Death used to be an ending.
Then humanity learned to record everything.At first it was innocent—photos, journals, biometric logs. Later came neural shadows, behavior models, decision trees that could reconstruct a person better than their closest friends ever could. A life, once ephemeral, became replayable.
People stopped fearing oblivion. They feared misinterpretation.
When rebirth was confirmed—not through prophecy or faith, but through statistical recurrence—the world did not rejoice. It recalculated.
A soul returning without memory was no miracle.
It was an error in accounting.
The dead did not vanish.
They reappeared—empty.
And the living did not know whether to welcome them as heirs, impostors, or thieves of continuity.