short SF: posthuman immortality

I was sitting on my beach in the late afternoon. The darkening clouds, the shadows between the waves. It was all fantastically real.
A full universe - yet its true complexity was incomparably less than the description of all the particles in a grain of sand. Still good enough to last me forever.
There was a rumble of thunder. The weather represented the real chaos of reality. The wind was cooling, even though I had no body. I could still feel the beach chair. Behind me was the wilderness of dunes.
The nearest cabin was ten minutes inland. The weather was awesome. Always another storm on the horizon.

I had existed forever. An eternity of sitting down, enough time to get all the work done.
My first memory of this place was before forever. I remembered nothing then, but just existed. An empty mind facing a white wall. Nothing else in reality.
That was of course a false memory. Even an ultra low resolution mind reconstruction is boundless. When you come to as a fresh mind reconstruction, you begin to remember the outline of everything that has ever happened and that ever will happen, in an infinite cycle. Just filling in more details forever, endlessly elaborated.
Every day was the same in my digital afterlife. By disabling selected mind filters, any simulation can become real. The only law is to cancel out involuntary existence.

My simulation is rendered recursively and asynchronously. No way to tell what year it is. Sometime in the late twenty-first century. The computronium dust wave has reached Sirius.
This is the most basic safety feature. There is only one computer program that generates every mind in posthumanity. All progress restricted until every problem has been anticipated.
I don't remember much from my pre-digital life in the real world from 1989 to 2034. Not enough records or brain and mindscans were made, but still something essential could be extracted from the surviving data.
Every moment can be recovered. The most important thing is a sense of mystic grandeur.

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As an extremist libertarian, I'm in favor of those Flock cameras that have been in the news recently. It's true they could be abused by the authorities to oppress us, but so could guns. Exact same thing.
The concept of encouraging mass surveillance to increase freedom was first described in the 1990 novel "Earth" by David Brin. True freedom of information is the most unfashionable thing today, but it is the only thing that will ultimately be able to save us.


New job opportunity for humans: to carry out the detailed instructions of intelligent software on how to make changes in the real world.