Welcome to DeathStream (short story Pt. 1)

Your first time Streaming a death is always horrifying, and that word "horrifying" hardly does justice to the feeling. It’s the kind of horror that makes you vomit, or faint, or cry, or pace half an hour in your room tearing your hair out. You come out of the stream knowing you’ll never be the same, that you’ll never wipe that memory away. You’re left with the fear that your own death, your real death, whenever it comes, might be just as nightmarish or agonizing as the one you’ve just experienced.

The second time— and amongst the people I’ve met there is very rarely a second time— the horror is still there but less severe, as it’s accompanied by an anxious sense of curiosity. You know this time the gravity of what you’re getting yourself into, and you probably picked out the specific type of death you intend to experience. As awful as it’ll be, you’ll come out of it disturbed and relieved in equal measure. Now you’ve lived two deaths and come out the other side of both. The agony was extraordinary but only temporary. Your real death won’t be any worse, and even if it is, it will be as temporary as the others.

If there is a third time, then there will be a fourth, and by the same token a fifth, a six, and so on. As unpleasant as death may be, it is addicting, and if you are like me, you’ll start to collect deaths, hoard them, obsess over them. Aside from the adrenaline rush of the experience, there’s the euphoria you feel coming out of it, and eventually there’s a sense of duty and obligation that becomes far greater than any voyeuristic satisfaction. There is no lonelier moment in life than that horrible realization that death is upon you, that you only have a matter of instants remaining. It’s like sinking rapidly into quicksand, and one thing a veteran will discover is that almost everyone dies thinking of someone they care about. They often imagine how this loved one will react to the news of their death, and this heartbreak and sense of isolation is often more unpleasant than any physical pain. To stream someone’s death is to share their experience in their time of greatest isolation. Sure, the death may have happened months ago and you’re pulling it out of some dark web internet archives, but you’re there. You’ve seen what they saw, felt what they felt, even thought what they thought. You have become them and, in doing so, ensured they were not alone in that final agony. Even as their life seemed to be spilling out, indifferently, like water into an ocean— it was being collected, preserved, appreciated— even treasured.

People often assume that using SoulStream to experience a death is like watching a snuff film, but there’s really no comparison. When you watch a video of someone dying, you have the benefit of distance. You have an abstracted perspective, and even if you empathize with the person and try to put yourself in their shoes, you still recognize the crucial fact that you are not them, you are just a person watching a disturbing video. This is not to say that snuff films aren’t genuinely disturbing— they are, and in some cases they are even more disturbing than a SoulStream. When you watch a video of a death there is this awful tension, always the same feeling, as you wait for the event. In one that I’ve seen several times, a Korean man is working with a giant hydraulic press that keeps closing and opening with clock-like regularity. Suddenly it stops, and he leans his head inside to see if something has gotten stuck or broken. Only one of us knows that the hydraulic press is about to resume its work. Aside from this anticipatory tension, there is the gruesome aftermath, the smushed head and the limp body, and there is the chasm between my experience and his own. What was it like to be that man, having his head crushed like a melon? I will never know, and that not-knowing is really what disturbs me about snuff films.

Streaming a death is effectively the opposite of watching a snuff film. There is no gruesome aftermath, only the experience, and you rarely know what’s coming. There is no distance, no abstracted perspective, no chasm between your experience and theirs. Any one of SoulStream’s six hundred million users knows that for as long as the stream lasts, you are not you. You are living another life, no memory of your own. That fact alone is enough to traumatize people when they come out of it. Like the monk who dreamt of being a butterfly or the butterfly who dreamt of being a monk, it’s easy to feel like the Streamed life was your real life, and that through some mix-up you’ve been put in the wrong body. We all know countless stories of people who’ve gone insane after spending five minutes in the mind of some supermodel, celebrity, or coworker on vacation. There’s been some sort of mistake, they’ll say. I’m not Jane Doe, I’m world famous pop singer Ariana Grande! It’s easy to laugh at that when we see it in a youtube video, but we’ve all felt this dissociative effect to some extent, even when we don’t want to admit it. This effect, I assure you, is significantly more alarming when you die.

Technically speaking, you shouldn’t be able to Stream someone’s death. Whenever somebody dies while they’re Live, SoulStream gets notified automatically based on the data from vital signs and they wipe the Stream immediately. The dead account gets locked, and nobody can ever see that person’s old Streams again unless the company decides there’s some monetary incentive, like when a pop star dies and they want to milk some of the better memories at a premium. Every now and then, a tech savvy weirdo will be in the right place at the right time, and if they move fast they can rip the data from the death and save it somewhere before it gets wiped from the server. The Stream then finds its way to the dark web through any number of channels, usually to a site like deathstream.tv or any of its hundred proxies. These sites are encrypted and decentralized, and they will go on existing for as long as the internet goes on existing. In this way, a person achieves as sort of afterlife, a spiritual immortality.

As the head curator of deathstream.tv, I like to think of myself as a St. Peter-type character, standing watch at the pearly gates. The only difference is everyone makes it in— I never turn a Stream down unless its a duplicate or unrelated to death. It might be more apt to compare myself to a librarian. My job is to collate and organize new content, and to answer user questions when necessary. We get thousands of visitors to deathstream.tv every day, and many of them, understandably, want to know what they’re getting themselves into before they commit themselves to a particular Death Stream. No one knows the collection better than I do, so a considerable part of my day is spent providing summaries and answering content-related inquiries. When I’m not streaming potential videos, organizing new videos, providing summaries, or answering questions, I’m either sleeping, eating, or doing the most important work of all: creating content.

TO BE CONTINUED

Cover Photo: Image Source