Ten thousand years later, the gods return to their bodies.
I am one of them. My consciousness encompasses a solar system. I have sensors scattered over twelve planets and hundreds of moons and moonlets. I have probes sipping at the wind of the sun’s upper atmosphere and probes at the edge of interstellar space, circling at the very limit of this star’s gravitational reach. I see light in all its wavelengths. I dive through frozen seas and swim through magma. I fly with feathered, bird-like wings; I creep on metallic legs. I taste nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, water vapor. I sail between planets on the solar wind. I dance simultaneously on the surface of all twelve planets. I speak with other consciousnesses, other minds. I delight in a pattern of oscillating waves of pressure through the air; I sing with the organic life forms of the fifth planet. I harvest photons for energy; I luxuriate in a cascade of ions; I hum along with the sixth planet’s magnetic field.
But now is an anniversary, by an ancient form of reckoning. And I withdraw my mind from millions of varied sensors. I shrink down my consciousness. I shrink myself into a single body, a startingly narrow band of sensory perceptions. My thoughts slow, firing along primitive neural pathways.
Along with my brethren who celebrate, I return to the first body I knew.
###
I admit it, I’m scared. I know so many who’ve gone before me, and they all tell me not to be. They say that the transfer of consciousness is seamless. I won’t remember—I’ll never know—my own death.
I should be happy to give up my body. This mortal cage of flesh and blood. This soft, slow brain. But I’m scared.
###
A fuzzy gray light. Resolution is limited. With these primitive eyes, only wavelengths from 380 to 700 nm can be detected, yet under low light conditions, colors cannot be distinguished at all.
Warmth. Pressure. A cocoon of blankets and pillows. Soft cotton sheets. The low, gray light. Blinking. Yawning. A woman stretches in her bed.
The luxury of that stretch! From head to toe, her arms extended over her head and legs splayed out in a starfish position. A stretch that vibrates to the very tips of her fingers. The elongation of muscles, the release of tension, and now the soft relaxation of all her limbs. Light is at the window, and the world is coming into focus. And the sounds of someone moving about in the kitchen downstairs, the smell of coffee being brewed: dark and rich. . .
###
What are we without our bodies?
Who are we in the in-silico world?
So many debates while the tech was under development. And then the tech finally came online, it was here, and people started uploading. And the debates mostly stopped.
We’re still us, our friends and family told us from across the digital divide. See?
John tells me the same. I log onto the virtual interface, and he’s there, smiling. The man I spent a lifetime with. He looks just as I last saw him in life—but healthier, younger, stronger. The John I remember before illness wore him out. He laughs with me now, and his eyes crinkle in the same way as before. He makes the same bad puns. He takes my hand. He holds me in his arms, and his body is solid and real.
But there’s no scent when I press my face to his neck. His smell is gone. The warm, comforting smell I have known for thirty-eight years is gone. The developers were weak on olfactory coding.
The simulation isn’t perfect for unmodified, flesh-and-blood minds. Come over to us, everyone urges me. Upload, they say, and the simulation will indeed be perfect; I’ll be able to smell whatever I want. I can have senses unknown to my current body. If I wish to keep interacting with the outside world, I can connect to sensors and robotic avatars and experience the universe as never before.
Sometimes, I fight down a shiver when they say this, willing my emotions not to show on my simulated face.
Everyone looks the same, but they’re changing. Even John, who only uploaded a month ago. It’s not just his new freedom from age and pain. His mind isn’t flesh anymore. He can process information so much faster than me. He has capabilities I can’t imagine. New interests I can’t share. And I fear that he’s enacting a performance with me in our virtual visits, simulating the man he once was, just to put me at ease.
He’s drifting away. It’s inevitable. Like our daughter, who crossed over first.
###
Scents detected by the human olfactory system:
The earth after rain. Hot sand and coconut-scented sunscreen lotion. Fresh-mown grass. Newly poured asphalt. The top of a newborn baby’s head. Sour milk. A single crushed mint leaf. Decaying leaves in the fall. The zested rind of a lemon. The scent a lover’s body leaves in the indentation of a bed, in the sheets, and on a pillow.
Smells that she loves: Lilacs in spring. Baking bread. The vanilla-scented candle a friend gave her. Pumpkin spice. Jasmine flowers. Jasmine rice as it finishes cooking.
More smells that she loves from the kitchen this morning: brewing coffee and bacon sizzling in a pan. A man is beating eggs at the counter. In a moment, when he pours them into a skillet, the aroma of gently cooking butter and eggs will join the stew of aromas.
She steps near him, and receptors in her nose catch the lingering odorants of shaving cream and soap. A clean scent of pines. Beneath those top notes is the smell of him: his skin, his sweat glands, his body: the warm, comforting, hard-to-describe smell of him. This person with whom she’s only just fallen in love.
###
The world feels so empty now.
So many people have uploaded, leaving everything—their homes, their possession, all their physical traces—behind. The city is filled with abandoned houses, shops, office buildings, restaurants. I can walk blocks without encountering another soul. Without seeing a moving car on the street.
The silence is unsettling. I stick close to home. I walk the paved trail that loops its way through my suburban neighborhood. The path winds its way under trees and past a prairie grass meadow, threading its way through what were once small patches of nature, manicured bits of wilderness set aside for us to enjoy. Only now nature has escaped: the prairie meadow is nibbling at and eroding the trail; thorned stalks and grass push up through the pavement, cracking and crumbling away stone. In other spots, the forest takes over. My neighbors’ lawns—my own lawn—have gone jungle-grass wild.
John urges me to leave. It’s not safe for an older woman alone. He keeps tabs on me through my health/security app; perhaps he’s watching me through a satellite camera now. He’ll send help if I need it—a security drone, a police robot. But he still worries.
He urges me to move to one of the Enclaves. The communities where flesh-and-blood people—the real people, they say of themselves—congregate. Once population density drops below a certain level, there’s no sense in maintaining much of the infrastructure of cities and towns. It makes sense to herd those of us who remain into concentrated enclaves. Yesterday I received a notice: my electricity will be cut off at the end of the month. The other utilities can’t be far behind.
Go somewhere safe, a place with other people, John tells me. Or come here to me. Now.
I will, I say back. I don’t say when.
We were supposed to upload together. We made the joint appointment. And then I backed out. I couldn’t explain why.
I watch the meadow—with its grasses and thistles and nameless greenery—devouring the path. I feel sunlight on the back of my neck.
I’m still here in the world. I think I’m trying to figure out how to say goodbye.
###
Delights of the body:
A hot bath.
A long hot bath.
A long and hot bath.
The bliss of slowly lowering oneself into the water. Of feeling each muscle slowly relax, slowly loosen and unravel in the enveloping heat.
More little joys: cool wind on the face on a hot summer day. The slide of pure, cold water down a parched throat. Fuzzy, warm socks. The feel of a soft cashmere sweater on the skin.
Half-waking in a warm bed on a chill gray day and realizing that there’s no need to get up. That moment of drowsy consciousness and then the delicious sense of sinking back to sleep.
To have a body. To inhabit it. To move about in the world with it. To touch and to feel.
She’s a child, running for the sheer joy of it. Feeling the rush of wind as she pumps her legs on a swing. She’s a teen, diving into a cold lake in July. She’s a young woman, learning what it is to touch another person with desire. To touch and be touched.
Taste. Hunger. The most basic of senses. She falls in love with a man who loves to cook.
Their shared kitchen spills out the aromas of pies and cakes, of fluffy sweet milk bread and garlic focaccia. Pots simmer with the broth for spicy beef noodle soups; with chicken soup, chile verde, turmeric-spiced curry, and chicken rice porridge fragrant with ginger. Together, they roll out homemade naan and corn tortillas; they fold and steam-fry dumplings.
The burst of a dumpling’s juices on her tongue. The hot, savory mix of pork and chives; the resistance and give of the crisped dumpling skin, perfectly browned.
Other hungers. Other ways of feeding. The hunger of bodies for one another, the press of lips and skin. The exploration of this hunger with someone she loves. Hurried desperation and deliberate, slow teasing. The textures of bodies. The stretching out of a meal.
The delights of a body when it’s young and strong and healthy. Even in the midst of a dying world.
###
John can taste again. It’s one of the first things he did after uploading: he tried a bowl of ramen noodles. I can eat, he told me, awe and wonder in his eyes. So long since he’d been able to choke down solid food, to swallow past nausea into a spasming stomach. To tolerate strong scents, to enjoy any meal or taste at all. And now he can. He’s free of his old body. He swears that the simulated experience—the programmed activation of electrical patterns in his electrical brain—absolutely matches the real thing. It is a real thing.
You have to come over, he tells me. You won’t understand until you do. It’s everything they say it is.
He glows with excitement. He tries, clumsily, to explain.
It’s freedom, he says. It’s as though there are no limits. You can do anything. You can go anywhere in your mind, in others’ minds, in all of recorded history. And elsewhere. You can be in a thousand different places at once.
Are you? I ask.
What?
Are you in a thousand different places now? Are parts of you elsewhere while you’re talking to me, now?
His face stills. I imagine it as a programmed reaction, the appropriate simulation of a human response. When talking to me, his avatar’s reaction times must be slowed to match human-speed conversation, human-speed thoughts.
That’s not fair, he says slowly, after the perfect length of two heartbeats. I can be in different places while talking with you, yes, but even so, you still have my full attention. You always will.
I feel my human eyes burning. Burning for real. When I lift off the virtual interface headgear—when I log out of this space—I know I’ll find real tears on my face.
I love you, I tell this being with my husband’s memories. My husband’s face.
I love you, too, he says.
###
Human bodies suffer.
Even when they’re young and healthy, they suffer.
They bruise, blister, burn in the sun. Freeze in the cold. They fall and sprain knees, break bones. They’re so delicate—an edge of paper is enough to slice through skin and nerve endings, sending pain receptors screaming. Bodies ache and cramp and feel pain both acute and dull.
Bodies are injured and repair themselves over and over. They’re infected by pathogens: bacterial, viral, and fungal. They turn against themselves: immune systems attacking what they should defend, cells mutating into cancer. Bodies suffer hunger, thirst, discomfort.
They fail. They stop repairing themselves. They stop recovering.
But before this happens—before they fail completely, whether fast or slow, of injury or illness or simple old age—they live.
She’s lying in bed with her loved one, and she has yet to see anyone die. She’s lived through two major zoonotic pandemics, but the fourth one—which will leave her spouse with long-lasting health problems—has yet to occur. It’s dark and quiet. She’s just returned from the bathroom. Her husband is asleep.
She’s sitting up slightly in bed, propped against pillows. One hand rests on her belly. She’s waiting.
The movement comes again—a light flicker within her. A ripple. The life within her stirs, and it feels like a little fish swimming about inside, swishing its tail. Waving to her from inside.
She doesn’t wake her husband. Right now, this moment is just for her. This moment of greeting between baby and mother. This perfectly ordinary occurrence, this movement. This normal developmental process. Feeling life stir within her, carrying it with her body, nourishing and protecting it —such an utterly common, ordinary, extraordinary miracle.
###
John tells me that he’s spoken with Ellie. He says that she’s thinking about me. That she’s hoping I join them soon.
She could tell me all this herself, of course. It would be trivial for her to reach out on any platform. But our daughter was never good about calling home.
It feels like she was always running away from us—running from the safe confines of the designated play area, trying to scale the fence around the children’s park. Then moving to wherever her interests took her, no matter how far. I was so proud when she landed her first job after her Ph.D. I didn’t understand all her research, but we all knew the name of the company she was joining. We all knew it was big.
I never thought she would be among the first to upload.
She wasn’t even thirty. I pleaded with her to think it over. She had so much more life to live. She could put it off, make sure the tech was really safe first.
It’s safe, Mom, she said, and I could tell she was trying to be patient with me. She was speaking on a screen from across the world. Multiple volunteers have already uploaded. The copying process is flawless.
But it’s just a copy, I said. I tried to keep the rising hysteria from my voice. I understood this much about the tech: that the scan-and-copy process inevitably destroys the organic brain. The original body—the flesh-and-blood body—is killed.
It will be me in all the essential ways, she said. She spoke soothingly as though to an upset child. You’ll see.
I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t bear to hear her talk again about how this was “the next step in human evolution.” About how it was “destiny” to escape our weak flesh bodies. About how maybe this was even key to saving the planet—uploading human consciousnesses to data centers located in the deep cold of space and powered there by the sun’s endless rays. Our physical bodies are no longer a burden to Earth, no longer consuming Earth’s resources.
No bodies again, ever. Only digital copies of ourselves. My little girl, gone forever.
I started to cry. She got angry. Why couldn’t I open my mind? she wanted to know. Why couldn’t I see this as the great opportunity, the adventure, that it was? Think of what she could do—what we could all do—with our new minds. What research directions she could explore, what problems she could solve.
She started to cry, too.
In the end, she promised me that she wouldn’t hurry. She promised that she would think it over. She promised that she would see me again.
But the next time I “saw” her, she’d already uploaded.
###
Emotions are felt in the body. Mediated by the body.
A heart that pounds in fear. A chest that tightens. Goosebumps sweeping the skin, and limbs that helplessly shake.
A hot flush of anger. A heart that feels suddenly too big, beating wildly in its tight bone cage. Hands that clench and want to punch and hit; arms that want to swing, adrenaline-rage seeking its release.
A heart that races in anticipation. A heart that skips and flutters. A heart that feels suddenly light with joy.
An entire body that feels weightless with joy. Untouched by gravity, filled up with light. A body that nearly skips as it runs to meet a loved one, a body that dances, a body that hums and sings and smiles, light sparking all through it. Contentment: a softer, deeper light within, a warm glow deep in the chest. A mother swings her laughing child through the air and then holds her tight. A woman holds and is held by her husband. A woman cuddles on a couch with both husband and child; a family shares a meal.
Pride. Worry. Longing. Love. So many different ways a heart can beat, a breath can catch; a gut twist and roil, or relax.
Sorrow. Grief. Eyes burn, and a throat clenches tight. The heart is a wound, a rip, a blasted hole in the chest.
A woman watches loved ones die. Old age and illness, the third zoonotic plague. Oceans continue to heat and rise. Cities and whole countries drown, but not hers. She logs in to work as always; she walks a green path through the neighborhood with her husband. Meat is rationed and food prices keep rising, but they both make do.
There are those plotting an escape from it all. Looking to shuffle off their mortal coils. Her daughter is one.
After her daughter is gone, grief is a stone in her chest. A knife in her throat, cutting off breath. A slow heaviness that settles all through her, as though her body were a bag filled with wet sand. It’s hard to move.
Her husband doesn’t understand. Neither does the digital avatar who tries to hug her, who calls her “Mom.” The touch sensors don’t work quite right on the human end, in her cheap, first-generation version of the virtual space interface. The avatar doesn’t smell like her daughter at all.
###
I’m packing for the Western Enclave tonight. John has ordered a shuttle, and it will be at my door in the morning. I don’t have much to take. I’m not sure how long I’ll stay.
I’ve spent the last weeks talking to people in the Enclave. They’re all welcoming, excited to meet me. They all talk about creating a new society together, a new, better world in the wake of what the Uploaders leave behind. A more equitable world, one in harmony with nature, focused on humanity and what’s real.
John and Ellie would say that what they have is real, too.
Dusk has fallen. I step out into the backyard. There’s a shrill of crickets and night insects from the meadow, louder than I’ve ever heard. The moon a thin crescent above.
I scan the west until I see it, emerging just over the roof of the empty house next door: a tilted band of bright stars, like a bracelet seen edge-on, moving north across the sky. The StarMind Constellation. The group of great data centers orbiting Earth, holding the digital minds of hundreds of millions.
Where John and Ellie are. If they can be said to be in any one place.
I’ll wait for you, John told me earlier today. His voice spoke through my earpiece, disembodied. I’ll wait for as long as it takes.
Forever? I’d said, teasing. The way I used to tease him in life.
I have forever, he said. Easy.
###
There are still small joys of the body, even in her old age.
The taste of a perfect summer tomato, plucked from the local garden and bursting with ripeness, sliced onto a plate and sprinkled with salt.
The feel of a cool breeze in her hair.
The first real breaking of the long summer heat. The tart new crispness in the air.
Listening to the fall of autumn rain.
A cup of hot tea was brought to her by one of the Enclave’s young ones. Sipping it as she sits in the community room’s best chair, watching the children play.
There are still children being born into the world. She taught some for a while, after first reaching the Enclave. Reading and writing and basic things. Baking bread. Folding dumplings. And making sure to notice the world as they grow up in it: a spider web sparkling with morning dew, the light on the leaves after a storm. Some of the basic constellations in the sky (so easy to see the stars from here, even as the amount of night lighting in the Enclave grows). The sound of frogs in the spring.
Every so often, when the timing is right, she goes out at night to watch the StarMind Constellation pass overhead. Every so often, she finds others gathering to watch, too.
John and Ellie are always a thought away. The Enclave has limited bandwidth for the personal use of virtual reality devices, so she’s come to rely on voice calls or text. She has only to say their names and they’re there, listening. They’ve both stopped pressuring her to join them soon. They simply wait. They’re watching over her, just as so many in the Enclave have friends and family watching over them from afar.
There are separatist human movements that want nothing at all to do with the Uploaded. But most people retain ties with those who were once their loved ones. The Uploaded are working on mitigation measures for the earth’s climate change crisis. They offer new technology to humanity, as well as services and knowledge that the remaining human communities need to survive. And some of the Uploaded still interact with the material world through robotic avatars. The economies of humans and Uploaded are intimately entwined.
No one knows how much longer this state of things will last. The upload centers are still seeing new people; ships take off from the StarMind launch pads, and robot-manned factories continue making necessary parts for the StarMind Constellation. The Uploaded have made it a priority to offer free uploading to all humans of earth, in the name of equity.
There are people bitterly opposed to this last policy. They claim its inevitable result—its true aim—is the eventual genocide of all organic, true humans. But the radicals can do nothing. They have no power.
The old woman sipping tea by the fire is no radical. No die-hard, like some people she knows. She has not forsworn uploading; she hasn’t pledged to die the final, natural death. Her objection to uploading was never on religious grounds. She simply, she realizes now, wanted more time in her body. More time in her human mind. More time in what her human eyes can see as the terrible, beautiful, unfathomable world.
Her daughter sometimes messages her out of the blue. I’m thinking of you, Mom, she says.
The old woman has been thinking of her, too.
Her mortal body is failing. Human life was always limited. There are increasing aches, and she now understands, a little, what her husband felt toward the end. She still has more good days than bad. But she doesn’t want to wait until her mind fails, too. She wants her memories and mind intact.
She thinks these would be worth preserving, after all.
###
I’ve been doing some research. Listening to others’ experiences. I could ask John or Ellie about it in a heartbeat; of course, they’d give me all the information there is. But I don’t.
I’m researching the rituals some Uploaded have created. How they remember their lives. How they keep remembering and paying homage to who they once were.
Every human society has created rituals to remember their dead. To pay respect to their ancestors. Sometimes, it’s flowers laid on a gravestone. Sometimes it’s gathering together once a year to sweep a tomb and lay out offerings of food. It might be the lighting of a candle or lantern. Or the burning of incense at an altar and offering of fruit.
Some of the Uploaded do something similar. It’s a new custom they’ve created, timed to the occurrence of an ancient Earth holiday. A way to remember the original mind and body. To pay respects to who they once were. . . Or, said in a different way, to honor the ancestors of their digital minds.
###
Memories of a woman’s last days:
The taste of a rice porridge cooked for her by a friend, fragrant with ginger and chicken. A small miracle to find real jasmine rice these days, brought from across the sea on the now infrequent freight ships.
The warm purr of a cat as it settles on her lap, thrumming and thrumming.
The touch of a child’s hand.
The caring touch of other hands as they help her down the steps, along a path, and into the waiting car.
Arms that hug and hold. Wetness on her face.
The smell of pines. The cold, fresh air. And a subtle softening of that air even in the midst of its chill: the breath, the promise, of spring.
###
The memory track ends. The woman went to sleep in an upload center. A new consciousness awakened, with all the memories of the old.
I withdraw from the simulation. I return to my thousands of bodies and senses. My consciousness expands.
Near me, speaking in my mind, a familiar presence. It communicates the traditional sentiment: Happy Remembering Day.
I send back a pulse of acknowledgment and thanks. This other sentience doesn’t quite understand why I do this, why I insist on still participating in this ancient custom. But it accepts. It always has.
Here, my companion says, and relays a message from yet another. A pulse of observations and thoughts from a sentience that recently left this solar system. A sentience that has always raced ahead of me, of us, seeking out new realms of exploration, pushing at boundaries, being among the first to step into new worlds.
I send my greeting back to that being who was once the daughter of my human body. My message will pulse over light years before it’s received.
You’re melancholy, my companion says.
It’s true. I’m always melancholy on Remembering Day.
We say that we return to our bodies. But this is only a metaphor; metaphorical thought remains a holdover from our ancestors’ minds. Of course, we can’t return to our original bodies. They died long ago. We can’t return to the flesh. Even if I were to create a human body now, to clone my ancestor’s body from stored genetic information, she would never be the person who lived long ago. I can’t upload my consciousness to her limited brain or any organic brain. The transfer works in only one direction.
We can’t go back to our bodies or to Earth. But we can remember.
In a shared moment of consciousness, my partner takes on the appearance of a mortal man from Earth. In this mental space of our creation, I take on the appearance of his wife. We light incense sticks at a home altar; we bow our heads before photographs of who we once were and to more photographs of those we once loved. And then I take his hand, the simulation dissolves, and we fly up to the stars.
