Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 222

smartphone. Not surprisingly, it appears magical to a community of people
with little advanced technology, but none of its godlike powers can prevent
the inevitable fall of the civilization that built it.
The third manifestation of the cloud and its atlas is through the meta-
phor of the soul. When Zachry asks a scientist, one of the few remaining
in what was once an advanced civilization, how her people face death
without belief in a soul, the scientist replies in Zachry's dialect, “our truth
is terrorsome cold.” Zachry inds it worse than cold: “Just that once I
sorried for her. Souls cross the skies o' time . . . like clouds crossin' skies
o' the world.” And later, as Zachry and the scientist hide from attackers,
“I watched clouds awobbly from the loor o' that kayak. Souls cross ages
like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue, nor size don't stay
the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's
blowed from or the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi, the east an' the west
an' the compass an' the atlas, ya, only the atlas o' clouds” (Mitchell 2004,
308). As mysterious as clouds, the spirits of people live on across time
and space and only a goddess or a spiritual atlas can tell us what they are
and where they are going.
Like Aristophanes and The Cloud of Unknowing 's writer, David Mitch-
ell is a cloud engineer who builds his clouds out of human imagination.
Like the engineers who construct the systems that make up today's cloud
computing, Mitchell's creations overcome the constraints of time and
space to capture essential information and help us to process it in ways
that advance our understanding of the human condition. Mitchell's cloud
takes numerous forms, but they primarily embody a network of individuals
who meet across time through the wide variety of media they leave behind,
demonstrating that even as today's digital engineers work on the means of
storing consciousness in complex systems, we already store consciousness
in the devices that ill Cloud Atlas . The journal of a nineteenth-century
lawyer, the musical score of an early twentieth-century composer, the
detective story that describes the life of a struggling writer, the ilm that
lampoons a British publisher's agent, and on into the future where we
ind the icon of a cyborg-turned-goddess, the computer device that brings
time and space to this present moment, and the oral tales that a simple
tribesman leaves his children, all form a cloud of consciousness. There
are, of course, differences between the clouds shaped from the literary
imagination and those that emerge from the no-less-imaginative worlds