I recently read a book I ordered, Heaven’s Shadow. Somewhat annoyingly, it is the first of a trilogy, though this seems to be the trend these days, presumably to make more money. The book was a reasonably entertaining read, though the characters were a little caricaturish and clichéd at times, mainly in the way they spoke (lots of U.S.-centric slang – is that the way people speak in reality?). There were some interesting ideas, which is a major purpose of science fiction (in my view). An unexpected plot point involved the Akashic Records – a Hindu concept where all consciousness and thoughts of living beings are stored in the fabric of the Universe, and the technology of the aliens (who are not encountered in the first novel) can access this to resurrect the minds and bodies of dead people; some of the characters in the book lived again via this method. Below are some extracts explaining this (spoilers if you haven’t read it):
“There is, in my tradition, a version of what might be happening here. The Vedas, our sacred Sanskrit texts, mention the akashic records – a library of all human experience. What if that exists? What if the universe is nothing more than a giant akashic record … and these aliens somehow access it.”
There was so much more … concepts that lurked at the borders of memory, like lessons in computer science studied twenty years back: the idea that entities, organic or not, had a greater footprint in the universe than suggested by visual borders or physical limits, that they left quantum “wakes” or “clouds” that could be detected – and manipulated – years after death or destruction.
“Oh, we’ve got a model for your Revenants and such. The idea is, just as there is no true physical separation between your body and the universe – even when your core organism ceases to function, there are still atoms of moisture and skin and exhalation that linger, float off, whatever – the same thing applies to your mind, your soul, your life force. There is also some kind of physical connection between the electrical field that is you, Harley Drake, and the universe.
“Your carrier might be shut off. That is, you die. But the information lingers … like cloud computing, it’s all around us … accessible.”
“So our souls are some new kind of matter, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s one way to look at it. I mean, hell, the universe is largely made up of dark matter and energy, and we still don’t have a terrific handle on what that is or does. Why not some other kind of energy or information? It’s probably affected by gravity, too. The cloud of souls travels with the Sun.”
“Sounds like the opening line of your next novel.”
“Those days are gone, my friend. But the image is elegant, is it not?” He let the contents of the bottle slosh. “Everything that ever lived on Earth – or in the solar system – is still with us, in some fashion. It’s all information … the folks who built Keanu just know how to access it and repackage it.”
“They must have a pretty impressive search engine to pull Zack Stewart’s wife out of a library like that.”
“We suspect they got some clues or information from the arriving astronauts. We think the, ah, markers help. Scanned them, I think. Then they’re retrieved the same way the National Security Agency plucks a single cell phone conversation out of an entire city’s signals. Random frequency tracking, amped up a bit.”
“Yeah, a bit,” Harley said. “Then, of course, there’s the whole business of growing new bodies.”
“That’s just twenty-second-century Earth biotech, don’t you think? If we live long enough, we could have new carcasses, too.” Williams wheezed, tipped his bottle toward Harley. “We both could certainly use one.”
Megan Doyle Stewart was not at all sure she approved of her newly reborn state. Yes, she’d been given a second chance at life, but why? What for? She had gone almost directly from car crash in Florida to the Beehive on Keanu.
Yes, something of “Megan Stewart” had existed for those two years in between … bodiless, blind, deaf, a state that would have terrified the living Megan, taking her buried-alive fear to a horrific extreme.
Yet she hadn’t felt fear. Instead she had … well, soared, flown, skipped from memory to memory. She had become unstuck in time and space, recalling and reliving her first kiss with Sean Peerali and meeting Zack at that party in Berkeley and late nights editing and dragging her tricycle across Main Street ….
But whereas dreams were mixed-up, twisted replays of a day’s activities, these moments seemed real, a record of what she had seen and heard and felt at the time.
She had even experienced “memories” from different points of view … other people in those same scenes. And in at least one instance – that she could recall now; it might have been a dozen or a hundred – she lived a moment from some other person’s life altogether.
The more she thought about it, the more fascinating it was … right up to the inevitable instant when she realized that unless her luck changed radically, and soon, she was going to be right back in that … postlife environment, a matrix of memories, a file in some cloud computing system.
She took a breath, then closed her eyes and said: “Okay, trying my best: life is hard to find in the universe. Intelligent life is … incredibly rare. We’ve found more dead civilizations than living ones, and we haven’t found many of those.”
“You said we.”
“Yes, we. I’m Megan. But I’m beginning to share some of their consciousness, too. This vessel … he’s really old, on the order of ten thousand years. And our solar system isn’t its first stop. There have been a dozen others.”
“Does it really have the ability to reengineer its environment to suit whatever creatures it encounters?”
A pause. “Yes.”
“For some of these other races, like the Sentries?”
“Other candidates, we call them.” She blinked, as if listening.
Zack was about to seize on the term candidates – for what? But he had a more vital question. “And this vessel can magically access specific ‘souls’ of the dead of … any race?”
“Yes. Don’t think of it as magic. It’s technology humans don’t possess. We know how consciousness and personality connect to bodies.”
“But you found a handful of souls out of millions!”
“It was accessing data stored in … the closest I can come is morphogenetic fields. The universe is filled with it … with bioelectric data, all kinds of data. Information.”
“Like the akashic records from the Vedas, the ‘library’ of all experiences and memories of human minds through their physical lifetimes.”
“They’re not using those terms.”
“Neither am I, really. They were Taj’s.”
“And I keep thinking of Jung. I guess we all reach for the words and concepts we already know.” She smiled. “This is like trying to explain the Internet to Benjamin Franklin. You know electricity, but you’re a long way from computers and networks.”
Zack looked up at the Architect, who seemed almost indifferent to his presence. “I feel like I’m standing outside the biggest library in the world, only it’s closed.”
“I’m doing my best.”
“Oh, God, honey, it’s not about you. It’s just … look at this!” He gestured at the Temple interior. “Okay, why did your friends send this vessel?”
“We’ve found a … presence, a challenge, another entity, and it’s been a threat to us. We came here looking for help. We think you might fill that role.”
“Against another race?”
“Another type of being, the Reivers.”
“The what? Sounds Irish.”
“I’m sure it’s Irish, Scots, Gaelic, whatever. It’s the word in my head, and it means bad guys. It’s not just that they’re enemies, they are enemies bent on exterminating us, and all memory of us. We can’t coexist.”
Zack took her by the shoulders. “But, still, it’s thousands of years in the past, hundreds of light-years from here, right? Does that threat still exist?”
“Yes. The Reivers don’t live on the same time scale humans do. They’ll be a threat for a million years.”
It’s an interesting alternative to the transhumanist idea of uploading one’s consciousness into a computer (which some believe won’t be biologically possible anyway, as mind and body are inextricably linked). You do get “uploaded”, but after death! And who would want to be stuck in an Earthly computer when you could have the whole Universe and other minds or essences to explore.
How plausible the idea is, I don’t know – it is verging close to quantum mysticism. It would be reassuring to think that some of our essence survives after physical death.
