It is the 22nd Century

After a long, happy life, your father has passed away.

Now, you remember your father very fondly. After all, you were raised by him! All the things he taught you, all the ways he showed he cared to you, your mother, your siblings...

But, as fate would have it, you had decided to move far away, many decades ago, and news of his passing did not reach you until processions, last wills and testaments, and everything else were processed (you got the stand mixer, lucky you)!

So, you fly down. You wish you could take something more grounded, you think, like the high-speed rail. But high-speed rail is a staple of where you have decided to live, and not America, where your parents have resided.

The funeral proceeds as any funeral should. Many of your close family friends and members of the community showed up, and many are weeping or solemn. You take a bite out of funeral potatoes. They are delicious. You give your eulogy for him, evoking further tears out of the crowd. A true celebration of the life your father has led, until...

You were not involved in planning the funeral, but you heard that your mother and siblings had pooled their resources on one specific show-stopper. You thought it would be some performer, or a grand display, but instead, you see some silhouette in the distance. Upon further inspection...

No, it can't be. Is that your father?

But it is! You see a perfect visage of your father in his prime. The errant gray hairs are all a brilliant blonde, his eyes unclouded and teeth pure white. He walks around, greeting the funeral-goers, and keeps walking until his eyes meet yours.

He says your name, excitedly. He moves with a quickness to meet you, but his movements are oddly clipped, strangely stilted.

As he gets closer, you notice that his birthmarks are nowhere to be seen. There was a wart on his neck, and you are damn certain he even had them in the photos you had seen of him in his prime, sometime around 2029, when he graduated. He would have only met your mother three years later...

He engages in conversation. He sounds almost exactly like your father, but once in a while, he pronounces a word completely wrong, or pronounces it in a technically correct way, incompatable with the man's accent. The conversation turns to a fishing excursion the both of you had. He misremembers the color of the tackle box, but you know he could never, because it reminded him of the evergreen forests he once knew long before he moved out here, in Arizona.

As you two talk, you ask to excuse yourself. He is politely understanding, allowing you to go, but not before saying that he loves you, and that he is incredibly proud of the person you have become. You can barely stop yourself from crying. That being said, the first thing you do is find a nice bush and let go of those potatoes you ate. You need to ask what the hell that thing is. Why does he look like him? Who would dare profane a man that you have loved, turn his memory into that?

You ask your mother, but she is too deep in grief to get a straight answer. To be expected, they were together for 62 long years. Then, you turn to your siblings. That is when you get the truth.

Your father is in that casket, about to be incinerated and spread across the roots of some great big tree in the backyard. But that thing? That is the result of a new venture that has become popular this decade. They had paid the funeral home to custom assemble a Bereavement Simulacra. The body is made from the latest Figure bot, but the brains are all a custom-tuned version of GPT-10. The voice, a culmination of all of your father's recorded calls, home videos, everything. That is what constitutes the ghost you see before you.

You have to excuse yourself, early. When you return to your VRBNB (The two companies had a merger), you can do nothing but take the fetal position and cry, cry, and cry.

It is the 22nd century. Your father is dead.

And nothing is sacred.