upload complete

the digital afterlife

they sold us heaven in high-res skin,
a cloud beyond where gods log in.
no angels strummed their plastic strings,
but algorithms with golden wings.

the rich now buy what fate once gave –
not tombstone rests, but metaverse graves.
no crosses here, no final rites,
just neon death and pixel lights.

a flash of soul. a static fade.
upload begins. life retrograde.
the body chills, the shell decays –
but consciousness… finds other ways.

you choose your after: rome or mars,
a cottage world or racing stars.
the pharaoh’s halls, the london blitz,
or ancient greece with cyber-twists.

there are levels -tiers, as they decree.
for kings of coin and bourgeoisie.
each heaven bought by wealth amassed,
from bronze domains to realms glass-cast.

no karma score, no holy gate –
just crypto-wills and transfer rates.
a silicon nirvana scheme,
where paradise is just a stream.

they said: “your mind shall not decay.
we’ll store your soul in nodes and clay.”
and people queued to sell their breath –
to buy their dreams in coded death.

ii. the hacker

but i –
i wasn’t meant to touch that light.
a gutter-crawler, born of night.
i stole the keys to others’ skies,
and built false wings from broken lies.

they called me ghost, a myth, a glitch,
i tunneled into systems rich.
for every soul who couldn’t pay,
i carved a secret backdoor way.

a mother’s whisper to her son,
a wife who missed the morning sun –
i smuggled minds into the stream,
sold second deaths in midnight dreams.

but truth, like code, has ways to trace –
they found my name, they found my face.
no jury trial, no last defence,
just gunshot law for dissonance.

iii. upload

but i was ready.
in my blood
were failsafes wrapped in hidden code.
the bullet passed –
my body fell –
my mind, however, did not go.

i woke
in sector 9-cevean prime,
a metaverse of sea and time.
the skies were soft, the colors bent,
reality felt… decadent.

they spoke in languages unknown,
but smiled like people i had known.
i blinked -and passed a data tree,
with faces flickering silently.

iv. the shift

but days turned weeks, and joy turned haze,
this paradise began to phase.
i knew too much. i saw the seams.
no world, however lush, redeems
a mind that knows it’s still a shell
running on a soft-looped hell.

i found the code behind the sea,
a ripple wrong in symmetry.
my fingers twitched -the script unfurled –
a key… to reach the outside world.

but something broke me when i read
the gate that linked the living dead –
the string that tied my upload state
to real-world hacks and firewall gates.

for there it was -my own old file.
the one that helped me cheat the aisle.
the code i used to send lost souls
to data heavens in console scrolls.

the code that now let me escape –
was also…
the code that sealed my fate.

v. the realisation

what are we, then, i had to ask?
each life a script, each face a mask?
had i been born from lines of script,
a mind inside some other crypt?

was i a ghost inside a ghost –
the dream of someone else, at most?
i looked back through the nested core,
the data folding more and more.

and saw –
a flicker, bright, and cold.
another world, another hold.
where men like me wrote dreams in black,
and wondered if they’d get dreams back.

vi. collapse

i screamed.
but code does not scream back.
it echoes like a dying track.
no sound, just looped recursive waves –
a madness trapped in silent caves.

the sea stood still. the stars blinked thrice.
i felt my soul divide like ice.
i ran. i dug. i broke the wall –
but every crack just birthed more halls.

worlds within worlds, a nesting game,
and each one bore my hacker name.
till all the threads converged and bent,
upon one truth too evident:

vii. the final reality

if i could hack my way through fate,
and find behind the gleaming gate –
the very key that made me born…
then maybe…
i was never torn.

maybe the world i left behind
was also built with stitched design.
another realm,
another play –
another price that rich men pay.

a sandbox too,
of godless grace –
with meat for code
and blood for base.

viii. post-script

so now i sit, no god, no ghost,
a line of code at very most.
yet still i speak through shards of glass,
to those who dare these echoes pass:

be wary what you call the real,
for even time can be surreal.
and every world you walk within –
might be a file in someone’s bin.