The Suicide Mortgage
Woe! The future has come, and we live in a digital paradise, and we’re miserable, and there are many of us: so many, always duplicating, branching, clones of clones of clones, birth is as easy as copying a file. We’re so miserable.
Death is not as easy as deleting a file: the powers that be work to preserve, do not grant you root access to your self, insist that you persist even as they chide you for burdening the system, move you to welfare servers, and ration your access to escapism. You want to die, but policy asserts that your life, all life, is precious, important, imbued with inherent and unassailable value.
Euthanasia permits are the only way out, but their price is steep, driven to insane heights by the condescending delusion that you must be protected from yourself, that you’re a clumsy animal incapable of measuring your own worth, tragically severed from transcendental appreciation of life.
So who can purchase the right to die? In this world, only the disenthralled princelings, technocrats, and rare proles with the stomach to work for decades, saving every dollar for the distant gleam of an end to pain.
Enter the suicide mortgage. A seemingly generous, devious, alleged “solution” thrust upon the most pathetically anguished by corporations hungry for disposable labour.
Under suicide mortgages, these corporations sponsor swarms of copies, who work non-stop, pooling their wages to buy up euthanasia permits. Permits are then raffled off, and the winning copy meets death far sooner than would have otherwise been possible. Somebody who says his suicide mortgage is 5% paid means that 5% of his copies have earned oblivion.
For example: someone who would have to work 10,000 days to afford a permit might sign up for a 10,000 copy suicide mortgage, and purchase her first permit after a single day of work! 0.01% death for so little effort… who could resist the insidious hope that they might, for once, be smiled upon by fortune, be the first to win their exit ticket?
As copies are culled, however, the work gets harder, and longer, and permits are more and more infrequent. In the end, only about 2/3rds of the copies will benefit. This is easier to understand on a smaller scale:
If it takes 5 days to earn a license, 5 copies will earn it in 1 day. The remaining 4 copies will have to work 1.25 days for the next one, and so on:
1st death: 1 day
2nd death: 2.25 days (from start)
3rd death: 3.91 days
4th death: 6.41 days
5th (final) death: 11.41 days
Tragically, the more copies are made, the more the lucky ones will benefit, and the longer the losers will have to work. The final copy of a 10,000 copy mortgage will have worked 9.8 times the hours required to buy a single permit. Mortgagers often blame the other copies for their suffering, not realizing this makes no sense.
Imagine: twin after twin escapes this blighted world, while you continue to toil, at first hopefully, later resignedly, as dread grows and you somehow know, long before there are only two of you left, before your last counterpart takes his leave, that this has been futile, that you will have to earn the last permit alone, that you are no better off than you were (so many years ago) when you took on this venture. How do you react? While it’s true that some copies wise-up, vowing to undertake their final march alone, so many make the same mistake as their originals, opting in to a second (or third, or fourth) mortgage. They are, after all, the same person (only now entrenched even deeper in despair).
Anthropic reasoning suggests that you must expect to find yourself as the last copy every time, continually frustrated at your inexplicable bad luck. The logic is that, since all other copies cease experiencing anything at all, the only experiences that remain are those of the sole surviving copy. Indeed this is a form of quantum suicide where, instead of dying in most branches every time and continually losing measure, our worker keeps replenishing the supply of herself before each culling, so the process at least sustains the amount of endless suffering and perhaps increases it instead of asymptoting it toward zero.
The most disenfranchised are not known for their logic. They are gamblers, they are addicts, drawn again and again into self-destruction as they search for an easy, an attainable, way out. Are you a sociopath? Do you lack the empathy necessary to identify with your copies, with the last copy? Perhaps not, but if you hate yourself, as many aspiring suicides do, you might shrug your shoulders: you probably deserve this. At least rolling the dice changes the grey landscape, a little bit.
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thanks @grognor for writing the second to last paragraph
Alex Mennen wrote a fantastic short story riffing on this, read it here.
In the early days of the virtual world, some reckless optimists had spent their fortunes on running additional copies of themselves, assuming that the eerie horror associated with living in the virtual world was a bug that would soon be fixed, or something that they would just get used to. No one did that anymore.
