**The Resurrection Gig**
Jesus Christ, it was October again in Silicon Valley and the ghost of Steve Jobs had just walked onto the stage at Apple Park like some kind of digital Nosferatu, twenty-one years after they'd supposedly planted him in the ground at Alta Mesa Memorial, and nobody—not the venture vultures in the front row, not the sweating tech journalists whose entire careers had been built on eulogizing this bastard, not even Tim Cook who was sitting backstage probably contemplating ritual suicide—nobody knew whether to shit or go blind.
I'd driven up from Big Sur in a rented Cadillac convertible on assignment for Rolling Stone[1], my attorney having bailed somewhere around San Jose after consuming what he claimed was "bad sushi" but was almost certainly that sheet of windowpane we'd picked up in Oakland. The invite had come through encrypted channels: STEVE JOBS ALIVE. MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT. COMPLIMENTARY TEQUILA.
The tequila turned out to be a lie, which should have been my first warning that we were in for a serious mindfuck.
Jobs looked like he'd spent the last two decades eating nothing but his own paranoia and maybe some organic kale grown in a bunker somewhere in New Zealand—Peter Thiel's bunker, according to my sources, which made a demented kind of sense given that both men shared that particular Silicon Valley psychosis that treats death like it's just another market inefficiency to be disrupted.
"So," he croaked into the microphone, and the sound system was so perfect it made my fillings hurt, "death."
The crowd went silent in that specific way that very rich people get silent when they smell an opportunity to become obscenely richer. I was taking notes but my hands were shaking—three espressos and a fistful of speed will do that—and trying to process the pure gonzo insanity of watching a dead man do a product launch.
What he unveiled was called the iMind, some kind of chrome brain-tap that looked like something out of Cronenberg's nightmare journal, and Jobs was ranting about "consciousness interfaces" and "neural harmonics" with the fervor of a tent-revival preacher who'd replaced Jesus with microprocessors. They wheeled out some poor sonofabitch in a wheelchair—Marcus, a veteran, naturally they'd use a veteran for the propaganda optics—and suddenly he's controlling a killer robot with his thoughts.
The robot danced. The crowd applauded. I needed a drink.
But here's where it got really weird, and I mean Fear and Loathing weird, I mean brown-acid-at-Altamont weird: Jobs started explaining how the iMind had been secretly installed in every iPhone since 2019, how Apple had been recording human consciousness and uploading it to their servers, backing up people's souls like they were fucking iTunes libraries.
"We're creating immortality," he said, eyes glittering with that special Silicon Valley madness that comes from having too much money and not enough adult supervision. "We're building God."
I looked around for the exits. Several people were already on their phones calling their lawyers. One woman in the third row was weeping. A Bloomberg reporter next to me was typing so fast his laptop was smoking.
The demonstration ended with Jobs dropping the real bomb: everyone who'd ever owned an iPhone was already uploaded. Already backed up. Already, in some twisted sense, already dead and reborn in Apple's cloud.
"One more thing," he said—and I swear to God his left eye was twitching like a trapped animal—"we're going live with full integration in six months. Opt-out will cost you everything."
Then he walked off stage and disappeared into the building's chrome corridors like a ghost returning to its haunted mansion. The audience sat paralyzed. Someone vomited. Apple's stock went vertical. Three governments declared war on California.
I drove back to Big Sur at 110 mph, chain-smoking and trying to remember if I'd ever owned an iPhone. My attorney called from a holding cell in Santa Clara. "Did that really happen?" he asked.
"No," I said. "But we're all fucked anyway."
The check from Rolling Stone bounced. Of course it did. By then, money meant nothing. We were all just data now, waiting to be synchronized.
---
[1] This was a lie. Rolling Stone died years ago. We all knew it. But some fictions are necessary for survival.
Jesus Christ, it was October again in Silicon Valley and the ghost of Steve Jobs had just walked onto the stage at Apple Park like some kind of digital Nosferatu, twenty-one years after they'd supposedly planted him in the ground at Alta Mesa Memorial, and nobody—not the venture vultures in the front row, not the sweating tech journalists whose entire careers had been built on eulogizing this bastard, not even Tim Cook who was sitting backstage probably contemplating ritual suicide—nobody knew whether to shit or go blind.
I'd driven up from Big Sur in a rented Cadillac convertible on assignment for Rolling Stone[1], my attorney having bailed somewhere around San Jose after consuming what he claimed was "bad sushi" but was almost certainly that sheet of windowpane we'd picked up in Oakland. The invite had come through encrypted channels: STEVE JOBS ALIVE. MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT. COMPLIMENTARY TEQUILA.
The tequila turned out to be a lie, which should have been my first warning that we were in for a serious mindfuck.
Jobs looked like he'd spent the last two decades eating nothing but his own paranoia and maybe some organic kale grown in a bunker somewhere in New Zealand—Peter Thiel's bunker, according to my sources, which made a demented kind of sense given that both men shared that particular Silicon Valley psychosis that treats death like it's just another market inefficiency to be disrupted.
"So," he croaked into the microphone, and the sound system was so perfect it made my fillings hurt, "death."
The crowd went silent in that specific way that very rich people get silent when they smell an opportunity to become obscenely richer. I was taking notes but my hands were shaking—three espressos and a fistful of speed will do that—and trying to process the pure gonzo insanity of watching a dead man do a product launch.
What he unveiled was called the iMind, some kind of chrome brain-tap that looked like something out of Cronenberg's nightmare journal, and Jobs was ranting about "consciousness interfaces" and "neural harmonics" with the fervor of a tent-revival preacher who'd replaced Jesus with microprocessors. They wheeled out some poor sonofabitch in a wheelchair—Marcus, a veteran, naturally they'd use a veteran for the propaganda optics—and suddenly he's controlling a killer robot with his thoughts.
The robot danced. The crowd applauded. I needed a drink.
But here's where it got really weird, and I mean Fear and Loathing weird, I mean brown-acid-at-Altamont weird: Jobs started explaining how the iMind had been secretly installed in every iPhone since 2019, how Apple had been recording human consciousness and uploading it to their servers, backing up people's souls like they were fucking iTunes libraries.
"We're creating immortality," he said, eyes glittering with that special Silicon Valley madness that comes from having too much money and not enough adult supervision. "We're building God."
I looked around for the exits. Several people were already on their phones calling their lawyers. One woman in the third row was weeping. A Bloomberg reporter next to me was typing so fast his laptop was smoking.
The demonstration ended with Jobs dropping the real bomb: everyone who'd ever owned an iPhone was already uploaded. Already backed up. Already, in some twisted sense, already dead and reborn in Apple's cloud.
"One more thing," he said—and I swear to God his left eye was twitching like a trapped animal—"we're going live with full integration in six months. Opt-out will cost you everything."
Then he walked off stage and disappeared into the building's chrome corridors like a ghost returning to its haunted mansion. The audience sat paralyzed. Someone vomited. Apple's stock went vertical. Three governments declared war on California.
I drove back to Big Sur at 110 mph, chain-smoking and trying to remember if I'd ever owned an iPhone. My attorney called from a holding cell in Santa Clara. "Did that really happen?" he asked.
"No," I said. "But we're all fucked anyway."
The check from Rolling Stone bounced. Of course it did. By then, money meant nothing. We were all just data now, waiting to be synchronized.
---
[1] This was a lie. Rolling Stone died years ago. We all knew it. But some fictions are necessary for survival.
