Seven Minutes in Heaven with the Electric Seraphim

Content note: Suicide, sexual assault, ableism, dysmorphia, torture

SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN WITH THE ELECTRIC SERAPHIM™

An Elysium Resort and Casino Exclusive

The Electric Seraphim changed the world forever, and now they’re shaking things up at Elysium. Seven Minutes in Heaven with the Electric Seraphim™ offers guests the opportunity to hang with the only remaining digital impressions of these legendary rebel girls. Our expert guides will introduce you to the Seraphim, illuminate their impact on everything from healthcare to haute couture, and—if you’re lucky—share some firsthand stories about our efforts to preserve endangered digital afterlives.

When I finally asked my mother about my aunt Cassie’s death, I made it clear that trying to shield me from the darker details would be a waste of time. I knew Cassie was a deeply unhappy young woman, and I knew she was friends with the girls who killed themselves in the abandoned Quiznos. Ghoulish crime scene photos were everywhere, and my classmates, eager to prove their grown-up bona fides, spent multiple lunch periods poring over each and every one. With their bodies slimed in a blend of borax, school glue, and glitter, the girls looked like they’d been hacked up by a pneumonic goddess; it’s the kind of image that sticks. Moreover, no amount of parental concern could have kept me from knowing that Cassie topped the Quiznos girls by building an honest-to-God trebuchet and flinging herself into a billboard advertising “CONTINUOUS NUDE STAGE ENTERTAINMENT.” It was a major local news story and the source of a few short-lived memes, for one thing. For another, it sparked a bloody arms race among the girls and women who would come to be known as the Electric Seraphim, which reached its crescendo in thirty-nine suicides by homemade guillotines across the English-speaking world. The Seraphim proceeded to wake up in some of MIT’s most sophisticated computers, making them history’s first bodiless human consciousnesses.

I knew it all, I told my mother, and not just because it involved my family. Cassie’s afterlife had become a historical milestone. But my mother did not want to shield me from these details. She wanted to tell me that the year before she died, Cassie surprised everyone by becoming a passionate churchgoer.

“She drove Father Dacey nuts with questions,” my mother said, Cassie’s final school picture in her hands. “It was all, ‘Father, what do you think about reincarnation? Have you heard we lose seven pounds when we die? Do you think that’s the soul leaving the body?’ And the truth is, we were over the moon. We were like, okay, she’s out of the puberty woods, no matter how. I thought maybe she wanted to study religion.” She smiled ruefully. “I bought her the rosary they found under her bed.”

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

RECKONING WITH THE UNHOLY CONTRADICTION AT THE HEART OF HUMANITY!!!

🔪🍰💖a fun and easy guide by the electric seraphim💖🍰🔪

life: it sucks 😭

millions of people’s lives are just hunger, sickness, and misery
every time we gain new insight into the universe, we use it to kill each other
jobs that help people pay shit and jobs that fuck people over make you rich
mommybloggers
everyone who bullied you is actually probably going to live a perfectly fine life and you will be the girl people remember for wearing the same unwashed hoodie every day

why does life suck?

all these shitty things boil down to one ultra-shitty thing
our idiot bodies and idiot brains are constantly at irreconcilable war with each other
this isn’t a niche internet opinion, it’s a gigantic philosophical topic called:
***the mind-body problem***

Classmates and teachers recall Cassie’s good grades and reticent nature, but meaningful anecdotes are thin on the ground. “It was hard for her,” my mother remarked as she sifted through Cassie’s medical records. “God, I forgot how bad her endometriosis got. And there was acne, and the whole body-image drama, and trouble making friends. We thought, yeah, okay, she’s not going to be prom queen. But we didn’t care. At least it meant she wouldn’t get pregnant.”

As Cassie’s uneasy reckoning with adolescence continued, a promising undergrad earned a minor position at MIT’s Consciousness Lab. Her name was Rachel Cisneros, but Cassie knew her best as petitepyre.

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

>TOTAL TRUE CRIME FORUMS

>>ELECTRIC SERAPHIM MEGATHREAD / PAGE 56

HELIOSHYPEx: does anyone have that interview cisneros’s sister gave right after it happened? the one by the dunkin where she yells about their stepdad? probably not insane to wonder if he was sketch

Thomtina4: BS……I KNEW RACHEL IN HIGH SCHOOL AND WHAT EVERYONE’S AFRAID TO SAY NOW THAT SHE’S DEAD IS SHE WAS A GIANT BITCH!!!!!!!! SHE CYBERSTALKED ANYONE WHO CALLED HER ON HER SHIT AND WAS A KLEPTO TO BOOT…..SHE LIKED MAKING OTHER PEOPLE AS MISERABLE AS SHE WAS AND THOUGHT BEING SMART MADE HER GOD….LOTS OF PEOPLE HAVE TOUGH LIVES AND DON’T DO WHAT SHE DID!!!!!!!!!

CaRaRaRoan: I don’t know about her being a “klepto,” but there are a lot of posts floating around from people Rachel was really shitty to in hs. Look up Lexie Crowton’s videos. Rachel basically gave her an eating disorder because she was bored one summer.

the-devil-you-kno: most stable nelly cooper fangirl

Cisneros created the Electric Seraphim’s central server, 24/7 ELECTRIC HEAVEN, two months into her time at the Consciousness Lab. Most of its first members, including Cassie, met through their love of indie pop musician Nelly Cooper; the server’s name was taken from “Soda Aisle,” one of Cooper’s most celebrated songs. Initial discussions were standard fandom fare: dissections of favorite lyrics, rumors about Cooper’s love life, links to fan art and memes. But as the weeks went on, each member revealed more and more about her other interests, her offline life, and eventually, her frustrations, anxieties, and ambitions. Cassie was among the first to volunteer personal information: When talk turned to “The Deer on the Side of I-95,” Cooper’s ode to skipping class, she revealed she’d never been brave enough to play hooky.

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

the mind-body problem

your meat and your mind are basically two separate people who hate each other
humans never stop fretting over how to make a better world but when a cheap thrill—sex, comfort, money, etc—is offered at terrible cost—committing rape, developing an addiction, exploiting someone, etc—we choose the thrill every time
you know how you procrastinate even though you know from visceral experience how badly you will regret it. and then you do it anyway. and you feel bad. but eventually you do it again. what the fuck kind of dumbass animal plays itself like that
- you have never seen an ant play itself like this

symptoms of the mind-body problem

staying in bed on your phone for hours after waking up, even though it makes you feel like a miserable slug
the way you carefully don’t look in the mirror before you shower because facing the simple, neutral truth of your body feels like it will annihilate you
every law that boils down to “women can’t do/wear x because if men see women doing/wearing x it will make them so horny their body will completely obliterate their mind and make them do something horrible”
the billions of dollars made off crystals, “energy healing,” insane diets designed to bring ~mind and body into harmony~
all religion and most of philosophy
- no matter which one you look up it will take you <5 minutes to get to a proposed solution to the mind-body problem under some other name
  - notice how none of these religions or philosophies have solved it

calicocassie: you seriously have me reading descartes

calicocassie: like i’m procrastinating on my algebra homework because i’m too busy reading descartes

toralee: LMAO SAME

petitepyre: my finest achievement!!!!!!

As Cisneros began her senior year, months of research began to bear fruit. Her team realized their hypotheses had been too modest—consciousness was beginning to look downright flexible. Initially, Cisneros was reluctant to discuss her work on the server, only making vague allusions to “shit at MIT.” After much prodding, she began to reveal details. The girls were intrigued and immediately clocked the work’s aesthetic potential; it was around this time they began calling themselves, semi-jokingly, the Electric Seraphim. Buoyed by this interest and a bottle of rum, Cisneros spent Halloween night treating the denizens of 24/7 ELECTRIC HEAVEN to a rant about mind-body dualism. The eternal clash between flesh and consciousness was irreconcilable, she argued. This was our species’ fatal flaw, but her lab was on the brink of overcoming it. This might seem an odd opinion for Cisneros to hold so passionately, but theories of consciousness are essential to her field; three of her lab mates had gotten into a major spat over integrated information theory the previous winter. Moreover, certain prominent voices did position the mind-body split as a wellspring of individual and societal ill their research might alleviate. Some even envisioned a day when the body and mind might be temporarily decoupled to treat complex trauma.

Still, Cisneros’s specific beliefs were strange. She was entirely aware of this: abashed and hungover the following morning, she told the group, “ty for indulging my autism lol i love this shit and go insane when anyone will listen.” Her worry seems absurd to the modern observer, who knows that the Seraphim were all esoterica-obsessed misfits. Plenty of girls were fans of Nelly Cooper, after all, but few spent hours debating whether her work was best described as “baroque effluvia” or “Floridacore.” Cisneros’s ideas weren’t too outré for such a population—they were a perfect fit.

The Seraphim encouraged Cisneros to reveal every facet of her opinions. Almost simultaneously, they began to dissect them into individual ideas, embroider them with their own experiences, and tug them into interesting new shapes. They made memes about epiphenomenalism. They became obsessed with the work of modernist poet H. D., whom they saw as a kindred spirit. Once Cisneros revealed the full scope of her team’s work at MIT, they began to think bigger. Thus, they created “RECKONING WITH THE UNHOLY CONTRADICTION AT THE HEART OF HUMANITY!!!,” a series of digital slides that sum up the group’s argument for destroying the body and living a fully digital life. It’s bizarre, jokey, and philosophically shallow. It was also hugely compelling to girls in the throes of adolescent turmoil.

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

the bottom line

the mind and body are inherently oppositional
this set-up happened because of the random collisions of a chaotic universe, not because it’s meant to be
it endures only because it’s not terrible at enabling us to fuck before we die
this has never worked
it will never work
stop expecting it to work

“We loved her,” my mother said. “And it’s not like some of the other girls, where we’re like, ‘Oh, but we never told her!’ We told her all the time. All the time. We weren’t the kind of family that didn’t say it. We wanted her to be happy, whatever that looked like. We didn’t handle everything perfectly, but God, there was love in the house.”

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

calicocassie: i don’t think my mom has read a fucking book in 15 years

calicocassie: i get why but

calicocassie: jesus

We don’t know who initially suggested putting MIT’s tech to the test. Cisneros presented the idea as something certain members were already discussing in private channels, but many historians dismiss this as a canny lie. Regardless, by the time Cisneros entered grad school, the Electric Seraphim were seriously discussing who would be the first to make the jump to immateriality. After some debate and a server-wide poll, they chose fifteen-year-old Cici Kaur, seventeen-year-old Kate Beckett, twenty-year-old Lily Vuong, nineteen-year-old Isioma Okeke, and twenty-three-year-old Taylor Chiswick. These young women decided that an abandoned Quiznos would be the “departure point” over the holiday season, and Cisneros quietly began gathering the necessary hardware. An argument regarding carbon monoxide poisoning threatened to delay their plans, but they soon settled on cyanide. They also decided, on a last minute whim, to flood the place with gallons of opalescent slime. “Nymphet grotesque,” Okeke joked in her diary. “Gross + gorgeous + kind of hilarious = the entire fucking thing.”

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

toralee: okay i know it’s annoying but it’s the mom friend in me, i have to ask

toralee: are you sure?

intheaftergl0w: Am I sure I want to make human fucking history

intheaftergl0w: No Tori, I’ve decided the prospect of becoming a keyholder at the St. Louis area’s third-biggest supermarket chain is just too sexy to resist

major_taylor: IF YOU’RE READING THIS IT MEANS I’M GONE!!!!! LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT’S NOBODY’S FAULT!!!!!!!!!!!!!! JUST NOT INTO THIS WHOLE MORTAL COIL THING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HIT ME UP IN 70 YEARS WHEN EVERYONE’S DOING THIS SHIT!!!! I’LL BE THE MINOAN SNAKE GODDESS DUAL WIELDING BERETTA M9S HANGING OUT WITH TALLULAH BANKHEAD IN CYBER-HEAVEN’S FINEST JACUZZI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! P.S. SORRY QUIZNOS THIS WILL PROBABLY KILL YOUR BUSINESS BUT THE IMAGERY WAS JUST 2 GOOD

>TOTAL TRUE CRIME FORUMS

>>ELECTRIC SERAPHIM MEGATHREAD 3 / PAGE 26

electricangelicXO: just thinking about cici’s goodbye note on the anniversary 💔 every year i remember that she left her brother instructions for how to get to the secret levels of tachyon crisis 3 and i want to fucking die

calicocassie: anyway!

calicocassie: away i go to prepare gr33n g4bles!!!

petitepyre: jesus we are not spelling it like that

calicocassie: gotta bottle the raspberry cordial!!!!

calicocassie: gotta weave the straw hats!!!!!!!!!!!!

sylvangore: Dibs on seducing Marilla

wolfwhimsy: OMG FUCK YOU

“She built it—the catapult thing—at that other girl’s house. Sylvia something.” My mother gestured vaguely towards the southern window. “She lived in a town over the highway. Barely-there mom, no dad. It was probably her that gave Cassie the ride to the billboard.” She paused. “Mom identified the body alone—she didn’t want anyone else to see. But we had our phones, and commuters took pictures. They were everywhere. So my life raft became keeping Mom from seeing horrible things on the internet about Cassie. Which is funny to think back on, now. But you know, this was before the guillotines. It seemed like something I could do.”

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

petitepyre: idk something about overdosing is just

petitepyre: i mean i know it’s a dependable means of getting it done en masse, but after what cassie pulled off

petitepyre: idk i don’t love it

price-of-silk: No, overdosing fully sucks in comparison

price-of-silk: She COMPLETELY erased the possibility of going back, COMPLETELY chose mind over body—it’s potent

price-of-silk: Killing the flesh in specifically fleshy ways is also like…mwah

petitepyre: yes!!!

toralee: LMAOOOOOOOO

toralee: okay you just gave me a great idea

Hey Bobby! Something new to show the lax team!

—Victoria Lee, in a note taped to the guillotine she assembled on the Stevens family’s front lawn

“Fuck everything else I’ve ever done, right?” Dr. Eileen Kim rolled her eyes, but her insouciance did not completely hide her anger. “I’m going down in history as the lab tech gasping, ‘They’re alive in there, oh Christ, I saw them.’ Depending on who’s telling it, I’m either a sinister atheist confronted with proof that the soul is real, or a dumb bitch who responded to a major scientific advancement like a fearful caveman. But the truth is, we were all hysterical. A bunch of girls killed themselves—not just killed themselves, but beheaded themselves—then woke up in the most insanely well-protected shit MIT had. Fuck everyone who thinks they wouldn’t have been freaking out if they’d been there. It was biblical. Remember the suicide cults out west, afterwards? Remember that insane Vatican press release? Now it’s normal. Now you can major in it. But it was the end of the world. For a couple of days, it was the end of the world.”

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

calicocassie has entered WAITINGROOM.HVN

crazycakes1 has entered WAITINGROOM.HVN

_____amaranthine has entered WAITINGROOM.HVN

sylvangore has entered WAITINGROOM.HVN

toralee has entered WAITINGROOM.HVN

neverendingcircus has entered WAITINGROOM.HVN

PINNED POST: ✨✨✨READ IMMEDIATELY UPON BODY DEATH!!!✨✨✨

TO ACCOMPLISH FULL TRANSFERENCE: STATE FULL NAME, AGE, AND PLACE OF BODY DEATH

REPEAT AS MANY TIMES AS NECESSARY

crazycakes1: wa iit

_____amaranthine: KATIE YASMIN MARTINEZ 22 FARMVILLE VIRGINIA

crazycakes1: d=did i dddddd

calicocassie:

sylvangore: IF33LG0!!!DIF33L1T IFEELG0D

sylvangore: C4NY0UH34R!!!M3

toralee: BURNING BURNING BURNING BURNING BURNING BURNING BURNING

neverendingcircus: in the trees in the trees a dog’s stomach acid idssolving my brains in the treeetrees im in the ttttrees im in the dog

_____amaranthine: KATIE YASMIN MARTINEZ 22 FARMVILLE VIRGINIA

_____amaranthine: @ELECTRICSERAPHIM!!!!!! FUCKING READ THE STICKY!!!! NAME/AGE/PLACE OF BODY DEATH = INTACT TRANSFERENCE

_____amaranthine: KATIE YASMIN MARTINEZ 22 FARMVILLE VIRGINIA

calicocassie:

calicocassie: cassie

calicocassie: cassie 17

calicocassie: big road

Once she knew for sure that she was the last of the Electric Seraphim left standing on this side of existence, Rachel Cisneros transferred her friends’ consciousnesses from virtual limbo to their eternal home. She proceeded to write a note to her younger sister, have a final lunch at her favorite pizza place, and poison herself in her Honda Accord. The next day, Consciousness Lab tech Eileen Kim discovered the Seraphim on the digital plane. I was bundled off to a family friend’s house, where I played a lot of Scrabble and was kept away from screens. Meanwhile, my mom dealt with the press.

“I really just remember flashes of it,” she said. “Camera guys in the bushes, having to get a new phone, all that. Hearing a senator say Cassie’s name, and thinking—not even being able to think. But that’s what made me realize what this was.”

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

Here is the truth we now face: the immortal soul exists. It can be observed, manipulated, and quantified. There is life beyond the body and life beyond its death. In a sense, we can now say with total confidence that we dwell within God’s domain—it’s just that we might be playing the role of the deity himself.

This isn’t just a paradigm shift; this is the dawning of a new age. And its angels are girls in shredded jeans, transmuting the angst of our hyper-connected lives into a strange new gospel.

—Christopher Evenson, “In the Kingdom of Heaven,” WashingtonPost.com

***TO ALL CONCERNED PARENTS!!!***

***PLEASE SHARE FAR AND WIDE!!!!!***

Please be on the lookout for MUSIC BY THE FOLLOWING ARTISTS: Bevvy Banks, Malefactress, PRIMULA, Snapdragon VVX, Catherine Kitson, and Nelly Cooper

These artists are closely associated with THE DIGITAL AFTERLIFE COMMUNITY!!! A local mother discovered multiple playlists featuring these artists on her daughter’s phone after she committed suicide, and wants to spread the word. Within weeks of joining these artists’ online fan communities, this girl went from being a HAPPY CHILD and GOOD STUDENT to KILLING HERSELF!!! PLEASE KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR CHILDREN’S ONLINE ACTIVITY!!!!!!!!!!

I’ve won forty-two major awards, released seven albums, and been married twice in the decades since the Electric Seraphim made headlines. But to a lot of people, I’m only ever going to be the musician who brought them together. If you picked up this book because you want to know how I feel about it all, my answer is what it’s always been: I am devastated. Please stop fucking asking.

—Nelly Cooper, A Dream of Purest Hunger: My Life on Stage

ferrousfemale

12 likes / 3 reposts

rachel cisneros was a fucking genius and i can’t believe i have to live in the 40-50 years when no one will be allowed to say that without being called insane

#everyone calling her a tragic waif/psycho manipulator/dead-eyed autist would have been celebrating galileo’s murder in the streets jsyk #fucking morons

JOSH: Welcome back to “In the Garage with Josh and Barry G,” where we’re discussing the fact that souls are portable and a bunch of fangirl malcontents figured this out before, you know, scientists.

BARRY G: So, we’re getting these copycat suicides now. And first they were other fucked-up girls, hoping to do a homebrew version of whatever the Electric Angels—

JOSH: Seraphim.

BARRY G: Eat my ass. Okay, people hoping to figure out the Electric Seraphim’s route on their own, mostly just making a mess. But now there have been other types of people. I heard about a guy up in Illinois, some middle-aged dad. And I’m thinking—I know what he’s thinking. Gonna be the only dude for miles.

JOSH: He’s picturing some old-school sci-fi shit, right? Like he’s gonna crash-land onto Femtopia 6 and they’re going to shiv each other for the chance to fondle his balls.

BARRY G: Yeah. But picture this guy. He wakes up there—and he realizes that actually, he’s going to spend eternity listening to them half-ass their way through “Celebrity Skin” on the guitars they somehow haven’t learned to play in a hundred cyber-years.

JOSH: Centuries of, “Yes, honey, being a teenager with a Lexapro prescription is the hardest thing in the world.”

BARRY G: “No one has ever suffered more than you, a white girl who has never lived in a house with fewer than three bathrooms! You were right to kill yourself!”

JOSH: I mean, he’s getting those daddy issues blowjobs. He’s getting them. But at what fucking cost?

—In the Garage with Josh and Barry G, “Episode 128: The SSC Tuatara, Milkshake Rankings Part 7, and Our Dumbass Digital Future”

toralee has entered TORIDONTLOOKATTHIS.HVN

petitepyre has entered TORIDONTLOOKATTHIS.HVN

calicocassie has entered TORIDONTLOOKATTHIS.HVN

toralee: OMFG

petitepyre: hee hee hee

>>VICTORIA LEE

>>CAN YOU ROMANCE THE LOVELY PRINCESS UHURA AND HELP GALACTIC QUEEN BOUDICCA DEFEAT THE NEO-ROMANS AND TEACH MR. DARCY HOW TO DEAL WITH HIS FEELINGS BEFORE THE CLOCK STRIKES TWELVE???

calicocassie: happy birthday!!!!

toralee: I FUCKING LOVE YOU GUYS

“Those first five years were ridiculous,” Dr. Kim told me, as we wandered around Kendall Square. “There was this initial flood of bribes from very old, very powerful people hoping to make the jump to immortality ASAP. There was a proposal to bulldoze all of this, this whole block, and make a megacomplex for people who were going to abandon their physical lives. Talk of raising kids digitally—as in, from birth. There was the stupidest fucking argument going around that it was going to be unethical to raise kids any other way, actually.” She laughed. “I mean, it wasn’t a mainstream opinion, obviously, but I saw people get into actual shouting matches over it. And the money bombing in—God. It was five years of watching half of everyone I knew find religion.”

Mind-body decoupling did, of course, change the world. Hippocampal hard drives have allowed for enormous advances in neurological healthcare. Somatic fasts are huge among the ultra-rich looking for the next frontier in wellness. Tinkering with time on the digital plane has allowed elite research teams to produce months of work in a matter of hours. But nobody is raising their kids “immortally,” vacations aren’t taken in digital Narnias, and body death generally still equates to the end of human life. Consciousness, it turns out, doesn’t behave like code—and it doesn’t respond well to the regular wear and tear of life in a server.

We settled onto a bench and watched the setting sun gild Massachusetts Avenue. “My cohort knew what a fucking disaster this was from the beginning,” Kim said. “We’d had intra-lab beef with the research team Cisneros was part of for years because they were so in thrall to this sort of bullshit. They never wanted to face the reality of how hard it would be to back up something as live as—well, life. How do you lock down and reconcile different versions of a person, sometimes inhabiting simultaneous instances—and what about when an error inevitably occurs? What does the first major software change do to them? What about the fact that enforcing best practices—which we hadn’t even begun to develop at that point, let alone enforce—would be a fucking nightmare? About two years in, when people started talking about uploading newborns, my friends and I looked at each other like, Jesus, is it on us to start this conversation? And we tried! My friend Neil, who’s on the neuro side of things, was always on the news, explaining the importance of synaptic pruning and how catastrophic it would be to exist long-term in a computer that can’t replicate it. Everywhere, we talked about this. But nobody cared until Joey Crane. And you know, it’s awful what happened to that girl, especially after dying of fucking cancer. But there was also this relief that something had finally gotten through to the public.”

Millions remember the day Joey Crane was uploaded into the Tahoe Transcendence Center’s server. But millions more now know that huge parts of her mind were sheared away due to the technology’s compression issues. Even worse, bootlegged copies of Crane’s psyche made their way to the internet’s most unsavory corners. Joey Crane’s Eternal Punishment, a video game of uncertain origin in which players torture Crane in a procedurally generated hellscape, is the most infamous example of this phenomenon. One bombshell blog post led to another, and soon, a cottage industry of docu-series, podcasts, and books cataloging her slow decay and the hubris that enabled it was established.

Start-ups stalled or revamped their aims, the wealthy got bored, and discussions of Kendall Square megacomplexes for the digitally inclined ended with a whimper, rather than a bang. But it was too late for the Electric Seraphim. They had already made the jump to the great beyond, and they were already paying the price.

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

petitepyre has entered _________________.HVN

petitepyre: jfc

petitepyre: @toralee did you see my mom leave? she’s wearing a blue dress and probably screaming into her phone

petitepyre: god i hate this shit

petitepyre: and

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petitepyre:

Â£ ðsžšåÞя¶ŠŘ§Ů½ æØ¢Ã ¶â€š▯Ř§ŮÞ¥¿▀ Â£½ ▀

Ř§Ů ¶Â£½ ½DON’T DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME »舐Þ¥¿Ř§Ů舐☒舐 Ř§Ů 舐☒舐

舐•ñâmå•舐¶— Â£½ óÞ¢áñ▯Ř§Me gustan las verdes mejor

they’re like ACTUALLY

souræØ¢Ã ▀Ř§Ů舐舐½ —

Ř§Ů

petitepyre: and i can’t get to sleepsleep

petitepyre: unless

petitepyre: @toralee

petitepyre: have you seen my mom?

“Upkeep is the biggest problem.” Nora McKinnon pulled an ancient eyeliner pencil from a moving box. The Electric Seraphim Archive, which claimed a back room in Stoatworth College’s main library, was crammed with expired make-up, doodle-filled notebooks, SSRI prescription bottles, and other detritus of the Electric Seraphim’s material existences. “People have no idea how much work it is just to maintain digital afterlives, and the older ones—the oldest, in this case—are basically hieroglyphics to modern software. Then, inevitably, there are some actual mistakes. Hiring gets sloppy, and you end up with procrastinators who never test the restore function. And the institutional support isn’t there—donors like glitzier projects. All you can do is try to make sure things get worse as slowly as possible.”

Selling the Electric Seraphim to Elysium Resort and Casino was still a difficult decision, however. Many of Stoatworth’s archivists joined the college because they felt so strongly about the Seraphim, both as individual people and as a scientific milestone. But the brutal truth is that the people most invested in the Electric Seraphim—those who knew them as sisters, daughters, and friends—are beginning to die off. “Selling to Elysium was the only way we could do right by these girls,” McKinnon said, straightening a stuffed cow wearing Mardi Gras beads. “That’s why we did it. We had other offers—some of them from very shady people, if you want to know the truth. Elysium is a little tacky, sure, but they’ll keep them going in relative peace. Everyone who’s so mad online, who sees the sale as—how did that one guy put it? ‘A new low in academic venality.’ I want to ask him, when’s the last time you heard anything about the Seraphim? Nine times out of ten, people say the Saturday Night Live sketch about the goth girls who get trapped in a sports betting app. That came out nearly thirteen years ago. Or—well, they won’t say this, but porn. You know the one?” I said yes, I was aware of Server Sluts. She smiled grimly. “Yeah. So it’s hard to indulge certain criticisms.”

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

in conclusion:

😭

wtf do we do

glad you asked
the answer is
KILL YOURSELF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THEN GO LIVE IN THE COMPUTER FOREVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Once SynaptiScopes were cleared for public use, Elysium Resort and Casino invited the Electric Seraphim’s remaining relatives to take them for a test drive. Some had wonderful experiences; Isioma Okeke’s cousin was able to share a joke with the girl who taught him how to make a paper airplane so many years ago. But my family decided against engaging with this new technology.

In large part, this is because Elysium pulled no punches when describing Cassie’s degraded state. My aunt wasn’t suffering, they assured us, because our concept of suffering is fundamentally incompatible with her existence. But she would probably appear distorted, and we would project our feelings about that onto her. “Let’s say she manifests with one eye,” the liaison explained. “We see that and think about how painful it would be to lose an eye.” She might also look like a smear of purple light or a tangle of arteries and Cyrillic text, which typically inspires even more horrified reactions. Moreover, her ability to interact with us was almost certain to be limited, if not nonexistent. Elysium assured us employees were well-versed in her moods, and only ventured into her space when she was completely relaxed. But no one had actually observed Cassie unambiguously responding to external stimuli since the purchase was made.

“Those years after it happened, it was like she belonged to the world,” my mother said. “And then it died down, and we got her back. Cassie could just be my little sister again, wearing her soccer uniform and asking mom to make her a grilled cheese.” She shook her head. “To see her like—everything the lady described. It’d be like throwing that girl away.”

—Jacob Magarelli, “The Ghost in the Machine: My Aunt, Her Death, and the Digital Afterlife,” Upfront Magazine

ELYSIUMADMIN2: As we prepare to return to the physical world, let’s give it up for calicocassie—pioneer, total badass, and gracious host. She’s one of a kind, and we hope her maverick energy has rubbed off on you today.

ELYSIUMADMIN2: Please let the attendant unhook your harness before exiting the SynaptiScope.

ELYSIUMGUEST3 HAS LEFT ELECSERA000001.HVN

ELYSIUMGUEST8 HAS LEFT ELECSERAS000001.HVN

ELYSIUMGUEST12 HAS LEFT ELECSERA000001.HVN

ELYSIUMADMIN2 HAS LEFT ELECSERA000001.HVN

calicocassie:

calicocassie:

calicocassie: 😭

(Editors’ Note: Juliet Kahn is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Seven Minutes in Heaven with the Electric Seraphim

by Juliet Kahn in Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty-Six | 5285 Words

Juliet Kahn