The Cloud

My grandfather suffered from dementia.

His fall from grace was epic. In his youth he had been a Rhode’s Scholar, travelling the world teaching physics to poor children, raising them up from destitution, bringing them back with him – first to Oxford, later to Princeton where he was a professor for thirty years.

My Grandfather revolutionized his chosen subsection of Physics – some kind of extraordinary particle he discovered and then learned to utilize. It’s ironic, given what happened to his mind, that his discovery laid the groundwork for the explosion in computing power which eventually spawned The Cloud.

The first symptoms of my Grandfather’s deterioration were subtle. He’d forget where he’d put his shoes, or where his keys were. He would spend ten, fifteen minutes looking for his wallet, only to remember it was already in his pocket the whole time.

As the months progressed into years, the chaos in his brain began to eat away at the essence of who he was as a person. I remember once I was sitting with him after dinner and he looked at a prominent photograph of my grandmother, hanging on the wall – his wife of 60 years before she passed.

Grandpa stared at it with all the interest of a cow chewing cud. I asked him if he was OK and he just frowned.

“Why put up a picture frame if you’re not even going to put in your own photos?”

I didn’t understand at first, but then it occurred to me what he meant – he thought the picture was from the store – one of those stock photos they stick in picture frames of fake, happy strangers living their fake, happy lives.

I told him the photo was of Grandma and he said nothing. Just looked back at me like a child lost in a museum.

Near the end he didn’t remember anything. He was a shell of himself, a shell of a person, roaming the house aimlessly. I tried to imagine, as he deteriorated into a shade, what it must have felt like to lose your mooring in the world. One second you’re a boat tethered to the dock of life, the next you’re alone, adrift at sea, the world a blank canvass of strangers who, unbeknownst to you, were once your friends and family.

The last six months were extremely frightening for him. Every day was a tumultuous set of recurrent realizations playing in a cycle – a rinse and repeat of burgeoning fear at being in a house which was not his, with a grandson who he saw only as a nameless captor.

He died one year after The Cloud came into service. It was too late to upload his memories, his personality – all we would have gotten was the perpetually saved mind of a lunatic old man.

I think it was his inability to partake in the technological miracle of the Cloud which convinced me not to do it myself. In truth, it enraged me. I guess I felt too keenly the injustice of it all – that the man who’s mind was responsible for the all knowingness and functional immortality of everyone else could not, himself, partake in the fountain of perpetual life. The hell with them.

What is The Cloud? Imagine a place you cannot see, a network hidden in the air, not unlike “the cloud” of the early 21st century, and yet so much more. In this place, in The Cloud, everything that it is to be human, the sentience we cherish so completely as the only real semblance of ourselves – in this digital place, that sentience is stored, along with all of the memories and beliefs and feelings which define it. The result is, as I’ve said, the closest thing to immortality that humanity is ever likely to achieve. Our bodies and their profound complexity of cells and genetic errors, are impossible to truly preserve. But our minds can, it turns out, with sufficient brute force computing power, be quantified and held in a kind of consistently updated stasis.

At first, this was the purpose of The Cloud – a backup for when the organic mind dies. But slowly, over decades, the updates to the digital mind became more consistent and frequent, with every user striving for that perfect 1 to 1 relationship between real life and recordation.

In the end it felt natural to forgo recording the brain and simply transfer the function of the mind to The Cloud itself. No longer was the organic mind responsible for maintaining the illusion of humanity in the body – now that integral service was carried out by The Cloud and beamed with such speed and accuracy to the human vessel so as to appear seamless in its transition.

People were still, technically, People – but their Peopleness had been outsourced to The Cloud. By 2098, 95% of the human race was outsourced in this way and, until this morning, they held themselves up as Gods, able to live forever in the digital sphere and have new bodies grown on command into which their minds could be sent.

As I said, up until this morning.

It’s a strange thing when the entire world falls apart. There are no announcements or news casts – because all of those things are based on the world as we know it being there. But when the world leaves, when the people in it disappear, the only announcement is their silence.

I woke up in my Grandfather’s old apartment in midtown Manhattan and turned on the news, as I do every morning, only to find static. I flipped through the channels and found either the same static, or prerecorded commercials. I tried to contact my feed through my optical implant, and found nothing. Just nothing – a complete failure to connect. My heart racing I looked out the window.

Before me the city streets stretched in either direction, left or right, North and South. I looked toward uptown, then downtown, my eyes wide in disbelief.

On the sidewalks, in the streets, were human forms. But as far as the eye could see they were just roaming, aimlessly, filling the streets and sidewalks alike. Cars stalled or crashed into poles and walls, their drivers sitting in front of the steering wheels, dumbfounded. Bodies packed into public buses confused and reduced to human shaped collections of unadulterated instinct. One such bus, only a block away, shook violently as its occupants tore each other to pieces. Eventually it stopped and a man exited, his skin and clothes dripping smears of red on the black asphalt, he looking into the sky, just standing there, unmoving, for at least a minute before I looked away.

I would learn later that these were the husks of the soulless human race, their minds corrupted and vacant, reduced to a bundle of binary nonsense stored in the digital sphere. Like an infection in a pig farm, a computer program had spread from one mind to the next, devouring everything in its path, corrupting code like a virus corrupts RNA, until the entire herd was infected, the stores of their cumulative selves reduced to digital ash.

Like my grandfather before it, humanity’s mind has been lost, eaten away by forces no one will ever entirely understand, turning our species into a shade of its former self.

It is horrifying. It is tragic. But in my heart of hearts, it feels fitting, in its way.

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