Consultation 124.

“God, if an author suddenly dies but schedules several years worth of releases in advance and nobody knows their identity, would any readers ever notice?”

What’s with this ‘if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it’ type question?

“Why would you want to know that?”

“Well, I’ve heard of someone faking their death, but I’ve never heard of someone faking being alive when they’re already dead. I was wondering if it was possible for you yourself to convince the world you were alive when you’re really already dead.”

“I see. So you wanted to see if it was possible to do the opposite of faking your own death?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“Well, it’s such an absurdly stupid thing to want to do. It makes no sense. There’s no real benefit to faking being alive. The only time you’ll ever see something like this happen is if someone else is faking you’re still alive so they can reap some sort of benefit. The dead person has nothing to gain by pretending they’re still alive.”

“I agree that it doesn’t make much sense for the dead person to do it in practice.”

“Then why?”

“Well, one day I was trying to find an antonym for pseudocide, a single word for it, but I couldn’t find one. I then wondered why I couldn’t find one but I eventually realized why it wouldn’t exist. It’s never been done as far as I’m aware, hence why a word for it doesn’t exist yet. That being the case, I realized the type of person that could most easily achieve this act would most likely be an author. Don’t you think it would be kind of cool for an author, a master in the art of words, to be the first one to create a word for it before being the first in history to perform the act of faking being alive when they’re already dead?”

“Hmm… well, it would be interesting to see. Technically, you might even be able to deceive people into thinking you’re immortal if you wrote and scheduled chapters for hundreds of years in advance and released them on a weekly basis. But the only problem with that being the progression of civilization. You’d need to predict certain developments in the future of your world to not raise any eyebrows depending on the story being published at a particular point in time. Language will also develop over time and the system people use to communicate will also change. It’d be like the difference between how people talked in The medieval ages compared to how people talk in modern times for you. Words may even disappear altogether and novels might one day be written purely in emojis alone.”

“E-Emojis?”

“Yes.”

“For real?”

“Yes, I’m being dead serious.”

“Don’t you think that’s a bit of a… stretch?”

“Have you seen the comment section on TikTok?”

“... but that’s just TikTok, right?”

“It’s not as impossible as you’d think. Due to the introduction of character limitations on messages in various social media platforms over the years, it has led to a large increase in use of emojis by youth to significantly shorten the length of their messages. This results in their attention spans decreasing more and more over time until they can’t even be bothered to use words anymore. They only get lazier and lazier as time goes on. They would rather read what is simple and easy for them to process than what is overly complicated and difficult to understand. Images are perfect for this purpose since they are much easier to comprehend. Thus, there will be more and more emojis created over time until written communication is done solely through emojis.”

“To convince people you are still alive, you’d need to be able to write while factoring variables like this into the equation.”

“You’re telling me I need to use emojis when writing from now on?” ?

“Maybe. But don’t start now.” It’s a freaking eyesore.

“God, how would grammar and things like verb tense work with emojis?”

“You think youth give a shit about that? It’s all going to just turn into one universal tense. Past, present, and future, there will be absolutely no distinction.”

“What? How can that even be possible? How will someone know whether you’ve fucked their mother previously, you are fucking their mother right now, or you will fuck their mother in the future?”

Is that really her first concern? But seriously why the hell is that her number one priority? Does she work in the area of fucking people’s mothers?

“Uh… well, it’ll be something like this ?? for ‘fucked your mother,’ ??‍? for ‘fucking your mother right now,’ and ??‍♀️ for ‘okay, I’ll fuck your mother in the future.’”

Her eyes widened in enlightenment. “Oh! I see. I guess that can work. They all seem like something in the present, but when they are combined you can somewhat discern the intent of when the action is supposed to take place.”

“Uh, yeah… if that’s what you got from that then sure, why not?” It made no sense to me, I just pulled it out of my ass as usual.

“I think I get it now. I need to get to work as soon as possible. I don’t have any time to lose if I want to be the first one to both create and use the emoji for faking you’re alive when you’re already dead for the first time in history. Thank you, God, this has been very eye opening.”

“Right…” what the hell is that emoji even supposed to look like?