This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Griffin Ayaz Tyree with his story Surrogate. Based in San Diego, Griffin is a psychiatry-bound medical student (when he’s not writing sci-fi). You can find out more about him by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the creative process behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Surrogate

When I sit down to write — which I don’t do nearly as much as I’d like to — I often find my stories revolve around themes of death and grieving. Part of that is professional: I spent a great deal of the past two years rotating through a large hospital system. As one can imagine, with the quality of medical care as it is, the vast majority of patients recover. Very few patients die — but some extremely ill people skirt the boundary between life and death for a time. Many more receive diagnoses that mean the end of their lives as they know it, and have to grieve for a part of themselves. And always on the wards, there’s an understanding that death and illness are inescapable parts of life itself. I suppose that makes everything else more precious.

Another part of my fixation on morbid themes is personal: my father recently passed away after a long illness. And I have not known grief to be a neat linear path, with a clear beginning and end. I’ve known it to be a wet, snaking thing that seeps into the heart and bubbles up in spurts at the most bizarre provocations: an old e-mail or a catch of song.

But what if we never had to grieve? That’s the question at the heart of Surrogate.

Science fiction is fertile ground for ideas about delaying, or even preventing, human death. The one that figures prominently in Surrogate is the connectome: a digital map of neural connections in the human brain, theoretically able to preserve someone’s consciousness post-mortem. It’s a fascinating concept, and even if it were feasible in its current form (it’s not), it would raise a slew of deeply existential questions — among them, is a digital copy equivalent to the real thing? Or is there no ‘real’ thing beyond a pattern of thought?

A lot of ink has been spilled (er, printed) grappling with those issues, with no clear resolution. So in the absence of any certainty that ‘we’ would persist after an upload, is the goal of connectomics to preventing our own non-existence at the time of death, or to comfort the living — to prevent them from ever having to confront the reality of death? That’s the central theme I wanted to explore.

Secondarily, I wanted to imagine how a society where mind-uploading is commonplace would rearrange itself, socially and economically. There are shades of gig mentality, customer service and spirit possession stitched together into the titular profession. Admittedly, I projected a major struggle of many health-care providers (especially those who work in intensive care settings) onto the narrator — namely, for someone regularly exposed to matters of life and death, the act of balancing the emotional weight of their experiences with the need to function.

So there you have it; a bit of a thematic mash-up, but in any case I hope it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read!