The X-Files: "This"

X-Files: "This." Season 11, episode 2 (second episode of main revival season for the series), through-numbering #210. Fox-TV 10 January 2018. Glen Morgan, director, and script with Brad Follmer and Benjamin Van Allen (staff writers). Created by Chris Carter.

From "The X-Files (season 11)" on Wikipedia: "Mulder and Scully are contacted by the virtual consciousness of Richard Langly, which is part of an NSA simulation designed to come to life when participants die. Langly asks his friends to shut down the program because the entities there have become digital slaves and their ideas are being harvested. Mulder discovers that Erika Price is responsible for the simulation and is using it to aid with her own agenda. He buys Scully some time, who manages to turn off the simulation's servers, which later cannot be found once an FBI team returns to investigate."

From Alyse Wax plot summary on line: Mulder and Scully have fallen asleep on the couch, working on X-Files and watching old Ramones concert footage. A static noise wakes up Scully and she discovers a grainy video coming through on Mulder's cell phone. It is Langly. "Mulder, am I dead?" Langly asks in the video. "Because if I am, they know that I know." [* * *]

In interestingly complex ways, Scully and Mulder follow figurative bread-crumbs to Professor Hamby,

Scully and Mulder find Hamby after class and it doesn't take long before she spills everything. A company (possibly the same group trying to kill Mulder and Scully […]) came to Hamby and Langly with proof that they could live on forever as computer programs. They consented, and spent two weeks doing scans so that their brains could be uploaded to a simulation. Because the real and engineered brains couldn't function at the same time, their simulated selves wouldn't come to life until their bodies died. If Langly is reaching out now, he must have figured out that they lied.

Hamby is murdered before completing instructions on how to contact Langly. Mulder and Scully escape and (continuing with Wax's summary, "take up residency in the booth of a crappy bar, where [….] Mulder has phreaked his phone and it doesn't take long for Langly to reach them. He again asks if he is real, and describes the simulation as if he designed Heaven. The Ramones are there, he can eat whatever he wants, and no one gets cancer. Even still, Langly begs Mulder to destroy the simulation. They are digital slaves, where the elite will take what they do in order to leave the planet and colonize space."

Relevant here the theme of digitalized simulated life in a sense inside a cybernetic machine: apparently a server. Note also the appearance of this cyberspace as heavenly and its probably reality as hellish.

Rich Erlich, Initial Compiler, 12Jan18, RDE, Title, 26Aug19