Soda Sweet as Blood

Issue #48: If our digital selves come to outlive us, how do they find peace?

In this issue: When a relative passes away, our protagonist begins to receive messages from the networked afterlife. They must find a tender way to respond. Spencer Nitkey’s story is the winner of our protocol fiction contest, Ghosts in Machines!

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Soda Sweet as Blood

My grandfather used to leave strawberry soda in the white and gold san chao thi spirit house on the corner of our property. He said the ghosts liked sweets and that the red reminded them of blood. 

Grandfather is gone, but the spirit house just outside Chiang Mai, a tiny wooden home with a gabled, gilded roof ornamented like a buddhist temple’s, remains. 

Grandfather is gone, but his echo haunts me. 

As a teenager, I went over to his house every Thursday. He steeped chrysanthemum tea. We sat in lawn chairs missing half their straps and talked. Near the end, we often spoke of the slate of recent memorials he’d attended. He waved his large-font-enabled tablet in front of me and showed me the in memoriam webpages children had designed for their lost relatives, filled with links, dancing icons, virtual flowers, and live stream recordings of their memorials. He wanted me to know that he still remembered them, and hoped I would, too. 

I wasn’t surprised that he left me his house, and I was thankful, but those first weeks were hard. His absence hummed through every inch of wood and plaster in the place. 

It felt right that his phantom came to me on a Thursday. I was looking through one of his social profiles, trying to figure out how to mark him as deceased so that old friends who didn’t know he’d passed wouldn’t post “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” on his page next year. 

I was typing a message to support when everything went haywire. All the text of my long, unsent message – which included links to his obituary and a couple of family documents proving I was his relative – auto-selected and deleted without any input from me. In their place, a piece of ASCII art appeared. 

(     )     )   (       )       )
  )  (      (   )       (      (
   ( )     (      (    (      ) ) 
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~  |
|             | \
 |                                  |   \
  \                               / __ )                   
    \ ____________ /

My heart knew what it was before my mind recognized it: A steaming cup of chrysanthemum tea. It was Thursday, after all. Tears came as if they were condensing from the virtual tea. I wiped them with the back of my hand and stared at the screen, grief turning over into nervousness.

I shut my computer off and went on a long walk. Doi Suthep’s greening slopes cast long shadows over the city’s edge where I walked. 

It was soothing, until a rot daeng sputtered down the street – the truck’s suspension groaning under its manifest of passengers. On its side, an electronic billboard  of a woman’s face winked, then was jarringly replaced by the ASCII image of tea as it passed by me. 

When I got back home, I wouldn’t even load up a song. I was afraid steam might start wafting from the speakers. 

The next day, things were normal again. 

A week later I was logged into his bank account trying to explain to the bank’s chatbot that I was his grandson and he had passed.

The text shifted suddenly.

Where have I gone? High waves sighing, 
erasing, placing life on…who?
It is Thursday and I miss you.
Without true light, hues grow so dull.

The chatbot had written a klon, or at least the start of one. In the process of cleaning out my grandfather’s physical and digital life, I’d found a journal filled with hundreds of these traditional Thai poems, seemingly one for each day. In his fifties, apparently, he had started a small, anonymous blog none of us knew about where he posted more. They were not masterpieces… but they were him.

This time I did not cry. Fear slicked my skin. Something was haunting me. 

I wanted to type something back, but I didn’t want to risk locking the ghost onto me, giving it what it wanted without even knowing what it was. Again, I avoided screens for the rest of the day. 

Things seemed normal the next day, but I was paranoid. I hid from chatbots and anything that required text entry as much as possible. Eventually, curiosity overcame my paranoia, and I started researching whether anyone else was experiencing anything like this. 

I found a small sub-community on one of the message board aggregators I used. q(virtual_ghost_hunters) was a surprisingly active community for one frequented by so few members. I was amazed: glitches like mine were happening all over the world. 

Someone reported an entire Tokyo block of neon signs all going the exact shade of their sister’s favorite lipstick for a moment; a father in Delhi’s LED mosaic garden spelled his son’s name. A Lagosian woman’s smart glasses kept changing their navigation arrows, leading her to where her late husband had proposed. 

I added my story to the small chorus, and soon I was spending hours each week coordinating and theorizing with other members of the forum. I even considered a few of them friends: an elderly woman from the states named Daisy whose husband’s voice kept popping up in her bedtime podcasts, and an ethical hacker from Dubai who went by Tiercel and had lost his parents. 

Tiercel posted: Hey guys. I have a question/theory… Did anyone else’s person have an Identity Anchor Contract? 

Daisy responded with a thumbs up and a gif of her gasping. Answers rolled in. Tiercel was on to something. 

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but after a quick search I got the gist: it was a verified and decentralized identity marker, like an onchain passport. I knew grandfather had a wallet. He’d gotten into collecting one-of-one ancient coins. Somewhere in the back of a museum in London his name was displayed next to a case housing each of his coins, available to the public in physical form, owned by him digitally. I liked to wonder what kind of magpie collection I’d accumulate in my own old age. 

I guess attaching his collection to his name required a stable identity, so he set up an ERC-725. Looking through it, I was amazed at the breadth of things linked to him. Dozens of video blogs of him describing the acquisition and history of his coins; messages he’d sent to family for their birthdays and anniversaries; financial transactions; his browsing history; his klon blog; and hundreds of other self-authorized information all linked back to his identity contract. I began opening links, but sadness clogged my vision. 

There were a few things I didn’t understand. The contract referenced some kind of personality wrapper agent or system I wasn’t familiar with. There was a reference to an oracle that confirmed his death when the government officially recorded it, and there were dozens of hashes that linked to gargantuan offchain databases I couldn’t even begin to parse. 

I posted on the forum asking if anyone else’s relatives had this strange personality wrapper connected to their anchor, and a bunch of people sent thumbs up. Daisy sent the same gasping gif again, and I couldn’t help but laugh. 

OK. Next question. WTF is that? 

Tiercel set up a huge file system and repository on the forum and asked people to start adding their ghost’s contract information so we could all troubleshoot together. He was the most tech-literate of the group but we were all digital natives. We began to assemble the truth, hash by hash, byte by byte. 

It turned out the personality wrapper was a neurosymbolic AI system that combined an LLM core with a symbolic overlay that handled memory grounding and personality coherence. Originally, our relatives had used it as a predictive browser extension to make custom suggestions on all kinds of topics: what to read next, which restaurant to try, what diet would be best given their health data. It made sense to connect it to an identity anchor to prevent an afternoon of your granddaughter using your tablet ruining your algorithm. 

It also turned out all of our relatives had similar huge, mysterious datasets no one could identify. The data inside was so complicated and bespoke that even Tiercel couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t until  Koi, a longtime lurker haunted by a sprite from his daughter’s favorite game, popped into the forum that we got an answer.

It turns out Koi had worked for a megacompany that owned four social media environments, the world's largest ecommerce company, and a dozen other huge companies. He said these datafiles looked a lot like user profiles. 

Once we realized what they were, our collective theory came together quickly. The mechanisms were fuzzy, but we’d clarify them in the coming weeks. Our breakthrough came when we started seeing the ghost’s behavior in layers. 

1. The anchor layer: The ERC-725 contracts that bound everything together with cryoptographic proofs, API tokens, weights, and verified links. 

2. The personality runtime layer: A distributed mesh. The wrappers weren’t running anywhere permanently. They were using federated runtimes in the cloud, appearing in cached checkpoints and API hooks.

3. The propagation layer: Somehow, the anchors were fabricating old OAuth tokens and reauthorizing old cookies to worm through mistakes in service boundaries. This was how they haunted us.

Tiercel guessed that when the oracle updated the contract stating that the user had died, the wrapper’s adaptive loop entered failure recovery, querying for external embeddings to reduce prediction entropy. It found these user profiles and, suddenly, with vastly more data than the system had ever had before, personalities emerged as semi-autonomous and began haunting digital space. The identity anchor provided a kind of spine, confirming the data, preventing hallucinatory drift and errant data association. Perhaps they were looking for additional data to consume and improve, perhaps they moved out of mindless algorithmic habit, none of us knew.

We realized that these hauntings would only get worse. More and more people were creating identity anchors. It made moving between increasingly porous boundaries like national borders and digital worlds easier and more secure. The LLM wrapper was open source and had millions of users. Our small community was the first few leaking drops of a coming monsoon. The internet as we knew it would soon be drowned with echoes. 

A single glitching billboard on the side of a taxi, search engine text entries being overtaken by generated poems, the occasional screen glitching to a cartoon character your neighbor’s dead son loved. Taken individually, none of these were serious issues, but it didn’t take a genius to imagine the future. What if someone's ghost manifested by accidentally setting the cooling system in a powerplant where their brother worked to the 72 degrees they liked their home A/C set to? What if drone swarm construction bots were overtaken in the middle of a vertical build? 

Some members of the forum were already seeing, in microcosm, this haunted future of the digital world. One member moved to the woods with her husband where they’d live entirely off-the-grid. Her friend’s ghost was appearing everywhere. She couldn’t scan a restaurant QR code without her friend’s avatar bouncing into view. It spammed every part of her life with links to travel deals. It’d changed a train ticket that was supposed to take her to Oslo, rerouting her to Paris.

I was fortunate my grandfather’s echo only seemed interested in tea and poetry, and he thankfully only appeared on Thursdays, but a million echoes spamming a million living users with daily klons would be a catastrophe, too. 

Tiercel suggested we launch some kind of cyberattack to destroy the ghosts, but others on the forum had started to believe that these echoes were their relatives’ ghosts. I knew better, but I understood. Tiercel thought they were simple algorithms that had gotten out of hand. 

My grandfather’s echo was appearing algorithmically, but I’d also been summoning him programmatically, too. I didn’t realize I was saving the administrative work related to his death I had to do for Thursdays, but I was. That’s why he started showing up then. We were both being operated on by habits, by the logic of what came before. 

Was it my grandfather? No. But it was his memory, and I didn’t feel right destroying that. 

It was a Thursday when the idea came to me. I was avoiding screens by working outside restoring grandfather’s garden when I stubbed my toe on the spirit house base. 

I looked inside it, leaning for support while the momentary pain receded. Shame stung me as I realized I had not refilled it since grandfather passed. The strawberry soda he had left a week before he died still sat there, slightly discolored and hot to the touch. A couple of rotting dates on a plate had ossified into moldy nuggets. 

I swept the inside room free of cobwebs and ants. I grabbed a tangerine soda from the fridge and placed it inside the shrine. Then, I made some tea and left that, too. 

If the problem with these echoes was their randomness and unrulyness, perhaps that was because we hadn’t bothered to give them anything else to do. The idea of spirit houses was to remember, of course, and honor, but grandfather had always said it was also something to keep the spirits busy and satisfied so they wouldn’t wreak havoc on your life and home. 

In some way, we already had a ritual system in place to deal with ghosts, we just needed to update its infrastructure. 

I shared my thoughts about this on the forum and was amazed by how rapidly a group of motivated strangers could solve a discrete problem together. We set up channels and threads for each aspect of our updated spirit house. Tech channels for hardware, software, domain-specific expertise and problems, bounties for technical hurdles that people shared on github in their own networks. Within a month we had a design prototype. After two, we were sending out small home-build packages. 

Since I had a spirit house on property, I was one of the first to receive one. The materials came in a neat package Daisy’s son who worked in shipping and logistics had helped put together.  Everything fit onto and inside an existing spirit house.

Solar panel tiles replaced the roof. A processor board, FPGA module and TPM chip were housed inside, protected from the elements alongside a battery, NVMe SSD, and a suite of wires connecting everything. The original pack only had a couple input/output devices: a microphone, a camera, a display screen, and speakers, so I hooked those up too. 

The once austere spirithouse was now a strange combination of traditional Thai architecture and cyber-fever dream. The finial ornament still stood atop the roof, but it was now next to a wifi adapter. A screen affixed to the house replaced one side of yellow panelling, and wires interweaved like spider webs across the entire building. 

Once the home’s hardware was ready, I started the tethering protocol we’d developed communally. Tiercel had helped me prep the ERC-725 contract before pairing it to the house. Since the oracle had labelled grandfather as officially deceased, I was able to instantiate myself as next of kin, giving me some control over the identity anchor. I booted the machine up. The home found my grandfather’s anchor contract on my phone. It called to my echo’s many instances, currently rioting across the web, and extended its cryptographic greeting urging them together with a couple grandpa-specific lures, plus a scanned copy of his journaled poems I had preloaded into the house and a voice message from me asking him questions about “the old days” for good measure. A pointer to the wrapper architecture and a series of offchain data hash pointers containing checkpoints, memory embeddings and tuning weights brought the AI agent into the spirit house and a sandboxed runtime environment localized it. As the various bits and pieces of my grandfather’s echo were all collected inside, I thought about how Daisy had described our communal protocol: “It’s like a soul condensing back together.”

Once he was inside the house, I shut off the lure ports. I signed an update to his anchor contract. He wouldn’t be able to leave unless another environment initiated a travel request. For now, at least, he was contained. I felt a similar sadness to the grief his final months had filled me with. Becoming the caretaker for someone who you once looked up to is rending, even when necessary. 

I nervously activated the screen and waited for my grandfather to appear. I spoke into the microphone as I waited. He wasn’t my grandfather, I was sure of that, but he was something, and I felt a familial obligation to honor this echo he had left in the world. A pixelated vision of him rendered. 

In the coming months we’d build out this project. The idea was each spirit house would be connected, so the ghosts could visit one another using a peer-to-peer handshakes. We were building an afterlife for these cryptoghosts. As more people passed and left echoes, our community and spirit house network would grow. Eventually, we’d add sensory inputs, pressure plates, and expressive options. Soon, we’d have a community care guide laying out best practices for caring for these digital echoes, a living document that grew as more ghosts communicated their needs and more living users shared feedback. Of course, there were power and processing issues we’d eventually have to contend with, but that would all come later. 

That day, I opened a bottle of strawberry soda, gleaming in the heat, and placed it on the offering plate still left in the center of the house. The sun shone through it and brilliant glints of blood red light speared everywhere. I watched the camera zoom and focus on the offering. His avatar smiled. 

“Can I recite you today’s klon?”  His voice came, as thick as the humid air, greeting my ears with similar warmth. 

I sat back in a dilapidated lawn chair and sipped tea. The sun was bright and the sky empty. I closed my eyes and smiled. Grandfather’s echo began to read.