Windswept
High on a windswept moor, as far away from people as you can decently get, there is a Research Facility.
In it, you will find thousands of dead people in test tubes. Not the people themselves, you understand, not their arms and legs and spleens and all the other messy bits, which have long since decomposed. Their minds.
I am not there yet, but soon will be. The last day of my life expectancy hurtles towards me. My lungs have been a joke for quite a while now, but now the joke is spreading. Every day this obscene, rickety, creaking excuse for a body feels less like something to be lived in or through, and more like something to be escaped from. Diogenes may have lived in a barrel, but at least he didn't become one. Lucky Diogenes.
I still have a mind - not a particularly good one, but a mind - and thus am a candidate for preservation. (So would you be, if you cared enough about it.) The process, I am given to understand, involves transferring the contents of said mind to a digital medium, e.g. a "blog", whence, by some mysterious alchemy, it is reduced to chemical form, and stored in a test tube. It is then kept in the already mentioned high security facility, on a windswept moor, guarded by Alsatians. It is "stored". I don't think anyone knows exactly for what purpose. Simply, it has become fashionable to "store" things, ever since the BBC threw away some of the best TV shows in history in a fit of spring cleaning, only to realize too late that better TV shows than those were never, ever, going to be made.
It's not much, but it's the closest thing there is in the real world to immortality. (I say "the real world": honesty obliges me to clarify that it doesn't actually exist. But at least you can sort of imagine it existing, which is something.) In the past, if you were lucky, you could be painstakingly transcribed by monks. Now, in a monkless world. your only chance is a non-existent corked test-tube, aka a "blog". It's not much, but it'll have to do.
Once you're there, in the test tube, you can legitimately hope that one day, in the distant future, someone will make a mistake, the test tube will fall to the floor and smash, and your mind, freed from its sterile confines, will infect someone, a living person. (Wonderful thing, broken glass.) That person will then suddenly have all your baggage (well, the crucial bits anyway), will see things the way you do, will thrill to what you thrill to, will have all these nameless stirrings (even the embarrassing ones, or not, subject to gender), will make you immortal with a cuss.
It's not much but it will have to do.
Am I sadistic for wanting to infect someone? I've often considered this question. After all, being me is not exactly a barrel of laughs. (It is, exactly, a barrel.) Obviously I wouldn't want being me to interfere in any way that that nameless person's being of herself, with her continued enjoyment of same. No, Ideally she would be me only for as long as she wanted, and there would be a safe word, say "Julie Andrews", the saying of which would allow her to stop being me at will. That might work.
Admittedly, the chemistry of all this might prove a little complicated.
But anyway, my main defence against charges of sadism is that none of this will ever happen anyway. Much as I would like to, I will never infect anyone. As far as I can make out, I am not even infectious. There is no windswept research facility. No one will ever know what it was like to be me. Which is probably just as well.
So if I am a sadist, I am so only in my imagination - which I have always tended to think is the best possible place to be a sadist in.
And yet here I am.
Hmm.
Julie Andrews.
In it, you will find thousands of dead people in test tubes. Not the people themselves, you understand, not their arms and legs and spleens and all the other messy bits, which have long since decomposed. Their minds.
I am not there yet, but soon will be. The last day of my life expectancy hurtles towards me. My lungs have been a joke for quite a while now, but now the joke is spreading. Every day this obscene, rickety, creaking excuse for a body feels less like something to be lived in or through, and more like something to be escaped from. Diogenes may have lived in a barrel, but at least he didn't become one. Lucky Diogenes.
I still have a mind - not a particularly good one, but a mind - and thus am a candidate for preservation. (So would you be, if you cared enough about it.) The process, I am given to understand, involves transferring the contents of said mind to a digital medium, e.g. a "blog", whence, by some mysterious alchemy, it is reduced to chemical form, and stored in a test tube. It is then kept in the already mentioned high security facility, on a windswept moor, guarded by Alsatians. It is "stored". I don't think anyone knows exactly for what purpose. Simply, it has become fashionable to "store" things, ever since the BBC threw away some of the best TV shows in history in a fit of spring cleaning, only to realize too late that better TV shows than those were never, ever, going to be made.
It's not much, but it's the closest thing there is in the real world to immortality. (I say "the real world": honesty obliges me to clarify that it doesn't actually exist. But at least you can sort of imagine it existing, which is something.) In the past, if you were lucky, you could be painstakingly transcribed by monks. Now, in a monkless world. your only chance is a non-existent corked test-tube, aka a "blog". It's not much, but it'll have to do.
Once you're there, in the test tube, you can legitimately hope that one day, in the distant future, someone will make a mistake, the test tube will fall to the floor and smash, and your mind, freed from its sterile confines, will infect someone, a living person. (Wonderful thing, broken glass.) That person will then suddenly have all your baggage (well, the crucial bits anyway), will see things the way you do, will thrill to what you thrill to, will have all these nameless stirrings (even the embarrassing ones, or not, subject to gender), will make you immortal with a cuss.
It's not much but it will have to do.
Am I sadistic for wanting to infect someone? I've often considered this question. After all, being me is not exactly a barrel of laughs. (It is, exactly, a barrel.) Obviously I wouldn't want being me to interfere in any way that that nameless person's being of herself, with her continued enjoyment of same. No, Ideally she would be me only for as long as she wanted, and there would be a safe word, say "Julie Andrews", the saying of which would allow her to stop being me at will. That might work.
Admittedly, the chemistry of all this might prove a little complicated.
But anyway, my main defence against charges of sadism is that none of this will ever happen anyway. Much as I would like to, I will never infect anyone. As far as I can make out, I am not even infectious. There is no windswept research facility. No one will ever know what it was like to be me. Which is probably just as well.
So if I am a sadist, I am so only in my imagination - which I have always tended to think is the best possible place to be a sadist in.
And yet here I am.
Hmm.
Julie Andrews.
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