Curated Immortality

Introduction The desire for immortality is not new. When viewed through the lens of human biology, the fear of death seems to be not only a natural side effect of the survival drive, but also deeply and irrevocably intertwined with a fear of loss, of grieving, both for oneself and for others. As a result, human beings have invented a wide range of technologies intended to defy the natural process of decay. Photography, analogue music technologies, and videography, for instance, all attempt to freeze a moment in time. More recently, projects such as Project December have extended this impulse into the digital realm, offering the bereaved a means of sustaining conversation with lost loved ones. Problems arise, however, when we project ourselves into a not-so-distant reality, such as the one found in Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime (2014), where death and the notion of mortality are challenged by the existence of Primes. This article engages with the reconceptualisation of immortality from the preservation of bodies or consciousness to a project of curated memory. Rather than extending life, artificial machines extend stories and narratives, functioning as embodied archives that maintain relational presence through selective remembrance. We ask questions about whose interests immortality serves and who controls the stories that endure. The Making of Immortal Primes In Marjorie Prime, Primes are artificially intelligent robots whose existence centres around the post-death preservation of a human being. Their appearances are designed to resemble that of their originator, and they are fed the memories and experiences of the people they are meant to embody. In many ways, Primes are living archives. They do not, however, exist as an educational resource in the way we might think of traditional archives, which are intended to store and inform about the past. The purpose of the Prime is not solely to contain the knowledge and experiences of an individual, but to physically embody them, recreate them—become them. If loss and grief are linked to an individual’s absence, Primes act as physical placeholders, slotting into these moments of absence to circumvent the grieving process. However, the concept of a Prime is rather ambiguous, as it does not fall neatly into transhuman and posthuman concepts, unlike much of the science fiction work dealing with subject matter relating to robotic or artificially intelligent figures. At the heart of both transhumanism and posthumanism is a desire to enhance humanity and prevent the extinction of the human race, i.e., to challenge human vulnerability and to defeat death. The ultimate goal is for human development to have a positive, directly proportional relationship to time and temporality, and for this to be possible, there must be a guarantee of immortality. One of the key differences between transhumanism and posthumanism lies in how they define the human being. As defined by Martin Sand and Karin Jongsma, transhumanists “envision a future that brings about a decline of our physical and mental boundaries as compared to today. The unpleasantness of all physical constraints—including diseases, senescence and death—should be overcome” (293). It is important to note that the individual’s consciousness is maintained; it continues. The goal is to defy corporeal finitude so that consciousness may persist, but biology is not viewed solely as a limitation. Although transhumanists often regard it as something that can be improved, rectified, or transformed, biology nevertheless remains central to transhumanist thought, as part of the metaphysical conception of the human continues to reside within the biological body. Donna Haraway’s concept of a cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, is, for example, considered closer to transhuman than to posthuman because of its continued relation to biology. Posthumanists, in contrast, question the centrality of human biology. There is an understanding that at a certain point, the limitations of biology will hinder human development, and so what defines the human being—the body, the brain, consciousness—begins to shift. The human subject becomes malleable rather than fixed or immediately tangible. This transformation can manifest in a number of ways. Karen Barad’s intra-action explains how posthuman beings emerge through their intricate entanglements and dynamic interactions among bodies, machines, environments, and systems of meaning. Additionally, as Myra J. Seaman notes, the posthuman subject is often imagined as an extension or cessor to the universal human, emerging through technoscientific developments that seek to move cognition beyond the limits of the biological body (247). If biology traditionally defines humanness, then the posthuman project imagines human development moving beyond strictly biological existence and becoming increasingly intertwined with nonhuman systems. Nevertheless, the concept of consciousness often lies at the root of the aforementioned approaches. Transhuman and posthuman immortality both involve extending an individual’s consciousness, though the methodology of doing so might differ. Transhumanists focus on technology extending the lifespan of the corporeal body, in a sense, the biological container for one’s consciousness. Posthumanists, on the other hand, envision a transference of consciousness beyond the body into a technological framework, as in Rosi Braidotti’s concept of technological mediation of human subjects. But for both, the preservation of consciousness builds a path to immortality. This is what makes the concept of Primes distinct: there is no attempt to extend the consciousness of one who has passed, but rather to create a vessel through which the said individual’s stories, experiences, and relationships can be reinstalled and continue to exist in tangible form. Thus, Primes are neither truly transhuman nor posthuman in their approach to immortality, as the latter two place greater emphasis on the subject’s personal inquiry: how can I extend my own life? My own consciousness? In the case of Primes, this shifts the question to: who and what does the Prime exist for? Primes act less as the continuation of someone for the sake of their own desire for immortality, but rather as grieving aids for those who are experiencing the pain of losing a loved one. Memories Curated In the opening scene of Marjorie Prime, the audience encounters an elderly woman, Marjorie, with her 30-year-old-looking husband, Walter. Time is taking its toll, and Marjorie’s memory is deteriorating. The two exchange turns from the mundane to a shared memory: a trip to see the movie My Best Friend’s Wedding. They recall Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz; Marjorie asks whether she liked the film. Walter replies that she once said she wanted a gay best friend afterwards. “Did I get one?” she asks. In response, his tone shifts—“faintly generic”—as he answers, “I’m afraid I don’t have that information”, before resuming a warmer affect and adding that it was the day he proposed to her (Harrison 9). This is the moment we realise that this is not Walter but Walter Prime, a lifelike duplicate of Marjorie’s dead husband, meant to comfort an ageing Marjorie. Jon, Marjorie’s son-in-law, says to his wife Tess, “Senior Serenity says companionship is the most important / thing” (14) in reference to Walter Prime, implying his existence is in some way comparable to the companionship offered by the real Walter before his death. Walter Prime is not Walter resurrected; he is a regression of Walter, whose decades of ageing and experience have somehow been wiped out, and then selectively reinstalled. Walter Prime’s memories are malleable and manipulated throughout the play to best serve Marjorie. The opening scene stages memory not as retrieval but as calibration. Walter’s temporary lapse exposes the mechanism beneath intimacy: he is learning, storing, adjusting and reproducing information through guided interaction. The exchange resembles the basis of machine learning and how people train their AI tools nowadays in miniature. Through repetition, correction, and supplementation, often provided by Tess and Jon, Marjorie and Walter Prime piece together fragments of memories that may have been fading or lost due to the former’s ageing and the latter’s passing. The Prime gradually becomes a more coherent version of Walter and increasingly guides the story of Marjorie’s life. Memory here is not recovered from a stable archive; it is collaboratively assembled. Primes are always role-playing, and memory is inherently performative in Marjorie Prime. The latter is rehearsed, edited, and continually revised, involving both repetition and recollection. Patrick Hutton distinguishes the two: “Repetition concerns the presence of the past ... . Recollection concerns our present efforts to evoke the past” (xx–xxi). In the play, the two are inseparable. Walter repeats stories fed to him, but each repetition is already recollection, filtered through present desire, omission, and new inputs. Thus, this living archive of memory is constantly changing to serve the people engaging with it. This resonates with Jacques Derrida’s argument that “the question of the archive is not a question of the past ... but a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” (27). The Prime embodies this future-oriented memory work precisely. Walter Prime does not preserve the past as it was; instead, he materialises what the living decide will endure. The archive is no longer a repository but a promise, a curated projection shaped by present needs. The idea of remembering as selective and curated becomes more conspicuous when Marjorie’s consciousness gradually grows more incoherent, and one day, she mentions her son, Damien, who died of suicide at a young age, out of nowhere. TESS: I thought she’d forgotten. I guess I sort of hoped.JON: But we have to remind her, right?TESS: Do we? (Harrison 18) Throughout the play, it is slowly revealed to the audience that the family, especially Marjorie and Tess, have been haunted by Damien’s death for fifty years, while no one is able to talk about it. The idea of forgoing or intentionally concealing some memories from the person who once had access underscores the transfer of agency and the impact of this memory curation project. In PART ONE of the play, Marjorie’s memory is shaped by what Walter Prime tells her (taught by Tess and Jon), along with the residue of her own; in PART TWO, Tess works to reconcile with her mother and herself through interacting with Marjorie Prime, a replica of her mother after she passed. Memories become more mediated and distant from their source as narrative authority subtly shifts to the living and, ultimately, to Primes. Human characters become immortal as Primes archive their personal histories and carry their legacy. This reveals immortality as a relational process grounded in narrative extension, always laced with belatedness, and oscillating between linearity and rupture. The loss of memory and narrative authority, the new narrative’s departure from lived experience, and the transfer of narrative control to others, particularly technological nonhumans, can register as forms of helplessness and fear. The discomfort is reflected in the play through Tess’s constant reluctance to engage with Primes when she expresses feeling like every day is science fiction: “we tell them our deepest secrets, even though we have no earthly idea how they work” (16). Yet, this process is also governed by care. In the dialogue above, Tess’s endeavour to conceal information about Damien from Marjorie is a necessary act of memory curation out of love, allowing Marjorie to overcome the trauma she never acknowledges but never forgets, until now. The act of care shapes the past into a liveable present. With Marjorie’s passing and the subsequent reappearance of Marjorie as a Prime in PART TWO, the mother and daughter finally get to converse to navigate the loss the former has suffered, and the consequent trauma and resentment the latter has endured collaterally throughout their lives. Tess reiterates that she is Marjorie’s only child when asked. Everything seems to work, partially, with the Prime being a better version of her mother, according to Tess, but not her. Forgetting becomes even more powerful in a later scene when we see Jon talk to the Prime version of Tess, who, unable to handle Marjorie’s death and the tense relationship with her own daughter, hanged herself during a vacation. If Tess, like her mother, had lost access to the past trauma, perhaps she would not have taken her life. In this context, forgetting is not a cognitive failure, but rather a means of fostering ongoing intimacy and harbouring a future. It allows one to see the present with hope, free from the shackles of the past, to appreciate the world as it actually is, and to imagine a future by letting go of all residues (Gross 420). Close to the ending, Marjorie Prime expresses that she is no longer sad when Walter Prime brings up Damien in their conversation: “all I can think is how nice. How nice that we could love somebody” (64). In Marjorie Prime, the focus is less on the ethics of memory curation or life continuation and more on the need and desire for a negotiated version of reality—both for the living and for the legacy of those who have passed. Denouement In the final scene, Tess Prime, Walter Prime, and Marjorie Prime sit at the table. It is in the same living room, but “a great deal of time has passed. Centuries maybe” (59), highlighting their immortality. Walter Prime is telling the story of his proposal to Marjorie when they see Casablanca at the movie theatre. The conversation flows naturally. It is the same story, but not the same movie that Walter Prime told Marjorie in the first scene. In fact, when Marjorie was reminded of the proposal earlier, she suggested to Walter, “what if we saw Casablanca instead? Let’s say we saw Casablanca in an old theater with velvet seats, and then, by the next time we talk, it will be true” (9). Like this, Casablanca replaces My Best Friend’s Wedding as a part of the memory. The three continue their conversation, casually reminiscing about the past as if they had lived it. Though the nature of biological memory is malleable as well, this scene amplifies the deliberate effort to alter the way reality is represented through the Primes’ recollection of events. Does this alter reality completely? Memories, carried and shared by Primes, are untethered from lived experience. While Primes’ archives of personal histories may be affective, they are never the same as how they were once lived. Lyndsay Michalik Gratch and Ariel Gratch argue that “individuals translate internal and external phenomena into personal narratives. Through this process of translation, lived experience is synthesized into coherent explanations that help define one’s self-identity” (15). From the human perspective, when the lived experience is lost in recollection, one is also losing parts of oneself, reflected in the play when Jon asks Tess: “how much does Marjorie have to forget before she’s not your mom anymore?” (Harrison 19). From the other perspective, the narrative immortality mediated through Primes is essentially derivative, composed of translated or sometimes fabricated memories rather than embodied encounters. Thus, narrative is neither static nor stable when human memories, as unreliable and deceitful as they can be, are involved; it remains so until the narrative is fully transferred to Primes, who never misremember or forget. Primes are simulacra. Perhaps Tess’s exclamation of living in science fiction is accurate, sharing what Jean Baudrillard observed: “we live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning” (79). Primes are neither original nor a simple copy. They store and accumulate information about themselves—facts, anecdotes, tonal inflections—yet the multiplication of data does not guarantee depth of meaning. As information increases, complexity may diminish. Narratives are more coherent. Painful memories are excluded. Conflict is softened. The resulting figure offers emotional comfort but also reveals the tension between the instability of living memories and the static information acquired by Primes. This is a response to mortality. The archive reveals its seams as the simulacra overtake the narrative of the dead, and eventually, render them irrelevant. In Marjorie Prime, Primes act as stand-ins for the absent and exist to mediate and reshape grief. Each character who dies in the play, first Walter, then Marjorie, and then Tess, is purportedly copied into a Prime after death. But Jon’s reaction to Tess’s Prime uncovers the great truth about loss, seen in the line, “Tess ... . You were right. It’s nothing. It’s a backboard. I’m talking to myself” (Harrison 57). A Prime is, ultimately, a commodified distraction from grief. While Primes may temporarily fill the void left by death and loss by serving as substitutes for the deceased, such surrogates are inherently unstable. As Joseph Roach argues, they inevitably either fall short of the expectations placed upon them or exceed them, creating a surplus (2). The reality cracks open, revealing that a Prime may supply what has been lost, but it cannot fully emulate the living, breathing individual. As the final scene of the 2025 Broadway revival plays out, no human except for the three Primes remains. They continue to share memories, while words gradually lose their meanings and fade into the void. Indeed, mortality is no longer a hindrance to remembering; yet, Marjorie Prime asks what becomes of memory when it persists even as meaning, experience, and human presence begin to fade. Eventually, what form of immortality do Primes actually offer, and what persists? 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Hutton, Patrick H. History and the Art of Memory. London: UP of New England, 1993. Roach, Joseph R. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Sand, Martin, and Karin Jongsma. “Towards an Ageless Society: Assessing a Transhumanist Programme.” Ageing and Technology: Perspectives from the Social Sciences. Eds. Emma Domínguez-Rué and Linda Nierling. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. 291–310. Seaman, Myra J. “Becoming More (than) Human: Affective Posthumanisms, Past and Future.” Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2 (2007): 246–75

Consciousness · Conversation · Embodied cognition · Immortality · Personhood · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism