One of the first questions that naturally follows the central theme of Dead Air—”What if one day a year, you could talk to the dead?”—is of course “Who would you talk to?”
The answer, for most people, would be a deeply personal one. Most of us are missing someone from our lives who we wish we could reach out to and have a conversation with years after they’ve departed, whether we’re seeking counsel, comfort, or simply yearning to feel their energy and spirit fill us up again like they did when they were still here. It’s also a chance to say things that went unsaid during the living years, mend fences over conflicts that no longer seem so important, and share news that would bring joy to someone who had always supported you in life.
When I first wrote Dead Air, I didn’t pick up on how important that above paragraph was in terms of giving the narrative emotional heft. Initially, I was so focused on the social implications of how D-TALq technology would impact the world that I overlooked the more meaningful, and much more personal changes, they would have on each person in the story.
It wasn’t until artist Joe Ng and editor Sebastian Girner each talked to me about finding a way to show Dead Air’s main characters interacting with D-TALq technology that it finally clicked for me. Over time, we discovered that answering that question—”Who would you talk to?” for each of them gave us a way to gain huge insights into how the past of each character informed their present, and their future. Those private, one-on-one moments between the living and the dead served to underscore the larger question about what the entire group of friends would be willing to do to investigate and understand the mystery of their own shared past once a very specific D-TALq revelation had rocked each of their worlds.
There is, of course, another way to approach the whole “Who would you talk to?” debate, and that’s to look at it like a dinner party where you get to invite five people you admire from history and hang out around a table for a few hours shooting the breeze. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is how at least a percentage of D-TALq customers would make use of their time, but in designing the tech we tried to make sure that the boundaries and restrictions regarding how contact was made, how far people would look back, and how often they could do so would tend to make most people adopt a somewhat less touristy approach to necro-communications.
Taking a look at both sides of the “talking to the dead” coin, how would you answer the question?
