This began as a good-spirited revolution against the grave’s silence. The problem for those of us still living, however, is the increasing difficulty in determining who’s dead and who’s alive. Computers operate around the clock, sending out the social intercourse of the dead: greetings, condolences, invitations, flirtations, excuses, small talk, inside jokes— codes between people who know each other well.

And it is clear now where this society is going. Most people have died off, and we are some of the few remaining. By the time we die and our death switches are triggered, there will be nothing left but a sophisticated network of transactions with no one to read them: a society of emails zipping back and forth under silent satellites orbiting a soundless planet.

So an afterlife does not exist for us per se, but instead an afterlife occurs for that which exists between us. When an alien civilization eventually bumps into Earth, they will immediately be able to understand what humans were about, because what will remain is the network of relationships: who loved whom, who competed, who cheated, who laughed together over road trips and holiday dinners. Bach person’s ties to bosses, brothers, and lovers are etched into the electronic communiques. The death switches simulate the society so completely that the entire social network is reconstructable. The planet’s memories survive in zeros and ones.

This situation allows us indefinitely to revisit shared jokes, remedy lost opportunities for a kind word, and recall stories about delightful Earthly experiences that can no longer be felt. Memories now live on their own; no one forgets them or grows tired of telling them. We are quite satisfied with this arrangement, because reminiscing about our glory days of existence is perhaps all that would have happened in an afterlife anyway.

Encore

Although the concept of the afterlife is quite old, its full-scale implementation has only gotten into swing in the last century. The afterlife existed before then, but only barely.

To understand this, you need to be aware that your Creators are talented at just that—creation— but they’re not involved with the observation and judgment of our actions, as we had previously supposed them to be. The Creators watch none of the details as our lives unfold. They could not care less. Only afterward do they become interested again, when they have the opportunity to do what they do best: create. At this second stage, they are called Re-Creators, and their goal is to find all available records of your life and create a simulation of you, reconstructing all your days. They take it as their challenge to see if they can recover a good likeness of you from the piles of evidence you’ve left behind.

They begin by tracking down your birth, marriage, and death records. For most people, the afterlife started only a few hundred years ago, when record keeping began. They then take account of the phone company records: every call you made and to whom. Every credit card purchase is retrieved and analyzed for time, location, and purchase. The Re-Creators analyze every existing frame of video footage on the planet for your every appearance: buying coffee at a convenience store, standing in front of an ATM withdrawing money, clutching a diploma, walking unwittingly in the background of other people’s home videos, eating a hot dog in the bleachers during a basketball game.