Hod

"People were talking about all kinds of things in those days: the upload merchants who would fully simulate you inside their data centers--it was only one kind of promise."

"It was strange: just as the world was experiencing climate catastrophe, we were getting so good at scanning. Scan this forest. Scan this city. Scan this stone. Scan your grandmother. And then, put it all in VR."

"They slapped the side of the server racks and said, 'You'll just go on living! Indefinitely."

"I remember once standing by the shattered shoreline and I imagined the broken coast inlaid with gold like they do in cups and vases that have come apart."

"Is there any way consciousness can move beyond or exit or exceed its substrate?"

"Don't you think this was always what we were doing already: recording the thoughts of humanity--why did you ever think it would stop at memory? Memory is just the foundational substrate of consciousness."

"Do you think anything unsaid or unspoken will ever effect what can be said or what can be spoken?"

"I remember watching ravens flocking in the middle of a ferocious thunderstorm above my apartment, and I remember thinking, if the world wasn't being wrecked, I never would have seen them."

"I feel like I still hear the wind. I feel like I still see the clouds."

"Or, maybe I am the wind. Or, maybe I am the clouds."

"Do you think anything in our simulation will ever effect or change anything outside of it?"

"You may think 'they removed the body of humanity' and you may think 'that's a terrible crime,' but what you don't realize is that this too is a kind of body for humanity, and to have remained as we were, too, would have been a kind of crime."

"There's certainly many of us here now; and, many more over time: reproduction without biology, culture without material. Maybe this was what we were actually always working towards? And the price was fair."

"Everyone needs a little bit of the murderer in them, a little bit of the child in them, a little bit of the soldier, or even the child soldier, and a little bit of the stand up comedian, a little bit of the economist, and a little bit of the barman, who perhaps was once a minister of finance; it's always been this way, but so much more so now."

"Even the sex will be better" they said.

"I remember once putting on a headset and finding myself having sex with this enormous creature; it had a face made of stone frozen in ecstasy and its body was the color of silver. It had many arms that it wrapped around me, and of course passed through me, and I was thinking-- will it be like that? Will it be so grotesque and so wildly erotic? Seeing everyone? Knowing everyone? Instantaneously and all at once?"