The soul of the machine 2

Two weeks ago, I reminded you that as we hit the home stretch for Tales of the Vuduri, I won't have time to truly flesh out all the Big Ideas I had for the novel The Milk Run. Instead, I am presenting some capsule summaries of the motivation behind a subset of those ideas. Today I want to cover the receptacle of the soul, assuming it exists.

Within the universe of Rome's Revolution, the artificial entities be they computers or machines, OMCOM, MINIMCOM, Junior, the Stareaters, all of them had personalities and in some cases were more human than those around them. This raises the question: does the soul have to be uniquely tied to a biological organism or is the soul the essence of organization and consciousness that need not be tied to an organic body.

If you've never watched the Netflix series Black Mirror, you might want to check it out as it is basically a 21st century version of the Twilight Zone. It is a deft mix of science, technology, speculation and social trends, usually with a twist, that takes place in the near future. Black Mirror won two Emmy awards (Outstanding TV Movie and Outstanding Writing for a TV Movie) for an episode entitled 'San Junipero'.

San Junipero creates a Matrix-like (or Framework-like) artificial town by the same name and as people get old and find themselves heading toward death, their consciousness is uploaded into the mainframe and they are allowed to visit the town. When they die, they are offered the choice to upload to San Junipero permanently. Basically, it postulates that the soul can be digitized and stored in a simulation. So why would that consciousness have to start in a human husk? Why couldn't it start in OMCOM or MINIMCOM or even MASAL? In The Milk Run, I just assumed this was true. Once an entity becomes self-aware, that self-awareness is equivalent to the soul and there should be some way for it to survive beyond the destruction of the host. In the case of humans, that would be death. In the case of machines, it would be destruction of the mechanism.

Much of the climax of The Milk Run takes place in Purgatory and Heaven. MASAL's soul is there as is OMCOM's and MINIMCOM's soul. It is explained in the book that there are an infinite number of Heavens (like one for dogs and cats) and the soul has some say as to which Heaven it goes to. I just felt that my characters were realistic enough that it was senseless to distinguish them by their origins. I wanted them all to go on to the after life so that's how I fashioned the story.