Valentine’s Day 14 of my 21 day writing challenge (got a late start on this one but it is my V-Day post)
Spoiler Alert: Discussion about Broken Mirror Season 2, Episode 1 - Be Right Back
Lovers become deeply connected through shared adventures and challenges and victories and defeats. Shared hopes, shared dreams, shared futures maybe shared genes. Your experience is not in isolation, it is merged with theirs and theirs with yours. They feel your joy and you theirs. You feel their pain and they yours. They feel you and you feel them. Where do they stop and you begin?
You are you but in love you are more than you and they are they but in love they are more than they. “We” and “Us” comes to mind but still cannot quite capture the essence of love.
In a Black Mirror episode I watched the other day, a fictional manufacturing/technology/grief counseling company, that makes “love”, finds themselves also failing to capture the essence of it. They have concocted a way to console grieving loved ones by providing them communication with their deceased partners. A sort of technologically advanced seance with the computer keyboard standing in for the ouija board.
Through an algorithm designed to sniff out, combine and organize every trace of the deceased’s written online communication, they smoothly replicate a personality that can communicate via text in eerily accurate ways with the soul-mate they’ve left behind. The company literally goes into the “clouds” and resurrects people from the dead who text.
And that’s not all. If you upload pictures and video and anything else that can give their algorithm a more complete data base you can upgrade to speaking with deceased loved one on the phone.
And that’s not all. If you think texting and speaking with them is satisfying imagine what it would be like to see them again. This is not cheap, mind you, but can you really put a price on love?
As you can imagine, “making love” (not that "making love") and selling it back to the people who originally made it is a tall order for even the most technologically advanced purveyors of grief counseling.
In this episode, the wife yearns so distraughtly for the WE and US she shares with her husband that after the Introductory Offer of text, she upgrades to the Speech Package and finally she decides she cannot do without the Deluxe Bundle.
This show is both delisciously fascinating and unsettlingly creepy. The writing and acting is so convincing, I wouldn't be surprised if a business plan for a business of this type is not already drawn up and waiting for investors to fund it.
If you have read this far and I haven’t ruined it for you, I encourage you to discover at your leisure how this love story unfolds.
Before you do though, accept my invitation to conduct a thought experiment.
How much of you exists in the cloud?
If “resurrected” right now, how complete would your reincarnate self be?
Could your partner find solace in the company of your algorithmic Lazarus?
Could you find solace with your partner's?
To what extent are we being sniffed out, combined, organized, packaged and sold right now to corporate strangers?
These are all deep questions as we live more and more in the cloud.
The question that spurs me to action is this:
If I died right now, would my living have been enough that all my loved ones would reject such a proposal because they know there is no way any cloud created algorithm could capture my energy, my passion, my essence, my love!
To keep this science fiction from ever becoming your loved ones reality, I offer this:
Love so deeply RIGHT NOW that those you love are inspired within every fiber of their being with enough “WE” & enough “US” to process any grief in the event of your loss. Love them in a way that your strength increases their power and your essence uplifts their spirit and your love gives them a new lease on your shared lives now and forever more.
I remain grateful.
*PS Being an idea guy, and in keeping with the vibe of this episode, I couldn’t help myself from coming up with a few names a technology company like this might call themselves. I came up with:
Laz-R-us
WEincarnate (think reincarnate)
WEincarnation (think reincarnation)
