Your Name Here, by J. David Bell

You arrive early.  The tests, they’ve told you, may take all day.  The waiting area is jammed.  You people-watch.  Old bodies, frail bodies, a smattering of cue-ball tweens with huge, haunted eyes.  A geezer slurping oxygen in spasmodic gulps, a palsied granny wobbling in a wheelchair.  Relatives and personal care attendants lean solicitously, untangling IV lines, patting parchment hands.  Barely enough of these cadavers left to save, but here they are, ardent for eternity.  A skeleton starts to cough, his knotted hand flying to his mouth, his eyes gaping.  Others look away in politeness, embarrassment, dread.  The hacking rips your chest.  You fight a rising disgust at being hemmed by such ugliness.  You pray it’s true what they say, that everyone’s different on the other side.

Bored and anxious, you leaf through the e-chure.  You’ve read it a hundred times.  The slogan: “After Life, Live it Up!”  The pitch: “Achieve Immortality!  Become a Name!”  The pristine bodies cavorting in select pleasure locales: Aruba, Montana, the Outer Banks.  Their forms glide with the assurance of youth as they bodysurf, sun, track big game.  The crystalline coral gardens, the battlements of red rock bathe in an unearthly glow.  Shimmering, that’s the word for it.  Everything shimmers.  The choral voices on the edge of hearing tantalize.  If you stare too long you feel your body drop into the surround, weightless, floating.  The illusion of being there is dangerously convincing.

You tap the screen, scrolling pages.  More images surface, hover, dissipate into mist.  For those with aspirations to culture, the deluxe package promises nirvana as living canvas, dabs and whorls of pigment, a swirling mindscape worthy of Monet.  For the young or chronically immature, the clichés of pop cult beguile: a Star Wars space station, a medieval fortress à la Tolkien.  For the more traditionally pious, bright light and ethereal music, a hint of vestments, maybe robes or wings.  Limits exist, though, to the architects’ imagination, limits placed by design.  Except for the very wealthy, those who can upload their most private fantasy to the graphical interface, one must be content with the company’s simulacra, and these incline toward the generic.  An afterlife too closely patterned on a particular belief system may prove unacceptable to another.  Offense may be taken.  You’ve been told this commercial tact is the origin of “Names,” a term non-denominational to the point of insipidity.  (You’ve also heard it’s an anagram of the pagan “Manes,” shades or spirits of the dead.)  The noun has yielded some arresting street lingo, including “Taking Names” (the recording process), “Name Recognition” (the meeting of acquaintances in the beyond), “Name Dropping” (the erasure of corrupt files.)  For obvious reasons the company chooses not to publicize that last possibility, though the fine print does spell it out.  Legal boilerplate, but still, it gives you pause.

Now that you are here, though, you wonder at all the precautions.  After all, no one has ever come back to complain, to demand a refund.  The whole enterprise could be a sham and none would be the wiser.  Becoming a Name, you decide, entails a certain leap of faith.  Will the path you’ve chosen meet your expectations?  Will it fulfill your dreams?  And if not, what then?  Names are gnomifiles, mental echoes of your lifelong self uploaded to the Your Name Here virtual mainframe, with its advertised lifespan of effective infinity.  These phantoms cannot, so far as you know, communicate with the living.  They cannot request a reset, retain an attorney.  The marketing geniuses who have cornered the hereafter are beholden to no one, need fear no government regulators or incensed clients.  To become a Name means to trust enough in human ingenuity–and honesty–to seek eternity in a construct of man’s devising.  They may have discovered how to immortalize the mind, but they have yet to figure out how to stopper the soul.

No wonder, then, the truly pious will have nothing to do with the place.  They have set up a permanent picket at all Your Name Here offices.  You walked through their ranks this morning, your eyes on the revolving door; you waved away their glossies of crackling flame behind the words of John 3:16, the promise of God’s undying love.  You withstood their prayers, their appeals.  You noted that none wore the insignia, the fiery cross of the Defenders of the Gate.  Of course.  Their operations were secret, their attacks unannounced: “as a thief in the night,” they wrote, searing the words in charcoal and ash.  Now armed guards patrolled the clinics, and in L.A., site of their bloodiest attack, craft circled overhead.  The Defenders were listed as a terrorist organization after that bombing, which left five techs and twenty clients dead, not to mention the untold numbers of Names awaiting their owners’ deaths before upload to the virtual mainframe.  In triumphal feeds, the Defenders cited John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”  And Revelations 3:3: “If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.”  More than one church was rumored to back them.  All denied the charges.  In ways the architects never intended, becoming a Name had become a matter of taking your life into your hands.

You wonder what became of those raw Name files, severed from their donors, preserved in the virtual equivalent of cryogenic freeze, then abruptly, in a silent puff of explosives, curling into smoke and flame.  Did they wake from their sleep of death long enough to witness their end?  Did their owners suffer a pang at the passing of their cyberselves?  And what of those whose physical deaths had already passed, whose bodies lay in the grave but whose recorded consciousnesses had yet to be transferred to permanent storage?  Was there nothing but darkness for these hopeful, deluded souls?  The Defenders had sworn they would not cease till they had razed the ersatz heaven of the Names, rent its towers to the foundations, choked this veneration of false altars and idols.  Immortality for the asking, for the buying.  The consumer culture finally proving, if more proof were needed, that it worshiped no God but Mammon.  So many whose faith rested on machines, whose lights were so darkened they could not wait upon the Lord.  You would not have thought—you sniff, recalling your Dante—that Death could have undone so many.

Yet here you are.  Soon you will be called into the room behind the reception area, seated in the blue vinyl chair where insurance information will be collected, BP and pulse checked, medical history ticked off.  Your height, weight, and vision, for reasons obscure to you, will be recorded.  Moved to an examining room and stripped to your shorts, you will be tested for physical and—so they say—mental fitness to endure the transfer process.  You will be screened by a tech with a compboard, who will administer a psych eval to determine your readiness to place faith and fate in the lab workers who will harvest the thirabytes of mental data that constitute you.  You will testify that you have no religious, moral, or other scruples to the Naming process, that you agree to hold harmless and indemnify Your Name Here, its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, and employees from and against any third-party claim arising from or in any way related to your use of the Service, including any liability or expense arising from all claims, losses, damages (actual and consequential), suits, judgments, litigation costs and attorneys’ fees, of every kind and nature, brought by your heirs, if any, in perpetuity.  Only once during the interrogation will the tech administering the diagnostic hesitate, frown, the compboard illuminating his face flicker.  You will initial after each paragraph listing potential bugs in the system: partial transfer, which may result in your consciousness surviving for perpetuity in a damaged state akin to that of infancy or mental retardation; data corruption, said to produce symptoms of permanent virtual dementia and/or psychosis; subject splicing, wherein your Name, rather than communing with others, becomes fused with at least one fellow traveler; GI arrest, wherein the link between Name-consciousness and surround fails intermittently or permanently, producing, it is believed, either total sensory deprivation or an effect resembling an endlessly skipping laser disc or strobe light.  When the techs are done with you, clothes returned, results posted, you will schedule the daily recording sessions that will occupy you for the next several weeks, as the immeasurable reams of thought the techs name you will be extracted.  (The process, you’ve been warned, is exhausting; even if it were less extensive, it could not be completed at a single sitting.)  You will then make your way back out through the lobby, where new faces of doom and decay will have assembled, their eyes resting on you in confusion and wonder, maybe in anger, some in suspicion, even in pity, you the sole apparent possessor of an as yet unbrittle body.  You will wade through their stares like fog.

On the sidewalk, past the sawhorse perimeter drawn for the protestors, you will refuse their literature once more, watch them cross themselves, fold hands over rosaries, close eyes and bow heads in dumb protest or petition.  You will think that, for all their slideshows and icons, these emissaries lack the vital courage of their faith.  Though only a child when September 11 struck the nation, you nonetheless felt an awe-like sickness in the pit of your stomach at the thought of its dealers’ fiery martyrdom, the conviction it required to yield their bodies to the flame.  You wonder who will be the saved: those who stood by in passive prayer, or those who flung themselves into the roaring breach.  You ache to receive an answer.

You remind yourself to be patient.  You will be dead in less than a month, and then all things will be revealed.

***

When you received your death sentence, a mere half year ago, you craved assurance that your demise might serve some cause, some purpose.  You saw, as only one on the brink of mortality can, the mere waste of your days: never to be married, never to raise children, never to answer life’s calling.  You would not have bothered to lengthen this excuse for existence if you had not been brought to believe that, as a Name, you might claim some place in a grander scheme.  You grew convinced that Time had been your enemy all along—Time, and the world’s indifference.  As a Name, those hindrances would no longer apply.  Eternity beckoned, a limitless escarpment gilded by special status.  Compared to that, casting aside the body that had slogged through its middling allotment of years seemed a small price to pay.  You would die, but your Name would live forever.

“Getting your affairs in order” was a joke.  You didn’t even own a dog.  No farewell letters to polish, no final trips to take, no last flings to consummate.  The only challenge to face was the breakdown of your body, a process they’d cautioned you would be grim: as the virus spread through you, shutting down organs, thinning bones, you’d experience pain on a scale that would make the faint of heart tremble.  And your mind would remain intact through the failure of your physical being, your mind would witness your body’s utter dissolution.  It had to be that way: you could not be transfigured otherwise.  The loss of corporeality did not particularly faze you, though naturally you fretted to learn what form the pain and debility would take.  You were assured you’d last long enough for a full recording, even if, as proved to be the case, your final sessions would be conducted at home, where you would lie pinioned to your bed, your legs too weak to carry you and your arms too frail to lift toward the window’s light.

The extraction, it turns out, is every bit as grueling as foretold: your body shudders as if your guts are being sucked from their moorings.  Yet as the days pass and you watch your frame dwindle, your chest collapse, your ribs slice through your flesh, you feel a calm descend upon you.  Soon it will be the end.  The fire in your veins has become, if not tolerable, at least not unfamiliar.  It burns away your outline, leaving only your spirit.  The more your body weakens, the more your will braces; lingering doubts drop off like the last wisps of hair you’ve found littering your sickbed.  You realize you are becoming what you will remain for the rest of Time: ethereal, incorporeal, pure faith and implacable conviction.  Without a body to bear you down, you soar.  The words of the hymn return to you: “on eagle’s wings.”  Had you possessed such faith before, you would not have waited so long to take this journey.  But the journey was requisite to forge the faith, you know that now.  You are a pilgrim on the road to glory.  Only by this path may you enter.

The techs bustle by your bedside.  They strip the last shards of your sharpened consciousness, watch your breathing grow so shallow only you know it is there.  “Is he gone?” they ask, probing for a pulse.  Their gloved hands leap from your skin before they find it.  “He’s on fire!” they curse, and you smile inwardly, no longer able to form your face to your mind’s resolution.  You know the end is near.  You wish you could speak to them, pronounce your final sentence.  You watch the room darken, the techs and their machines freezing and melting away, and you know you are there at last.

***

You wake to perfect darkness.  This is not unexpected; the literature predicts a delay in the Name’s correspondence to the GI.  Or it could be the interface is malfunctioning or, what did they call it, sleeping during the system’s routine self-maintenance.  Whatever the case, you will need to be patient, more patient than you’d ever imagined it possible to be.  Time is no longer a factor.  No, Time has no meaning here.  Eternity stretches before you.

In the absence of external stimuli, you test your consciousness to register if all appears intact.  You remember who you are, how you got here, why you are here.  Good.  You suppose you should experience delight that you have cheated death, that such a place truly exists, that you have not been deceived.  Instead, you experience only eagerness to begin.  You quiver for another Name to pierce the darkness, to make contact.

Patches of light, filmy and fluid as sun through a leaf’s green membrane, begin to penetrate the dark.  The surrounds flicker like heat lightning.  A landscape forms out of nothing, the one you selected at random from the menu: endless green fields, groves of fruit trees, a sparkling river.  Lanky bird shapes, perhaps sandhill cranes, bank against a strawberry and lemon sky.  Now that you see it, you suppose you might have been drawn to it by some impulse toward tranquility.  Or at least, its bland beauty was preferable to the alternatives.  You’d been appalled, but not surprised, to find that one of the options was a mammoth mall.  (Its slogan, in squirming neon: “You are what you shop.  Forever.”)  The experience of the interface, like everything else here, is personalized: what you see as a sheltered valley some other might know as a seascape.  Even your sense of self will not match another’s: they will see you, and you them, as each wishes.  If all works as advertised you will be able to commune with other Names, but not to experience the afterworld through their eyes.

The tickle of an uncompleted swallow weighs in your throat.  Only you have no throat, your throat is in your mind, a function of mentality’s tenacious belief that it must be tethered to some physical form.  You had a choice to refashion your body as you willed, to become the hero or idol you’d not been in life.  Most Names shaved years.  Some, you learned, went so far as to swap genders.  But you announced that you would have no body at all (the tech had raised an eyebrow); you would become pure mind.  You’d been convinced at the time, and even more so as your disease ravaged you, that one could be a slave to one’s body as surely as to other false gods.  The fact that your motives were different, you’d been assured, would give you an advantage no other could foresee or resist.  Unhampered by a material body, you could achieve the mission for which you’d come.

You rove, wraithlike.  Your mind, you discover, possesses an expansiveness and flexibility it could not have matched on earth: it gallops in great dizzying vaults, wolfing territory, refusing boundaries.  Soon it is racing ahead at light speed, conscious of what lies beyond long before you reach it.  Your pace, impossibly, quickens: trees shoot past so quickly they seem to sprout from bare earth, a mountain range is at once remote and eclipsed the moment you record its existence.  The world warps, space no longer laid out in a radius around you but curling through you as if through the eye of a needle.  The experience is exhilarating, the power to conjure rather than inhabit a world.  Yet this ability more than anything cements your conviction that this place is counterfeited, its designers no true believers.  Here you are a God.  In the heaven to which you aspire you would be but another thankful soul.

With a shiver of excitement you realize your first contact has drawn near.  You have no idea whether it is male or female, young or old, black or white: however it may choose to experience itself, all you see is an open, throbbing form, something like a flower, something like a wound, something like a heart.  This, too, is as it should be.  Your purpose coils within you as the Name recognizes your presence, expands its consciousness to embrace yours.  Sensing no threat, it opens wider to commune.  You detect the fragrance, the balm, of its greeting; the walls of its cavity melt away.  To its eyes, you might be another bargain-hunter at the Perpetual Mall.  In moments it will speak, in the customary manner.

I am Ada, it says, its nebulous form pulsing like lips.  Its voice is as the rushing of blood. I welcome thee.  Tell me, beloved friend, thy Name.

I am Death, you respond, the Destroyer of Worlds.

Then you strike.  Your mind lashes out and plunges into its aperture, a sensation at once wildly exciting and cramped to the point of panic, and what they told you would happen begins: the Name called Ada screams, shudders, convulses around you, its mollusk-form radiating frenzied signals of memory and collapse.  You experience, in a brief burst of illumination, its life: the cancer that hollowed its mortal form, the lust for fleshly pleasures that brought it to this place.  (The Name called Ada, you learn, was a woman.  Her stink suffocates you.)  You witness her sins as if they were your own, and for a moment you long to withdraw, to break contact, to flee.  But it is only a moment, and you hold firm until the Name called Ada flames, her consciousness consumed, you have been told and so believe, by her own sins.  You are only the agent, the activator.  Entering this false paradise, you do nothing but reveal the truth.

When the Name called Ada withers into a film, feebly palpitating, you leave it to hunt for others.

With each it is the same; with each it is different.  The Name called Bel shrivels at once, its sins so palpable you can taste them like a gum on your tongue.  The Name called Gem sickens, its form turning leprous and black before you shake free.  Many repeat Ada’s fiery end, though the intensity and tint of the flame, the concentration of mind you must expend to draw forth their confession, varies.  You do not linger to speculate, but move on.  The most satisfying are those you drive mad, those you leave shrieking monosyllables or tearing at their leached forms.  These, you trust, retain enough awareness to suffer the torment of self-knowledge.  As you spread through the system, encountering Names, waiting for their welcome, stabbing through their defenses, you learn to prevail over the flood of feelings that at first made you waver; though your loathing does not slacken, as you find that none can withstand you your will to carry out your appointed task grows ever stronger.  In no time the Elysian fields are littered with their carcasses.

Your only regret is that you cannot communicate with those on the outside.  You have opened the door, but you may never know if they have managed to complete what you made possible.  The timing of their attacks was to have coincided with your death, but not having spoken to them for months beforehand—by design—you cannot be sure if they remained as resolute as you, if they struck as boldly as planned, or, if they did, if their success was as total as all swore.  You suppose you may find out.  If the attacks succeeded, the place of Names should remain vulnerable to you for as long as your deathless consciousness walks this land.  If they failed, if those responsible for this heathen heaven remain alive or the pathway to the VM remains intact, then someone may be able to undo the damage you have caused: to restore or delete corrupted Name files, to reboot the system, to root your consciousness out of the mainframe.  Yet even if they did, would you know it?  Or would you be snuffed out so completely you’d have no knowledge you had failed?  Could you, in fact, exist at this point as anything other than what you have chosen to become: a virus, a rot in the system?  It was this same virus, implanted by the Defenders, that killed your body, leaving only your infected mind.  Deprived of that, what could you possibly be?

These questions wrack you, but you tamp them down as you move on.  You remind yourself of what you have vowed to do, of the sacrifice you alone were willing to make, the place you were willing to go, and all with full consciousness that you would receive neither recognition nor reward in this afterlife.  Your mind has been lopped not only from your body but from your immortal soul; neither can know the fate of the other.  Suppose all goes as planned.  Suppose you obliterate all that haunt this place.  Still your mind will never leave.  It will remain for all Time in the hell it has created.

The wailing of ruined Names surrounds you like a sulfurous cloud.  The plains smoke with the fire pits of your passing.  You sense an infinitude of untouched Names crowding the boundless horizon, terror-stricken by now but unequipped to repel what you carry.  You decide to let them wait for your coming, to add doubt and despair to their punishment.  You know at last that this is what you are meant to do.  You know you will make it to heaven, even if you must spend an eternity in hell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J. David Bell is the author of Framing Monsters (2005), a study of monsters in fantasy film, as well as of numerous short stories. His works have appeared recently in such journals as Terrain.org, The Squirrel Cage, The Battered Suitcase, and Dark and Dreary Magazine. He has just begun writing a novel, tentatively titled The Rise and Fall of the Great American Sandwich Lab. You can follow his thoughts and rants at http://bellsyells.blogspot.com/.