Resurrection stone.
Last time I’ve made one through my mind was in Harry Potter. The whole series has this complicated philosophy of three deathly hallows Voldemort was pursuing, and Dumbledore actually possessed. One of which was the resurrection stone.
The Tale of the Three Brothers1 (from The Tales of Beedle the Bard) showed the simplified version of the story.
- It showed the death cannot be reverted, and only ressurects the dead person to our world. So the stone is basically pointless.
- The most powerful wand there is is pointless either. The owner would be hunted by others till one would be killed in one’s sleep.
- And only the invisibility cloak is the true wisdom, it allows one to escape death for as long as one wills.
That’s how I got J. K. Rowling’s premise.
Saving
But what if the resurrection stone would be different? What if the algorithm be different? First of all, it could reverse the death by not bringing the dead person into our world, but making the person actually alive.
I don’t know, reverse the time for a second!
Skip that bullet, skip that missile, skip that car accident, anything.
In Harry Potter universe, they have their tiny time machine after all. There are many time machines in popular culture.
This alone could build the entire universe of opportunities. But this time I’m not going too deep into this fantasy. I’d go much simpler.
A Device
What if we had some device to communicate to the dead person?
More likely, the device I’m personally interested in right here is some inter-universe communicator. Something that would allow parallel universe communication.
Because otherwise, it would be some memory of the person only. It would be so great to talk to some departed people, the ones I had in my life. Yes, talking to them being stuck in the past2 would be great too, but it’s not too meaningful. I’m different now, so should be they, right? Otherwise it’s merely3 a time machine.
I can talk to the dead any time.
I actually do that. I speak to the dead, as much as I speak to the imaginary friends.
They are the same, in a way. Aren’t they?
They are good, yet they have their issues, namely just one: they never speak back. Because they do not exist.
Dead-to-Dead Communication
So I offer this to work differently. The new ingenious algorithm, just go communicate to the parallel universe.
It has its own issues too. The number of parallel universes are infinite. And I’m present in all of them, unless I’m dead.
There are some universes where I’m not. Yet, they are of no concern to me, they’re irrelevant to this problem.
So, I’m there too, and I can be different too. But since the number of the universe is limitless, there should be at least one where I am alive and the person I’d like to be alive is also alive. But here’s the problem, I’m an impostor for that universe.
Then, probably, I’d like to seek the universe in which… I’m dead too. It would be like… dead-to-dead communication!
‘I’m dead there, and you’re dead here. Hey, would like to talk?’
Of course, it’s going to be very complicated4 either. What if that other person does not miss me as much as I miss them?
Hey bud, it’s cool you called! But you know what, I have my life in here, and I just… have too little time to talk to you right now, sorry.
I mean, I don’t want it to be some avatar who just waits for me all its life, and is ready all the time, whenever I want them to be.
On the other hand, what if we miss each other so greatly, we could abandon our universes? What should we do? Am I moving your place or you move mine? Would one of us regret that at some point?
Yeah, we should move my place back then! Should we travel just another universe where both of us dead? Should we go some place we never existed, so not to trigger confusion for the people who buried us?
Oh, still, it would be so nice to just talk, right? Or, will it be a bad service? Probably, one needs to work through one’s trauma and let other person go. They will live in our hearts till we remember them. I afraid, this opportunity to have that other person in your life back again, it would be just very difficult, like a drug. It would be impossible to give up. And possibly it’ll make one valuing others too little.
I’m going to call you another universe when you’ll die, so fuck you now, I don’t care.
There’s no silver lining in this. Dead are dead.
Limits
But– just– what if– right? What if. Maybe, we could introduce some limits. You can have this brief talk, I don’t know, a month in total. You can speak it 3 minutes at a time, you can spend a weekend together. But the clock is ticking.
What a torture it would be!!
What if there’s no hard limit, nobody knows how long would this opportunity be. But the time is still limited. You cannot hang out together all the time. You canot spend half a day together. Maybe a phone call time limit, like, you know, a three minutes. Or an hour. Or two, if you’re too desperate.
What would it be?
What would you talk about?
Some silly everyday shit?
I’ve got a new iPhone, it’s been great, yet the more advanced they are, the more I’m worried about this piece of glass and metal. I don’t like it, I want my iPhone 4 back, I wasn’t too dependent on it, I didn’t value it back then so much. We have our entire lives there right now, man!
Oh, maybe that was the talk with the person from the past. They know the new iPhones too. I just don’t know what would we really talk about.
Would I ask questions?
Hey, how’s your life going? How far have you come from that point you died? In my universe. What was your life? Before… you died. Here.
Would we talk over some complicated things? Would we solve world’s problems together? Would I try to explain something to that party? Would I try to actually listen more?
Mess
All this would mess with both of us too greatly. They lost me there. And I lost them here. We cannot just erase that either.
This is against the universe physics. It could easily destroy the entire universe for all of us.
Probably, we have to suffer for the rest of us out there. It’s inevitable after all, we’re going to die anyway. One day or another.
And there’s not just one person that could be greatly missed. Could be two, three, more. What would it be? How would that work?Would we have separate phone lines to separate universes?
Oh yeah baby, it would make the relocation subject much more complicated. I’m missing Alice, but I’m missing Bob either. Sad they are alive in different universes!
Or… aren’t they? Infinite number of universes, you were sayin’?
But also, we have not just dead persons. There are relationships that are dead. We took our separate ways, and we live our lives without each other.
If I’m deeply missing someone, that other person is certainly not. Otherwise, we’d be together.
And sometimes even this is much more complicated. We could be missing each other, but it’s not that easy. We’re different, and there’s nothing that is really broken, but us. Unbroking us is making us different. There’s this other universe for that, different us.
We are who we are.
What if there’s another universe with both of us being missing each other greatly? Oh, that would be a nice plot for a very silly movie.
Infinite number of different stories.
Acceptance
It looks like this problem is not solvable.
There’s no real way of talking to the dead beyond what we have already. Acceptance.
We can always talk, and they can listen. They cannot comunicate back. Or maybe they can, but we have no way of proving whether we’ve got them correctly.
I believe in parallel universes, that’s a neat theory.
Each time I’m about to be dead, which is often by the way (and not only because of the war, it’s what the life is), each time I think I’m dead now, in some parallel universe. And I’m glad I continue going in this universe of mine.
I’m just not too happy with some people being gone already. I don’t believe I’ll ever accept this. This would go worse and worse and worse. People are gonna die, and the grief would accumulate. Thankfully, I’ll die too, at some point. I just hope it won’t happen too soon.
I’ve accepted this order of things, living with this. Being broken, here and there. We all are, after all.
Till death do us part.
According to J. K. Rowling, The Tale of the Three Brothers is loosely based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale. ↩︎
I’ve seen this concept — of having a dead person to visit our world for a day — developed in Onward (2020), a surprisingly good animated film about the death of a father and how one of his two sons deals with it.
As he develops his understanding of his elder brother playing the role of his father, and so he didn’t actually miss his father as much as his elder brother did. Yet, this concept is about slightly different things, not something I mean here.
The film is better than I expected, yet it’s still a one-time story. I won’t like watching it a gazillion times, as we have with, say, Ponyo or Totoro. ↩︎Oh wow, diminishing a full-blown time machine here! ↩︎
It’s so sad that the reality breaks all that so easily. All these ideas are so fragile. I think, a great recepie for inventing some fictional universe is to make it fictional. Meaning, not real. Just ignore the reality.
Star Wars, have you ever paid attention they do have ships blown like those cars in movies of 80s and 90s? Impossible, space have no oxygen for blasts. And it’s not the only thing that is so wrong with that universe. ↩︎