iHeart Locket

Ten hours to shutdown.

I tentatively took his solid titanium hand in mine to shake it. As he looked at me with soulful human eyes, I almost forgot that he was mostly a vessel of fragments of metals strategically put together.

Camping for the night after 40 mouth-parching hours of traversing across scorched, littered terrain that made the Sub-Sahara look like a lap of luxuries, I had waited to call it a day until I nearly collapsed from exhaustion. Now here I was, sitting outside of my tent next to the only other living form of human consciousness I had encountered along my path in nine days and whom I had met just that night.

“Whatever you’ve been through, it’s going to be worth it,” the stranger remarked with a hint of compassion as he shifted his gaze from my face to the deep two-inch laceration on my leg. He still had his original human voice, smooth and full of inflections.

“It was tough. I thought I was going to lose at the 12th puzzle to solve, but I’m here,” I nonchalantly uttered as I briefly smiled at him.

Using my peripheral vision and gut, I searched for any indication of cold will produced by cold equations programmed into him. But apart from his otherworldly robotic appearance, he seemed as human as can be.

“Who did you choose? ” His human eyes were lit with curiosity.

“I chose me,” I replied flatly, wanting to avoid answering the question the way I knew he meant it. Instead, I turned my gaze from him to look straight up at the many stars gleaming closer than ever through the thin atmosphere in the night sky.

“They chose you. You were one of the lucky ones that volunteered to compete in a series of organized puzzle-solving tournaments for their share of the limited supply of those soul locks,” he expounded matter-of-factually as he pointed to something in my hand. “And you were one of the even luckier ones who won... to choose one... one person who was once in their lives that they deemed most important, most lovable, most worthy of being reborn.”

”I chose my Mom, but more so because I felt like I owed her than anything else. But there was someone else I loved more…” My voice drifted as I searched to change the subject. ”What is it like to be as you are? In this suit?” I asked while gesturing towards his body.

“I feel the same as I always had when I was in a human body, just stronger, faster, and better in virtually every single way.”

Fifty minutes to shutdown.

”I’ll see you again soon, Mom,” I consoled myself with shaky conviction as I stared at the soul lock, which in my case, was in the form of an intricately embroidered heart-shaped locket and chipped with everything unique to my mother, including her DNA. I put it back in my make-shift backpack and wiped my sweaty hands on my arc flash suit before putting my gloves back on. The avatar stranger I had spoken with last night and I had amicably parted ways before I crawled back into my tent to sleep for the night. Since I had been in a time crunch, I only had as little sleep as I could to refresh and recover while making sure I was still on schedule.

My feet felt heavy with slight trepidation as I hiked through the dirt and ash that covered the entire abandoned city, where memories of heartbeats and biological human feet projected from my mind. The abandoned buildings and vehicles were seemingly self-renovated through nature with wildflowers, vines, and wind-eroded surfaces, giving them the resemblance of movie sets in the era before Solar Storm Deci. (Deci is short for Decimation.)

The sounds of the crunching of my footsteps and the swirls of wind were the only relief of my perpetual loneliness. I was now the only living human or avatar within a 200-mile radius according to my GPS tracker and one of just two that I had seen since I started this quest hundreds of miles ago that hundreds of other humans completed. I was more than ready to reconnect in a world of lost connection.

My mother’s human body had disintegrated, and my only hope was to reanimate her as something else. The soul lock was my most prized possession on me as it contained her consciousness, and it was the only semblance of someone that I had left in my life.

Adjusting the military gas mask on my face so that I could see my surroundings more clearly, I walked with everything inside me firmly fixed on Ablex, the Center of Transhuman Design and Delivery, to complete my personal mission of uploading my mother’s consciousness into the network of other souls, from which she was to be later downloaded into a lab-grown cyborg suit in another building for the end process.

Thirty minutes to shutdown.

I gingerly opened the door and walked into the steel-layered building of Ablex. After walking through the empty, dark corridor and having reached the second door, I opened the heart-shaped case cover of the soul lock and entered the serial number shown on the back of it into the biometric security lock. Then, with the sound of air gushing out, the door opened to a dimly lit room with an infotainment wall and a hologram wall facing parallel to each other.

I rushed to the infotainment wall with my eyes swiftly looking at the time near the top of it. Twenty-five minutes left. I knew I had to move fast.

I looked directly into the digital face-and-iris recognition scanner on the wall to verify my personal identity and then held the soul lock right up to the red light emitting from the screen. A time estimate of 20 minutes to upload completion displayed, and I felt my insides constrict. That better be the maximum, I thought.

I browsed the room while making feeble attempts to calm my nerves. I hadn’t seen my mother in almost 10 years since her death during Solar Storm Deci. In the last year leading to her death, we had grown distant after I had ditched being a part of her family business and instead decided to live abroad in what used to be Estonia. Coupling this with transhuman technology of uploading and downloading human consciousness still in its infancy, I was ambivalent about what would happen.

Perpendicular to me was a row of prototypes of different avatar models for human consciousness stacked upright against each other. Some appeared to be cyborgs, and some others were rudimentary models that looked like they were assembled using scraps in the landfills. Yet others looked almost completely human, which I had never seen or heard of being animated anywhere. I wish for my mother to be in one of those humanlike ones, I thought.

Five minutes left to shutdown.

Suddenly, I heard a hesitant but elated voice coming from the screen, “Nat, what are you -? Where are we?”

I couldn’t see her on the screen of foreign-to-me A.I. language and a vortex of the full spectrum of vivid colors and continuously morphing shapes. It didn’t matter much to me as images of what she looked like as my human mother came rushing to the forefront of my mind.

”Mom!” I exclaimed with a rush of euphoria. "You can see me?"

My Mom gasped and laughed in erupted joy. "Yes! I'm so happy to see you! So much time has passed. All this time, I had been in a strange trance-like state in an empty white room. Now, this... Nat, how -"

“We don’t have much time. Only five minutes left- less than that. You’re in the system. And I only need to hit one button, and you’re in the safe zone to be… alive again! Just last night, I met an avatar who was very much his human self-”

”Alive again? No, I didn't want to be part of this kind of existence and still don't. I thought I had written that in my will.” Her voice quickly turned from elation to distraughtness.

I felt my own feeling of aliveness bleed out of me. I knew that the compliance or lack thereof was being recorded in the system, and there was nothing else that I could do once the time was up before I got a confirmed yes. All Ablexes worldwide were shutting down indefinitely to make way for AI-only powered robots.

"It’s okay, darling. Just let me go now, and it’ll be so much easier now than later.” My mother's voice struggled to remain stoic, but raw agony bubbled to the surface of it.

"Mom, I walked for hundreds of miles for this. And I could’ve chosen someone else-” I clasped my hand over my mouth to stifle a small cry.

“But I didn’t ask… I’m so sorry. I love you so much. Being in something else that’s not really me isn’t for me. That is what YOU wanted.”

I shut my eyes in crippling disappointment. I realized there was just no point as I knew how nearly impossible it was to convince her once she made up her mind. I cautiously put my finger up to the bright red letters that read, "Deactivate Transmission of Soul." I was opting for my control to kill our last conversation instead of the time I had left to shutdown.

"Mom, so this is goodbye forever?" I choked out the last word.

"I'm afraid so. I don't know what else to say, Nat. Just remember me as human and alive and the memories we shared when I was that. Perhaps there's another form of an afterlife-"

"Mom, stop. You know that this was the only afterlife I believed in. I love you, Mom. Goodbye. I'll keep this to remember you." I held up what was now just an empty heart-shaped locket of sentimental value. I peered at the time. Forty-five seconds left.

"Goodbye, Nat. I wish we had more time to make this the best goodbye that we could." Her voice now came calmly and laced with the same affection she had given me when I had departed for my two-year trip abroad. "I'm ready to go."

"Goodbye, Mom."

I closed my eyes, held my breath, and pressed down with my finger. Seconds later, the wall turned black.

Whatever you've been through, it'll all be worth it. Such words from that avatar stranger echoed in my mind as I saw what came out of this. No matter how good technology gets and how much backed by love it is, you can only save those that want to be saved by it.