt the nanobots flood their bodies, they wondered if their death would change things for Avi. If maybe, at the end, he would decide to join them.
- Introduction: The Beguiling, Troubling Future of Work, by Diana M. Pho
- Work Ethics, by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
- Remembrance, by Lexi Pandell
- The Long Tail, by Aliette de Bodard
- Collaborative Configurations of Minds, by Lettie Prell
- Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love, by Usman T. Malik
- ars longa, by Tade Thompson
