The Uploaded

by Ferrett Steinmetz

“It’s the only way.” Wickliffe falls to his knees. “I’ve tried to hack their archived brains, Amichai! I’ve tried political changes! The only way the Upterlife can survive into future generations is to change the living.”

  “That’s your plan, isn’t it? If you can change our minds before we upload, programming us to love the physical world, then every living person who dies will serve your agenda in the Upterlife! Oh, it’ll take a few generations before your new waves of brainwashed uploads outnumber the stubborn ghosts already in there – but you think long term, don’t you? And I’m betting once you get your hands on our meat-brains, we’ll be very devoted to voting in your interests…”

  “I’m not playing politics,” Wickliffe pleads. “The Upterlife is sick. It’s lost touch with reality – I need to tweak your minds before you get in there, make you strong enough to not lose yourself in simple pleasures, amplify your interest in the real world so it survives into your postmortemed existence… It’ll make things better for all the living…”

  The folks on the rooftops yell at Wickliffe, raining garbage down upon him. Rubble tumbles through his flickering body, bouncing off the spirocopters.

  “We’re not your slaves!” they cry. “Life is choices!”

  “Once you remold us to make the Upterlife cozy,” I ask, “then where’s it stop? Do you start tweaking us to eat the foods you want? To sacrifice ourselves for your future?” I shake my head. “You won’t stop. You haven’t stopped. And Lord knows you’ve already tried to hack the Upterlife to suit your agenda–”

  “It’s a good agenda!” he roars. “It’s what you want! I’m trying to build the life you asked for!”

  “Not like this,” I say. “Not like this.”

  I turn as something flutters inside Wickliffe’s chest. It’s Gumdrool, waving something at me, holding his fist high in triumph. I squint, trying to make out what it is:

  A button. A big red…

  He pushes it.

  My throat pops.

  Peaches screams as Gumdrool’s remote detonator, somehow tuned to my necklace, goes off. He could have just shot me, but that’s not Gumdrool’s style: he wanted me to know he’d hacked my technology.

  The NeoChristians see my blood dribbling onto the rooftop. They bring their rifles up to shoot Gumdrool, but I wave them off; I want Gumdrool to know exactly what hit him.

  Gumdrool looks at me through Wickliffe’s ghostly chest with a fierce pride: I got you, you sonuvabitch.

  “You fool!” Wickliffe yells. “You just proved his point!”

  “I disproved it, sir,” Gumdrool replies proudly, his voice emanating from the copter’s speakers. “These scum won’t make the Upterlife. So let’s void the unworthy and go back to fixing the system.”

  “You don’t understand! He hacked the voting system!”

  “…what?”

  Gumdrool looks up. Night has fallen. Everyone in Greenwich Village holds up their Shrive Points, revealing their final judgments:

  A thousand points of gold.

  Every one of the Greenwich Village rebels has Shrived Liminal.

  “How can that–” Gumdrool looks around, refusing to believe in the results he’s seeing. “The dead decide if you get in! They all get to vote! He can’t override the collective wisdom!”

  I’m too busy clutching my tattered throat to explain things. But Peaches, as usual, is ahead of everyone.

  “No,” she says, looking at me with sad admiration. “But he can change the collective wisdom.”

  It was, I think, my most elegant workaround. Could I hack into the brains of the dead? Wickliffe tried for years and couldn’t manage it. Could I hack the results of a single person’s Shrive? No.

  But with every Shrive, a copy of our brains was sent to the dead’s subconscious for judgment.

  What if I made my case directly to the dead’s subconscious?

  Maybe I amplified it. Maybe I sent more data than I should have – you know, tons of spicy footage and decrypted code of everything Wickliffe had said to me and all of Wickliffe’s interactions with Gumdrool, popping into the subconscious of a quarter-trillion brains like an infomercial from hell.

  And when all of Greenwich Village Shrived, it beamed one gigantic message into the minds of the dead.

  Was it mind control? Absolutely not. Wickliffe’s safeguards ensured I couldn’t send false messages:

  Only things I believed to be.

  Listen, I said. Here’s the proof Wickliffe has been trying to hack your brains for years. Now he wants to hack ours.

  We want to live. We want to eat delicious food, make love to our partners, make something good of our lives. But we refuse to enter the Upterlife with compromised thought-patterns. We would sooner void now than live in an uncertain paradise, not knowing whether we are truly ourselves. We would sooner disappear than be compromised.

  If you think we’re wrong, void us.

  If you think our cause is just, let us in.

  “The dead just voted,” I cough through what’s left of my larynx, staggering to the rooftop’s edge. “They think you’re full of it.”

  “You can’t do this!” Gumdrool screams. “If the living can die at will, then – then nobody will be left to run the servers!”

  It’s not about strength, Evangeline had told me. It’s about philosophy. Wake up enough people, and you’ll win.

  Didn’t Christ end badly? I’d asked.

  We all end badly, Amichai.

  In the footage, I can see myself whispering. My lips are white from blood loss. Nobody knows what I’m saying, not even me.

  I wish I knew what I’d said.

  “Yaw… Your choice,” I gurgle, a herculean effort. “Your… policies have given everyone a… a guilt-free ticket to the Upterlife. So maybe… you should make this world better… for the living.” I raise a hand, too slowly, to point at Wickliffe. “Start… by getting rid of him.”

  “No!” Gumdrool shouts, beet-red. “The Upterlife can’t let in traitors like you! The Upterlife needs the pure! The dutiful! The committed!”

  “One way to find out,” I whisper, giving him a bloodtoothed grin that will be emblazoned across every newscast for months to come.

  Then I tumble off the ledge to smash onto the broken pavement below.

  56: THE UPTERLIFE

  * * *

  Not that I remember any of that.

  I lay down for my final Shrive, nervous whether this would work. Peaches had to put my Shrive helmet on for me, because of my injured arm.

  I took off my Shrive helmet with both hands.

  I looked down, confused. My arm had healed. How had that happened…?

  …oh.

  Even when you’re braced for it, it’s a shock to find you’re dead. But my body felt nothing; my simulated body only released simulations of unpleasant hormones into my simulated bloodstream if I wanted.

  While we can enable stress reactions, the world hummed, studies have shown it’s best to remove physical reaction factors from transitional space. A variety of “Welcome to the Upterlife” tutorials flitted into view, offering to bring me up to speed.

  Mother Mentor technology. The dead had had supertutorials all along.

  I batted the helpscreens away. The room was a perfect white square in a vast emptiness, the walls made out of shimmering diamond. It glowed – my eyes felt like they should water, but they didn’t. My eyes wouldn’t water here without my authorization.

  I punched the wall. Small displays popped into view, registering the simulated damage they could inflict, the level of pain this would have caused in the outside world – then offered a variety of body customizations, from superhuman strength to synesthesia.

  “That’s…” I said, then fell quiet as I listened to the sound of my voice. It was as clear as life.

  A bell chimed. Would you like to watch video footage of the events between your most recent Shrive and your mortality? a tutorial asked. Many find it provides a feeling of closure.

  Pe
aches, I thought, panicked. Greenwich Village. They had to know my plan had worked – and more importantly, they had to know not to all jump off the roof now that I’d won, because if they did then we lost our leverage.

  It occurred to me I might have escaped the void, only to be trapped in rusting servers as the living committed mass suicide.

  I put my hands to my temples – simulated hands to simulated temples – and scanned for the IceBreaker. I’d attuned it to my brain patterns, which hopefully translated properly into the Upterlife – so now the IceBreaker, hardwired to the Upterlife servers, should respond to my command.

  I focused. My brain snaked along the invisible wires threaded through the Upterlife – and I reeled. My mind brushed across billions of brains, all linked by the same subconscious pool, suggesting an astonishing array of wonderlands. My parents had stayed with the stupidly childish dungeon-crawls, but there were places far more interesting: inversion zones and fifth-dimensional crawlspaces and worlds where silicon was the primary organic chemical…

  With an effort, I activated my IceBreaker.

  Screams flooded through the microphones. “Peaches!” I yelled through the IceBreaker’s speaker. “It worked! I’m here! What’s happening?”

  “A… Amichai?” Peaches said, first hesitant, then thrilled. “Amichai! You mad bastard, you did it!”

  “Why are people screaming?”

  “You… you started a rain of bodies, Amichai. It’s... I can see you on the ground.” I realized how hard this was for her – even though she knew I’d uploaded, she’d just seen the man she loved splatter across Bleecker Street. “You’re buried under corpses. The streets are…” She squealed as an explosion erupted over the mic, followed by falling debris.

  Oh no. I’d stashed the IceBreaker under the ledge, out of sight, but that meant my cameras couldn’t get a good view of the action – and all I had was cameras, I was a ghost…

  “Peaches, tell our people not to jump! Use the NeoChristians to hold them back if you have to. We’ve gotta use this as leverage to make some changes, or Wickliffe is right – everything will collapse. The Upterlife’s worth fighting for – just not his way.”

  Please, Izzy had begged. You can’t knock it all down, Amichai…

  “It’s not that,” Peaches said. “And don’t lecture me, I just saw you die.”

  “OK. The real world’s a trauma circus: got it. What’s happening?”

  “Gumdrool jumped before you were halfway down. He splattered. Then the LifeGuard in the copters went diving out after him, seeing a clear path to the Upterlife. The ’copters are crashing, Amichai–”

  “You.”

  I whirled around.

  Gumdrool stood at the far end of the cube. He was breathing heavily. He’d enabled shock reactions.

  “You do not belong here.” Gumdrool walked towards me, cracking his knuckles.

  “I don’t? How’d you make it in?!” But the dead loved devotion to duty, and Gumdrool had been nothing if not faithful to the Upterlife. Even his suicide at the end was designed to prove me wrong. He’d probably gotten in by the skin of his teeth, but–

  I ducked as he swung. Diamond shattered behind me. He’d enabled superhuman strength.

  I wondered how to activate mine; a swarm of tutorial-screens blocked my vision. I scrambled backwards.

  “I will splinter your bones,” Gumdrool swore. “Then I will erase you from the Upterlife, because you do not deserve this paradise, and I’ll tell Wickliffe I solved his problems, and I’ll be the hero! Not you! Me! I’m the only one who ever cared about the Upterlife, Damrosch! Me!”

  – wait a minute –

  “Quite right,” I said. “Take your shot.”

  He cocked his head, confused. Then swung.

  As his fist barreled towards me, a dialog box appeared:

  Injurious physical contact initiated by Ian Montgomery Drumgoole at 8:13 p.m.:

  Accept for this session

  Accept for this injury

  Accept all injurious physical contact options for this session

  MORE OPTIONS

  DECLINE ALL, I chose, and Gumdrool’s fist swung through my head as though he’d punched a cloud.

  “We’re in the Upterlife, you idiot,” I told him. “You think it’d be Heaven for me if you got to beat me up all the time?”

  “I’ll find some other way to stop you,” he said. “I’ll–”

  “You’ll do nothing.” I pulled up a long list of interaction allowances for Ian Montgomery Drumgoole. “We’re both immortal now. You have no way to trap me, or imprison me, or even interact with me if I don’t desire it. That’s a special hell for you, isn’t it? Knowing I’ll be dismantling Wickliffe’s legacy… And all you can do is listen to me on the news.”

  “But I–”

  “Oh, dear.” I stabbed at the list merrily, narrowing our potential interactions. “Maybe if you’d stayed in the real world, you could have done something. Tortured Peaches. Kidnapped my sister again. Shot up a school full of orphans. But here, in the greatest technological achievement known to man? Why, it appears you have been reduced to a ghost.”

  I blocked him from visual cues. He disappeared from sight, though I heard his bellows of rage as he tried to tear my throat out.

  “This is what you wanted, Ian,” I told him. “You got your Upterlife. Don’t blame me if it wasn’t what you signed up for.”

  “I will find a way to stop you, Damrosch! I’ll make you pay for–”

  “You’ll forgive me,” I said serenely. “In a century or two.”

  I pressed the “BLOCK” button, and Gumdrool left my Upterlife forever.

  I savored the moment. Then I tuned back into the IceBreaker.

  “Peaches! I’ve got some political maneuvering to do. Can you hold off on broadcasting what we’ve learned until I can get a better solution?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “But Amichai – Gumdrool’s the only one who made it. All the other LifeGuard, they just – just voided…”

  “Yeah.” I felt a pang of sympathy. They’d flung themselves out of copters because they were eager for death; they hadn’t realized Gumdrool’s pure intentions saved him. They were selfish suicides. And they were gone.

  A lot more would be going soon, I realized. A lot of real death was going to hit the world.

  I hoped that was a necessary sacrifice.

  57: CONVERSATIONS WITH CRIMINALS III

  * * *

  Wickliffe’s Upterlife home was surprisingly unassuming – a dingy apartment, old enough to be made of wood and paint. The only sign of his immense wealth was the abundance of plastic, which impressed me until I realized Wickliffe had grown up in an era where plastic was common as wood.

  At first, I thought the dinginess was because Wickliffe didn’t spend a lot of time here. Then I looked out the back window and saw the tombstone with the bouquet of dandelions, and realized where we were:

  The apartment where his father had strangled his mother.

  This was the place where, alone and grieving, Wickliffe had vowed to defeat death.

  Wickliffe looked shrunken, cadaverous; he sat at a scarred table, drinking from a bottle of cheap scotch. He didn’t look up.

  “So what are your terms?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “You just got the quickest impeachment in history.”

  He took another drink. “And you’re going to do what, exactly, with all these newfound votes?”

  “Form a new government.”

  “One all-living, I suppose?”

  That was a sentiment popular in the living world – no more ghost politicians.

  Yet it was chilling – you never realized how easily people ignored a videoscreen until you were dead. I’d suggested things to the emergency council Peaches had assembled – but they’d ignored my image to turn to the flesh-and-blood human next to them. I could clear my voice to regain their attention… but I wondered how much of that came from the fact I’d ju
st saved their world.

  I wondered whether anyone would listen to me after a century or two.

  “Not by a long shot,” I said, more confident than I felt. “But the dead vote for the dead, and we all know it. So they’ll get to vote their representatives into the postmortemed chamber only. The dead will control forty percent of Congress, the living sixty percent. They’ve still got a say – just not the final say.”

  “What else?” Wickliffe asked, his eyes bleary and bemused. “You won’t stop there, of course.”

  “Higher taxes on dead-owned property. Heftier taxes for each living generation they’ve existed through, until the eldest postmortemed are taxed at 90 percent. The goal is to free up resources for the living.”

  “Because we’ve got everything we need right here.” Somehow, his words felt like a sly joke.

  “The Upterlife is a paradise, sir.” I never understood why I said “sir” to him. Except maybe that I was in his shoes now, and they were a lot heavier than I thought they’d be.

  He rose, creakily, from his chair. “They won’t like that. The postmortemed crave their power. But they have to take what you’re offering, don’t they? You woke them up to the fact that they couldn’t keep building their paradise on the backs of the living.”

  I straightened with pride. “Voiding straight I did, sir.”

  He poked me in the chest, a low-level interaction I’d preauthorized. “You couldn’t have done it without me. Remember that.”

  I wanted to contradict him, but in a way he was right. None of this would have been possible without his dreadful experiments. If he needed to convince himself it had been the right thing to do, then so be it.

  “And me?” he asked.

  “You’ll be assigned to prison branch. You didn’t build a mechanism to purge consciousnesses from the Upterlife–”

  “I think ahead.”

  “– so we confine you in a small Branch in Kansas. Low-memory. Separated from the main network.” Not many managed to commit crimes in the Upterlife – embezzlement was your best option – but once in a while, someone would leave aside more exciting virtual heists to pull off an actual accounting shenanigan. “Your life’s going to be very boring, I’m afraid.”