Ivan Davydov

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Hell of Paradise Novel. Moscow 2022. 150 pages

Russia's imperator has started a future digitalization project. With the ultimate goal of saving his own brain, his memory, so to speak himself, in order to be able to upload himself into his own completely renewed body after his physical death. Or into a sane double body with all previous information purged from its head. Like cleaning a computer before filling it with new content and uploading a new identity.

But when the Emperor wakes up one morning, he has doubts about his mental state. Didn't his scientists inform him correctly? Is he the victim of a conspiracy? Because maybe what he sees and feels is just the world that appears to his digitized consciousness and no longer to himself? Maybe now he's just a brain in a bottle with wires attached? So it just seems to him that everything is there, but actually there is nothing? Perhaps digitization is still being worked on and he is currently in an intermediate state before returning to real life? Or is he already dead and transformed into the head and body of one of his several doubles?

Is this perhaps already his paradise? Or hell? Or hellish paradise? Or heavenly hell?

The suspiciously anxious Emperor is trying to keep his head cool to find out if he's really alive or just a resurrected consciousness?