expectations

Great Expectations
(from SUM, by David Eagleman)

As the happy result of a free market capitalist society, we are finally able to determine our own hereafter. It has become privatized and computerized. For a reasonable price, you can download your consciousness into a computer to live forever in a virtual world. In this way, you can rage against the dying of the light by choosing an afterlife that is fast, furious, and spicy – the crystallization of your fantasies and aspirations. You can pre-define your lovers, maximize your sexual allure, zoom around electric pumping cities in your choice of a dozen Porsches. You get firmer muscles, a perfect complexion, and a flat washboard belly. Innumerable virgins cheerfully await your arrival. Cell phones and jet packs are standard issue. Sizzling cocktail parties run around the clock. It is no surprise that everyone is lining up for this avant-garde afterlife. Instead of slipping into worm-fodder, it is quite an advantage to choose the moment of your own death, and elect the finest of all possible hereafters. The only ones not signing up are a few religious folks who claim they’re waiting for their Heaven, imagining they will discover themselves in an afterlife of biblical description. The Company, having long ago outgrown the concept of God, attempts to explain to these people that their fantasies have cursed their available realities. The religious counter that God’s greatest gift to them is the ability to look beyond what their eyes can see and have faith in something grander. That’s not a gift, that’s a universal trap, the Company retorts – it’s like having the availability of a wonderful lover but desiring an unattainable movie star instead. The religious don’t sign up and eventually slip off into a neutral death in a lonely hospital bed. For the others, the transition into the virtual hereafter is painless: when your pre-scheduled moment arrives, you come in and recline in the red dental chair. The Company nurse assures you that you will feel as though you’ve closed your eyes in their office and without delay opened them again in your glorious virtual afterworld. The Company technician presses a button and you become pulverized by a laser beam. A copy of the three dimensional structure of your brain is re-created in zeros and ones on a cluster of hyperthreading processors. There’s only one caveat: the neuroscientists and engineers who have developed this procedure have no way of proving it works. After all, the pulverized have no way to report back. However, it is generally agreed that nothing can go wrong with the download: all of our physical theories predict that reconstructing an exact replica of the brain will reproduce exactly the feeling of being that person. So everyone is presuming that it works. Sadly, it does not work. Its failure is not due to bad engineers or unscrupulous businessmen, but instead stems from a misunderstanding of the cosmic scheme. Your essence cannot be downloaded because your essence (which the Company did not believe existed as a separate entity) gets spirited off to Heaven. Despite your excitement about your chosen afterlife, it turns out that God exists after all, and has gone through great trouble and expense to construct an afterlife for us. So you awaken on soft clouds, encircled by harp-strumming angels, finding yourself swathed in white togas. The problem is that this isn’t what you wanted. You’ve just paid good money for an afterlife of fast cars and charisma and drinking and lovemaking. This Heaven, by comparison, seems hopelessly inadequate and stale. You’re wearing an ill-fitting white toga instead of an anti-gravity jet pack. Endless white columns are the replacement for pumping electric cityscapes. There’s manna and milk at the buffet instead of sushi and sake. The harp music is maddeningly slow. And you’re still as unattractive as ever. There’s nothing to do here. The overweight people to your left are playing bridge. All this recent disappointment has put God in an awkward position. He nowadays spends much of His time trying to comfort His subjects scattered across the cloudscapes. “Your fantasies have cursed your realities,” He explains, wringing His hands. “The Company offered you no evidence that it would work – why did you believe them?” Although He doesn’t say it, everyone knows what He’s thinking when He retires to His bed at night: that one of His best ideas – the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter – has backfired.