Looking Back at “Assembling Eternity”: The First Spark of Soul Tech

On September 12, 2023, the idea that would eventually grow into Reflekta and kick off what we now call the Soul Tech movement was just a thought experiment. A speculative white paper, written by Co-Founder Adam Drake, called Assembling Eternity.

At the time, it was a blend of memory, technology, and imagination. The essay wondered if a person’s voice, likeness, and personality could be captured, reconstructed, and made available to future generations in a way that felt authentic and deeply human. It was equal parts memoir and blueprint, as much about an emotional need as it was about the tools that might satisfy it.

That spark, humble, personal, and born from a few minutes of shaky camcorder footage of Adam’s grandmother, has carried through everything we have built since.

How the Vision Has Evolved

Two years later, the tools are sharper, the interfaces smoother, and the boundaries between memory and interaction more fluid than ever.

When Assembling Eternity was written, AI voice synthesis was compelling but imperfect. Now, our voice models can capture the subtle musicality of speech, not just how a person talks, but how they sound when they are thinking. Photogrammetry has gone from a niche studio process to something anyone with a decent smartphone can initiate. And personality modeling has grown far more nuanced, pulling from diverse data sources to create avatars that respond with empathy, humor, and insight rather than just plausible sentences.

And yet, the most important part of the vision has not changed. It has never been about technology for its own sake. It has always been about preserving presence. It is about giving people a way to carry someone with them, not just their stories, but their gestures, pauses, quirks, and worldview.

What’s Still the Same

The heart of Assembling Eternity remains untouched. The essay began with the loss of an opportunity, a wish to have asked more, recorded more, and captured more of someone before they were gone. That longing is the same reason people today turn to Reflekta.

We still believe the future of memory is interactive. We still believe that voice, image, and personality together can form a presence that feels meaningful. And we still believe that what we do in this life will echo into eternity, not only through what we leave behind but through how future generations can engage with it.

The Essay That Started It All: “Assembling Eternity” by Adam Drake

Originally published September 12, 2023

The footage, shot on an old Hi8 camcorder back in 1996, is grainy and dull. The camera pans right to left and back, as if the director (me) has no idea what he is doing. (He did not) We are in my childhood home, sitting in the kitchen, as my grandmother prepares to fly back to her home in Florida. My mother, my high school girlfriend, and I watch as my grandmother applies lipstick and answers questions about her early life.

This is some of the only footage I have of my grandmother who died in 2009. I want to strangle that 17 year old kid shooting the video. I want him to stop focusing on his girlfriend, to stop making dumb remarks, and to ask his last living grandparent more questions. To not stop rolling tape. To capture it all.

The video stops, my grandmother flies off to Florida, and those brief minutes are what will be the last of her into eternity, assuming the now digitized copy we have does not decay or get corrupt.

But what if death was not the end of the story?

THE GENESIS OF AN IDEA

“Artificial intelligence” is a bad name. What it should be called is “generative patterns.” AI does not think, at least not in the way that intelligent beings think. What it does is look for patterns, assembles them into likely outcomes, and presents them as answers. For instance, I can ask AI who designed Fallingwater, and it will give me a treatise on Frank Lloyd Wright and what led to his masterpiece. But I cannot ask it to tell me what it sounds like in the building. What it smells like. What it feels like.

Current AI tools such as Bard and ChatGPT rely on billions of data points to come up with cogent solutions, and they do a lovely job of putting those answers into easily digestible nuggets. But what they do not do, what they cannot do, is exist.
I have been consulting with a start up, and we are diving deep into AI. Not only are we using it to streamline processes and operations, but we are pushing it to create content for us. And while there remains an uncanny valley between a human creation and an AI assisted creation, the line is getting very, very blurry. It was during one of these experiments that I wondered if we could simply replicate a person.

We could capture their voice, their likeness, and their personality, assemble them, and power this Frankenstein monster through an AI engine. And, taking it to the next level, could we make digital copies of ourselves?

Imagine, hundreds of years from now, your ancestors would be able to interact with the digital version of you. They would see your face. They would hear your voice. They would ask you questions and receive responses based on your personality. It seems like the plot of a bad science fiction b movie, but it is insanely close to being a reality. And here is how I would do it.

YOUR VOICE

There are many different AI voice synthesis tools, but my favorite is Eleven Labs. They manage to create pretty realistic sounding recordings and give users the option to add emotion and personality to the recordings.
In another few months, you will not be able to tell the difference between an actual human voice and its AI derived counterpart.

YOUR LIKENESS

I recently watched the newest Indiana Jones and marveled at the de aging process they put Harrison Ford through in the movie's opening scenes. It is getting terrific. No, it is not 100 percent accurate, but it is much better than what has come before. For reference, look at the de aged Carrie Fisher from Rogue One only seven years ago, and just imagine where we will be seven years from now.

Ford’s younger self was resurrected through the use of machine learning, specifically taking a look at old footage of the screen actor and using AI to assemble it into a reasonable facsimile. They then had Ford’s face scanned while he performed and used that to help animate the final product.

The average person does not have years and years of film archives to sort through, but with everyone’s lives now appearing on social media feeds, they may not need a few decades worth of superstar film roles to make it work. In fact, a simple high definition 3D photoscan will do the trick.

A company called Pixel Light Effects, based in Vancouver, are at the tip of the spear on full body photo scanning. So now, after sitting in a short session in one of their multi camera photogrammetry stations, every wrinkle, pore, and smirk can be saved for posterity in 1s and 0s.

YOUR THOUGHTS

As I mentioned above, AI does not exist. It cannot reason. But it can make the best possible guess, and more often than not, it is correct. When replicating someone’s personality, a task no doubt the hardest to achieve in this “make a digital copy of yourself” scenario, we must take a multi pronged approach.

I had initially assumed a long and detailed questionnaire would be the answer. But in speaking with my friend, Miles Spencer, he said not to waste anyone’s time, “We have got years and years of their personality inside their social media channels.” I agree, though there is a large margin of error in scraping social media channels, especially given most of society’s propensity to add a heightened sense of reality to their lives on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

I would scrape their social feeds and emails, have them answer a shorter questionnaire, and look to companies like Storyworth to help round out the edges of their digital personality. Using a combination of all these data points and some highly educated guesses based on location and education, I firmly believe we can capture someone’s personality and history with 99 percent accuracy.

Now, if only someone could create a brain scan that allowed complete copies of their personality to be digitized. Oh, right, Mr. Musk seems to be already contemplating this.

ASSEMBLY

The hard part is over. We have your voice. We have your physical form. We have your personality. Now, to tie them all together. My assumption is this will live on a screen. You will not be able to hug a virtual Adam. You will not be able to high five me, at least not physically. But you can ask me questions as quickly as you would ask Siri or Alexa, and instead of getting their search engine based responses, you would get mine.

(The actual intelligence behind these answers, as my digital clone will proudly display, will be up for debate.)
Want to know what I thought about Teddy Roosevelt? Eager to ask me what my favorite dessert was? Want to know what I think of how you are parenting my great great great grandchild? Ask away. And the more you ask, the more my digital clone will learn.

What is also interesting is the idea of an age baseline, whatever age you become “digitized.” It is not hard to imagine we will be capable of shifting years forward and back to see and hear how our digital clones change. I would certainly have fewer wrinkles and a different opinion of Elon Musk if you had asked me questions ten years ago. Future Adam will undoubtedly have different ideas and personality quirks too.

INTO ETERNITY

Digital cloning will not mean you will get to live forever. You will still die. People will still mourn the loss. But what if we could leave a little bit of ourselves for future generations? What if we could create a tangible legacy? What if centuries from now, a digital Adam is still making tasteless jokes and wondering when he will get his flying car?

— Adam Drake

Closing Reflections

When we look back at Assembling Eternity today, it is clear that it was not just a speculative essay. It was the opening chapter of a movement. In the months that followed, that seed of an idea grew into Reflekta, a platform dedicated to making the preservation of presence possible for everyone.

From a grainy home video in 1996 to AI-driven interactive legacies in 2025, the journey has been one of both technological leaps and deep human intention. The vision was always to make memory something you could step into, speak with, and learn from. That remains our mission today, and it will remain our mission for as long as people want to connect across the boundaries of time.

Because what we do in this life will echo in eternity.