iDeath

Shadows are fallin' and I've been here all day
It's too hot to sleep and time is runnin' away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal
There's not even room enough to be anywhere
It's not dark yet but it's gettin' there

Of course, the irony had occurred to him that the latest technology products for his last few Apple launches would easily outlast his own lifespan now. What did he have left? A month, maybe? Possibly less.

"What about a death app?" he'd suggested to one of the few skeleton staff he still liaised with on a daily basis. "It could shut down all synched devices once its recognised the user is no longer alive."

It wasn't a bad idea in principle but Steve knew better than to sell the concept of death to a global market that thrived on the concept of living forever. What many had failed to notice in all of his iconic Apple presentations was that he understood better than anyone the transient nature of technology.

This transcience was something that he felt strongly humanised the products he now had the world so obsessed about. To his mind, their eventual obsolescence wasn't some cynical ploy, rather it was comparable to those meticulously constructed Tibetan sand mandalas that are eventually tossed into the sea after they're finished. Or perhaps  more pertinently - a human life itself.  Everything had to die eventually, even robots. He remembered watching the Spielberg film Artificial Intelligence and pondering on the drive home from the cinema how plausible it was for the robot child David to actually survive an entire ice age and still maintain some form of simulated human transience about him. Would it even be a good thing? Or just more of the same stretched over a longer arc of time.

He wasn't going to survive much longer than next week, let alone an entire ice age at the current rate his body was falling apart due to the cancer. If he thought of his body as a piece of design then he could find some morbid fascination in observing its rapid deterioration as if he were critiquing one of his own products.

"Functionality is key to everything, really, when you think about it. When things become slow and stop working so well, we know the end is near. It's time for an upgrade. Or a re-birth? Maybe they're the same thing."

On a piece of paper he wrote down the word 'iDeath' and contempated it for a few minutes as the bright California sunshine found its way through the blinds of his Palo Alto home.

As someone who had flirted with zen buddhism he knew about the concept of destroying the ego so that it dissolved into emptiness.

The ego was just as much a construct as was Steve Jobs - his mortal avatar.

His biggest problem in life had always been that he'd needed his ego to drive his ambition, to kick his own ass out of bed in the morning and all the asses at each of the companies he'd worked with. It had only been these last few years that he could become a little more zen as a result of being deified as some sort of tech mystic/visionary. That wasn't to say he wasn't still as much a short tempered despot as he'd always been. He just didn't need to shout so loud as people appeared to listen more.

Had it been his ego that made him behave like that throughout his career in tech? Or was it that burning desire and belief in making the world a better place with his products? A bit of both. At least he had more spiritual self awareness than Gates who had mostly just concealed his own cult of personality better than he did. And, of course, Bill had the charisma of one of his computers, which was to say none at all.

Gates would probably live forever though, just like that robot kid in that Spielberg movie. Bill lived in fear of dying but Steve faced it with a certain respect, even admiration.

Now facing his own pending shut down, Steve thought about the rituals humans have when they close down various apps and functions on their computers for the night, in his case a lifetime. What did he have left to close down before it was all over?

Somehow, thinking about himself as a computer, seemed strangely to help keep the fear he had in his heart in abeyance. He didn't want to die. He wasn't so spiritually wise that he had found himself free of a primal fear of dying but thinking of himself as a machine of sorts helped him be less emotional about his own demise.

Picking up one of his first iPod protoypes, he studied it in his hand and found it strangely comforting. Turning it on and admiring its functionality he began to scroll through his uploaded albums list from a few years back.

Choosing an album by his favourite artist, Bob Dylan, Steve grabbed some headphones and plugged them in as he listened to the only song right now that seemed to match his deathly mood.

This was his own private iDeath of sorts, he supposed.