So how does Victor and Gloriana Graves’ family, the Gravespawn, how do they mean to resurrect the dead? The idea was implanted by Victor himself and explained at different times throughout his life. He wanted a vision of death to be something that didn’t bring fear but brought hope.
It’s not an easy task, and not one that’s going to be done anytime soon, even if it is possible, which it may not be. No one can be sure. It involves something called Dyson Spheres (or swarms). You can Google the term for additional information. Essentially, imagine a large, large, LARGE sphere constructed by humanity around our sun. Its interior is covered in solar panels, harvesting as much energy from the sun as possible.
Do you have any idea how much energy that actually is? It’s astronomical, pun intended. The sun bathes the planet in more energy in a couple of minutes than humanity uses all year. And that’s just the energy of a single dot of the sun’s total surface area. Imagine if we had a sphere around the sun that captured the energy and converted it for us to use. What would we even do with that amount of energy?
We could power computers. And by the time we get around to having built a Dyson sphere/swarm, the computers of that time will be very efficient and very capable. Artificial intelligence will be very capable as well, as I’m sure you can only imagine. A brain powered by a sun. People have already spoken about what that future civilization might do: build simulations.
Simulations. I don’t want to rehash tired old tales here, so Google it for information. In a nutshell: simulations can run that create new universes. That’s not what I’m interested in, though. What I’m interested in will take a leap in our scientific understanding of the universe.
I propose that these simulations will be able to recreate the past in totality. They’ll be able to view it as it actually played out for us in history. Sure, we’ve never had any time travelers come by to visit, barring John Titor, so maybe time travel is out, but playing the past like a documentary series isn’t.
The people of the future will be able to see everything about us. They’ll have every atom accounted for, every quark. They’ll be able to see into our brains and see the way our neurons fire. They’ll be able to recreate and read our thoughts as they happen to us. They will have long since uncovered the mysteries of the human mind, understanding completely the way thoughts are formed, how pictures are formed in our head, et cetera.
The future will finally be able to determine what consciousness is. Is it just an after effect of neurons firing? Some ghost in the machine? Is it gone for good once it’s shut down?
I propose that consciousness is something that can be targeted and extracted from the past and brought forth to our future’s present. This is a step beyond a simple clone with all of our thoughts in them. That is not a suitable path towards truly resurrecting the dead, but simply a copying method. Star Trek fan theories talk about this a bit, saying each time a crewmate uses the transporter, their ‘consciousness’ ends and an exact replica of a person is created wherever they’re beamed to, without any knowledge that their predecessor had died. This state of affairs is no doubt going to be figured out before we figure out how to truly resurrect the dead, of course, so by the time the true Victor Graves is truly brought back, he’ll have a very old clone with his own memories there to greet him.
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Why do I and Victor believe this? We don’t, not entirely. We can’t ever be for sure that it’ll work that way. But we are hopeful for the future. We are hopeful because of what we see in the technology around us. Victor Graves is, after all, a bit of a tech bro.
Look at technology around us, everything we’ve created in the modern world, and wonder why it’s even possible. What purpose does the fact of it being possible serve in an uncaring universe? The dinosaurs never needed it in the millions upon millions of years they roamed the earth, yet the possibility was there all the same. All the mathematics and science and applied engineering concepts and everything else has always been possible deep down in the code of the universe. It’s as if it’s made for us to figure out. It’s like the world’s hardest most time-consuming puzzle.
Does that mean there’s God? Who knows? Victor certainly doesn’t. You can imagine, though, with him one day being president, he needs to be able to appeal to our Christian countrymen. And the truth of the matter is that he simply doesn’t know what’s going on behind the wall of stars that shine above us. And that’s the story he sticks with. He is very hopeful, though, and very optimistic, based on the evidence he’s seen, that one day, somehow, the resurrection of the dead will be possible, even if it doesn’t make any sense to our current understanding of the universe.
So what happens if that method of resurrection isn’t actually possible? Is Victor just dead? No, Victor is always a pragmatist. As he comes up to the end of his life, he slowly starts fading out from the public view, at first from the general public, and then from the Graver public, and then from Graves Blood Dynasty and then even from his own personal family. Like a heart slowly dying, its beating getting more and more shallow and coming less often. And after the last appearance, he’s just no longer seen again, not ever. Where did he go? No one knows. Well, I know. Me and the current patriarch/matriarch of the Graves Dynasty know.
Antarctica.
He froze his body.
In fact, he sets it up that all of his bloodline will be shipped to Antarctica upon death, stacked in shipping containers on great cargo vessels. We can’t know for certain the future will figure out the way to resurrect the dead like we’ve outlined above, but we can do it an old fashioned way: freezing ourselves and at some point hoping medical science allows us to be unfrozen. Gravesrest, Antarctica. Where for miles and miles and miles, thousands of corpses are lined up, some young and nubile, some mangled, most old and intact. They lie there waiting, hoping that their offspring will someday have the ability to wake them up from their deep slumber.
