Sharon’s diary, entry 1286 – A windy sunny morning, 8 degrees Celsius, probably a November day

I decided to enter this record, on the topic of “touch”, under a simulated November day, on a little island, as those were the conditions of one of my last memories, before being uploaded. It is the memory of a day when not much happened apart from the sun and the wind touching whatever bit of my skin was not covered by protective clothes. One of the few things I was not able to recreate in this place from where I am writing, is that intangible touch of the sun, that ungraspable hold of the wind, that certain feeling that something is close to you, and at the same time it doesn’t care about you, it caresses you without owning you, it belongs to you, as well as to everyone and to no one.

I was among the last ones to be uploaded, before the temporary blackout that cut all circuits and crashed the upload pad indefinitely. Communication to us, the uploaded consciousnesses (UCs), was resumed, though with interruptions, and sometimes we don’t know if we’re not actually talking to a pre-recorded world, as the amount of uncanny and absurd in our interlocutors on the other side of the screen is at levels hardly seen in my previous life. As I realised that research was to be on halt for a while, and no more disembodied fellows were to join me any time soon, I started this diary, as a pass-time of a time that was never going to pass again, and with chances that anyone reads these memories as reduced as the chances of us being sometimes downloaded.

Touch is therefore connected in my memory not so much to my fingers, which were quite parsimonious in providing me with signals about the outside, being mostly engaged in utilitarian tasks, such as writing, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, things they did without much reflection, not stopping to reflect on the information they were channelling, being more concerned with the end result. They were mostly clumsy fingers, not so trustworthy, also not very questioning; they did not feel inclined to finger the hole in a dead man’s chest to check if the wound was real. And not because of some simple sola fide in which the signals sent by the eyes were thought to be more reliable, it was mostly a reticence towards the ostentatio vulnerum, a refrain from touching the evidence of pain, as if not to inflict it again on the wounded body. Or, perhaps, the fear the wound might be transferred to the touching body, already affected by a hyper empathy similar to that experienced by Lauren, Octavia Butler’s character.

The first batch of UCs were those belonging to a bunch of self-declared “hideous sacks of meat”¹, who indulged in each other’s enormities on long-termism, space bunkers, underground tunnels and cryptocurrencies, all imagined to preserve the rich and perpetuate their dreams of immortality². Until they started going bankrupt one by one, and the total collapse brought their uploaded avatars to freeze in the most awkward positions. We, the other uploaded, did not have access to their codes, so now we have to go around their obscene grimaces and ghostly limbs every time we walk the green corridors of data. We say about them that they had lost touch of reality and that was what brought their final end.

Another fear was additionally terrifying these former fingers of mine, the thought that they might feel not enough, that they would disappoint, with their awkwardness, receptacles of stimuli on both sides of the touching and the touched. There was one exception though, which never failed, stroking through the fur of a pet and touching those C-tactile afferents, which “apparently process slow, gentle touch as ‘pleasant’ and ‘affiliative’, [with] slow, gentle touch (…) likely to be especially effective in having a calming effect.”³ The response of the animal was a touchback of such intensity and complete surrender, complete with nose-kisses, purring, heat-emanating, grateful looks, claws hiding and paw cuddling, which made touch a primary mode of communication, and led me wonder how miscommunication between humans can lead to such catastrophic results, when they have so many tools at their disposal, whereas simple touch can make one be perfectly understood and gratified by an animal.

Do not imagine that I feel at home here. It is a home designed by a bunch of kids on drugs, commissioned by the richest of the rich to fit their narrow vision of what eternity could look like. A vision by the commissioners’ likening, of a white world with leather couches and infinity pools, where their avatars wearing hotel slippers would be eternally served by brown people calling them Sir, who would not be allowed to touch the same bathrooms and the same kitchens⁴. This is a vision of eternity that is worse than any depiction of hell in medieval manuscripts and yet here I am, stuck in the only possible world that was on offer on the market of digital afterlives.

When a virus emerged and spread rapidly, in the 2020s, which induced the panic of touching other people or being close to them, a frantic search for other material and spiritual connections started, deeply correlated to the acute awareness of one’s senses (or lack thereof, as in the case of taste and smell). The use of touch was essential in providing a reassurance in life’s continuity, and was manifested, with dedication levels unwitnessed before, in all sort of activities, of which by far the most appealing was in-door or out-door gardening. Personally, I had peas in the kitchen, orchids in the bathroom, monstera and ficus benjamina in the living room, asparagus, cucumbers, parsley, mimosa pudica, palm-trees, passiflora, aloe vera, araucaria heterophylla, olive trees and many others, on the terrace. Suddenly my fingers were so green they resembled a Windows-95 desktop screen. Some plants liked the company of each other, others were sending distress signals such as little teardrops on their leaves, some were curling up while others profoundly disliked being touched. There were simple life lessons but knowing that half a planet was learning these lessons at the same time created the awareness of ways to link to each other much stronger than the internet, similar to the fungi networks of trees perhaps. Similar to how trees are performing crown shyness, knowing how not to touch each other while inhabiting the same ecosystem.

You may wonder how I ended up in this cloud, and how many more average former humans can be found here. You might think there was a revolution, that finally people brought their forces together to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Not really, we arrived mostly accidentally here. I stole the fingerprint of a guy programmed for upload and there I was. The gateway to the afterworld was in the fine circular lines of a forefinger. For others, it was a glitch. Some were volunteering for tests and many were driven by curiosity. It wasn’t a completely selfish act, as our bodies were still transformed in compost for the trees. We were neither cosmists, waiting for full in-flesh resurrection, nor longterm-ists, waiting for our frozen bodies to be reloaded in a technologically advanced society on another planet. I am chatting sometimes with fellow UCs in this world, and we share memories about our former senses. Of which, unanimously, most of all we miss touch.