The Romance of Quantum Archaeology
A cave
A large family sit around a fire in a cave. The animal skins they sit on are plump, and fire warms the cave more than in life. In their hands are hunks of roasted wooly rhinoceros. Outside it is late spring. It is always late spring in this place. They had all died in a terrible winter, so it was very thoughtful of the spirits to ensure it would never be cold again. Even at night, it is warm enough to walk around. Each night the stars and moon are very bright. There are no cave hyenas.
They had hoped for survival upon death, thinking perhaps that they would enter the realm of dreams to watch over family. They hadn’t expected this. So many furs. So much meat. So much warmth. All together.
The spirits had explained things to them- they were very kind. The spirits had said they could come to other places in the spirit world to spend time with other people if they wanted to.
But the cave was very nice, and people outside family and clan were confusing. It would be too difficult to learn all their names, for they were without limit.
All the pain is gone and they are happy.
An apartment
There are over 100 billion humans who had ever lived, of whom approximately 63 billion had been resurrected thus far. One could be forgiven for thinking every single one of them had a live stream. Of course, their viewership follows a power law, and for the most part the great influencers of history remain the great influences of afterhistory.
An image flicks on into being in a viewer’s brain.
“I’m joined tonight by four very special guests, Paul the Apostle, Mahapajapati Gotami, Moshe Rabbenu, and Andal to discuss founding religions”
A flick of the mind, a moment of intentionality paradoxically almost unconscious. The channel changes.
There’s a look of confusion in Achilles’ face, resolving in a quaver to concentration. He’s commanding some retro strategy game. Then chat resolve a consensus message to send him: “Πάτροκλος”.
Behold the rage of Achilles
As Achilles shouts and screams, the viewer reflects that, at any time, Achilles could have muted that word, or disabled chat, or used AI filtering, but hadn’t.
Time to watch something less depressing decides the viewer. Ai was a peasant woman who had lived in the middle kingdom. Only her village had known her wit, which had sometimes gotten her in trouble, but always won her the people of her village back round. Now, post-resurrection, many thought she was one of the funniest people who had ever lived, and she was one of a handful to achieve great fame in the afterlife despite being a nobody in life. Right now, she was in the middle of an incomprehensible riff about legumes, yet the delivery…
No, that wasn’t what tonight called for
It’s the Symposium with everyone’s favorite host, the gadfly of the connectosph…
You’re here with Jerry Springer and tonight I’m joined by twelve people killed at a Yemeni wedding and former president Oba…
Fucking Πάτροκλος!! (wouldn’t you like to?)
There is, of course, always the pornographic option. I am not wasting another evening as Hylas, it is time to grow.
Despite his resolution, the viewer keeps on flicking.
“Tonight I’m joined by Neil Sinhababu, a resurrected philosopher from earlier this century, and, this is truly extraordinary, two people who claim to have lived out his theories, playing out an acausal romance across cen…”
“Why he did it, we speak with the author of the Voynich…”
He could always write another epic. Every week the writer’s society sets a challenge- an allowable set of cognitive prosthetics you may use, enter their competition, and try to write something to impress the judges. A slender chance for that last rare commodity, public adoration. This week’s competition allows unlimited long-term memory enhancements but nothing else.
Now the viewer is seated on a cloud over a desert, parchment levitating before him, quill dripping black ink, twisting in a slow circle. Memory augmented, he plans his epic, even jots down a few lines, but something is wrong. With a theatric gesture, he crosses out all he had written and begins to write anew.
In 1651, Hobbes had claimed that even in a state without scarcity, humans would always have reason to contend with each other, because glory is finite. Past a certain limit, fame is of necessity finite, and so the struggle for fame is zero-sum. Why fight to be known? Why not fight to be someone worth knowing?
A courtyard
There are two kinds of people. Those who hope there is an afterlife because they don’t like the idea of death, and those that hope there is an afterlife in which to punish the wicked. It would be easy to think that the latter sort are the moral inferiors of the former sort, and perhaps taken over some great average they are. But all people have their reasons to bear.
They called themselves the Circle of the Just, and they came from across tens of millennia. Most of those gathered in the hall had suffered something awful. Some chose to retain on their digital bodies the wounds that had killed them. An assembly of smaller committees and delegates had decided on a speakers order. There was to be discussion, debate, voting then the drafting of a joint declaration.
The proposal animating this gathering was simple, a pact should be made of all people of decency to ostracise those who did great wickedness in the previous life, at least until some repentance is made. A vast list of malefactors shall be assembled digitally. Pressure would then be applied to get as many people as possible to sign a pledge not to talk to anyone on that list. Since the intellect which raised the dead would not allow any person to be harmed, such ostracism was the closest they could come to creating hell or purgatory.
A young man stands, calling himself Flóki. He is handsome except for a slash across his throat. Translator modules tell the crowd he is speaking old Icelandic. He tells of his torturous final hour.
More speakers come. Tales of awful months, awful lives. Cruelty for the sake of cruelty, cruelty for the sake of power.
Near the end, a young woman stands, calling herself Auður. She is beautiful, except for a necklace of bruises around her throat. Riot breaks out in the hall when she names Flóki her tormentor and murderer.
Nothing like the Circle of the Just ever got off the ground because something like this always happened.
A digital recreation of old Heian, in cherry blossoms
“You called me “Hikaru Genji?”
“I intended only respect my prince”
A kind wave- “You offended no one. So says the author: “perhaps one day some unforeseen circumstance would bring her into his life”…”
“You have read it then?”
“Devoured it. A passage comes to mind- “You are here to remind me of someone I long for, and what is it you long for yourself? We must have been together in an earlier life, you and I.””
“Now I shall quote my book” ripostes Murasaki, gesturing at a path through the garden “It is, in general, the unexplored that attracts us.”
Murasaki leads Minamoto no Tōru down the path, arriving at a simple wooden door. “As soon as I knew that you were here and willing to talk, I resolved that I must show you my dinosaurs”. The door opens unto a cretaceous paradise.
In front of a ziggurat reaching unto heaven
So spoke Naram-Sin “His majesty decrees a musical accompaniment”
The men and women of the imperial band look around at each other. His majesty seems oblivious. Finally, all eyes resolve onto Gashansunu, who moves her chin back and clicks her tongue in exasperation. If it is to be her, she shall not deliver a gentle message.
“You can just say you want us to play for you, Naram-Sin.” said Gashansunu
“You will address me as his majesty, or better, his majesty placed by the gods to rule the land between the two rivers, himself a God and rightful King of the four corners of the w-”
“We’re not going to play for you, and we are no longer in the land between the two rivers.” said Gashansunu, cutting him off with force. “Even if we went to that place, you no longer hold any power there, or anywhere.”
Naram-Sin looks around. Most of his musicians will not meet his eyes and those that do bear defiance.
“But I have bought you to the afterlife, to this land of endless food and dr…”
“You bought us here only insofar as you had us drink poison, and others of us you had hit over the head. The God that is called the great computer truly bought us to this afterlife, as it bought our friends and family. You played no true part. You are a minor king that was very nearly forgotten by history, a difficult, cruel, and uncultured man certainly no God. Your justice was erratic, your piety was questionable and your intellectual powers limited. Moreover, you had abominable taste.
The dead king replies in anger, but no one is listening. The courtiers snuff out, avatars vanishing to other places in the digital afterlife. At last, only Gashansunu and Naram-Sin remain.
“Also” whispers Gashansunu “I poisoned you”.
Gashansunu vanishes. Naram-Sin stands silent for a moment, wails and then kicks his Ziggurat three times.
Two chairs in a forest
Nikolai Fydrov Fydorovich sits across a fire from a stranger figure, who I will not name.
“Is this what you wanted, Nikolai?”
“Yes.”
“But the dead and the living remain as alienated as ever, it’s just that they now do so in each other’s company.”
“Some of them are as alienated from each other as ever, certainly.”
“Alright, yes, some of them. But you must concede there is a great many alienated.”
“Yes, but they have the time now, to work on that together, all the time there is to work on reconciliation, and in God all things are possible”
“You still think…”
“Yes.”
A street
In life, he was most often not recognized as an artist at all. In death, he has become most popular.
Although he could simply will his art into being, he works with his hands, moving anonymously down a simulated alleyway, with loving-kindness laying out his linoleum tiles.
STILL TIME TO FOLLOW
TOYNBEE IDEA-
ALL GO TO JUPITER
He gets a lot of bemused looks. He knows that people must say it’s a crazy idea behind his back.
He expects this. At first, they hadn’t listened last time. But they’d come around. They’ll come round on Jupiter too.
A cave again
The family are still eating happily by the fire. There is a cave bear sleeping by their fire too, but this one doesn’t seem as agitated as the ones from the world of the living. The children play on his back. One of the children has found that he can float just by wanting it hard enough, the others are trying to copy him.
The spirits had informed them that a new cave full of people like them had been restored, and granted a cave nearby. Perhaps they might go visit. Famhair was of an age when she would soon desire a mate, so it seemed prudent to make connections now.
Eventually, they would wander down, but for now, the warmth and comfort were still too great.
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