Friday Fictioneers – Reincarnation

~ neilmacdon
hydro-dale
PHOTO PROMPT © Dale Rogerson

She’s not gone. Not really, not totally. Like scent, she lingers in the air. I turn and turn the ribbon-tied packet of letters, caress the image of her face with my fingertips.

She speaks to me still. Words I remember and social media posts I’ve forgotten or never knew. Their joy slices my heart, these curated words.

How to explain it, this e-mail? Does the soul, after all, survive? Do ghosts exist? Maybe the dead persist in binary sarcophagi, amidst secret chambers of the digital pyramid.

She needn’t be gone. I have her password. She can wear me.

 

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

65 thoughts on “Friday Fictioneers – Reincarnation”

  7. The sense of loss comes through strongly. I wonder if we are all developing a Cybersoul stored in the digital ‘cloud’. Then, will we experience the ghost effect and the feeling that our friends and lovers are still with us albeit in digital form. Will our future be cluttered with frozen web sites as reminders of what we once were?

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  8. Well done. The idea of an uploadable personality has been a staple of science fiction for some years now, but the implications are so fascinating. I think the best Black Mirror episode is about this very subject.

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  9. Subtle. Very subtle. Wistful and sinister at the same time. There is almost a sense that he can own her now as he would have liked to own her in life, wholly completely and exclusively for himself. I’m with CE on this one!

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  10. I believe it’s the Irish who believe that if a person is remembered, they truly never die…. translated into the social media realm… if you took over a dead person’s page, who’s to know??? Great story… kinda disturbing, too!

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  15. One of my secret fears is that each one of us in Cyberia have files compiling our every aspect of personality, so when the time comes for The Matrix to be real, we’ll never realize we’ve become human batteries (I hope you’ve seen The Matrix) movie.

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  19. Lovely poetic language in this, Neil. I think “She’s needn’t be gone” is a half-echo of “She’s not gone”. The responses here illustrate fears that have never crossed my mind! I should find Black Mirror on Netflix and try to keep up.

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  30. Maybe we’ve finally created our own hell where bits of us float around and won’t be erased because they bring profit. I love that you apparently used Dale’s @ sign as the prompt. Beautiful writing.

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  32. “She can wear me” sounds a little creepy. I like the thought-provoking questions in this piece, as they are so relevant in this day and age.
    Interesting that we both thought of ghosts!

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  33. This is wonderful, Neil. We live in this age where our lives are spread across the internet. Our partners can discover us or rediscover us after we’ve gone. They can learn who we were, even beyond what they knew. And your story raises the sense of loss and then perhaps discovery, although the discovery isn’t joyous.

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