The Judicant & The Death of the Immortalists
A Morbid Look Back on the Network State of Vitalia
An excerpt from the journal of Tristan Roberts — February 15th, 2034
I met my lover at Ray Kurzweil’s funeral, just as the prediction market foretold.
The automated betting pool I had posted years earlier flurried with activity when a reputable Cast confirmed the techno-optimist’s departure from the material plane.
A screenshot of the market, before the flurry of activity. It hovered around 10% for years.
My theory: one of Alcor’s staff tipped an info-mongerer pseudonym, cascading algorithmic trading bots that swarmed any market relating to Kurzweil, transhumanism, and the Singularity. His body, presumably, had been fused with a cocktail of preservatives at the site of death and was already enroute to the Vault in the Texas Republic.
The likelihood to find a partner at Kurzweil’s funeral plateaued around 72% as I waited for the Caltrain. This was a higher likelihood than the market had ever shown. Yet as much as I savored the possibility of finding a new flame within the chill of death, I tried to not let my hopes soar too close to the sun. As with all love markets, it was hard to gauge how many of the bets were my friends and lovers publicly wishing me well… or secretly wishing me to move on.
I had not been close to Ray… but my social currency secured an invite to the ‘celebration of life’ service held at the megalithic Unitarian Universalist church in San Jose. The Unitarians had become the closest thing to the religion of the Singularity, or at least, the only one that did not implode under the weight of its founders’ egos.
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