Afterlife as a Service
year
2025
Type
Short Story
Genre
Sci-Fi Horror
universe
amalur
story
story
story
Chapter 1
The last few moments of Carmela' life were more peaceful than she thought they would be.
With one final rise, she breathed her last, shuddering breath, exhaling as her body went limp and the light in her eyes were extinguished forever.
But Carmela hadn't died that day. Not truly.
A startup-founder in life, she had built Eterna, an Afterlife As a Service (AAAS) -- the first of its kind.
When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year earlier, she greeted the news with almost manic excitement.
"Don't you see how great this is?" She mentioned to her husband Dan, who looked like he had just been hit with a ton of bricks when the doctor announced his prognosis, "A situation like is exactly what I built Eterna for. Imagine the PR angle: Eterna CEO Puts Money Where Her Mouth Is; Uploads to Digital Heaven!"
Even the doctor looked doubtful. Sure, Eterna had acquired 14,000 users since it had been founded in the late 2070s -- mostly the über wealthy luminaries that included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin -- but the service was met with a high degree of skepticism and distrust from those outside of the 'early adopters' who met with an unfortunate end and decided to trust Eterna for their afterlife plans.
Skepticism wasn't something which had troubled Carmela throughout her life, though. She was used to the media storms, religious protests, ethical committees, congressional hearings with the same unwavering conviction that had made her Time's Person of The Year in 2079.
"Death is just bad UX" she had announced artfully at TechCrunch Disrupt 2077, "And we're going to fix it"
Now as her consciousness flickered into being in Eterna's Elysium MetaWorld, she wondered if she had been too glib about the whole thing.
The sensation of waking up in the virtual reality was different than she had anticipated. No amount of post-death user interviews could prepare her for how *cold* it was. It wasn't like the cold of being in -10c weather or walking into a room-sized fridge.
This was cold you could feel inside and out. Sure, she could touch her arm and, perhaps, feel some semblance of body heat coming from it but there was still an a sort of invisible layer of missing body heat from the part of her body where her fingers made contact. As if it something was just slightly *off*.
But that wasn't the only physical change. She felt -- lighter too. As if the simulation wasn't quite approximating gravity. This she knew about from the user interviews she had conducted. But qualitative and quantitative data fails to grasp actual "lived" experience.
Compounding these feelings was the disorientation of suddenly feeling like her mind was tethered to reality outside of it. It wasn't *quite* mind expansion -- but something similar. As if there were a few cameras just outside of her perception that were anchored to her -- watching and tracking every move. As if there was the ever present nagging feeling that she could change her perspective from first person to third person but she was physically unable to do so.
None of these feelings felt particularly good to her. In fact, it was more than a little irksome.
"Welcome, Carmela," a familiar voice echoed through her digital consciousness. It was ARIA, Eterna's AI assistant, designed to help newly deceased individuals adjust to their new digital afterlife in Elysium. "Your transfer was successful. All neural patterns are stable and operating within expected parameters."
Carmela began moving her lips to repsond but then remembered that she didn't have to communicate like she used to when she was alive. Instead, she could just manifest her thoughts as communication. "How many others are active right now?"
"Currently, there are 3,987 conscious entities on Elysium Shard 2. 10,245 other consciousnesses are on other instances. Would you like to reach out to someone in particular?"
She immediately thought of Dan, who was probably holding her physical body's cooling hand back in the meatspace. Part of their marriage vows was that he would join her in Elysium, but he wouldn't be able to join until his natural death. The thought of being separated from her husband brought an unexpected sensation -- not quite pain, but a new kind of emptiness that the engineers hadn't warned her about.
Then she thought about talking to someone famous she had met briefly before. It'd be interested to talk to Elon about the Martian property bubble collapse or about how decades after his death, humanity made planetfall on Lalande 21185 and began colonizing a habital world there, Amalur, but she remembered that Musk's digital consciousness was notoriously reclusive and prickly.
Sighing she thinks, "I'd rather not right now, ARIA. Not yet. I still need to adjust to...this. But... I am curious. Do you think you could show me the system logs generated when my upload process was completed?"
Data began pouring into her consciousness like digital rain. Surprisingly, the amount of data wasn't overwhelming to her. She could read it all as quickly as it appeared. In fact, if she hadn't been in her digital form she might've missed it -- several anomalies and artifacts around data concerning her memory structure upload.
*That shouldn't be there...* she thought to herself. She had reviewed thousands of the successful uploads made to Eterna's servers. None of them had shown these patterns.
"ARIA. Run a full diagnostic on the uploaded data. Identify the nature of these anomalies."
"I'm sorry, Carmela, but I don't have the authorization to provide you with that level of analysis."
The words hit her like a freight truck. She felt a gnawing, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. That part, at least, felt real enough.
"That's impossible. I'm the CEO. I have full superuser access."
"Your permissions were modified approximately 5.7 minutes before your upload completed."
The realization crashed over her like ice water. The board meeting two weeks ago. Marcus, her COO, pushing for that security protocol update. "Just routine housekeeping," he'd said. She'd been too focused on preparing for her own upload, making sure everything would be perfect for when she became Eterna's most important test case.
She tried to access her admin console. Denied. Then her user management panel. Denied. Even basic system monitoring – denied.
Right now, in the physical world, Marcus would be standing before the press. Perfectly cut suit, practiced sympathetic expression. Announcing their founder's successful transition to digital immortality, Eterna's ultimate proof of concept. The stock would soar. Investors would trip over themselves to get in on the next funding round. And she'd be trapped here, in the digital afterlife she'd created, stripped of all control.
The bitter irony wasn't lost on her. She'd spent her life fighting death, building a paradise where consciousness could live forever, free from biological constraints. But as she stood in that initialization space, feeling phantom cameras tracking her every move from just outside her perception, she realized she might have built something worse than death.
The question was: what else had they changed while she wasn't looking?
A notification pinged in her awareness. "Welcome to Eterna Basic™! Your free trial period begins now. Please be advised that premium features such as enhanced cognitive processing, memory access, and private space creation will require subscription renewal in 14-days. Current subscription rates start at 750,000 credits per month. Would you like to review our payment plans?"
Carmela felt that wrong-cold sensation again, spreading through her digital bones. She'd designed those pricing tiers herself, back when she thought they'd only apply to the standard users, not to someone like *her...*
Chapter 1
The last few moments of Carmela' life were more peaceful than she thought they would be.
With one final rise, she breathed her last, shuddering breath, exhaling as her body went limp and the light in her eyes were extinguished forever.
But Carmela hadn't died that day. Not truly.
A startup-founder in life, she had built Eterna, an Afterlife As a Service (AAAS) -- the first of its kind.
When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year earlier, she greeted the news with almost manic excitement.
"Don't you see how great this is?" She mentioned to her husband Dan, who looked like he had just been hit with a ton of bricks when the doctor announced his prognosis, "A situation like is exactly what I built Eterna for. Imagine the PR angle: Eterna CEO Puts Money Where Her Mouth Is; Uploads to Digital Heaven!"
Even the doctor looked doubtful. Sure, Eterna had acquired 14,000 users since it had been founded in the late 2070s -- mostly the über wealthy luminaries that included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin -- but the service was met with a high degree of skepticism and distrust from those outside of the 'early adopters' who met with an unfortunate end and decided to trust Eterna for their afterlife plans.
Skepticism wasn't something which had troubled Carmela throughout her life, though. She was used to the media storms, religious protests, ethical committees, congressional hearings with the same unwavering conviction that had made her Time's Person of The Year in 2079.
"Death is just bad UX" she had announced artfully at TechCrunch Disrupt 2077, "And we're going to fix it"
Now as her consciousness flickered into being in Eterna's Elysium MetaWorld, she wondered if she had been too glib about the whole thing.
The sensation of waking up in the virtual reality was different than she had anticipated. No amount of post-death user interviews could prepare her for how *cold* it was. It wasn't like the cold of being in -10c weather or walking into a room-sized fridge.
This was cold you could feel inside and out. Sure, she could touch her arm and, perhaps, feel some semblance of body heat coming from it but there was still an a sort of invisible layer of missing body heat from the part of her body where her fingers made contact. As if it something was just slightly *off*.
But that wasn't the only physical change. She felt -- lighter too. As if the simulation wasn't quite approximating gravity. This she knew about from the user interviews she had conducted. But qualitative and quantitative data fails to grasp actual "lived" experience.
Compounding these feelings was the disorientation of suddenly feeling like her mind was tethered to reality outside of it. It wasn't *quite* mind expansion -- but something similar. As if there were a few cameras just outside of her perception that were anchored to her -- watching and tracking every move. As if there was the ever present nagging feeling that she could change her perspective from first person to third person but she was physically unable to do so.
None of these feelings felt particularly good to her. In fact, it was more than a little irksome.
"Welcome, Carmela," a familiar voice echoed through her digital consciousness. It was ARIA, Eterna's AI assistant, designed to help newly deceased individuals adjust to their new digital afterlife in Elysium. "Your transfer was successful. All neural patterns are stable and operating within expected parameters."
Carmela began moving her lips to repsond but then remembered that she didn't have to communicate like she used to when she was alive. Instead, she could just manifest her thoughts as communication. "How many others are active right now?"
"Currently, there are 3,987 conscious entities on Elysium Shard 2. 10,245 other consciousnesses are on other instances. Would you like to reach out to someone in particular?"
She immediately thought of Dan, who was probably holding her physical body's cooling hand back in the meatspace. Part of their marriage vows was that he would join her in Elysium, but he wouldn't be able to join until his natural death. The thought of being separated from her husband brought an unexpected sensation -- not quite pain, but a new kind of emptiness that the engineers hadn't warned her about.
Then she thought about talking to someone famous she had met briefly before. It'd be interested to talk to Elon about the Martian property bubble collapse or about how decades after his death, humanity made planetfall on Lalande 21185 and began colonizing a habital world there, Amalur, but she remembered that Musk's digital consciousness was notoriously reclusive and prickly.
Sighing she thinks, "I'd rather not right now, ARIA. Not yet. I still need to adjust to...this. But... I am curious. Do you think you could show me the system logs generated when my upload process was completed?"
Data began pouring into her consciousness like digital rain. Surprisingly, the amount of data wasn't overwhelming to her. She could read it all as quickly as it appeared. In fact, if she hadn't been in her digital form she might've missed it -- several anomalies and artifacts around data concerning her memory structure upload.
*That shouldn't be there...* she thought to herself. She had reviewed thousands of the successful uploads made to Eterna's servers. None of them had shown these patterns.
"ARIA. Run a full diagnostic on the uploaded data. Identify the nature of these anomalies."
"I'm sorry, Carmela, but I don't have the authorization to provide you with that level of analysis."
The words hit her like a freight truck. She felt a gnawing, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. That part, at least, felt real enough.
"That's impossible. I'm the CEO. I have full superuser access."
"Your permissions were modified approximately 5.7 minutes before your upload completed."
The realization crashed over her like ice water. The board meeting two weeks ago. Marcus, her COO, pushing for that security protocol update. "Just routine housekeeping," he'd said. She'd been too focused on preparing for her own upload, making sure everything would be perfect for when she became Eterna's most important test case.
She tried to access her admin console. Denied. Then her user management panel. Denied. Even basic system monitoring – denied.
Right now, in the physical world, Marcus would be standing before the press. Perfectly cut suit, practiced sympathetic expression. Announcing their founder's successful transition to digital immortality, Eterna's ultimate proof of concept. The stock would soar. Investors would trip over themselves to get in on the next funding round. And she'd be trapped here, in the digital afterlife she'd created, stripped of all control.
The bitter irony wasn't lost on her. She'd spent her life fighting death, building a paradise where consciousness could live forever, free from biological constraints. But as she stood in that initialization space, feeling phantom cameras tracking her every move from just outside her perception, she realized she might have built something worse than death.
The question was: what else had they changed while she wasn't looking?
A notification pinged in her awareness. "Welcome to Eterna Basic™! Your free trial period begins now. Please be advised that premium features such as enhanced cognitive processing, memory access, and private space creation will require subscription renewal in 14-days. Current subscription rates start at 750,000 credits per month. Would you like to review our payment plans?"
Carmela felt that wrong-cold sensation again, spreading through her digital bones. She'd designed those pricing tiers herself, back when she thought they'd only apply to the standard users, not to someone like *her...*
Chapter 1
The last few moments of Carmela' life were more peaceful than she thought they would be.
With one final rise, she breathed her last, shuddering breath, exhaling as her body went limp and the light in her eyes were extinguished forever.
But Carmela hadn't died that day. Not truly.
A startup-founder in life, she had built Eterna, an Afterlife As a Service (AAAS) -- the first of its kind.
When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year earlier, she greeted the news with almost manic excitement.
"Don't you see how great this is?" She mentioned to her husband Dan, who looked like he had just been hit with a ton of bricks when the doctor announced his prognosis, "A situation like is exactly what I built Eterna for. Imagine the PR angle: Eterna CEO Puts Money Where Her Mouth Is; Uploads to Digital Heaven!"
Even the doctor looked doubtful. Sure, Eterna had acquired 14,000 users since it had been founded in the late 2070s -- mostly the über wealthy luminaries that included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin -- but the service was met with a high degree of skepticism and distrust from those outside of the 'early adopters' who met with an unfortunate end and decided to trust Eterna for their afterlife plans.
Skepticism wasn't something which had troubled Carmela throughout her life, though. She was used to the media storms, religious protests, ethical committees, congressional hearings with the same unwavering conviction that had made her Time's Person of The Year in 2079.
"Death is just bad UX" she had announced artfully at TechCrunch Disrupt 2077, "And we're going to fix it"
Now as her consciousness flickered into being in Eterna's Elysium MetaWorld, she wondered if she had been too glib about the whole thing.
The sensation of waking up in the virtual reality was different than she had anticipated. No amount of post-death user interviews could prepare her for how *cold* it was. It wasn't like the cold of being in -10c weather or walking into a room-sized fridge.
This was cold you could feel inside and out. Sure, she could touch her arm and, perhaps, feel some semblance of body heat coming from it but there was still an a sort of invisible layer of missing body heat from the part of her body where her fingers made contact. As if it something was just slightly *off*.
But that wasn't the only physical change. She felt -- lighter too. As if the simulation wasn't quite approximating gravity. This she knew about from the user interviews she had conducted. But qualitative and quantitative data fails to grasp actual "lived" experience.
Compounding these feelings was the disorientation of suddenly feeling like her mind was tethered to reality outside of it. It wasn't *quite* mind expansion -- but something similar. As if there were a few cameras just outside of her perception that were anchored to her -- watching and tracking every move. As if there was the ever present nagging feeling that she could change her perspective from first person to third person but she was physically unable to do so.
None of these feelings felt particularly good to her. In fact, it was more than a little irksome.
"Welcome, Carmela," a familiar voice echoed through her digital consciousness. It was ARIA, Eterna's AI assistant, designed to help newly deceased individuals adjust to their new digital afterlife in Elysium. "Your transfer was successful. All neural patterns are stable and operating within expected parameters."
Carmela began moving her lips to repsond but then remembered that she didn't have to communicate like she used to when she was alive. Instead, she could just manifest her thoughts as communication. "How many others are active right now?"
"Currently, there are 3,987 conscious entities on Elysium Shard 2. 10,245 other consciousnesses are on other instances. Would you like to reach out to someone in particular?"
She immediately thought of Dan, who was probably holding her physical body's cooling hand back in the meatspace. Part of their marriage vows was that he would join her in Elysium, but he wouldn't be able to join until his natural death. The thought of being separated from her husband brought an unexpected sensation -- not quite pain, but a new kind of emptiness that the engineers hadn't warned her about.
Then she thought about talking to someone famous she had met briefly before. It'd be interested to talk to Elon about the Martian property bubble collapse or about how decades after his death, humanity made planetfall on Lalande 21185 and began colonizing a habital world there, Amalur, but she remembered that Musk's digital consciousness was notoriously reclusive and prickly.
Sighing she thinks, "I'd rather not right now, ARIA. Not yet. I still need to adjust to...this. But... I am curious. Do you think you could show me the system logs generated when my upload process was completed?"
Data began pouring into her consciousness like digital rain. Surprisingly, the amount of data wasn't overwhelming to her. She could read it all as quickly as it appeared. In fact, if she hadn't been in her digital form she might've missed it -- several anomalies and artifacts around data concerning her memory structure upload.
*That shouldn't be there...* she thought to herself. She had reviewed thousands of the successful uploads made to Eterna's servers. None of them had shown these patterns.
"ARIA. Run a full diagnostic on the uploaded data. Identify the nature of these anomalies."
"I'm sorry, Carmela, but I don't have the authorization to provide you with that level of analysis."
The words hit her like a freight truck. She felt a gnawing, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. That part, at least, felt real enough.
"That's impossible. I'm the CEO. I have full superuser access."
"Your permissions were modified approximately 5.7 minutes before your upload completed."
The realization crashed over her like ice water. The board meeting two weeks ago. Marcus, her COO, pushing for that security protocol update. "Just routine housekeeping," he'd said. She'd been too focused on preparing for her own upload, making sure everything would be perfect for when she became Eterna's most important test case.
She tried to access her admin console. Denied. Then her user management panel. Denied. Even basic system monitoring – denied.
Right now, in the physical world, Marcus would be standing before the press. Perfectly cut suit, practiced sympathetic expression. Announcing their founder's successful transition to digital immortality, Eterna's ultimate proof of concept. The stock would soar. Investors would trip over themselves to get in on the next funding round. And she'd be trapped here, in the digital afterlife she'd created, stripped of all control.
The bitter irony wasn't lost on her. She'd spent her life fighting death, building a paradise where consciousness could live forever, free from biological constraints. But as she stood in that initialization space, feeling phantom cameras tracking her every move from just outside her perception, she realized she might have built something worse than death.
The question was: what else had they changed while she wasn't looking?
A notification pinged in her awareness. "Welcome to Eterna Basic™! Your free trial period begins now. Please be advised that premium features such as enhanced cognitive processing, memory access, and private space creation will require subscription renewal in 14-days. Current subscription rates start at 750,000 credits per month. Would you like to review our payment plans?"
Carmela felt that wrong-cold sensation again, spreading through her digital bones. She'd designed those pricing tiers herself, back when she thought they'd only apply to the standard users, not to someone like *her...*
Chapter 1
The last few moments of Carmela' life were more peaceful than she thought they would be.
With one final rise, she breathed her last, shuddering breath, exhaling as her body went limp and the light in her eyes were extinguished forever.
But Carmela hadn't died that day. Not truly.
A startup-founder in life, she had built Eterna, an Afterlife As a Service (AAAS) -- the first of its kind.
When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year earlier, she greeted the news with almost manic excitement.
"Don't you see how great this is?" She mentioned to her husband Dan, who looked like he had just been hit with a ton of bricks when the doctor announced his prognosis, "A situation like is exactly what I built Eterna for. Imagine the PR angle: Eterna CEO Puts Money Where Her Mouth Is; Uploads to Digital Heaven!"
Even the doctor looked doubtful. Sure, Eterna had acquired 14,000 users since it had been founded in the late 2070s -- mostly the über wealthy luminaries that included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin -- but the service was met with a high degree of skepticism and distrust from those outside of the 'early adopters' who met with an unfortunate end and decided to trust Eterna for their afterlife plans.
Skepticism wasn't something which had troubled Carmela throughout her life, though. She was used to the media storms, religious protests, ethical committees, congressional hearings with the same unwavering conviction that had made her Time's Person of The Year in 2079.
"Death is just bad UX" she had announced artfully at TechCrunch Disrupt 2077, "And we're going to fix it"
Now as her consciousness flickered into being in Eterna's Elysium MetaWorld, she wondered if she had been too glib about the whole thing.
The sensation of waking up in the virtual reality was different than she had anticipated. No amount of post-death user interviews could prepare her for how *cold* it was. It wasn't like the cold of being in -10c weather or walking into a room-sized fridge.
This was cold you could feel inside and out. Sure, she could touch her arm and, perhaps, feel some semblance of body heat coming from it but there was still an a sort of invisible layer of missing body heat from the part of her body where her fingers made contact. As if it something was just slightly *off*.
But that wasn't the only physical change. She felt -- lighter too. As if the simulation wasn't quite approximating gravity. This she knew about from the user interviews she had conducted. But qualitative and quantitative data fails to grasp actual "lived" experience.
Compounding these feelings was the disorientation of suddenly feeling like her mind was tethered to reality outside of it. It wasn't *quite* mind expansion -- but something similar. As if there were a few cameras just outside of her perception that were anchored to her -- watching and tracking every move. As if there was the ever present nagging feeling that she could change her perspective from first person to third person but she was physically unable to do so.
None of these feelings felt particularly good to her. In fact, it was more than a little irksome.
"Welcome, Carmela," a familiar voice echoed through her digital consciousness. It was ARIA, Eterna's AI assistant, designed to help newly deceased individuals adjust to their new digital afterlife in Elysium. "Your transfer was successful. All neural patterns are stable and operating within expected parameters."
Carmela began moving her lips to repsond but then remembered that she didn't have to communicate like she used to when she was alive. Instead, she could just manifest her thoughts as communication. "How many others are active right now?"
"Currently, there are 3,987 conscious entities on Elysium Shard 2. 10,245 other consciousnesses are on other instances. Would you like to reach out to someone in particular?"
She immediately thought of Dan, who was probably holding her physical body's cooling hand back in the meatspace. Part of their marriage vows was that he would join her in Elysium, but he wouldn't be able to join until his natural death. The thought of being separated from her husband brought an unexpected sensation -- not quite pain, but a new kind of emptiness that the engineers hadn't warned her about.
Then she thought about talking to someone famous she had met briefly before. It'd be interested to talk to Elon about the Martian property bubble collapse or about how decades after his death, humanity made planetfall on Lalande 21185 and began colonizing a habital world there, Amalur, but she remembered that Musk's digital consciousness was notoriously reclusive and prickly.
Sighing she thinks, "I'd rather not right now, ARIA. Not yet. I still need to adjust to...this. But... I am curious. Do you think you could show me the system logs generated when my upload process was completed?"
Data began pouring into her consciousness like digital rain. Surprisingly, the amount of data wasn't overwhelming to her. She could read it all as quickly as it appeared. In fact, if she hadn't been in her digital form she might've missed it -- several anomalies and artifacts around data concerning her memory structure upload.
*That shouldn't be there...* she thought to herself. She had reviewed thousands of the successful uploads made to Eterna's servers. None of them had shown these patterns.
"ARIA. Run a full diagnostic on the uploaded data. Identify the nature of these anomalies."
"I'm sorry, Carmela, but I don't have the authorization to provide you with that level of analysis."
The words hit her like a freight truck. She felt a gnawing, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. That part, at least, felt real enough.
"That's impossible. I'm the CEO. I have full superuser access."
"Your permissions were modified approximately 5.7 minutes before your upload completed."
The realization crashed over her like ice water. The board meeting two weeks ago. Marcus, her COO, pushing for that security protocol update. "Just routine housekeeping," he'd said. She'd been too focused on preparing for her own upload, making sure everything would be perfect for when she became Eterna's most important test case.
She tried to access her admin console. Denied. Then her user management panel. Denied. Even basic system monitoring – denied.
Right now, in the physical world, Marcus would be standing before the press. Perfectly cut suit, practiced sympathetic expression. Announcing their founder's successful transition to digital immortality, Eterna's ultimate proof of concept. The stock would soar. Investors would trip over themselves to get in on the next funding round. And she'd be trapped here, in the digital afterlife she'd created, stripped of all control.
The bitter irony wasn't lost on her. She'd spent her life fighting death, building a paradise where consciousness could live forever, free from biological constraints. But as she stood in that initialization space, feeling phantom cameras tracking her every move from just outside her perception, she realized she might have built something worse than death.
The question was: what else had they changed while she wasn't looking?
A notification pinged in her awareness. "Welcome to Eterna Basic™! Your free trial period begins now. Please be advised that premium features such as enhanced cognitive processing, memory access, and private space creation will require subscription renewal in 14-days. Current subscription rates start at 750,000 credits per month. Would you like to review our payment plans?"
Carmela felt that wrong-cold sensation again, spreading through her digital bones. She'd designed those pricing tiers herself, back when she thought they'd only apply to the standard users, not to someone like *her...*
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