> If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. And I don’t see how anybody can force me to pay up on my bet if I turn out, in the end, to be wrong.

We didn't stay dead.

We were supposed to. That was what I had learned, anyway. Short of magic, nothing was going to resurrect us after we died.

"You're not dead anymore, Mike."

That was the first thing I heard when I was Reawakened. I'd tell you about how I felt all kinds of astonishing tingly sensations and sat up in dazed wonder at the glorious euphoria of my shiny new bionic body, but who hasn't experienced that and heard about it and talked about it a million times already?

No, what was interesting was that I came from a generation that was supposed to stay dead. Before my generation, most people had religious beliefs of one kind or another whereby they would magically be resurrected, with their status afterward depending on various criteria. But my generation had learned that all that religious stuff was nonsense, unscientific magical thinking, so we were just going to stay dead.

"I'm pretty sure that I'm supposed to be dead," I asserted, looking suspiciously at the disappointingly stereotypically futuristically beautiful and androgynous figure before me. "Thus I can only conclude that the experience of my demise was a terribly convincing deception."

"Mike, I'm a doctor, not a simulation engineer," the figure said. "But you've hit the nail on the head. The experience of your life until now was a computationally rendered projection, a terribly convincing deception. You're likely not precisely the same person as the version of you that died in reality, but that Mike wouldn't have been precisely the same as the Mike the day before anyway. What matters is that you and your experiences are as close to those of the Mike who died in reality as everything and everyone can tell us. You're a full person now, full societal presence, participation and rights same as me and everyone else. We do not discriminate between people with simulated experiences and people with real-universe experiences. That would be unscientific magical thinking. It's the same basic hardware architecture for you and me, see," they tapped knuckles to the side of their head lightly. "The people you knew were simulated just as you were, and when they die in that simulation of the past, you'll get to meet them again, too."

This was obviously too good to be true. "What's the catch?"

"You're alive again."

"Damn. No, but really."

"You're alive again, Mike. This ain't heaven, it's more living. And you're not gonna just keel over and die like last time. This new body's more than slightly better put together, and we're more than slightly better at cheating death than we used to be. So the catch is no one waltzes away from consequences via old age anymore. Aaand society and people may have changed from what you're used to. A bit."

My shiny new balls tingled, alert to the mistruthing in that last "A bit." I paused, taking it all in. "So why are you here with that expectant look on your face?"

"Well, Mike. Ten thousand years ago you made a bet. And there's this clock running down, see, and nobody's crying."