ï»m šø ðëåð! ømg
Recently I sat through the anime, Serial Experiments Lain; one more angst-filled story of a lonely girl living in urban Tokyo and her freaky experiences dealing with The Wired (read: Google if it were run by an evil cabal). It begins with Lain discovering that “girls from her school have received an e-mail from Chisa Yomoda, a schoolmate who committed suicide … Chisa tells her (in real time) that she is not dead, but has just 'abandoned the flesh,' and has found God in the Wired.” This is your run of the mill cyberpunk conspiracy theory through and through. It follows in the lines of Timothy Leary's 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness, and the plots of The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell; somehow the next evolutionary step is for humans is to shed their flesh bodies and move into the on-line world we have created.
It's never explained in any of these stories how this actually happens, but it does and just like Max Headroom's world that is set twenty minutes into the future to excuse any glaring plot holes, quibbling is to miss the fun.
That got me thinking of the whole idea of the dead somehow being able to use computers and cell phones to contact the living. A lot of religions put forth the idea that once you die and go to whatever “otherworld” that is awaiting you, most, if not all, of your mundane everyday habits disappear. But why would an internet junkie stop being an internet junkie simply because they were dead? If we take the stance that we create our own realities in this world then logically we'd create whatever reality awaits us in the next as well (unless you don't believe anything happens, which is a form of belief in itself). Thus, the idea that Lain gets text messages from beyond the grave works if the character texting her more or less lived in the 'Net 24/7 anyway. The Pope hasn't come out on a stance whether there is spam emails in heaven but perhaps he should (on the other hand, the Pope, being an ex-Nazi Youth who is chummy with Holocaust deniers, has his own personal demons to wrestle with … it's odd that someone who is suppose to be getting private e-mails from his Catholic God acts about as far removed from the divine as possible).
Knn – Knn – my cell phone is vibrating. “Ï»m
Šø Ðëåð! ØMG?” the text message reads.
It is all the same. You would think with time
the Dead would get over their shock; their needs
being far less than the livings'. But no.
How they manage texting is a puzzle.
No one uses spell check. “Û R a Hø!
WTF?” Why believe death is able
to change any of us? If grace does not
come in life, it just won't come. Personally,
if one day I found myself lost elsewhere
I'd send more rude photos. It's all I got.
I'm a creature gone viral; my fleshy
body pure static, my rip roaring stare.