David Langford - New Hope for the Dead

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New Hope for the Dead

DAVID LANGFORD

From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

David Longford (www.ansible.co.uk,) lives in Reading, England. He publishes the fanzine Ansible,

the tabloid newspaper of SF andfandom, which wins Hugo Awards, and is also excerpted as a

monthly column in Interzone, and online at www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-archives/Ansible. He is the most

famous humorous writer infandom today—see his book He Do the Time Police in Different Voices—

and keeps winning best fan writer Hugo Awards. He is an indefatigable book reviewer (some of

his reviews are collected in The Complete Critical Assembly, Up Through an Empty House of Stars:

Reviews and Essays 1980-2002, and The SEX Column and Other Misprints). For the last decade he

has been publishing short SF of generally high quality, collected in Different Kinds of Darkness.

"New Hope for the Dead" appeared in Nature, the distinguished journal of science, that revived

its one-page short fiction feature, Futures, in 2005. We think it is significant for the SF field that

such a feature exists in such a place. This story is about the rewards and punishments of the

electronic afterlife.

Hello, Mr. Hormel, this is your hosting system at Nirvana Infomatics. We apologize for interrupting your

regular afterlife, but unfortunately the message is urgent. Otherwise we would not have intruded on your

VR sex athletics competition.

We are sorry to hear that you were going for a new high score. Nevertheless the message is urgent.

In accordance with your contract for postmortem uploading and long-term maintenance as an

Electronic-Golem Artificial Neurosystem or EGAN, we regret to inform you that your trust fund is not

performing adequately. This is a result of global economic problems, arising from the continuing states of

emergency in Iraq, Iran, Korea, France and the US Pacific Northwest.

To put it briefly, your current investment yield is no longer covering the monthly payments for full

enjoyment of this digital afterlife.

You are quite correct to invoke the emergency insurance terms laid down in Clause 12 of your

antemortem agreement. Unfortunately, our finance department has already taken the full potential claim

into account.

Yes, the world economy truly is in appalling shape. Otherwise we would not be forced to mention the

provisions of Clause 9, "Special Circumstances, Penalties and Termination."

But in the words of the classic novel—Don't Panic! Several alternative plans are available for financially

challenged and differently solvent entities in our care.

The simplest scheme is what our client-advisers amusingly call "being dead for tax reasons." Maintaining

your full activity as an EGAN requires continuing exabyte-scale storage capacity and very substantial

24/7 processor power. We can enormously reduce the associated expenses by storing you in static,

compressed Zip format for reactivation in a time of better economic weather.

Yes, it is true that we cannot guarantee a major future upturn. Shares can, alas, not only go down but

plunge and even plummet. Yes, it is possible that current issues such as global warming, fossil-fuel

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David Langford - New Hope for the Dead

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