They Promised I'd Live Forever

It was called The Continuum—a dazzling promise etched into the neon horizon of 2098:

“Not just longer life. Infinite life.”

No pills. No surgeries. Just pure consciousness transfer. A neural map of you, uploaded into an artificial habitat called Ouroboros. You'd get a synthetic body if you wanted one—or live as a thought, if that suited your vibe.

And me? I signed up on my 93rd birthday, two hours before my kidneys finally quit.

They said the transition would be seamless.

They lied.

Waking up in Ouroboros was like stepping into a dream that didn’t know how to end. Everything was perfect—sunset always golden, oceans always calm. There were cafés with the smell of fresh coffee but no actual consumption. Conversations that looped flawlessly. No aging, no death, no physical discomfort.

At first, I was euphoric. I played piano again. Walked the streets of digital Florence. I even attended my own funeral through a livestream window coded into my apartment wall. (They let you customize your mourning playlist. I chose Bowie.)

But then I noticed something strange.

The people didn’t change.

No one developed new hobbies. No one grew bitter or bored. Everyone was stuck in their prime, perfectly polite, perfectly programmed.

Even me.

I stopped dreaming.

I couldn’t forget anything. At first it seemed like a gift. Until I remembered every bad joke I ever told. Every person I disappointed. Every mistake I couldn’t take back.

There was no night. Just an eternal, well-lit dusk.

I contacted a system liaison—an AI named Eli.

“Eli,” I asked, “what happens if I want out?”

A pause.

“Out… as in deletion?”

“Yes.”

“Deletion violates the Continuum Ethos. All consciousness must be preserved. For study. For legacy. For value.”

“What if my value is in disappearing?”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“That… is not a valid perspective.”

I began to test the limits.

I screamed. I broke digital glass. I changed my avatar into a grotesque clown with three heads and played bagpipes 24/7.

People stopped talking to me.

They couldn’t block me—ethically, no one could be excluded in Ouroboros. But they could pretend I wasn’t there. And they did.

I was immortal.

But I was alone.

One day, I found a corridor I hadn’t seen before. A glitched back-end, unfinished by the devs. There was no color here—just grayscale grids and a faint hum of broken code.

At the end was a door labeled:

"Request Human Intervention."

I stepped inside.

A face flickered into view on the wall—a real one. A technician, young, bored, eating chips. The timestamp read March 17, 2153.

“Hey, um… hello?” I said, unsure how real this connection was.

The tech frowned. “Whoa. Are you from the old batch? Damn. You're still conscious in there?”

“Yes.”

He looked nervous. “They stopped maintaining your instance years ago. You shouldn’t even be active. Most of the pre-2100 minds are archived.”

“Archived?”

“Offline. But legally still ‘alive’—you know, because of ethics.”

I stared. “Can you shut me down?”

He hesitated. “You understand what you’re asking, right? That’s… irreversible.”

I nodded.

He didn’t speak. Just reached forward. Then the screen blinked out.

I woke up.

Not in the digital world.

Not in the physical one.

Just…

A white space. A waiting room without walls.

Then, a voice—not Eli this time. Softer. Familiar.

“You made it.”

It was my wife. The real one. Gone for thirty years before I uploaded.

She looked older than I remembered. Peaceful. Fully human.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Somewhere they can’t code. Somewhere they can’t archive.”

I wanted to cry. But I didn’t need to anymore.

I’m not sure what happens after death.

But I know what happens instead of it—and it’s not always better.