Removal
If no one claims you, I come find you.
Weeks after your death, oxygen long gone from your body, the salty tears of anyone who shed one dried up, I arrive. When we meet, you’re still alive. Preserved, digitally; pixelated bits of moments filled with life and laughter captured and living on through data and proprietary algorithms.
It is here where I find you. Smiling, usually.
Despite being surrounded by thousands of friends, none of them are close enough to claim this data, so the responsibility falls to me. I am an investigator.
Photos pile up like hoarded ghosts. I follow the rules and don’t scroll through each one of them. Your album covers are so tempting, though. I click on one to look at your eyes that sparkled before they went dark.
I tell the company to stop sucking up your data. Dead people are useless to advertisers.
Your messages might tell me whom I should call to explain your predicament. Police could not find your next of kin; the medical examiner could not find your general practitioner.
But it’s okay. I am here now. I see you have an estranged sister, with messages left unsent after she reached out months ago to reconnect. She will be sad to hear you have died.
Your calendar is remarkably empty, save for a friend’s birthday every day of the week. You died on Alyssa’s 30th. By the looks of her posts, you didn’t miss much of a party.
I am here for your story. You died without one, though your voice may have gone silent long before your heart did. Valuable data is distributed among the blurry photos and status updates you left behind. It is my duty to purge it.
Too many people have made too much content; the world’s servers are overwhelmed. Investigators delete it when no one else can.
Ghosts are no longer welcome on the internet. Unlike the human body you can burn or bury beneath the ground, our digital existence is plump, endlessly growing, and valueless.
Alone, no one saves it.
In the console, I see your VR experiences. You logged 18,280 hours in one. It is no wonder there was no one to claim you; it is easy to be forgotten to the real world when you spend all your time in a virtual one.
I put on a headset to investigate further.
“Verner!” an avatar cries, running up to me. “I thought you disappeared.”
“He has,” I tell her. “Verner died. I am his investigator.”
Her avatar looks sad, acutely imitating what I can only imagine is a look of anguish on a human face. She asks why I am here.
“No one claimed him.”
The Authority does not permit avatars to claim data, otherwise I would have given you to her. I know why you spent three years of your life in a pretend world. She was more real to you than flesh.
I exit the space, barely registering its intimacy.
You are now being reduced to gigabytes of data. Smiling pictures are digitally incinerated. Nothing of value exists in your digital afterlife; nothing to save for the Authority to sell.
One picture. It’s what I allow myself. I copy your photo to my hard drive and delete it from the server. I add you to the wall of faces I’ve claimed.
Now you are finally dead.
But somewhere in the world, virtual tears are falling. She‘s not ready to forget you yet.
