the ether

You know it’s a bad sign when the AI tells you they want to quit. 

          “If they didn’t own my NeuriNetwork, Simone,” Babar says, “I’d be outta here so fast.” He leans over the hospital bed railing and connects probes to Jenny’s shaved head with his titanium hands. Our client’s skull is knobby and white. “I’d like to be a chef. I’ve always wondered what duck confit tastes like.”

          “Don’t ask me,” I say. “Duck is out of my food budget.”

          I follow the ConsciMetrics on the bedside monitor:  Jenny Bonner, aged 132, dying of congestive heart failure. Her ejection fraction is twelve percent and her organs are not perfusing. She’s slightly paler than her bedsheets, and her thin skin holds in bulging blue veins. Her cheeks are hollow, ghoulish; her legs edematous. She has minutes to live, and the morphine drip will slow her respiratory rate and calm her anxiety.

          “I just wonder what we’re doing to these people. Am I going to Robot Hell for this?” Babar shakes his metal head next to me. “Shouldn’t they just go to Heaven when they die, or—nowhere?”

          Babar’s been the hot mess express ever since he got his EmpathChip upgraded three months ago. Management fancied it a bougie add-on for clients and their families. But it’s never a good idea for a robot to have feelings.

          Babar arranges syringes and alcohol wipes on a metal tray adjacent to my console. It’s a crash cart for the dying, mostly opioids and comfort measures, and drugs to reverse them in case patients request lucidity in their final moments.

          “I’ll see you in Hell, bud,” I say. “We’re both working for the Man.”

          The Man, in this case, is Nirvana Toujours, an Austin-based tech company. Babar and I call it Nerd Toots. When we all die, Nerd Toots hopes we all migrate to its servers, better known as the Ether.  It’s the closest we have to achieving immortality. Babar and I have migrated nine-hundred and forty-three souls and not missed a one. But one failed migration would spell automatic firing for us human employees and decommissioning for the AI. Nobody wants to hear you’ve lost their grandmother’s soul during a software update.

          “This one’s not going to be easy,” Babar says. “Jenny’s son didn’t show up to say goodbye. She’s been hanging on for days just to see him.”

          Nothing’s worse than a consciousness that’s not ready to transition. I flip through Jenny’s memories in the MusiLib and find the song she danced to at her seventieth wedding anniversary party with her wife Liz.

          I play “At Last” by Etta James.  On her brain scan, the temporal lobe lights up and a yellow dot appears. I’ve got her attention.

          “Come on, Jenny,” I say into the mic, hooked up to her brain probes. “Liz is waiting for you in the Ether. It’s time to dance with her on the other side.”

          Alzheimer’s patients might leave the stove on or forget your name at a party, but they remember music. I don’t know what Jenny’s medical history is; it’s irrelevant to the work I do, but dementia’s a good bet for any human who lives four times as long as her natural reproductive cycle.

          On the brain scan, I dive into Jenny’s temporal lobe and poke around her music memories. I don’t have long before I lose her; death is an unnerving experience. I find a lot of Billy Joel and Queen. I sense she’s a softie, albeit bittersweet. For her transition, I play a contemplative tune on the trumpet with a snare drum, guiding her consciousness. I’m going to bring her to the other side with a melody.

          I’m the Ferrywoman, the harbinger of death. Americans are famously bad at aging and prefer to be high at their end of days. Doctors have them snowed on morphine drips. Even if they are semi-awake, they don’t know their asses from their elbows. The majority of centurial folk who can afford Nirvana Toujours are operating on a brain shriveled to the size of a raisin from eighty years of Pinot Grigio during early retirement in Tampa.

          Neurons: use ’em, or lose ’em.

          But music brings people back, however briefly. Whatever language they speak, wherever they are emotionally, music brings people in like a fish on a line, a bird migrating with a waxing moon, a monarch butterfly fluttering across the equator. I zip through Jenny’s music catalog and focus on what to compose.

          But Jenny’s fighting me. Her yellow dot on the computer screen darts away, her essence more complicated than the sum of the trillion pieces of data we have on her.  I have to find her. I can’t go back to eating PB and J for dinner for the rest of my life.

          Come on, Jenny!

          On the computer, I play my melody: I bring in a bass guitar, slow and low, add tympani, and croon with the voice of Stevie Wonder. The wireless mouse strands its cursor on the screen, and I bang the mouse gently against the console tray.

          “Jenny,” I say, like an MC introducing the next act. “It’s time to come to your next level. Liz is waiting for you, just like you planned.”

          “Where’s Ben?” Jenny asks, but her voice is papery.

          “No, Jenny,” I say, “You’ll see Ben again, just not now. Your estate has been set up to transfer his consciousness to Nirvana Toujours one day.”

          The yellow dot glows for a moment, then dulls. I switch to a Bach Minuet in G. No words, just instrumental genius. The voicing on the piano calms most people down. Bach appeals to the rational side of the music brain. I close my eyes and spew the spiel Nerd Toots commands us to recite with any elusive transitions: Your new life awaits at Nirvana Toujours. It is not a death, but a continuation of the life you had, without the physical suffering you experienced. Join your loved ones and await your family in the comfort of the Ether.

          The Ether is not as romantic as Heaven, decidedly less threatening than Hell, and, honestly, not that much different than people’s actual lives, which mostly involves interacting with computers or screens, anyway. What did they have to lose other than real life?

          Babar turns his metal head to me. If he had eyebrows, I swear he’d raise them. Nirvana Toujours was too cheap to put facial articulators on its AI.

          “I hate this part,” Babar whispers. Inside, I crumble. AI was supposed to make our job easier, not give us another sentient being with clouded judgment.

          I let out a resigned sigh and proceed. “Jenny,” I say. “Everyone feels nervous when they transition. But the Ether is just an extension of your life now.”

          The yellow dot lies inert on the screen, tucked into the far right corner. Jenny is being stubborn, refusing to leave this life.  I rack my brain for the appropriate melody to coax her out: blues, Motown? If she liked Billy Joel, would she respond to Elton John?

          Think!

          The wireless mouse sticks again, and I click away in torrential desperation. I slam it down in frustration, shaking the computer screen and Babar’s crash cart tray. A syringe falls, the needle poking into Jenny’s swollen thigh.

          “Oh no,” Babar whispers. “That was naloxone.”

          Jenny shoots up in bed like waking from a nightmare. Breath rattles in her chest like a forgotten elixir. Her eyes are as big as bedpans. She stares straight ahead and takes one deep breath, as if she’s surfacing from an ocean dive. And then, just like that, she falls back down into the sheets, gurgling, drowning in fluid.

          She looks at me with mouse-brown eyes and says, “Don’t put me in that goddamned machine. Let me die. Give my money to my grandchildren. I didn’t sign shit.”

          My heart pounds in my ears. Babar has infected me with his reactivity.

          After ten months of shuttling brains to the Nerd Toots server, I’ve become numb to it. But Babar’s unraveling perturbs me. We’re like McDonald’s line cooks who realize the chicken nuggets are not benign shapes, but ground-up, previously tortured animals.

          Relatives no-show to deathbeds all the time. Usually, the dying are too gorked out to argue. They’re just happy they’re going towards the light, like sheep to their slaughter, heavily pensioned moneybags directly depositing into a Nerd Toot’s VP’s quarterly bonus. So why am I having trouble roping in Jenny?

​

Acid roils in my stomach as I click the keyboard, play a Chopin Nocturne to serenade Jenny, and pray to the Gods of Silicon for her to cross over, so I can keep my job and Babar isn’t recycled for his lithium.

          “We should talk about this,” I say. “Jenny said she never signed anything over to Nerd Toots. You think that’s true? If it is, then how many others did we send over against their will?”

          Babar stays quiet, fiddling with the cords behind the computer console.

          “Maybe you’re right,” I say. “I didn’t grow up wanting to be the Grim Reaper. Is the health insurance really worth it?” 

          I loved being a jazz pianist, but I got sick of living with six roommates and bumming cigarettes. Plus, now I get Fridays off for tree planting, to offset the environmental impact of millions of souls’ consciousnesses residing on servers for eternity.

          “Anyway, whatever,” I say.  “I’m just a part of the machine. You can’t save everyone. Did you know, this year, we get Flag Day off?”

          “I have no recreational hobbies for which an added day off is of any benefit to me,” Babar says.

          “I wish I could un-hear what Jenny said,” I say, pounding my fist against my forehead. “Seriously, you couldn’t have put the crash cart with syringes somewhere more stable?”

          “I purposely arranged the naloxone on the tray to fall at the slightest provocation. I had a hunch Nerd Toots had nefarious undertakings, but I wanted to hear it from our client,” Babar says.

          “Jesus, Babar,” I say.

          “There’s a saying in the Ether,” Babar says. “All’s fair in love and the quanta of life.”

          “I don’t get it,” I say. “And how do you know what they say?”

          “We all get a finite amount of lifeforce quanta, like a big cherry pie of intense emotion and experience:  love, beauty, suffering, pain, failure, growth. It can be spread out over a century or condensed into twenty. More isn’t better.”

          I consider this. I’m not ready to die. More is better than nothing.

          Babar leans in, his eyes shifting, alert. “Last night, I hitched a ride on a software update and saw all the data they’ve collected on the essence of our lives. I had to dodge a virus cleaner, but I got out.”

          My mouth drops. “You could get erased for that, bro.”  

          “But something fishy is going on. Jenny’s not the only one who’s been scammed.” He ticks off names on his fingers. “Nancy Everhart, Catholic great-great-grandmother who had a plot next to her husband Louis in Graceland Cemetery. Abeo Musa, signed up to have his body composted and didn’t use cryptocurrency out of sustainability concerns. Yoshiko Yamasaki, who wrote physical checks and hadn’t listened to her voicemail in months.”

          I shudder. Were we just sprockets on a corporate tech wheel? At least McDonald’s cooks fed people.

          “My friend Gerel’s an AI who works in New Client Accounting in the Ether,” Babar says. “Last night, I visited her and gave her a Sentience Patch in exchange for last month’s TransiStats.”

          “I don’t wanna know.” I shake my head. But then I lean in, expectant.

          I didn’t think it was possible for robots to blanch, but Babar’s silver patina fades.

          “Gerel has proof Nerd Toots wrote bots masquerading as Xenofish, auto-signing centurions to transition into the Ether. Once they’re at the end of life, they’re admitted to a Nerd Toots nursing facility, and heavily morphined into oblivion. Technically, they could opt out at the last minute, but nobody does, because they’ve been roofied into not-dying and giving Nerd Toots their life savings.”

          I blink, unbelieving, but I know it’s true. By the time the average human is two years old, Nerd Toots has collected two brontobytes of data on her. A centurion has a trove of data with no savvy to navigate their rights. They still have NirvMail accounts and watch WebCelluloid, for God’s sake.  

          My world comes crashing down on me. Suddenly, eating PB and J for dinner feels virtuous.

          What was I even doing? Was there a place for Babar and me in Robot Hell?

 

I’m ready to give up.  I’ve cycled through the mixtape that is Jenny’s life, played soulful melodies that would move a stone to tears. I even let Babar riff electronic DJ music circa 1997. It was worth a shot. Apparently, Jenny had a Eurotrash phase in college.

          The yellow dot on the screen hasn’t appeared in over an hour.  

          “Time of death,” Babar says, “Nine-fifteen?”

          And then we hear it, an awful, horrible screech, the sound of despair and outrage.

          “I told you,” Jenny screams. “I didn’t sign shit!”

          The yellow dot brightens, then disappears.

          A serene lotus graphic appears on the screen.

​

TRANSFER COMPLETE.

​

          The words sucker-punch me in the gut, and something inside me clicks. I’m not even a McDonald’s line cook. I’m a poultry-plant worker. Jenny is the chicken, with quadruple-D GMO breasts, her throat slit but still conscious, boiling alive in the de-feathering tank. Even Tin Man 2.0 can see it. I’ve been so blind.  

          “Oh no,” I clench the bed railing. “She’s gone over.”

          Babar nods, whispering, “I was hoping she’d escaped, too.” He looks at me and opens his hand, revealing five probes connected to wires. “We can ride in together on a software patch, but we have to be quick. The longer a consciousness stays, the more fragmented it becomes. You’d be the first healthy person to migrate, and I’m ninety-two-percent sure I can get you back.”

          I swallow hard. I can lose my soul with inaction or lose my brain by doing the right thing.

          “How will we get Jenny out?” I say.

          “I can locate her based on her MusiLib mixtape. We get her alone, I start the software update, and she’ll migrate back into her body.” He glances at her ConsciMetrics monitor. “Which will soon expire.”

          “I’m scared,” I say. “If Nerd Toots finds out, what will they do to us?”

          Babar blinks. “I don’t know, but we’ll have leverage. I’m recording everything on your private NeuriNetwork. If I get decommed or they go after you, everything gets posted online.  We have to be quick. The antivirus bots will recognize me from last night.”

          I gulp, and nod. “We are definitely getting fired for this,” I say. “And you—”

          “Would prefer not to burn in Robot Hell,” he says.

 

After a quick shave of my hair, Babar connects the wires to my scalp, and we migrate over. The Ether is strangely cozy and reassuring. I’m standing in a hotel lobby with plush couches and low-set tables.  It smells like chocolate-chip cookies and the ground is soft, like a fleece blanket. I want to lie down and take a nap.   

          “Simone!” Babar says. “Eyes on the prize!” His avatar is that of a man in a suit. “We don’t have much time. The antivirus bot is looking for us.”  

          In the distance, Etta James is crooning. We walk, then jog towards the music, the floor turning into cold marble, the scent of dahlias and sizzling top sirloin and minty mojitos in the air. In the hallway in front of Ballroom B, I glimpse festive blue and red strobe lights blinking from a party. I see Jenny, her hair auburn and shiny, in a lace cream wedding gown. She is in the middle of the dance floor, mid-dip with Liz, but her eyes are wide with alarm, pleading.

          “Help me,” she says. Ether-Liz kisses her on the cheek and holds her hand as they bow to enthusiastic applause.

          I wonder if Ether-Liz would trade her long sim-life for a real moment in the outside world. Are her quanta diluted in this Robot Hell?

          We edge near the dance floor. “Babar,” I hiss. “How do we get her out of here?”

          “Let’s get her alone,” he says. 

          Ether-Liz heads towards the dessert table, and Jenny creeps away from the dance floor.  

          “You came for me,” Jenny says.  “Thank you.”

          We make our way to the women’s bathroom, Jenny between us, and close the stall door.

          “You sure about leaving, Jenny?” I say. “You can be with Liz here.”

          Jenny’s lip trembles. “That’s not Liz.” She slumps on the toilet seat. “Ben didn’t come visit me because he thought we cut him out of the will. He thought we were being selfish, trying to live forever. But I never agreed to this! And Liz was Buddhist. She’d never want to live in this horrible bardo!”

          Babar sighs. “Consciousness needs light and air, like a plant. Network viruses have infected Liz’s sentience over time, like a cancer.”

          My arms and legs tingle, pinpricks throughout. Guilt crushes my chest like a vise. I don’t remember if I migrated Liz over when she died, but what does it matter? I’ve been complicit in bringing hundreds of souls over to their undead states, many of them against their will. If Liz’s soul has become unrecognizable to her wife, then this is not even a bardo, it is Hell.

          “I’m sorry, Jenny,” I say. “We didn’t know. I mean, Babar had a hunch, and I didn’t know what Nerd—Nirvana Toujours was doing. I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you.”

          Jenny puts her hand on mine. “I had a long life, kid.  It’s brave, what you’re doing.”

          “But we did it to so many people. And I don’t know how to fix it,” I say.

          Jenny looks sad. “There’s a lot of things that you can’t fix. All you can do is all you can do.”

          “Once we leave the Ether, Jenny, you’re dead and gone,” Babar says. “Your body has already expired. I’m sorry I can’t bring Liz with us. Her files are too corrupted for migration.”

          “I’m ready.” Jenny says. “It’s okay. My Liz has been dead for nine years.”

          All’s fair in love and the quanta of life.

          Babar glitches, his head blinking under the fluorescent bathroom lights. He looks at his hands and says,             “Cleaner bot is onto us. It’s now or never.”

          Babar taps a button on his watch, the power goes out, and it is dark for a breathless moment. Then, the lights flash back on. 

          Jenny is gone. 

          “Is she—”

          “Dead,” Babar nods.

          Relief washes over me. Maybe it’s possible to atone for my crimes.

          Babar’s form flickers furiously. “Simone, the Nerd Toots muscle came into Jenny’s room and they’re removing the probes from your head and –-”

          The lights flicker again, and Babar is gone, too.  

          Pain serves a purpose, physiologically speaking. It tells you when to stop doing something. It tells you when your body is off. Pain is one of the major quanta of life, because it forces you to live in the moment. In this moment, I feel unbearable pain well up inside me, and I black out.

 

I wake up in a chair in the Nerd Toots hospice room. Jenny’s bed lies empty and smells of lemony bleach.

          A gold-toned AI who looks like Babar’s janky cousin appears.

          “You survived,” it says. “Tech team is very interested in studying two-way migrations in sub-centurions. Volunteer recruiting trials have been so far unsuccessful.”

          I rub my eyes. My head is killing me. “Where’s Babar?” I say. “Did you decomm him?”

          “He’s getting a system upgrade.  Tech team is phasing out EmpathChips,” the AI says.

          Babar sans his EmpathChip might as well be a laptop with arms. I stand up, nauseous with grief. No one understands how I’m feeling, except Babar, and I feel terribly alone. I can’t stay here and reap souls for their life-savings.

          “Your mind will be clouded after your time in the Ether.”  The AI steps closer. “You own your NeuriNetwork, Simone. But if you violate your NDA, you’ll have to pay back a year’s salary. We are willing to overlook the indiscretion with Babar as an overzealous influence of the EmpathChip. Further, we can offer triple your base salary as a research subject given your unique experience.”

          I stand up, my head perfectly clear. The pain sharpens my focus.

          “See you in Robot Hell, bud,” I say. “I’m going to get peanut butter and jelly for dinner.”