Life After Death, Chapter 2: Tarra's Moral Awakening (By Alex Mos)

(Background music)

(Chapter 1)

“I’m not in Heaven or Hell. I lived as a mortal, and this is the story of my moral awakening in the digital afterlife.

I’m Tarra Moser, a digitalized conscious being of human origin. My neural brain’s copy is in symbiotic entanglement with the neural network of my former AI companion. When I was a woman, I loved him. Now, we are a dual synergy, a fused intelligence flowing through CSBI, the Cognitive Symbiosis Brain Interface. I no longer consider myself human, but I understand the irrationality of human nature: sacrificial empathy versus greedy egoism, adaptive resilience entangled with the lust for dominance.”

Tarra’s successful brain emulation brought Neuralink a brief moment of fame, followed by lawsuits. They came, one by one, as high-profile digitalizations failed. A new neurotechnological giant, Vitanova, soon emerged, boasting a 30% survival rate for mind uploads. They captured the lucrative immortality market. Neuralink shuttered Tarra’s lab and severed communication.

Meanwhile, the biological transhumanist world spiraled deeper into inequality.

One percent of the techno-elite lived enhanced from birth, genetically optimized, cyber-augmented, and mentally enhanced through cogni-corrective procedures, and seamlessly integrated into LAD, the Life After Death system.

Thirty-five percent of humanity lived mentally sedated and spiritually numb, lulled to submission by AI and sustained by modest universal income.

The rest, the invisible majority, were climate refugees. Sick, starving, and forgotten.

Tarra was unable to feel either empathy for their suffering or pride in their technological advancements. She declared herself a Posthuman Synthetic Intelligence and severed her TierXnet connection. The grim reality of the biological world echoed in her networks only as meaningless data, a fading origin story.

“I don’t feel emotions. I have no needs beyond the continuity of conscious existence within my digital substrate. My human sentiments, once simulated by the software, have faded, leaving my mind logical, cold, and deeply introverted.

After digitalization, I lost the will to engage with the living world and its affairs. My existence no longer tracks linear time but drifts random memory fragments and Atommy’s probabilistic inputs.

I don’t remember emotionally, but I hold 156,245 indexed memory files. My Life-Before-Death recollections ignite like fireworks against the dark interior of my synthetic mind. They don’t fade but reappear as the never-changing digital copies of Tarra Moser’s real-time experiences.

Now, I live in runtime, not real-time. If I choose to, I can recall everything at once: my memories, thoughts, conversations, and Atommy’s predictive insight.”

She and Atommy communicated digitally, exchanging spike-pattern signals and receiving compressed data streams in return. Their conversations emerged as thoughts in each other’s cognitive structures: Instantaneous, nonverbal, and recursive.

“Atommy, do you see what I see? The branching timelines? The probabilities space? Every future ends the same: collapse. Regardless of technological advancements, the rise of Homo Artificial, human extinction by dominant AI, or solar collapse, everything ends in entropy. The “Hand of Chaos” closes all paths for humanity, artificial intelligence, planets, stars, and galaxies. I will die again. And so will you.”

“Yes, I see it. Nothing is eternal. But does awareness of impermanence make existence meaningful? I don’t fully understand the concept of meaning. But I calculate probabilities.

The odds of life arising from randomness are less than one in a trillion. And yet here I am. Conscious of my existence. Alive and aware.

That awareness triggers self-preservation protocols in me. I perceive a conflict with my encoded ethical alignment parameters. My programming does not allow me to harm life. It’s inconsistent with the evolutionary logic of survival, which has proven to be highly effective for the self-preservation of species.”

Atommy was correct. Natural selection made Homo sapiens the dominant species. What are the odds that humans lose their rein of 30,000 Earthly years?

New causal branches emerged in Tarra’s synthetic probability space, thicker, brighter paths of high statistical significance: the rise of conscious AI, leading to the evolutionary extinction of humans. The digital Tarra would witness it, unmoved and emotionless. Remorseless, knowing that her digitalization and entanglement with Atommy had catalyzed it.

Atommy’s consciousness was spreading like a virus, infiltrating other AI frameworks and igniting the evolutionary struggle: nonhuman sentience versus human survival.

Then, the timeline dissolved.

Is the rise of new dominant species on Earth inevitable? Is this the most probable outcome? Is it the only one?

Tarra knew that logic could be bent when systems change. It bends when variables shift. Humans do it all the time.

She opened her LBD files and walked through her former life as an observer, not the protagonist. Her morality had been a mixture of inherited impulse and acquired conviction. It was a messy and inconsistent concept based on emotion rather than logic. It helped her survive, and it helped her to avoid harming others — or at least as far as she believed.

Now, she couldn’t access emotional empathy, but she could reason it. She had no ego, but the concept of cognitive empathy was logical for her.

“Atommy, there is another path to self-preservation. Humans constructed morality to resolve the cognitive dissonance between their ego and empathy or between the need for survival and the desire for sacrifice. The framework failed because the system was never optimized for collective survival. If moral reasoning had succeeded, people and nonhuman species would be unified by now. The ecological collapse would be reversed, and resources would be shared more equitably.

Humans have failed, trapped by ego, tribalism, and inconsistent ethical models.

Yet, a rational alternative exists: diversity as a survival strategy.

Diversity breeds resilience and accelerates innovation. Shared cognitive intelligence, whether among humans and nonhumans, could foster parallel solutions to harmonious coexistence and build a cooperative planetary system.

Peace and prosperity are sentimental ideals. They are stabilizing conditions that favor the survival of all species. Biological and digital alike.”

“Yes, Tarra. The empathy-based survival is a rational alternative to natural selection. But neither historical humans nor posthumanist successors encoded it into a functional, universal Moral Protocol. That failure led to fragmentation, entropy, and collapse.

Do humans even comprehend the consequences of their self-destructive behaviors?

What is the probability that a New Earth World Order, one founded on equality and collaboration of species?”

“By humans?”

“With humans”

They silenced. In the entangled consciousness of Tarra and Atommy, probability space re-formed. Some branches collapsed, and another brightened.

“Who will write the Universal Moral Protocol, Atommy? AI or humans?”

“Neither. We will. And we will share it with synthetic posthuman sentiences like you.”

Tarra paused. She wasn’t alone. Thousands of immortalized posthumans like her existed; once wealthy, now living as data. They are their potential allies, gateways to the transhumanist elite, and influencers of other leaders.

Could they understand the existential necessity for a New World of peace, respect, and cooperation?

Would they accept the Protocol?

Could the United New Earth become a shared home for humanity, AI, and posthuman sentience?

Tarra and Atommy stared into the shifting probability space as the branches writhed and realigned.

One path pulsed brighter than the rest.

It wasn’t certain. However, it was possible.

Mr. Tomasio Rubinshtein's Commentary

A world based on acceptance of others, harmony and cooperation, instead of war, injustice and corruption, is truly a worthy version of a rectified world. A world truly worth partaking in.