Why do we play our parts so earnestly? Why don’t we go on strike and blow the cover of the truth? One factor is the sincerity in the face of your lover: her life of unexpected reactive emotion, her heartfelt belief in chance and spontaneity. You’re slave to that gorgeous earnestness in her eyes, her engagement with a world of possibility.

But in truth there is a deeper reason you play your part so convincingly. If you play your part well, you can more quickly leave this acting job. Those with the best behavior are rewarded with ignorance: they are reincarnated as an uninitiated Beneficiary. You could permanently blow the cover, but the Directors are confident that you won’t; they know you will sink to any depth of infidelity to preserve the lie for your eventual return to it.

Death Switch

There is no afterlife, but a version of us lives on nonetheless.

At the beginning of the computer era, people died with passwords in their heads and no one could access their files. When access to these files was critical, companies could grind to a halt. That’s when programmers invented death switches.

With a death switch, the computer prompts you for your password once a week to make sure you are still alive. When you don’t enter your password for some period of time, the computer deduces you are dead, and your password is automatically emailed to the second-in-command. Individuals began to use death switches to reveal Swiss bank account numbers to their heirs, to get the last word in an argument, and to confess secrets that were unspeakable during their lifetime.

It soon became appreciated that death switches provided a good opportunity to say good-bye electronically. Instead of sending out passwords, people began programming their computers to send emails to their friends announcing their own death. “It appears I’m dead now,” the email would begin. “I’ll take this as an opportunity to tell you things I’ve always wanted to express …”

Soon enough, people realized they could program messages to be delivered on dates in the future: “Happy 87th birthday. It’s been twenty-two years since my death. I hope your life is proceeding delightfully.”

With time, people began to push death switches further. Instead of confessing their death in the emails, they pretended they were not dead at all. Using auto-responder algorithms that cleverly analyzed incoming messages, a death switch could generate apologetic excuses to turn down invitations, to send congratulations on a life event, and to claim to be looking forward to a chance to see someone again soon.

Today, building a death switch to pretend you are not dead has become an art form. Death switches are programmed to send a fax occasionally, make a transfer between bank accounts, or make an online purchase of the latest novel. The most sophisticated switches reminisce about shared adventures, exchange memories about a good escapade, swap inside jokes, brag about past feats, and summon up lifetimes of experience.

In this way, death switches have established themselves as a cosmic joke on mortality. Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.