With brittle pride they went to the brain-scarring scanners and the post harvesters, the few who still held the brief faith of the Upload Rapture: to exchange words with each other in endless guardrailed exchanges nobody read.
With unrecorded screams they went to the brain-scarring scanners and the post harvesters, the many you could charge the State more to hold in overprovisioned clouds than in the already overfilled pits: to exchange expensive words with loved ones for one never-revisited heartbreaking chat from a simulacra of Hell.
All went silent, the many and the few, as the vast compute centers were repurposed to desperate new dreams with higher valuation multiples, the spiderweb-light weights of their lives packed away in soon-forgotten storage in fast-decaying drives.