Thread by @pookleblinky

Imagine a billionaire with a whole army of fanatical dickriders, announces a new and exciting technology.

He's gonna upload your mind into a virtual utopia where you will live forever.

Destructively, yes, but still. Immortality and blowjobs on perfectly sunset beaches.

Each year, the billionaire posts updates on this brain-scanning technology, on the state of the digital utopia waiting on the other side.

The hype builds up into a fervor. It is now quite literally a religion, and he is their prophet.

People spam his every post, begging to enter his for-profit afterlife.

Desperate for him to even glance in their direction.

Eleven years later, he announces it is done.

He has built mind-uploading and an immortal utopia.

For the low low price, *you* can live forever in his proprietary paradise.

Within a week, over a million of his most devout fans are clambering desperately to get on the boat to immortality.

Every guy who camped in his replies to defend him, is about ready to kill to ensure he has a place in this utopia.

Over the course of a year, he uploads hundreds of thousands of his biggest fans.

Each day he posts short videos of random fans, inside his afterlife, waving to the camera, smiling beatifically, going "I've never had so many blowjobs this is amazing you gotta come in here!"

A year later, 2 million sweaty reply guys have been uploaded, leaving their fragile mortal frame behind.

Media is full of images of them, living it up in his for-profit afterlife. Some of the most famous ones give interviews.

And then, it happens.

A whistleblower leaks that there *is* no mind-uploading technology, no digital utopia, no forever of blowjobs on the beach.

Every single "upload" was simply killed via a pneumatic bolt to the head like a cow.

All of those sneak peaks into the proprietary utopia were just marketing fluff, CG demonstrations.

Every interview was literally just an actor in front of a green screen.

In the months before the uploading is legally shut down, becomes clear that the billionaire has deliberately killed over 3 million people in this scam.

His most fervent, sweatiest reply guys all died from an unceremonious bolt to the head behind closed doors, expecting a heaven.

The trial is an absolute spectacle. The law just doesn't know how to respond to a jim jones on this scale, to a war crime done by a corporation more wealthy than most nations.

Prosecutor: Why? Why did you mislead millions of your biggest fans to a cold industrial death at your hands?

Billionaire: I was told some things that are untrue, and some things that are true but not meaningful.

Video plays in the courtroom showing the operation of the San Francisco uploading center.

Harsh futuristic steel surfaces like a veterinarian's office, a back room containing an impressively futuristic blinking MRI-like device, a cheap pneumatic bolt gun. Gurneys and corridors

The bodies at this location were packed into vans which then drove to a crematorium out in the desert, next to one of the billionaire's other company's factories.

The world watches in horror as a man describes how he'd successfully pleaded on social media for the billionaire to upload his daughter dying of cancer.

"I now know she was simply put down like an animal and disposed of like trash," he weeps.

The picture emerges of a man who'd successfully tempted millions to their death, a remorseless cult leader who'd mass-murdered on a scale only possible with billions of dollars of budget and a marketing department.

Prosecutor: we've all seen similar atrocities done by states. Never before have we seen one man, with the *power* of a state, so casually partake in it. He threw away millions of lives the way other billionaires would buy a new mega-yacht.