Post-Body Experiences

Dear listener of my lonely delirious thoughts,

Romanticising the apocalypse was a gigantic mistake. Trust me. If it’s possible to call this miserable existence life, my ‘life’ is in no way worth it. I’d instead have chosen not to exist—not to have made the replica.

Time has been drawn out, elongated into endless waiting.

Back then, before my seemingly eternal life, I was a fan of apocalyptic sci-fi, the aftermath, what happens after the crash. I’d indulge in stories that would bring me out of my simultaneously dull and stressful everyday. Fiction was used as a drug to cope with the slow but severe damage the planet was undergoing. Every year things got just a little bit worse. But there never was a crash. The apocalypse never took place; there wasn’t any event, nothing specific happened.

Slowly but surely, it happened nonetheless: the last humans died. My body and original consciousness might have been there to witness it, but I didn’t, so I don’t know how it ended. But I know it did because if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be here; I wouldn’t be thinking. The device was programmed to be activated when it would be over.

Now there is just waiting, all alone, floating somewhere.

In a shock of the reality and severity of the situation, I, among millions of others, paid good money for this lonely misery! We were tricked by crude self-importance and our own curiosity. Sending tiny boxes, with humanities dearest symbol of love, the heart, and inside the heart, a literal replica of human consciousnesses, into space seemed like such a good idea.

This idea, and I see that now more clearly than ever, was almost as stupid as sending the Golden Record to space. Imagine NASA sending a vinyl made of uranium with a recording of tractors and sheep: as if any alien will care about the sound of mundane farming in the next 5 billion years. If they find out how to play it—what a fucking let-down. Imagine how rudely self-involved we humans are? Imagining that they would play a vinyl—I didn’t even in my human life play a vinyl. What if the aliens that find the Golden Record can’t even process soundwaves?

I didn’t see it back then; I thought I was doing something meaningful. But I see now that the replication of my consciousness is as useless as the Golden Record. When ‘the aliens’ find my consciousness, uploaded onto a chip inside the heart-shaped locket—what a fucking let-down. Imagine them finding a replica of a depressed 30-year-old’s consciousness that has been floating through space for millennia—pissed and angry at herself for making the replica—telling the aliens, in a frenzy: not to pacify themselves with the fiction of an event called ‘the apocalypse’.

I’ve played my raving rant over and over in ‘my head’:

“Don’t buy into it; the apocalypse is an ideological scam!”

“The apocalypse isn’t real, but the end is! It’s just like all gradual changes that happen in your life. You don’t notice it while it is taking place, but it is happening! It’s mundane, and it’s boring, but don’t ignore it!”

“The culture industry is lying to you! Nothing is exciting about an apocalypse! There is only a painstakingly slow end, it kills everyone and then it’s over! It’s like ageing, but not only you die, everyone dies, slowly of malnourishment, it’s painful, it’s hungry and hard.”

The worst part of this ridiculous consciousness brain scan adventure is that when, or if, I will ever be able to express these raging sentiments and rant to an actual alien, they will probably be met with confusion. No understanding, blank eyes regarding an angry replica, speaking in a language it doesn’t understand—if the alien who unlocks me even has a language at all! Maybe it only communicates through small movements in its slime-like body or by emitting a type of gas. I at least don't expect it to have two eyes, one nose, and a mouth.

This existence is completely useless! My intricate, human, oh-so-human worries are more likely than not to be out of the scope of communication to any civilisation beyond the earth. If I ever gain anything close to a body again, I will cry while I marvel at the gumption of humanity. We Ignored every tell-tale sign of the end because we had tricked ourselves into believing in an event, romanticising and normalising it. But I can see now, although way too late, that it might have been a better idea not to romanticise ‘the apocalypse’ in the first place.

Yours truly