Soul sold separately
One of those columnists, a Malcolm Gladwell type, or maybe the Malcom Gladwell himself, hard to tell, blamed Elon Musk for the soul market.
It wasn’t an unfair connection. Indeed, the idea you could buy a Tesla, but you didn’t own the battery that powered it, proved to be irresistible to any company that wanted to juice shareholder value. That nugget of an idea — sell a product but keep the IP, seemed to infect everything.
Mercedes sold a car, and charged their customers for acceleration. Apple sold a phone that would not work without buying into their cloud. LayZ boy’s new private-equity-backed owner sold a recliner but licensed the smart foam, and if you did not pay them every month, your soft, homely, relaxing rocker would sieze up, stiffening until it was concrete hard and immobile, like a Spirt airline pre-reclined seat.
I think it’s unfair to blame any one billionaire for the soul market and by extension, the soul market crash of 2105. Our system always wanted capital to be deployed efficiently. And nothing is more efficient than a handful of people holding all the capital. It was only a matter of time before they held our souls, too. It was, clearly, the most efficient deployment.
If anyone was to blame for the soul market, it was Dr. Retina Abertura and her graduate students at Georgia Tech during the last days of spring semester, 2034. It was her, and them, that discovered on a muggy Atlanta day in May the precise electric signature for consciousness.
It was simpler than it should have been. An enigma machine. A Skelton key. A unique sequence of numbers that every being had.
The trick was you could not know the sequence until the exact moment that a being died. Dr. Retina and her merry band of students killed so many mice models, searching for the key. And on May 3rd, 2034 mice model FT-2680 (nicknamed post death, Theo) was electrocuted, and their program recorded a 22 digit hexadecimal signature in the lab’s computer. Putting that signature into their codex yielded a precise replica of Theo’s entire being. His love of carrots. His unique way to navigating complex mazes. His tendency to take small naps after eating large meals of pellets (in this case, digital representations of pellets.)
It was Theo. Saved to a hard drive, in the basement lab of Dr. Retina on Juniper street.
Dr. Retina was quickly tenured. Her work celebrated. She was granted hundred of patents for the interlacing technologies that would become know as Soulstech™️; The small device that nearly everyone had installed at birth, that would provide their signature at the time of their death, and allow for anyone to make a full copy of the dead’s consciousness, on a hard drive, stored in any basement.
As I understand it, Georgia Tech’s office of sponsored programs ensured that Dr. Retina’s work was owned by them as well. And even after her physical death, they retained her services where she is still to this day, cranking out papers and research. A marvelously productive being. Property of Georgia Tech.