I'm still
feeling the nasty side effects from my epilepsy medication, (though
few seizures today. The medication does not stop all my seizures but
prevents massive flurries from happening, which we adverted) So yeah,
it impairs my ability to think so it was pretty hard to get this
story out of my brain. Though I think you'll enjoy it.
The Soul
Servers
They advertised
it as a shortcut to immortality and a means for utopia. They scanned
in human brains as bundles of data and into avatars. Some people
killed themselves after being uploaded because they believed their
body needed to be extinguished for them to properly live in the
database. Though most kept their real body and brain alive out of
fear. Over the generations fewer and fewer people didn't use it at
all.
People
described talking to their avatars like talking to their own souls.
Corporations loved the net of human brains. Infinite supplies and
undying customers. While democracies debated if scanned people had
the right to vote the dictatorships of the world made scanned kneel
before them in their virtual spaces. Truly it was an internet of
minds. Many called this new internet the Soul Servers.
Births started
happening inside the Soul Servers. Scanned people began cloning
themselves. The scanned also took parts of themselves, copied and
merged it to make children that didn't even know what it was like to
have a real body. As processing power of the computers increased and
the storage space as well generations of data minds could propagate.
Servers could hold entire worlds with billions of data people in each
of them. Individuality of the scanned mattered less and less and the
people of the real world started to lose interest in it. After
hundreds of years of maintaining it the people of the real world
stopped caring about it. They hated paying for it with their tax
dollars and several religious movements squashed out the will to
upload themselves. The Soul Servers no longer had any use to the
people of the real world. They let it rust and its generators run
themselves out. The generators had much power in them but the people
of the data world could see their fates. They started killing each
other and eliminating worlds to conserve on energy. They couldn't
contact the outside world and beg for power so they had no choice but
to watch their worlds blink away. Eventually all the data disappeared
like dust blown off an old desk.
That was a scary scenario, methinks. Your skill in capturing it in so few words is remarkable.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I tried to make this a bit scary, I decided to focus on the ramifications of a premise on society rather than on a single character.
ReplyDelete