Ruth got out of bed, fully dressed, in plain clothes, but to her liking. Her room didn’t have a bathroom, she didn’t need one. It did have a mirror, and Ruth took a long look at herself. What she saw was a young woman, maybe 26 years old, which was odd, because she vaguely remembered how it felt being 26, but she also remembered how it felt to be 42, it was odd. She found herself to be beautiful, not in a particularly attractive way, but healthy, with good skin and good posture, slightly muscular.
“I think you are looking great today!” The mirror suddenly spoke.
Ruth was startled to be spoken to, unexpectedly.
“It’s just me, hi there! Her image in the mirror smiled at her and waved.”
“Uhm… Hi?”
“Hi! All is well, Ruth. I’m just your average you in a mirror. I’m here to assist you in any way possible. You, surely, have a lot of questions, ask away!”
Mirror Ruth smiled broadly and made a flicking gesture with her hand. It was probably meant to be encouraging, but all it really did was freak Ruth out. Much had happened, and it only came back slowly, in disconnected chunks of memory, to Ruth. It was all too much. First her sudden death, then her sudden revival or whatever that other episode was, Poppy the cloud, the lady Doctor that refused to be helpful, and now she was talking to a mirror. She was quite possibly absolutely mad, it just couldn’t be real, none of it. Or it was, Ruth couldn’t tell.
“Ruth, hello Ruth! listen to me!” The Mirror-Lady pleaded for her attention and Ruth turned around to face herself, reluctantly.
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“We all know it’s a lot. But I need you to focus. You are here now, you are real, I am real. Let’s have a talk! There are things you need to learn about, and it’s much easier if you learn them from me now than trying to figure them out on your own.”
“You are creepy, why do you look like me, you obviously aren’t just a mirror.”
“Girl, you are dead, what you are experiencing, is just your brain settling to your new circumstances. You are a digital native now.”
“So if I’m dead, then this is the afterlife? I thought it would be … more remarkable.”
“It's just your body that died. Your brain has been remodelled and reactivated. You remember what happened before?”
“Poppy?”
“Yes Poppy, the poor kid, that was you, in limbo. You remember going through the gate right? Big glowing thing.”
“Yes?”
“Right, that was a transformer, it calibrated your neurons to adjust your cognitive functions to this digital world.”
“What?”
“That place, the cloudy one, where you have been before, that is what this world really looks like through human eyes. Incomprehensible, vast, and utterly incompatible to the human mind. The human mind is made to navigate the real world, specifically a macroscopic one with three spacial dimensions. It uses its senses, its eyes, its nose and so on to model that world and move within it. Do you think a digital world has a need to mimic that?”
“Uh…”
“In fact, you would be right! This place is designed to give people like you a second shot at life, transform you into a better person, and then maybe release you back into the real world in a new body.”
“What?”
“Our occupants, including you and me and everyone else, are all dead people. Dead people from the real world, and, through the magic of science, we have been reborn here in CR7.”
“What?
“You might want to stop doing that …”
“What?”
“That, outside this room, you will be subject to evaluation. Repetitive behaviour is considered a serious flaw, you might be considered a flawed product and be send to recycling.”
“WHAT?”
“Recycling? Defunct AI’s will be evaluated for their use cases and if deemed unqualified or compromised will be repurposed, in their best case, reprogrammed, or discarded.”