The Dark Corner

Abstract 

In the last decade of the 21st Century, humanity achieved what Christ was fabled to have done; restoring the dead to life. A combination of technologies enabled the creation of electronic representations of the minds of long-dead humans. One might call it “digital resurrection.” This has given us the power to transform our world in ways that have only begun to be understood. 

We have resurrected soldiers who fell in legendary battles – Carthage, Agincourt and Shiloh – and learned so much about how these warriors of old lived and died, changing our understanding of history in the process. Parents who lost children have been given another chance to see them live and grow, healing trauma in ways previous generations could only have dreamed. The impact has been so profound that a new word has been coined to describe these revenants – we know them as “Reanimates.” But so far we have only used digital reanimation to expand our knowledge. It is capable of so much more than that.   

Ours is a ruined world.  A planet of dead oceans, satanic heat waves and routine outbreaks of lethal illnesses wrought by our species’ incursion on the natural world. That some form of civilisation has survived at all is testament to our powers of endurance. But all of this suffering cannot have been for nothing. Climate change was not an act of God. It was the result of decisions taken long before any of us were born.  If we are ever to come to terms with the anger that defines our generation, there must be a reckoning.  

In this paper, the authors will present the results of a series of pioneering experiments in which a virtual environment, whose form and properties could be altered at will, was created within the memory of a computer.  A Reanimate was placed in the environment and its behaviour observed throughout its digital lifespan.  The findings may provide us with a means of meting out justice to those who escaped punishment for the crimes of long ago. Indeed, it gives us the chance to eradicate crime altogether by providing a disincentive so potent that no one of sound mind would dare risk their potential fate.  

Background 

The world at the end of the 21st Century differs greatly from that of a hundred years ago. Many of the most pessimistic climate change models proved to be correct. Large swathes of the planet are too hot for humans to inhabit. For half of the year, it is unsafe to go outdoors in the daytime across the southwestern United States. What was once the Amazon rainforest continues its long retreat into savannah grasslands. Rising sea levels have claimed many of the world’s coastal cities, with dykes and land reclamation techniques pioneered in The Netherlands now the only way of preserving the few that remain habitable. Long lost to us are Venice, Marseille and Miami. New York and Rio de Janeiro survive only thanks to the massive coastal walls erected after their countries’ ruinous mid-century civil wars. 

The most salient technological difference is the great leap forward in computer technology, nominally the ability to reconstruct a digital representation of a human consciousness – referred to henceforth as a “Reanimate” – with an emotional and intellectual fidelity upwards of 97% in some cases.[1] This development owes its origins to two discoveries originating in the mid-century.   

The first was the groundbreaking research conducted by Pillai and Patterson (2040)[2] in creating a technology that could reproduce a fully-functioning biological “copy” (preferred to the use of the word “clone” because of its negative connotations in popular culture) of a human being from an uncontaminated sample of the subject’s DNA. Originally intended for the purpose of growing replacement organs and limbs for individuals who had suffered catastrophic or life-changing injuries, the project received seed funding from the United States military. This led to an expansion of the technology to the extent that many large cities have at least one facility dedicated to the industrial-scale production of biological “templates.”   

The templates are merely cadavers that are prevented from decomposing by a series of chemical processes that preserve the tissue indefinitely.[3] The question of whether it was possible to digitally recreate the consciousness of a human being, living or dead, was answered roughly a decade after the widespread rollout of template farming. 

The first executable image of the human brain had been taken in 2031 by QNTM (2031)[4] when a digital copy of the consciousness of Miguel Acevedo, a living subject, was created. Much has already been written about the ramifications of the executable human brain image and this technology proved the basis for the next significant breakthrough in the field – generating an executable image based on dead tissue.   

Hastings and Bronstein (2058),[5] at the time working in the remnant of what was called “big tech” in the now-abandoned Silicon Valley and availing of the then-recent advances in quantum computing, devised a series of algorithms that could extrapolate vast quantities of data from dead brain tissue by scanning synaptic pathways. A person’s entire personality – their memories, their habits, even idiosyncrasies in the way they spoke – could be reconstructed digitally. This development meant that the afterlife, a concept fundamental to spiritual teachings and world religions since the dawn of the species, had essentially been achieved.[6] Clinically dead persons could now be recreated in the Cloud, with living relatives and associates testifying as to the verisimilitude of their digital likenesses in terms of their personality, memory and emotional responsiveness.[7] 

The two developments were finally combined when Hernandez and Passoa (2068)[8] used the template of a person who died in the early part of the century and recreated their consciousness, using archived data from the person’s social media and electronic footprint to imprint memories and personality traits on the brain.  This was considered the first example of digital reanimation technology, with the Reanimate experiencing reality as if they had just woken from sleep.  The implications of this were revolutionary.  It was now within humanity’s grasp to restore the dead to life. Readers will be familiar with several celebrated examples of recent years that have seen long-dead figures granted a second life in the Cloud. This has given voice to dead languages,[9] insight into historical events[10] and even allowed songs to be performed once again by their original composers.[11]   

The authors acknowledge the criticism and controversy that have followed this new technology, which has been the focus of much moral, philosophical and theological debate. Sceptics and opponents of digital reanimation question whether a reanimated consciousness can be considered to be “alive” in any way commonly understood. While accepting that these are valid points to raise, the position of the authors is that of George Berkeley: “To be is to be perceived.” Digital consciousnesses have exhibited all the necessary characteristics of being. They are self-aware, can respond to external stimuli and they display emotion. The authors contend that these entities are real; their minds function the same as that of a living human.  

With the planet now a far harsher world than it was decades ago, largely because of the actions of many people who are long dead and lived lives of luxury and contentment when they were alive, the overriding sentiment of the age is one of bottomless, undirected anger. Hatred for our ancestors runs deep because of the hellish world they knowingly bequeathed us. There is a thirst for what some[12] have termed “generational justice.” The work described in this paper details the first steps taken towards achieving that goal. It is now possible for the guilty dead to answer for their crimes. 

Methodology 

I. Cocytus Operating System 

Key to the experiments undertaken by the authors has been the development of an operating system that functions along the same lines as a graphics engine, provisionally titled Cocytus. The software creates a virtual environment for the Reanimate. What distinguishes Cocytus from existing software that launches executable brain images is the customisation features it offers the executor. Whoever controls Cocytus has what would appear to the Reanimate as the power of a god. Users can reshape and remodel the world the Reanimate inhabits with full control over all of the virtual environment’s properties: from factors such as temperature, luminescence and air quality, to the ability to manifest objects seemingly out of what the Reanimate perceives as thin air. Users can similarly alter the dimensions of the world as experienced by the Reanimate. They can be placed in simulated environments such as an expanse as bright and wide as the Central Asian steppes or a darkened room of eight cubic metres. 

II. Reanimates 

The authors applied the following criteria when choosing candidates for reanimation. 

• The original must have been posthumously convicted of a crime of significant magnitude to warrant prolonged punishment – murder, sexual assault, violence against the person 
• The original can also have been guilty of offences as described in the Climate Crimes Act of 2057 
• The original must have escaped punishment in their lifetime 

These criteria were influenced by the inevitable distress suffered by the Reanimates and it was felt that any potential feelings of guilt or remorse experienced during experimentation would be offset by knowledge of the original’s crimes.  It was furthermore decided that one candidate would be sufficient, given the resource limitations imposed on the experiments and that selecting from a wide demographic would not be necessary at such an early stage of development – there are ultimately only so many ways a human being can experience pain and distress. 

Reanimate A was an adult male; an American citizen who lived from 1973 to 2051.  Emerging from a privileged background and privately educated, Reanimate A’s professional life was almost exclusively spent in the fossil fuel industry.[13]  He held the position of CEO at one of the largest firms in that industry until its eventual nationalisation and breakup in the forties.  Reanimate A was instrumental in the firm’s aggressive exploitation of mineral resources on what, at the time, was indigenous land and also piloted a series of initiatives fuelling climate change denialism, exculpating the firm’s contribution to the collapse of the world’s ecosystems.   

A viable brain image for Reanimate A was easily generated thanks to the rich dataset provided by his public profile and substantial electronic footprint.  Conference speeches, quarterly earnings calls, meeting minutes and a TED Talk were all readily available and accessible, including the recording of a meeting during which he responded to a question on how First Nations citizens of Canada could be expected to adapt to rising sea levels by quipping, “Gotta learn to swim some time.”[13]   

Reanimate A, along with most other members of the firm’s executive board, was posthumously convicted of crimes against humanity under the Climate Crimes Act.  After obtaining this information, the authors commissioned a template of Reanimate A to be grown before applying the techniques pioneered by Hernandez, Passoa et al.[8] to generate a viable recreation of his consciousness. This was applied to the template, thus leading to the creation of an executable brain image. The image was then uploaded into cloud storage for the Cocytus experiments. 

Results & Discussion 

The Reanimate was successfully compiled and an executable image was loaded in memory with a startup time of 28.1ms – significantly faster than what has previously been achieved with the old Cerberus operating system.[14]  With the consciousness buffered in Cocytus’ flash memory, it only remained to generate a suitable virtual environment. 

Using Cocytus’ environment configuration properties, the authors generated a virtual “universe” that consisted of nothing more than a room of 168.75 cubic metres.  The room was unvarnished, with no means of egress or access, no windows and its walls coloured battleship grey.  Illumination was set to 1000 lux, comparable to that of a cloudy day, but with no apparent source such as a light or bulb – this was in order to add to the Reanimate’s confusion upon experiencing their surroundings for the first time.  The test subject was read from flash memory and placed in the environment. 

Reanimate A materialised on the floor and displayed behaviour consistent with waking from sleep upon activation. He seemed groggy and unsteady on his feet as he rose. His biological age was set to approximately 30 years and in otherwise good health. Several seconds after becoming conscious, he appeared confused when first noticing where he was and evidently had no recollection of how he got there. After a brief physical examination of the walls he began vocalising and calling for help. Approximately three minutes later, his cries became significantly more agitated and he proceeded to lash out at his surroundings physically. This was the optimal time to test Cocytus’ punitive capabilities. 

The authors began by reconfiguring the dimensions of the room; setting them to reduce in size by approximately one centimetre per minute. With no accompanying noise to indicate this was happening and no corresponding change in light levels, it was several minutes before Reanimate A registered any awareness of the change in his surroundings. The contraction speed was increased to one centimetre every ten seconds, causing the Reanimate to loudly vocalise distress and back himself into the room’s shrinking northwest quadrant.  As the walls and ceiling eventually grew close enough to touch from a seating position, Reanimate A entered a heightened state of distress.  

The dimensions of the room were eventually no longer enough to accommodate an adult human, causing the audible snap of the bones in the Reanimate’s legs and feet with consequent compound fractures. The blood loss from the fractures matched that observed with trauma victims involved in vehicle collisions; a further endorsement of Cocytus’ verisimilitude. Reanimate A finally expired, with a consistent rise in audible response throughout the experiment, when injuries consistent with an instantaneous fracture of the spinal column terminated his simulated body’s ability to sustain life. After this, Cocytus automatically restored the dimensions of the room to their original configuration. 

  Having successfully demonstrated the software’s ability to inflict pain, the next phase of the experiment involved testing Cocytus’ Nested Memory feature. For the application to truly function as a penal tool, it was decided that Reanimates should retain memories of previous “lives” within the environment. Reanimate A was rebooted and upon regaining consciousness in the same location as the previous experiment he displayed signs of extreme distress, evidently recognising where he was and what had happened previously. To ensure veracity, the same experiment was performed continuously, with Reanimate A being rebooted once the room had been restored to its original state. After several reboots, Reanimate A became lachrymose and eventually deteriorated psychologically to such an extent that his first act upon regaining consciousness was to scream. This demonstrated conclusively that he remembered what had happened to him and what was about to unfold. For the avoidance of doubt, the experiment was set to loop over a period of several hours but with the time dilation drastically increased, resulting in a relative time of 24,000 years for the Reanimate. 

Conclusions 

The authors are confident in asserting that Cocytus has exceeded all expectations. It has the ability to construct a virtual environment for hosting a reanimated consciousness while providing full control over the conditions of that environment. Most significantly, Nested Memory means that reanimates will retain full recall of previous events indefinitely, greatly increasing the software’s punitive potential. Coupled with the ability to control the reanimate’s relative perception of time, with seconds in the real world potentially equating to thousands of years digitally, Cocytus has deep ramifications for humanity.  

The software represents potentially the most powerful deterrent against crime that has ever been conceived. With the knowledge that Hell is achievable, to all intents and purposes, citizens will no longer be motivated to commit even the slightest transgression, lest their consciousness be resurrected and made to serve a sentence limited only by the whims and imaginations of system operators. This concludes the study. The authors wish you and your families a most pleasant day. 

References 

[1] Janssen, I.M. (2062). Object-oriented approach to Reanimate verisimilitude. Science & Nature , 32(8), pp. 29-44 

[2] Pillai, S.R. and Patterson J.P. (2040). Biological templates produced via Czochralski Method. Ouroboros , 22(3), pp. 88-111 

[3] O’Neill, A. and Petrov, M.N. (2042). Preservation of templates using ethically experimental means. Modern Medicine , 120(2), pp. 5-24 

[4] QNTM. (2031). MMAcevedo . Available from: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo [accessed 25 March 2097]. 

[5] Hastings, E.M. and Bronstein, L.T. (2058). Retrieval of viable consciousness from fossilised synaptic pathways. Ethical Computing , 5(9), pp. 32-56 

[6] Caniggia, J.F. and Fernandes, B.L. (2059). Implications and assessments of the digital afterlife for world religions. Philosophical Inquiry , 10(3), pp. 4-106 

[7] Anthony, N. (2062). Conversing with digital consciousness via traditional means. Digital Viewpoints , 20(5), pp. 56-81 

[8] Hernandez, M. and Passoa, J. (2068). Digital consciousness achieved via electronic footprint trawling and extrapolation. Electronic Frontiers , 10(4), pp. 14-39 

[9] Qvist T.A. and Brook M.W. 2085, Potential for reintroduction to Aramaic, Applied Linguistics , pp. 1-10 

[10] Goodbody D. and Owende P. 2080, New perspectives on Pearl Harbor, American History Journal , 44, pp. 713-720 

[11] Hendrix J. 1969, All Along The Watchtower . Available from: https://theworldisours.com/music/rock/jhx/aatw [accessed 25 March 2097]. 

[12] Amineh X.P. 2074, Historical justice for climate crimes, Perspectives On Global Development And Technology, 61, pp.757-825 

[13] Beckett, A.M. (2041). Guilty Men: The Hidden Figures Behind the Climate Apocalypse. 1st ed. Harlow: Pearson 

[14] Garvey F.D. 2076, Cerberus a “game-changer” for digital afterlife, New Scientist, 164(1), pp. 30-33 

Michael Anthony is an aspiring writer from Dublin who absolutely hates talking about himself in the third person. If you asked him what he does for a living he’d tell you he’s a musician. But that conceit wouldn’t withstand much scrutiny and he’d eventually confess to being a software engineer. Don’t hold that against him. When not considering the ways in which big tech has irrevocably damaged our lives, he’s distracting himself by indulging in commodity fetishism. He apparently lives in Fairview but it might actually be Marino or Drumcondra, depending on which locals you ask. Go figure.