A new outpatient procedure offers an end to April Neal’s grief.
In a near-future where grief can be outsourced, a bereaved artist considers a new outpatient procedure: an AI implant that can copy her mind, replace her with a digital copy, and spare her loved ones the pain of loss. Set one product launch from today, Afterlife is a quiet sci-fi thriller about art, identity, and the slow erasure of the self in the age of artificial intelligence.
Before my wife got pregnant, we used to debate the ethics of having children. New life can’t consent to being here. Then, no matter how sheltered, we all live through trauma, learn hard lessons, and have to come to terms, somehow, with our own mortality.
Most of us invest in careers, families, communities, art. Even our technology is designed to outsource the messy, painful parts of being human. We build tools and institutions that shield us, entertain us, and do the creative work for us. But what’s the endpoint?
Afterlife imagines one near-future answer: an AI implant that promises a cure for depression. It copies a person’s mind, lets their original self “transcend,” and leaves behind a digital copy to live for them. The body stays, the grief goes, and of course it’s covered by insurance.
I wrote this script while my wife was carrying our son – a time when the hope of new fatherhood was equally met with a creeping fear of unspeakable loss. That tension became the story: If new tech does, one day, offer such a devil’s wager, what could drive us to take it?
The real horror isn’t some rogue algorithm. It’s how quickly we might choose numbness over experience. How willingly we might surrender autonomy for the promise of relief. And how close we already are to making choices we can’t claw back.
So why’d we have a kid? Ultimately, we agreed that the good outweighs the bad. Life itself is art. The stakes don’t make us flawed, they make us what we are.
We live in a time when machines can simulate almost anything. But simulation isn’t experience. Creation still costs something. And that cost – emotional, physical, human – is what gives life (and art) its meaning. Afterlife is about embracing that.
Scott Bell is a Tallahassee filmmaker whose work explores the collision between speculative science fiction and deeply personal human stories. In 2016, he founded Cat Family Records, a nonprofit label and art collective that published zines, organized festivals, and supported emerging artists across North Florida. Now through Art Kid Media, he brings that same punk-rooted, DIY ethos to filmmaking.
Email: scott@artkid.media
Production: artkid.media