**The Revelation of Steven P. Jobs, October 2032, Cupertino**
The thing about resurrection—and let's be clear that this is what we're talking about here, the whole Lazarus deal minus the actual death part[1]—is that it requires a certain theatrical commitment that even the most megalomaniacal tech CEO would find exhausting, except apparently not, because here's Steve Jobs at age 77 looking somehow more gaunt than in 2011, standing in the exact same spot on the exact same stage where he'd unveiled the iPhone twenty-five years ago, wearing the exact same outfit (black turtleneck, Levi's 501s, New Balances[2]) except now the jeans hang differently because two decades of hiding in a bunker in New Zealand[3] will do things to your hip-to-waist ratio that no amount of pescatarian dieting could achieve.
The crowd—venture capitalists, tech journalists, the usual suspects who'd spent the last twenty-one years mythologizing a dead man who wasn't—sits in that particular Silicon Valley silence that costs $10,000 per ticket. Jobs clears his throat. The sound system, naturally, is perfect.
"So," he says, and there's this pause that costs approximately $47 million in lost productivity across the global markets watching the livestream, "death."
What follows is not an apology—this is Steve Jobs after all—but rather a Keynote about how he'd spent 7,665 days developing what he calls the iMind, which is basically a neural interface that makes Neuralink look like a Fisher-Price toy, except he doesn't mention Musk because that would be beneath him, even though everyone knows that's exactly what he's doing. The device, chrome and minimalist, sits on a pedestal that rises from the stage floor with the kind of automated precision that makes German engineers weep.
"The thing about consciousness," Jobs says, pacing now with that old evangelical energy, "is that we've been interfacing with it wrong."
The demonstration involves a paraplegic veteran named Marcus who hasn't walked in fifteen years suddenly controlling a Boston Dynamics robot[4] with his thoughts, except the robot is painted white and has rounded edges and somehow looks friendly despite being a military-grade killing machine. Marcus makes the robot do the Running Man. The crowd laughs. This is worth $2 trillion, easy.
But here's the thing that no one talks about afterward, the detail that gets lost in the stock market explosion and the ethical think-pieces and the Congressional hearings: when Jobs finally explains why he faked his death (something about "needing space to innovate without the burden of existence"), there's this moment where he stops mid-sentence and stares at the audience, and his left eye twitches in a way that suggests either neurological damage from beta-testing his own brain-computer interface or the weight of having ghosted his own family for two decades.
"One more thing," he says, because of course he does. The iMind, he explains, has been recording and uploading human consciousness to Apple servers since 2019. Everyone with an iPhone 12 or later has been participating in "the largest backup of human experience ever attempted."
The presentation ends. The lights come up. The audience sits frozen, unsure whether to applaud or call their lawyers or both[5]. Jobs has already left the stage. Within six hours, Apple's market cap exceeds the GDP of Japan. Within twelve hours, three nations declare the iMind a weapon of mass destruction. Within twenty-one years—but that's another story, and we're all dead by then anyway, or at least backed up, which amounts to the same thing.
---
[1] Though theologians would later argue this point extensively in the *Journal of Digital Resurrection Studies*, Vol. 1, 2033.
[2] He'd actually been wearing ASICS since 2003 but the New Balance thing had become canon.
[3] Peter Thiel's bunker, specifically, because even posthumous innovation requires venture capital.
[4] Now a subsidiary of Apple, acquired hostile-takeover-style while everyone thought Jobs was dead.
[5] They do both, simultaneously, which becomes known as the "Cupertino Paradox."
