Postmortem Service Shutdown
I wonder how people are sending signals that they are not okay before they find themselves on the street and die? I am looking at my puny profile at https://liberapay.com/abitrolly and think how depressive that profile is with a promise to do something for $50.. and 0, zero people who want to connect with this story. How many people like me are out there? People I do not see. People I don’t want to see. Because it is unbearable to watch. Unbearable to imagine that this is the end of everything. Dreams, inspiration and hope.
Well, maybe not hope. Clearly I had a rather good day when I wrote it. Most of the days I am too paralyzed to do anything about dragging myself out of this mess. I write this today, because today I feel great. Yesterday my childhood friend took me to the snowboard ride, and the muscle pain in my body feels like a relief from months of laying in the bed with notebook. My mind tries to get into this depressive state again, but body leaves it no chance. There are just not enough hormones to bootstrap the process. No matter how much “sweet melancholy” is out there is my previous posts, today I don’t even want to look at them. Sure there are things that could flip the switch, but it is good to have a choice to skip them altogether. Because it is so great to take a rest.
With that it probably pointless to continue the post about detecting why and how people withdraw themselves from the gameplay. Voluntarily, or forcefully, because of views, or because economics abandon them, because of the war, family, job, whatever.. When a person is gone, there is a looming trace of questions waiting for answers. Some of the people are remarkable, but even for those it is a sad story. If there are no people in the world who could care about us, maybe we could build an AI system that does. We don’t speak about death, and yet it is impossible to stop thinking about one insignificance in front of it. Why it is so sad to think about death? I don’t know.
Some sweet raisins are clouding my thoughts, and, as always, I’ve got a risk of never finishing this post, so I should push on, try to make a point, to get the spark of thought out there into the wild. I think that the sadness comes from the feeling of not being useful, not being able to achieve that others achieved. Even such a natural and simple thing as sex. Maybe the reason why people modify themselves to a different gender is because they do not feel like they should or could persuade others for sex. I don’t know. If as a man, I can’t get a woman, maybe I will eventually modify myself to become one of my own. I may pop up here and there for a bit, surprising my friends and doing social activity, but in the end, if I lose it, I don’t know what, but if I lose it, I will be gone. And the promise to do something positive, to change my life for the better with $50 of somewhat conditional not really basic income, will become an epitaph on my internet grave.
But to become an epitaph, a public plea, the begging for money, a cry for help in the state of (not very deep) sadness and distress (otherwise I wouldn’t write the plea at all).. To become one, this page needs to be transformed by someone to carry a sign at the end “I died.”.
And this is the beginning of Postmortem Service. I would say “startup”, but raising money from investors who are speculating on other people deaths looks too much of a cringe idea to me. So I made it even worse — a dad joke by attaching a word Shutdown to make it clear it is not a startup, but a service that helps people to leave the world in a proper way. Cleaning up. Leaving a trace that could help others to find a better path into the future. And of course there should be more quests and stuff to make the opt-out process more interesting. Like if we could care more than an ordinary post mortem agency. So it is like Shinigami meets Cyberspace and sticks there to play some Fortnite. And I mean play Fortnite, not Shinigami. Caring more means different approach. Making it personal while the person is alive, but working only for dead. If devils have advocacy, their customers could have some representatives too, and these representatives need somebody who can deliver the last wish.
There are two building blocks for all this stuff. I probably won’t find a better time and space to put it out “on paper”, so I let myself continue and mix a cocktail. Those ideas are not going anywhere, they’ve stuck, so there is no use of keeping them to myself, cherishing for the time to put them down “properly” in writing. If it never happened over all these years, then “never” is the day, so it is better today than never. Should I ask for forgiveness? Nah, I think it is just better to thank you for reading this and not taking it into your head. You know, sometimes you just need someone to speak to, and it feels weird.. if there are 0, zero people who reddit. Like there are friends and relatives and neighbors, and a lot of people around, but in this whitespace of thought it could feel like an uncomfortable lonely place to be. Freaky feeling of not being normal, which is hard to describe without tears trying to bootstrap the process of self pity.
Here I stepped on the wrong path. I wish I could end this up in some uplifting manner, but I failed. I failed to connect the dots between scenario of a system caring for humans that I sent to Everyday Robots, scenario for post-mortem agency that is fulfilling client dreams, and the scenario of Shinigami (or a demon from hell) who was sent to Earth to debug the problem with the quality of souls being sent there. There is no point in describing it all alone in detail if there is no fun and nobody to do this.
The scenario above tells a story of a boy who has no human experience, and who is guided by machines to fulfill his curiosity. Having no goals of taking possessions, or doing harm to anyone, he is not a target of security systems, so he just walks in into the bank and leaves, which angers the classical alpha male, a possible thug who became an “the owner” of this business because of the hunger for power and dominance. The identity of the boy is not revealed, so thugs start a hunt for another group of tags, which they believe want to take possession of “their turf”. The boy is lured into the offline event to deanon him by letting an easy going lady to make selfies with all computer freaks that come there. They could not not reveal themselves, so the photo with nerdiest nerd then should triggers a search to reveal accomplices… but there are not any. No friends, no relatives, full loneliness and cyberspace as something exciting to interact with. The thugs get suspicious and order the lady to get more info. Getting best friends with him was too easy, much too easy to build up a paranoia that this all is a game. Then finally he is asked to demonstrate his trespassing abilities and send a message from inside of the bank. Then he arrives and sends messages to his girl friend smiling and feeling good about it, thug is disappointed saying “So. That’s it.” and commands armed security systems to open fire. It is the most mindless and useless slaughter of a person who was curious and alone. The thing that should not exist. And how it is done is the part 2.
I promised two blocks, but wrote about three. Agency, demon’s quest, and a person. They are connected together at least by my desire to do something about them. They want to find their way out, and I hold no copyright or authorship to that, because everything I can do about it is to dream.