Digital Legacy

Knowing Carl was a skeptic, great care was taken to explain the bequest his father had left him in the will.

It was Carl's sister, Olivia, who told him, rail-roading his decision-making, "When your father tells you to do something, you do it." Father's lawyer, Ferguson, was there, too, administering his final wishes. It was he who had suggested Digital Legacy, opening Father’s mind to such prosperous horizons. Ferguson had even helped sign him up as a beta tester so the application would be free, to him, silently bequeathing any future upgrade fees to his sole beneficiary.

Carl did not take to the technology as the bandwagon had, with their drooling ardor for the static afterlife and horrors of an eternal self. He denounced it immediately, with unabashed wails, cursing its utterance in Ferguson's office. When his onslaught of forebodings tapered to a pulsed panting, he waved Olivia out of the office, exiting through the frosted-glass door. Jealousy clouded her reasoning.

There, on the mahogany expanse of desk between Carl and Ferguson, was the latest micro-LED laptop with LCE flex-display, standard with liquid metal circuitry, energy harvested to provide users with AI-sensor form recognition. The machine seized something at the center of Carl's core of being.

"I need your consent to continue,” Ferguson decreed.

Carl could see himself in the blank black screen of the powered-down machine that threatened to introduce him to his father's entombed digital likeness. The putrid stank of profit thickened the laptop's atmosphere. At the front desk, the receptionist's phone rang. The gentle tinkling of her laugh set upon Carl’s ears, and a thousand horns honked in the streets below.

There were keys on the keyboard he had never seen mixed among familiar letters, etched with ticks and hashes, like strangers at the door.

He sat with his eyes fixed on the blackness of the screen, the space between, trying to see what would come at him, tottering on legs of tremor through a technological nightmare.

The ground trembled where he stood, across from a man of focused intention upon improving himself. The quake would not devour him, but rather reflected a gathering of potential energy.

He could not stop what they had done, resolutely. It was done. He was merely refusing to partake; it was too morally abusive to endure. But he must witness what they had done, forced upon him without consent, then be invoiced and waved away to walk among the brassy sounding streets.

Now his sternum stretched to hold the air he gulped. He was starting to rationalize the technology's existence, and he was resisting justification in the name of giving the people what they wanted - regardless of the cost to afterlife sovereignty. When he finished reeling, a faint breath escaped his huffing mouth. He squeezed the words from soggy wooden cords in a growl of a response, "No, no, no!"

As sole beneficiary, he would defer this bequest to his sister. Gone were his inner ramblings and quaking beneath his feet. They planted firm on the ground where he stood to shake hands farewell. His chest filled its barrel, and the rush of release reminded him he was still alive.

Ferguson neither stood nor returned the extension of hands. A precise eye for success allowed him to dismiss other men. He knew Carl would sign once he remembered the feminine penchant for preservation, to maintain what was given. Olivia would hold onto her father, for duty, and to control her grief. But he realized this was the first of countless will battles to come as technology advanced acceleratingly while law lagged and secured its place in the system at hand. And he smiled at Carl with genuine content.

In Olivia's hands, the dead would live on, they would touch their beloveds again. There would be no stopping their adaptive shape from reaching through the liquid crystal elastomers and reconnecting with their loved ones. Those who had consented their likeness to the deceased's pre-designed digiverse. The dead in their graphene screen wraps and the living in their savage grief were swindled by the scaffolded scheme.

And the price would soar, eternally. Upgraded and degraded by degenerates. What did he care! What could he, the target audience of professional corporate moguls, execute to stop the afterlife timelines from overlaying!

"No! I do not consent!" he repeated.

Olivia hovered like a ghost through the frosted glass, praying for admission. "Carl, let me do it! Please; you have to do it - it's Father's will. Why are you stalling, Carl? My god, just look at it!"

"Stop begging. I will not." No. It threatened to coerce him, to succumb to defying all logical reason.

Ferguson's fingers ticked the keyboard awake and then pushed the machine closer to Carl. The keys glowed with queer fluorescence, like mourning glyphs, charactered runes upon the ritual altar.

Carl sat back down. He had hoped to stand firm against moral resistance, yet it occurred to him that hope was not enough.

There was water in his eyes, and he felt an Oedipal loss. He thought to let Olivia back in but instead chose the lesser rebellion, her face imprinted upon the door.

Carl’s hands pulled the machine square in front of him. The biometric scan commenced, affirming his identity, denying his authority. The program booted without a word. With predetermined action, his father's hand reached through the screen, caressed his cheek, then went rigid, and slapped his face.

When the paramedics left, they could not confirm the precise time, only that he died of blind certainty - the end of inquiry.